Donald Trump: Classic or Dud?

i agree it shouldn't be, but bragg campaigned by bragging about how many times he's sued trump, so he might not meet that standard.

The only way to guarantee no Trump presidency at this point is for him to drop dead

Aside from him being dead, the best part of this would be Don Jr. trying to run and eating shit.

Next Trump Up

It should be remembered that Michael Cohen served time in jail over crimes connected with this investigation even though he was a cooperating witness. The indictments handed down against Cohen clearly implicated another "individual 1" in the same crimes (who obviously was Trump). iow, the evidence against Trump was just as compelling as that against Cohen, but the prosecutor at the time chose not to seek indictments against "individual 1", undoubtedly because the criminal was the chief executive of the US government. If anything about this case was driven solely by "politics" that qualifies, and it tilted in Trump's favor.

Can anyone even slightly open to the idea of voting for a second dose of Donald Trump as president be described as "relatively sane"?

unless one wants to dismiss nearly half the country as not sane. i know we joke, but calling half the country insane is not a good look. michael cohen pled to eight counts, the least of which (3 i think?) were related to the hush money.

Lol are u Matt Taibbi

does he say stuff like that? no i'm not.

unless one wants to dismiss nearly half the country as not sane. i know we joke, but calling half the country insane is not a good look.

Well, first of all, we're not talking about "nearly half the country"; we're talking about 40% (max) of registered voters, who are less than 50% of adult Americans. So we're probably actually talking about 17-20% of the population. And no, I am not joking. If they are still willing to vote for Donald Trump to be president, after having already had him as president for four years and seeing what he brought to the job (racism, corruption, incompetence, et fucking cetera), they are either insane — in the sense that maybe they're suffering from dementia or some other organic brain dysfunction — or actively evil. And it doesn't really matter which, because the practical effect is the same.

Donald Trump is not a traditional "guy whose politics I disagree with". He's a criminal and a psychopath, and if you actively support him, you're a piece of shit. And if you don't currently actively support him, but you can be convinced to vote for a criminal and a psychopath as president, you are yourself fucked in the head. This idea you seem to have about giving people the benefit of the doubt, and assuming they're reasonable and rational actors — you need to let go of that shit. We don't live in that country anymore.

I can't even imagine giving benefit of the doubt to voting for a guy who proposed a Muslim ban, then tried to enact one his first month in office

insane is the wrong framing, I'd go with 'complicit with evil' same as it ever was.

Otm

(Four horsemen amassing)

it is not hard to imagine that people might be persuaded to vote if they don't buy bragg's alleged "novel legal theory" (kristoff) and think this is a political hit job

I don't think this describes any actual people (except for uh jason whitlock)

I like how Josh Marshall is thinking about this

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/how-to-think-about-the-trump-indictments-and-find-inner-peace

are there any previous examples of voters turning out because candidates are under criminal investigation? or does this supposed phenomenon only benefit donald trump?

lol

could maybe make a case for marion barry

feel like the right overestimates how conservative the population is, they'll vote for them because they're bigots or because they love guns or just really dislike liberals, but I don't think a whole lot of them are willing to go as far as "there is a nationwide conspiracy to steal the election and throw Trump in jail". even if they say that shit sometimes I think deep down they kinda think the news is real. I mean a hell of a lot of them got vaccinated.

catering to the far right serves their purposes, though, in the huge amount of the country where elections are not in doubt. many of them, maybe most, can be content with dominating their districts, or entire states, in the case of gop trifectas. if the senate or the presidency is democratic, well, that's a bummer, but they can still make sure that no significant legislation is passed, the supreme court and much of the federal judicial system is in their favor, and they can exist almost entirely in a rightwing media vacuum that will not only tolerate their bullshit but also reward them for more extreme views

gop politicians in these horrible places could theoretically try to be good people and not do things that actively endanger the lives of people. but that's not what their loudest idiots want, so they run the risk of getting primary'd by someone who is even more fucked up

yeah I just mean in general none of this shit is gonna "awaken a sleeping giant" that's gonna let Trump roll to the presidency again, that giant is already awake and perpetually fired up. but I think the last few election cycles have shown that going absolutely insane just might drive out turnout on the other side. I think that Josh Marshall blog summed it up pretty well.

Yeah, it's really bizarre that not one Washington journalist is willing/mentally able to accept the idea that tons of people really fucking hate Donald Trump and by extension the Republican Party. I mean, three straight elections now and these dipshits are still out there going, "This is likely going to fire up his base and might be risky for Democrats!" No, his base is not an electoral majority, and the people who hate "his base" are.

it's more than his base though. i would never dream of voting for trump in a million years but when i read these words in the nytimes it smells of "guy searching for a way to indict trump" not "rule of law being upheld."

