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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34983 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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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.

  • -28

Trump is useless. The Red Tribe will deserve everything they get (and more) if they give him the republican nomination that he is very likely to go on to lose the general with, leading to 4 more years of wokism from above. Perhaps even a Supreme Court seat; Thomas is getting old.

They say that if you can't teach people something with words, the rod usually suffices, and trump supporters deserve the rod, delivered harshly and mercilessly, if they go on to support such an absolute low class, useless, bumbling idiot over the actually competent Ron DeSantis.

No candidate has greater potential to derail DeSantis than Trump. He clings onto the hardcore vote and takes them with him, sets fire to his opponents in the primaries, and renders them worse general candidates.

I hope Trump actually gets convicted, irrespective of the validity of his crimes, just to render him ineligible. Even if De Santis loses in the generals, seeing him as the opponent will force democrats to prefer a moderate candidate.

just to render him ineligible

if you're concerned with the law, nothing he's been charged with or investigated for is even in the realm of something which would render Trump constitutionally ineligible

that being said, the law hasn't mattered thus far so no reason to think it would going forward

Even if De Santis loses in the generals

desantis will certainly lose in the general

desantis must win the midwest to win the general, but I will tell you midwesterners do not like desantis and he will not appeal to them because he's an uncharismatic dork with a long history of being a neolib neocon who votes for forever wars and disasters like TPP

he wouldn't even win Ohio let alone Wisconsin

seeing him as the opponent will force democrats to prefer a moderate candidate

Joe Biden was the moderate candidate. So was Hillary Clinton. Democrats, as opposed to the GOP, are far more capable of forcing through moderate candidates, and they have, irrelevant of whatever "Democrats" think generally.

Of course they do. There are a number of ways this happens, but the main driving force is the ability to affect outcomes in voting by party insiders because most of the Democrat primary voting base is in machine city politics, i.e., "black democratic primary voters," and in union members. Both of these groups are easy to drive to particular candidates. And even if all this softer "forcing" fails, Democrats have more control over who gets the nomination because the nomination is more controlled by party insiders in the nominating process, i.e., superdelegates. These party insiders have "forced" through candidates in the past. This process was slightly tweaked recently, but they are still able to force through a candidate in a contested convention (i.e., fails on first ballot).

yes, they can "force through" moderate candidates

IIRC Progressives in 2016 bitterly complained about super-delegates and the potential voter suppression effect they could have when added to tallies of delegates (which'd make it seem like Clinton's lead was insurmountable so why bother?).

Speaking as a left-wing social democrat who voted for Bernie in the primaries twice, those people were dumb.

The percentage of primary voters who ever saw a graphic w/ the superdelegates + Clinton's delegates on a TV screen or in a newspaper article was probably less than 5%, if not even lower.

There was no conspiracy in 2016 or 2020 against Bernie Sanders - he was just bad at appealing to make a majority of Democratic primaries vote for him over either Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. This isn't to say those primary voters dislike him, which is something I think people miss.

Yes, there are a small amount of leftist online who think Obama is a neoliberal war criminal and Hillary is terrible, and a small number of 60-year old MSNBC voters who think Bernie Sanders is a sexist who would've lost 40 states, but the median Democratic voter likes Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and if they're aware of them, AOC, Gavin Newsom, and even Joe Manchin.

The only Democratic person of note who is actually disliked by the median Democratic voter is Sinema, because she openly pushed againt things even median Democrat's support, and openly decided to go all-in on being friends with rich Republican's, when she could've been a Mark Warner-style Senator in Arizona for a generation, and hell, maybe even been a VP or POTUS candidate in a decade or two.

There was no conspiracy in 2016 or 2020 against Bernie Sanders

Tim Kaine is replaced as head of the DNC with Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who helped head Clinton's 2008 campaign, and then Tim Kaine is made Hillary's 2016 VP. The receipts were all leaked by WikiLeaks, which showed that the DNC did everything it could to ensure Hillary's win. (Donna Brazille even passed Hillary some debate questions in advance.) Tulsi Gabbard resigned in protest over it, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz was eventually made to resign over the controversy.

