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Breaking news. It looks like the jury convicted Donald Trump in the "hush money" case.
This verdict will likely galvanize voters come November – leading to record turnout among Republicans. I might even vote for the old rascal myself as I view this lawfare as both morally wrong and deeply destabilizing.
To make a prediction closer to home, we're now certain to cross 1000 posts on the weekly thread.
my enemies’ lawfare, my rule of law
It’s hard to take the lawfare accusations seriously.
there are tons of high level republicans who are not subject to prosecution, with the obvious explanatory difference being that they, you know, didn’t commit crimes
dem DOJs go after dem politicians for similar violations
the same DA goes after normal people for similar violations
This looks like a case of “man does crimes, gets prosecuted for said crimes.” The only remarkable thing is that this man is a former politician with a loser cult of personality.
Let me flip it around: can you honest to god hand on the Bible imagine a scenario in which Trump committed a crime and you don’t call the resulting prosecution “lawfare?”
Edit: I also suspect that the venn diagram of people calling for Trump to lock up Hillary over the made-up email thing and people calling the prosecution of Trump "lawfare" is close to a perfect circle.
No the obvious difference is that they never went to war with the establishment the way Trump did. Also, admittedly Trump is publicly a liar and sleazeball so that makes a lot of people think that he must be a criminal too, which creates a favorable environment for pursuing a prosecution.
No he did not commit a crime.
So to get a felony conviction here, the prosecutor, judge and jury had to introduce multiple unprecedented or ridiculous leaps:
Here is an establishment liberal explaining why this prosecution was so unprecedented: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-but-prosecutors-contorted-the-law.html
Yes, of course.
The thing about Trump is that he is a sleazy guy who lies a lot, but he is ultimately a show-man Boomer business man who listens to his lawyers and doesn't do obviously criminal things. He is not mobbed up. His faults are those of a carnival barker, not of a Bernie Madoff. There has been an enormous media campaign to portray Trump has some kind of obvious fraudster criminal but that is not actually who he is.
I'm in the tiny sliver of people who thought Comey got it right. He was right to have the press conference explaining what she did wrong to the American people, but also right not to prosecute. Her violation wasn't serious enough to try warrant overriding the electoral process with a judicial process.
When it comes to prosecuting the highest-level politicians, I would use this rule of thumb: If you explained the crime in a few sentences to George Washington, would he say, "what? I don't even understand why that is a crime in your era." Or would he say, "Of course that is a crime." Actually taking bribes, deliberately leaking secrets to enemy powers, executing opponents, etc, are all real crimes and should be prosecuted regardless of the person. But prosecuting high-level officials for technical crimes and gray-area crimes and crimes invented in the last 80 years gives far too much power to the bureaucracy.
Did Trump really go to war with the establishment? His largest legislative accomplishment was a huge corporate tax cut. That strikes me as about as establishment as it comes.
I get that he says things like “drain the swamp”, but it’s very unclear to me that he was anti establishment at all aside from his personality.
Different establishment. The establishment that cares about corporate tax cuts probably has some cultural and interpersonal overlap with the establishment that is involved in New York judicial system but it is not like that they are the same set of people with coherent agenda.
The establishment is like the Man -- fuzzy concept that sometimes have informative uses but still fuzzy, which makes it too imprecise and underdefined for other uses.
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