Consequences Of Indicting Trump

I agree that Lula has also been politically persecuted, but not Rahul Gandhi. He is just plain dumb, and has a habit of running his mouth off. In the age of speechwriters and teleprompters he chooses to speak off the cuff and ends up with his foot in the mouth.

In 2019, he misquoted a Supreme Court decision and then apologized.
https://www.indiatoday.in/elections/lok-sabha-2019/story/rahul-gandhi-unconditional-apology-to-supreme-court-1519806-2019-05-08

In the current case, he insinuated that all people with the “Modi” surname are thieves.
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/rahul-gandhi-guilty-in-defamation-case-what-surat-court-said-in-judgment-3886670

This is putting the cart before the horse. Politicians and business people in this lemon market wouldn’t get to where they were if they were not dirty, venal, and corruptible. Look at the career trajectory of Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Kamala Harris. Compare with Dennis Kucinich or Al Franken or Corbyn or Paul Wellstone. Of course Trump is corrupt and criminal, enough that the governing elites thought they could control him and to a larger extent they did control him.

Is it a mistake to charge him? Well, the wheels are coming off of the US unipolar project and now they’re just throwing feces at the wall imagineering that they’re putting up plaster. The Western governing elite are regressing to the stage of 6 year olds believing that if they whine and hope and threaten to hold their breath till they turn blue hard enough, they’ll get a pony.

“Maryland is now passing bills to make abortion legal for out-of-staters.”

Kudos to Maryland, but won’t they/might the patients be charged when they return home? In this age of uber-surveillance, I’ve read that formerly pregnant women are being charged with murder.

It would be nice if Trump were also charged, but for being a narcissist/psychopath. That’s the law we need on the books. This is where the French failed to “follow through” in order to inoculate their own future. It’s time to fix that. Obviously I don’t mean a law based on mental health or lack thereof, but definitely I mean a law based on (psychopathic) specific actions and behaviors, i.e., harm to the earth and other living things.

Trump has obviously pissed off the wrong people, and is actually being indicted (or in his own words, indicated). Who knew? I wonder which one(s)?

Let’s hope more of these a-holes piss off their even sicker brethren. They are being squeezed too, but in a very, very different (and much more luxurious) way than we are. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them “breakup” into factions, based on increasingly scarcer resources and fewer countries to pillage. Maybe this is just the first line of many being drawn in the sand as they fight for the role of supreme leader of the solar system.

It’s a weird form of blowback, in my opinion. For around 15 years now, the US has been aggressively pursuing “lawfare” as means of controlling the politics of third world countries, particularly in Latin America. There are like half a dozen countries in Latin America in recent years where the US has connived with local elites to use largely fraudulent charges to bring down uncooperative presidents and other politicians. That’s why Bolsonaro ended up president of Brazil, for instance.

I’ve noticed that approaches Americans take to politics in other countries, they tend to gradually start using back home. Arguably January 6 was a case of attempting the “colour revolution” tactic US intelligence services had been spreading around the world, at home.

That said, I’m not convinced this is quite as big a deal as Mr. Welsh is saying. These conventions are always a bit porous; an exception here or there is not uncommon. Martha Stewart, for instance. And the thing about the “elites don’t get charged” convention is that it kind of assumes that the illegality itself is kept fairly quiet–don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t prosecute. The people aren’t supposed to really notice the double standard–sure, they vaguely know, but they don’t have to think about it. Trump himself kind of constituted a violation of the normal deal–he was colourfully, blatantly, in your face breaking the law in dozens of ways all the time. There is a big part of the population that has for some time been outraged that he hadn’t been charged with SOMETHING. So I think the convention can to a fair extent stay intact; elites will understand that if you stick to the usual deal and keep your illegalities relatively un-blatant, you’re still fine. Most may feel that Trump was just screwing things up for everyone with his obviousness.

Arguably, it would have done MORE damage if they’d left him alone, and charging him with this peccadillo instead of something serious could be considered if anything a way to try to limit the damage.

Would now be a good time to ponder over how we might take advantage of this situation, instead of just pondering over what our plutocratic dons and all of those politicians they carry around in their pockets like so many nickels and dimes, are gonna do?

What Trump should have been charged with, if elites were smart, was his actual crime against elites, where he broke a norm: trying to stage a coup.

The problem with this is, his party wouldn’t agree. Not even to impeach him right after the coup, even though some of them would might want to be presidential candidates themselves and disqualifying him from future public office would be advantageous to them.