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I mean, if the Democrats put forth a competent moderate who can beat Trump, then I'd be happy. I don't have any particular allegiances to the Republicans. But look at the alternative democratic candidates now... they're in disarray. Obama wasn't a candidate until the very last minute. So a miracle might happen. But, it doesn't look like the demos have a popular leader they want to band around. I like Pete Buttigieg and Marty Walsh. No nonsense moderates. But they seem to putting their weight behind Biden.

This means it will likely be Biden vs Republicans, and he will not fare well in debates against anyone.

he wouldn't even win Ohio let alone Wisconsin

Democrats won 2020 because they came out in droves to beat Trump, not vote for Biden. De Santis can force a lot turnout in Democrats, and energize enough Republicans to take it.

Of their candidates the only one I could potentially stand is AOC and that’s despite her being the leader of the squad. I think she’s toned it down a little bit as she became a real politician.

But honestly I trust her as authentic. I don’t think she’s been bought and paid for yet. Not like Biden taking money from anyone American enemy who was willing to send his son a wire. And more than a few just come off as rich kids on a silver spoon that are listed (Newman for example) or just too old. She’s only a second rate mind (went to BC). I actually sense she’s a nice person. Not a sugar baby like Kamela.

Please don't insult my alma mater! (That's my job!)

AOC went to Boston University.

Sorry for being that guy. I guess she’s from a third rate school. And BC was my second choiceto be that guy.

Only other school I considered.

Really? I find her understanding on nearly anything to just be vapidly regurgitate social media slop. She has an Economics degree, she has no business saying some of the crazy shit she says about socialism. I'm not sure if it's worse if she believes what she says or she doesn't.

Democrats "won" 2020 because they fundamentally and illegally changed how elections were done and poured ~$1,000,000,000 3rd party dollars and biased gov grants to "get out the vote" organizations to certain areas of the country ran by certain people not to mention a vast manipulation campaign by google and facebook.

Without those illegal changes, Democrats would not have won.

De Santis can force a lot turnout in Democrats, and energize enough Republicans to take it.

you think this based on what?

there is a gaping chasm between defensible polling and not

you want to bet this poll vastly oversamples certain demos and the polling organization has a poor record predicting objective outcomes?

I hope Trump actually gets convicted, irrespective of the validity of his crimes, just to render him ineligible

What exactly are the eligibility criteria here? Wasn't there a guy running with a slogan "Prisoner 9653 For President"? Did they change the law since then? And if not, oh god, do you really want to hand a meme like that to Trump of all people?

There really is no winning with Trump.

Both Democrats and Republicans seem to be their own worst enemies this time around. Democrats can't figure out 1 decent candidate because of the infighting and senile old man. Trump out here making it impossible for a Republican politician to move on from MAGA while at the same time being unelectable.

without MAGA, there are no GOP victories

move on from MAGA to what? the GOP without MAGA is playing to a demographic which doesn't exist anymore and the reason the establishment GOP hates Trump and MAGA is because he embarrasses them to their country club PMCs that used to form the party structure

those people are either gone or now Democrats

Trump is the only candidate which has a chance to win a general because he's the only one with cross-party appeal who motivates low-likely voters to show up. Without him, the GOP loses badly. Donald Trump is the only get out the vote operation the GOP even has despite spending a billion dollars on a proprietary database which cannot even correctly flag people who are registered GOP who haven't voted yet.

without MAGA, there are no GOP victories

Are there with MAGA? After eking out a narrow victory against a historically unpopular candidate in 2016, Trumpism has mostly been getting its ass kicked electorally despite hefty structural advantages.

Yes, 2016, 2018, and 2020 were all better off with Trump rallying or on the ticket than if he wasn't with Trump running better than the GOP each time. Trump saved the Senate in 2018.

you didn't write any specifics to your comments so there is nothing really to respond to

As others have noted, almost any Republican would've won in 2016, and most probably would've won more convincingly.

