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So, my debut post. I've been lurking here for some time and I have decided to experiment with some public posting.
The culture war issue on my mind is the federal prosecution of NY State AG Letitia James. A summary, from my perspective:
She more or less campaigned for office with "Get Trump!" as one of her campaign promises.
Upon taking office, she and her team went through some of Trump's deals for the purpose of looking for grounds to pursue a claim against him.
She and her team discovered that in one of his real estate deals, he had supplied arguably exaggerated figures for property he had used as collateral for a loan.
The State of New York sued Trump in the general trial court making use of a consumer fraud statute which, until then, had been mainly used against businesses that take advantage of individual consumers (i.e. not deals between sophisticated businesses). This consumer fraud statute did not require proof of damages, which was helpful to the AG's efforts since Trump and his organization had paid the loan back in full and with interest.
The trial court awarded a judgment against Trump for hundreds of millions of dollars, a judgment which was later reversed on appeal.
This lawsuit had been one of numerous other "Get Trump!" legal activities, civil and criminal, in multiple jurisdictions.
After Trump was re-elected, a Trump loyalist with access to federal home loan files went through Letitia James' files and discovered arguable fraudulent statements in her mortgage applications for certain properties. Letitia James was referred for possible prosecution and ultimately indicted for bank fraud.
Normally in situations like this, the mortgage applicant is not prosecuted. Rather, they are required to pay the higher interest rates which would would have been required had the application been completed accurately.
Personally, my reaction to this series of events is one of satisfaction. I was outraged by the lawfare campaign against Trump and it seemed to me that AG James activities were an abuse of her office. The prosecution of James strikes me as a reasonable tit-for-tat, necessary to deter the Blue Tribe from future abuses. The most charitable interpretation I can think of with respect to these lawsuits is that they are a form of "Nazi punching," i.e. the idea that if you are dealing with genocidal psychopaths, it's reasonable to oppose them By Any Means Necessary. But of course, as others have pointed out here, when you combine (1) it's okay to punch Nazis; and (2) my out-group are, generally speaking, led by Nazis, the net result falls somewhere between "counterproductive" and "civil war."
What's also interesting to me is that for the most part, the media coverage has downplayed points 1-6 from above even to the extent of completely ignoring them in certain cases, giving the impression that Trump is just gratuitously using the justice system to target his political enemies. (Yes, this is the "boo outgroup" part of my post.)
So this brings me to my main question: What will happen next? Given that the Blue Tribe members (apparently) feel that they are the victims of a vicious unprovoked lawfare attack, will they decide to retaliate at the next opportunity? Are we about to enter an era where every outgoing president preemptively pardons himself and all of his associates; conservative businessmen with political aspirations avoid contact with New York and California; and liberal businessmen similarly avoid Florida and Texas? Probably this is an exaggeration, but I would guess that the Blue Tribe is thirsty for revenge and I could easily see this lawfare business escalating.
A secondary question: Perhaps, much like the mainstream media, I am omitting important context from my summary. Are there additional facts I should consider which would (or should) change the way I see this lawfare business? In one article I read (I think it was the New York Times) the point was made that the fraud alleged against Trump was much bigger than that alleged against Letitia James. But to me, this does not seem like an important distinction because the key similarity is that in both cases, it seems that the authorities chose a target for political reasons and then went looking for arguable wrongdoing by that person. (As opposed to starting with the wrongdoing and then looking to see who was responsible.)
I think one thing that could prove true is that, after some soul-searching, liberals will realize the legal pursuits against Trump emboldened his movement and gave it the life it needed for his re-election.
For the longest time, Trump claimed that everyone was out to get him and that he was being persecuted. Even after the impeachments and January 6, I never really bought it. Mitch McConnell said that “former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one” (criminal justice system or civil litigation). Biden’s DOJ had the only legitimate path for ‘lawfare’ and totally blew it. They had their big chance for like a year. He was dead in the water in 2022, paying something like $100 million a month in legal bills.
Then the civil suits and various trials all popped up within a year of the election and felt pretty hand-wavy. Even his felony conviction was unprecedented in legal theory, breaking federal election law at the state level by paying Stormy Daniels. Then his company gets put under conservatorship and every other day you’d hear about a 500 million dollar judgement. If not for winning the election, he’d have serious legal troubles to this day.
I was upset enough on the day of his indictment that I—along with a lot of others—contributed to his campaign. I believe Kamala has said something to the effect that some of this was counterproductive.
While there will never be another president quite like Trump, I have to believe they now understand how it all looked. For all the talk about Trump breaking norms, it’s got to be cognitive dissonance to (1) think “lock her up” in 2016 was a dangerous remark, and then (2) nine years later, campaign on throwing the former president in jail for whatever you can get him on.
I think it’ll be a live and let live thing. They tried this gambit and it did NOT work. It did not poll well for Kamala to say over and over how dangerous he was and laud her time as a prosecutor.
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