I blame Merrick Garland’s glacial, cautious, approach on the major crimes (acting as these were ‘normal’ times and acting as if this was a ‘normal’ crime and Trump was a ‘normal’ President) to blame for the lack of quicker action. The two-tier justice system you describe is no more obvious than here, where an elite is so obviously, transparently, undeniably guilty and instead of the 4 am raid to handcuff him and throw him in jail without bail (the treatment that ‘little people’ get even when their alleged crimes aren’t obvious, transparent, or undeniable) his lawyers get to ‘negotiate’ his treatment.

I say this as just down the street from me I saw the local state version of the FBI bust down a door to a neighbor’s house a few months ago in an apparent raid. I”m sure whatever the cause, it was not as serious as the things Trump has done.

This is one of those times I am going to strongly disagree with Ian, & he admits a lot of the weaknesses in his argument openly early on. I’m a bit older than Ian, I was in High School when Nixon was being impeached and was forced to resign, then was pardoned by the moronic (never elected VP or President) Gerald Ford. The “rule of law” for the richest and most powerful people in the U$A was openly murdered on that day, & the whirlwind that has been reaped by having Elites who can commit crimes with zero consequences is too massive to be measured by any existent meteorological measurement!! A society where Elites can openly commit crimes of looting, violence, torture, etc. and never face any negative consequences is a doomed society!! Of course I will agree with one point Ian makes, the Stormy Daniels payoffs are pretty petty criminal acts compared to other things he could’ve been indicted for, most obviously the taped phone call where he directed the Georgia governor to “find me 12,865 (or whatever the exact # was) votes” to create a false result showing he won the state. I guess the reason that this is the first actual indictment (34 counts according to what I’ve read) is that only one D.A. had the guts to actually do something like this, but it still remains a potential positive. I did see where Drumpf foolishly posted a picture of himself wielding a bat & threatened to go after this prosecutor, which his lawyers then told him to take down– can’t have helped his odds of dodging any accountability!! Now, to add one thing, I agree that there is a can of worms opened here & the outcomes are not predictable at this point. However, I don’t care “if it makes Trump more popular” with the morons who pay for his grifting, I can have no more control over that than many other unsavory things that happen in this flawed society. Even if (unlikely but not impossible) it resurrects his flailing career, another Trump term we all know would be a disaster, but at this point likely little or no worse than Biden’s continuation of Trump policies and telling the former Dem base when they fvck over the East Palestine folks and consign them to cancer deaths, “What are you gonna do? Vote for Trump? He wants an even weaker EPA than we do!!” Personally, I know the odds are not high, but if the Elites start to indict one another on the crimes that both duopoly parties do (Barney Frank getting the FTX scammers out from under any regulation for a $2 million payment is one recent example. Or Hunter Biden’s influence peddling and sex and drug crimes, or Matty Gaetz trafficking teen girls across state lines for sex and no charges bought), this will be a good outcome. . . .In closing I would like to note that this is a case where we have a Ginormous slippery slope where predatory monsters like Trump constantly escalate the crimes knowing they will never be held accountable. Remember his “joke” when running the first time, “I could shoot someone on 5th avenue and these people love me so much I’ll still be elected?” He was flaunting his impunity for all to see. Continued elite impunity is something that needs to END, ASAP. If Trump is the (fat) straw that broke that camel’s back, in the long run it is more likely to be a positive than negative development, though obviously none of us can know how this will all play out.

“But when you change a norm like this, it becomes open season and causes political instability.”

Good. If the elites feel it’s too risky to run for office, maybe they’ll stop running for office. The only way to run a country democratically is to deny the elites participation in the political process.

Rule of thumb: No politicians holding assets or having income +/- 10% of the median population. They’re damaged goods.

So interesting that this norm gets broke right after bailing out people way above the fdic limit – another new norm situation.

Eric Anderson

Good. If the elites feel it’s too risky to run for office, maybe they’ll stop running for office. The only way to run a country democratically is to deny the elites participation in the political process.

My chief disagreement (if you can call it that) with Ian is this:

1) Yes, Trump’s crimes in this case are indeed more trivial than those of Bush/Cheney, of Reagan (nice the confirmation of what we already knew about the 1980 “October Surprise” came out), of Clinton (Iran), and every other US president since Carter. However, the logic should be reversed–if you can’t prosecute and jail someone so obviously, so blatantly, so transparently, and so in-your-face guilty as Trump, then you’re not making it easier to bring others to justice, you’ve just made it HARDER. If you can’t make yourself go for the low-hanging fruit, what’s your chances of getting the fruit higher up?