Trump and Trumpist candidates have otherwise generally underperformed generic ballots and run behind less Trumpy candidates (most prominently: Trump losing both GA senate seats in 2020 and then doing it again two years later, even as Kemp cruised to re-election). The GOP would be vastly better served electorally tacking back towards the center, which would enable them to capitalize on many of the Dems' wackier social position. This would displease the more radical elements of their base, but they have little leverage beyond threatening to crash the party with no survivors (which, to be fair, they have so far used to some effect).

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MAGA is about aesthetics, not the issues.

The issues will stay the same. The aesthetics are going from institutional kamikaze (Trump) to institutional capture (DeSantis / Rufo).

Trump is the only candidate which has a chance

We aren't talking about Jeb or Ted as the alternative. DeSantis has shown himself to be a competent public speaker that has united coastal and urban florida voters.

MAGA was born from the issues and was successful because the issues and Trump being uniquely charismatic to a broad voterbase who were either Democrats or do not vote. Election 2016 was about immigration, trade, and war only because of Donald Trump.

DeSantis has shown himself to be a competent public speaker that has united coastal and urban florida voters.

No, desantis is an uncharismatic dork who comes off badly in public speaking. This description is ridiculous.

‘vote for the crook’ predate him by quite a while, I think. Criminals being more honest than the opposition isn’t exactly new in political memes.

"Vote for the crook" was short for "Vote for the crook, not the fascist". It originated in the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial election when David Duke made the run-off, and was re-upped for the Chirac-Le Pen runoff in the 2002 French presidential election. The point is an explicit appeal to people who wouldn't normally vote for your candidate to vote for the lesser of two evils.

If 2024 is Trump-Biden (80% probability conditional on neither of them dying or having some unconcealable, disqualifying medical issue) then "The Crook" is running against a mediocre incumbent who is normie by Democratic standards. So "Vote for the crook" would have to be an appeal to pure partisanship ("Vote for the crook, not the Democrat"). That isn't an election-winning message in a high-turnout Presidential election where persuasion matters more than base mobilisation.

Incidentally, as a matter of federal law, the only way Trump can be ineligible is if his behaviour following the 2020 election amounted to an "insurrection or rebellion", in which case he is disqualified from office by section 3 of the 14th amendment. I suspect some states have state-level laws which would deny ballot access to a prisoner, though.

They’d have to let him out right? If he was in federal jail he could pardon himself. If he’s in state jail, the supremacy clause preempts the legal authority for a state to hold the chief executive against the lawful authority of the federal government.

The most recent 'moderate Dem' to clinch the presidency has presided over a turbo-charged progressivism that's become even more expansive and normalized than even during the 'crazy' Trump years. A development that I was assured would not occur, because said President is old, boring, vanilla, and 'doesnt look or talk like an extremist'.

What on Earth makes you think a DeSantis nomination would force moderation of anything? I would like somebody to actually explain the mechanism that will force the temperatures to die down, because so much of the rationale on offer has proven to be naive or a lie.

And this kind of comment is why Trump solidifies the underdog vote.

Life is complex in the postwar era, and there are all sorts of hazards for American people who yearn to live by instinct. The voters you describe were educated in public schools, trade schools, and on scholarship at public universities, the very education infrastructure the elites put into place and then eschew.

The men and women you spit on barely have enough time in their day to make a living in a small business in a strip mall and spend an hour or two in the gym every day working off the calories from hyper-stimulus food. Then on top of that, they have to face their children being taught that their parents are carriers of the whiteness virus, the privilege virus, the capitalism virus, and the straight-and-cis virus.

And to blame people from broken families for buying into the fantasy of the billionaire’s supermodel wife is the topping on the scoffing cake.

Oh I absolutely agree it's not their fault, but it absolutely is their problem (by their I mean poor red tribers here). No different to how dogs abused by their owner often go feral.

