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Watching the press briefing Trump gave... something in me finally broke.
I don't think it matters what you call Trumpism. I think that we've spent all of this time propping up a broken system with a broken man. I recoiled from the accelerationists who said they were using Trump to break the system because that just seems so destructive and vile, no better than the people who break Starbucks windows.
I thought: maybe he's a good man. Maybe we should give him a chance. And the Democrats are so vile in their baseless slander.
But the Dermocrats didn't make him give that speech on January 6th.
Hillary Clinton should have been jailed and she should still be in jail. There is nothing to be gained however from holding on to a tool that has run out of use.
I mean is there anyone out there who didn't understand why Democrats were in shrill hysterics about fascism? The man like to scare them, and I don't know if I believe that he had so much fun terrorizing the libs (it's so easy and someone has to do it) that he fell into it, or if... well, I just can't go down that road yet.
This criminal wasn't worth all of this divisiveness in our politics. Maybe the divisiveness was already there.
I regret my support for former president Trump and I want him to withdraw from public life. Nixon had the decency to step down when his time was up.
That was Nixon's mistake. Plenty of politicians and presidents before and after did much worse than he did, and they stayed in the game. Obama sicced the IRS and DOJ on conservatives, Bush lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction to start a war, and Johnson did worse. Nixon participated in the cover-up of a break-in? Reagan's people participated in the cover-up of an operation to keep hostages in Iran until after Carter was defeated, and it worked.
Now that I'm writing this all out, I want to object that you're calling Trump a criminal because he's being charged with paperwork errors in paying a prostitute.
Regardless of what one thinks of the legitimacy of the charges against Trump -- I personally think they set a terrible precedent and will only serve the interests of Bragg and, probably, Trump, this is not an accurate summary of the allegations. The factual allegations are that Trump and Cohen arranged to have Cohen submit a series of false invoices for attorney's fee payments pursuant to a fictional retainer agreement.
Paperwork errors
Edit: Sorry, I don't want to sound antagonistic. I get that the point is that Trump tried to conceal his payments to Stormy Daniels. But they're not charging him with anything else. And the legal argument is that Trump hid a campaign contribution from himself to himself by paying for the NDA out of his own pocket. Bragg's legal argument would have to be totally different if Trump had expensed differently. Paperwork.
Yes, of course it involves paperwork. My objection was framing it as "paperwrok errors." The allegation is of intentional false statements. Again, whether he is actually guilty of that, or whether if so it is a felony or a misdemeanor, or any of the other questions raised by the prosecution are separate issues. But if we are going to have an objective discussion of the prosecution, it seems to me that we need to be clear on what that allegations actually are.
To be precise, the crime is intentionally falsely recording a personal expense (paying off Stormy Daniels) as a corporate expense (the Trump Organization paying a bill for legal services provided by Michael Cohen). Absent any other wrongdoing, this would be misdemeanor false accounting. Under NY State law, it gets upgraded to a felony because of the intent to conceal the campaign finance violations.
It would normally turn into felony tax evasion if the Trump Organization filed a corporate tax return based on the falsified accounts, but the indictment implies that the payments were 1040ed with the expectation that Cohen would pay personal income tax on them. This means that there was no revenue loss, so probably no tax evasion charges on the Trump Organization. (Cohen did not, in fact, pay the tax, and was jailed for personal tax evasion in 2018).
Apart from the tax angle, this would never normally be prosecuted unless an actual human being lost money as a result. But it is a real crime, not "three felonies a day" bullshit. Law-abiding businesses do not intentionally falsify their books and records. It certainly looks like the prosecutor has evidence of falsification and evidence of intent.
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