2) Deterring people from running for office is already happening to the ‘left’. If you run for office and you’ve not led an angelic life, the Right will dig that up in their research about you and go after you. Even if you have led an angelic life, they’ll either embellish or even invent from whole cloth dirt about you. And the corporate press will print it. The Right will have an quasi-leftist ally on this, an element of the feminist movement, if the alleged offense involves sexual hanky-panky of some sort (I’m thinking of what happened to Al Franken, whose offenses pale beside what many of the right have done).

If you’re right-leaning, of course, you can do sexual hanky-panky and downright crimes for years and the chances are that no one will say anything.

Rule of thumb: No politicians holding assets or having income +/- 10% of the median population. They’re damaged goods.

Better or related solution: after being elected to offense, you have to divest yourself of all wealth. You will dependent on SS and a good pension for your income after offense. These can increase with tenure (so your money motivation aligns with being re-elected) but after leaving office you have to live on these. No other source of income is allowed.

This would mean that yes, losing an election instead of pissing off your rich donor and future “employers” is the worst thing for you financially, and two, if you help a rich donor or interest you can’t benefit financially from it in any way.

I agree with the people who have said that if the Manhattan D.A. finds Trump prosecutable for this “petty little” alleged crime, he should go ahead and prosescute. If we can’t even prosecute a brazen sneering scofflaw, how can we ever prosecute the ever-so-clever artful dodgers?

And the Republicans started this by prosecuting people like Siegleman on cardboard replica engineered fake charges. They started it. Lets see if they can be utterly crushed in their attempt to finish what they started.

If the Blue Elites and the Red Elites co-escalate in ever more vengeance-based prosecutions against eachothers’ political figures? As long as those figures are being prosecuted for actual alleged crimes, however petty, let a thousand prosecutions bloom. If the Blue Leopards and the Red Leopards eat eachothers’ faces off by the thousands, they might co-weaken eachother to the point where the masses of gazelles can move in and destroy the remaining Red and Blue leopards.

And if the Red and Blue leopards burn the system all the way down? That is better than what we have now, and may be our only hope for reconquering our country back.

If the other prosecutors are all too cowardly or all too pro-system/ pro-elite to prosecute Trump for his alleged real and serious crimes . . . . orchestrating and driving the Capitol Riot, plotting to overthrow and set aside elections in various states such as Georgia, etc.; then this petty little prosecution for this petty little crime is better than nothing at all.

And if Trump is found guilty, pray that he uses the Judge’s offer of anything to say before sentence is pronounced — to turn himself into a Jeffrey Epstein “little black audio book” and recount everything he knows about every business crime by every person of his own class and business sector that he knows about, to get revenge on the class comrades who thought to sacrifice the tail in order to save the lizard. And if he knows anything specific about any underage girls that Clinton may have raped on Epstein Island, let him megaphone every detail of that, too.

And if all that means that we might end up with a United States of Modernia and a Gilead Republic of Shit Headistan, lets take our opportunity to make the most of it.

Trump couldn’t care less one way or another. He’s only always looking for maximum personal gain. Why couldn’t neocons make it more worth Trumps while than Putin could?

I see neocons as being more than just an NRA with far bigger weapons to profit from. They’re also big energy, plus whatever the hell Halliburton is. They’re rich. But then, Dick sure was publicly proud of his daughter going after Trump so competently. Maybe neocons made Trump an offer he could refuse. Or maybe they just underestimated his level of narcissistic stupidity. Or maybe he violated the goodfellas maxim: never rat on your friends and keep your mouth shut. Maybe Ivanka will tell all after big daddy’s gone.

Speaking of Alvin Bragg’s humongous balls, it seems that more timid other prosecutors may follow. Trump could soon be swimming in lawyer piss. On our end, be nice if “fighting the man” could be made an actual cultural value once again.

And finally Desantis. When one internet searches up “desantis” they’ll find Desantis Gear for sale. Stuff like holsters and impact weapons. If I had more time and money I’d peddle my own St. Desantis paraphernalia. Shrines, candle holders, framed prayerfully-looking-up pictures, and maybe a T-Mobile leased service or two. Be interesting to see what his supplicants prefer these days.