One year ago this week, the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into Donald J. Trump appeared to be dead in the water.

The two leaders of the investigation had recently resigned after the new district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, decided not to charge Mr. Trump at that point. Amid a fierce backlash to his decision — and a brutal start to his tenure — Mr. Bragg insisted that the investigation was not over. But a disbelieving media questioned why, if the effort was still moving forward, there were few signs of it.

“Unless y’all are great poker players,” Mr. Bragg told The New York Times in an early April 2022 interview, “you don’t know what we’re doing.”

What they were doing, new interviews show, was going back to square one, poring over the reams of evidence that had already been collected by his predecessor.

For a time, their efforts were haphazard as they examined a wide range of Mr. Trump’s business practices, including whether he had lied about his net worth, which was the focus of the investigation when Mr. Bragg had declined to seek an indictment. But by July, Mr. Bragg had decided to assign several additional prosecutors to pursue one particular strand that struck him as promising: a hush-money payment made on Mr. Trump’s behalf to a porn star during the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump was indicted on that strand. He is expected to surrender to the authorities in Manhattan on Tuesday and face arraignment on more than two dozen charges, which will be unveiled at that time.

This account of Mr. Bragg’s decision to revive the investigation and point it toward the hush-money arrangement, based on interviews with about a dozen people familiar with the matter, reveals the circuitous, sometimes uncertain road that led to the first criminal charges against a former American president.

Along the way, a key internal skeptic of the investigation became one of its champions; Mr. Bragg shook up the Trump team and hired an experienced lawyer away from the Justice Department to help lead it; and he ultimately found new promise in a key witness he had once disregarded as unreliable. The district attorney was also emboldened late last year when his prosecutors won a conviction of Mr. Trump’s company in an unrelated tax case.

"promising"

we frame it "nobody is above the law," they frame it "they can and will come after you too," and i think that will be a more successful framing.

How does one pay any attention whatsoever to the life and career of one Donald Trump and not feel that searching for a way to indict Donald Trump = upholding the rule of law? How? Please tell me how. Any other living human who didn't tiptoe so gracefully between the raindrops while doing crimes would've been indicted many, many times before now.

how does one pay attention to politics and not realize that political problems (i.e. figuring out how to get people to vote for your candidtates) can't be solved by legal means?

No one itt is suggesting it can?

for a long time now, the singleminded focus of all the cable news shows has been trump/jail. if there are any other issues important to them, they don't get mentioned.

you're not seriously suggesting that if this wasn't happening cable news would be covering anything actually important, surely? that is not what it does.

that's sort of our problem, don't you think? it's our public face. (i know, i know, who do i mean by "our" etc. etc.) like, we actually have a voice there, small as it might be, whereas we have no voice about what tuucker carlson emits.

I mean there's partic no "us" here because I'm not American but no I don't think you have any voice in what gets put on cable news, no.

sort of a weird situation where we learn about "their" evilness and horribleness and vileness from their cable shows, yet we can't do anything about the idiocy that happens on "our" cable shows.

frogbs being super otm

How about: all cable news is rank idiocy and who gives a rip what any of those sensationalists are breathlessly bleating about?

otm

I have been a news-centric human for half a century. I went to journalism school! I have yet to get a useful piece of information from a television show. And I don't _think_ I have ever had my mind changed or my opinion shaped by a television show, but perhaps I am wrong about that and am flattering myself.

re the combing of evidence - the guy hires people whose literal job it is to cover his tracks, so due diligence has to be a little more assiduous if the law is to be applied equitably

More like "combover" of evidence amirite

I teach and still practice a bit of journalism yet Willie Geist makes me weak.

TRUMP'S LAWYERS: "Whatever you do, don't piss off the judge."

TRUMP: pic.twitter.com/ksaPl7h98Y

— StrictlyChristo 🇺🇦🌻 (@StrictlyChristo) March 31, 2023

Last word OTM

I thought he misspelled “appalling” at first but now I get it.

He’s doing that thing where he distills an entire sentence down into one heavily emphasized word

Guy who is deeply hated by 55% of voters: “what are the chances that someone hates me?!?”

This was an entrance question at Wharton but somehow he skated his way through the admissions process

lol donnie trump is gonna get put down like a dog baby

im gonna be the trumps going to jail and it will solve all of our problems guy itt, it really needs really needs it

ty for yr service

cant wait to see donlad trump in chains!