Donald Trump: Classic or Dud?

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!

it could actually happen tho

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."

I think they're basically one and the same. I mean it's not as though, say, it was Ted Cruz who won in 2016, who was later found to have paid off a porn star and now 7 years later got indicted for it. I think that is something that would probably provoke the reaction some people are worried about, that left moderates would go "hey I don't like the guy but this is pretty extreme".

I'm mostly just paraphrasing Josh Mashall here but Trump is a very extreme case, he's unlike anything we've ever seen in American politics. While the election was going on his dumb "university" was in the process of being exposed as a total fraud, he was on tape bragging about being a sexual predator (while also having a dozen rape allegations being investigated), and he was also actively trying to get Russia to release dirt on Hillary Clinton. As President the dude was committing crime constantly - he forced foreign diplomats to stay at his hotel at insane prices and extorting the President of Ukraine were 2 big examples. Even stuff that was technically legal also felt like a massive abuse of the system, such as using something like $100,000,000 of taxpayer money to go golfing at his resort twice a week. When he lost the election he committed even more serious crimes, trying to extort Georgia to "find" votes, inciting an insurrection, and stealing classified documents for (apparently?) no real reason. If we decide as a country not just to let this slide but to also just treat this dude as just another politician, then we don't really have a country, we have a dictatorship. I don't care if this is like the Al Capone thing, where he's a massive criminal and you just get him on taxes. I don't think anyone on the left does either. He's a crook and everyone knows it.

idk if trump is exactly extreme if anything his crimes are smalltime compared to typical presidential behavior, but he did fail to understand how to play the game, you have to color inside the lines to maintain presidential privilege, for instance obama bailing out wall st and happily just letting them carry on with business as usual afterwards gets him a couple mil for a speech immediately upon retirement and the law doesnt care, id say what trump is more is heterodox in behavior and rhetoric if not underlying politics, which is how he became president in the first place insulting orthodox washington etc

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."

george bush did war crimes and so forth you get the picture xp self

xp yes otm exactly, it’s real smalltime shit compared to the usual crimes of the office, but that’s who he is!

he couldnt not be himself god bless

of those things you mention only the possession of top secret documents strikes me as clearly criminal. but is clouded by the issue of other pols also being found to have classified stuff in their archives. others are not crimes at all (if you replace "dirt" with "information" there's nothing actually wrong with seeking information on your opponent whereever you can find it). other things on your list point to a diseased mind much more than to criminality. i think there has been a growing awareness of trump's mental instability, even among former advocates, and they've been looking elsewhere for leadership. this case seems to want to halt that trend and throw the spotlight back on trump, and all indications are that it's very weak sauce. remains to be seen what happens but i don't get good vibes.

i think there has been a growing awareness of trump's mental instability, even among former advocates, and they've been looking elsewhere for leadership.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/29/fox-poll-trump-desantis-00089593

Your concern trolling is appreciated, though.

of those things you mention only the possession of top secret documents strikes me as clearly criminal.

Grow up and say what your real problem is.

my problem, such as it is, is that i would dearly like for the democratic candidate to win the next election.

I mean look at the guy's Hannity interview - Hannity is constantly saying stuff like "oh you wouldn't do this, you didn't mean it like that, this isn't you..." and then Trump would immediately go "no, I have the right to do that, it's not wrong, I can take anything I want, it's called presidential privelege, it all belongs to me". I would posit that if you let *that* guy run for President again, you don't really have a rule of law.

and yes I know Dubya and (to a lesser extent) Obama committed crimes in office, and that in some sense they were a bit more serious, but I would say that's only because Trump is not a very smart or savvy criminal. I mean the dude straight up tried to steal a presidential election in broad daylight. That's pretty serious. I shudder to think what he would have done had we gotten into some kind of foreign conflict. If 9/11 happened on his watch I feel like we would've wound up with something somehow much worse than what we actually got.

of those things you mention only the possession of top secret documents strikes me as clearly criminal.

his phone call with Raffensperger seems pretty blatantly illegal to me