However, just like the dog, if they are to be returned to polite society treatment (ideally persuasion through words and treats, otherwise the rod) is necessary.

However, just like the dog, if they are to be returned to polite society treatment (ideally persuasion through words and treats, otherwise the rod) is necessary.

Heads up bro, you've drifted from arrogant brahmin into telenovella villain.

The usage of the dog metaphor was an analogy, I wasn't calling poor red tribers dogs themselves. You're doing literally the exact same thing as progressives do when they say you are objectifying women when you point out the lock and key analogy.

the problem isn't that you're calling Red Tribers dogs, though that is pretty much what you're doing, and it's not exactly awesome.

The problem is that you are discussing large numbers of other human beings as though they are beneath you, utterly within your power, and bereft of all agency in their own fate. If you actually think that's how things are, you are a very foolish person.

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No, what I was doing was pointing out that you don't sound like a rich person, you sound like a cartoon parody of a rich person. I assumed that wasn't your intention.

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Disappointing. Also infuriating and sad in degrees, but mostly just disappointing. This is why intellectualism fails at capturing hearts and minds: you write something as out-of-touch and vain as how it’s our culture’s job to preserve “beauty” when the working class voters you hate can’t even afford a shitty townhouse for <200k or send their children to public school without fear of them being physically assaulted.

The old meme about Donald Trump being a poor man’s idea of a rich man was the biggest unintentional self-own of the halcyon days of 2016. Trump was an ugly mirror for upper class intellectuals that destroyed them completely: a status-seeking, vain, educated womanizer thoroughly convinced of his own unbeatable cunning and raw power. His existence stated, “this is what you are. I’m just honest about it.”

If you don't believe in enduring cultural values like the preservation of beauty, then why judge Trump for illegally blowing up an iconic piece of beautiful art deco architecture to build his gaudy black palace on fifth avenue a little more cheaply?

It's especially hard to judge him for that, when his executive order mandating neoclassical architecture for new fedgov buildings was overturned on day one of the Biden admin.

Obesity is actually quite critical, I think. The majority of the American elite (including Trump's own children) are not grotesquely fat. Like the underclass (and unlike DeSantis) Trump doesn't care about losing weight, he doesn't feel like he should make the effort. There was that old progressive canard, that Trump was a poor person's idea of a rich person. This is true, but can be restated more simply. Trump is like a poor person who happens to be rich. And unfortunately, he brings with him the worst traits of America's underclass.

He is only borderline obese and he hides it well with his large suit and big tie. Winston Churchill and other famous upper-class people were borderline obese too. It does not confer low class. The archetypical rich person is almost always caricatured as being overweight, even grossly obese (whereas the butler is skinny).

There is weight, and then there is carrying weight. Both men are elderly but where Biden is ostensibly "healthy" he struggles to navigate a flight of stairs whereas the ostensibly unhealthily "obese" Trump is observed traversing them with ease. The snide comments about the results of substituting soy and icecream for red meat pretty much write themselves.

I'm honestly wondering how you could dream that a desantis administration would stop "wokism from above"? The reason the left is pounding this on you is because you have no institutional power at the federal level. He can't even stop it in Florida. His bills are toothless, made-for-tv jokes. His PR stunts, flying illegals and his spat with Disney, did nothing and desantis caved quickly.

And that's even if he could win a general election which he could not because a GOP candidate must win the midwest and desantis wouldn't even win Ohio.

And that's even assuming desantis isn't a neocon neolib pragmatist which he is.

His bills have progressives trying to hide every book in the state currently. He's also actually gone and fired a DA that refused to enforce the law. His admin properly treats enemy media as the propaganda machine it is. And his admin isn't betraying him at every turn while he giggles about it.

He's been a more effective Trump in every way while also not being a nutjob about losing. The only real questions are would he be able to replicate at the Federal level (we already know Trump cannot) and what his foreign policy would look like.

Has desantis even stopped "woke from above" stuff in Florida? From the Floridians I know, he has not. He looks to be making something of a dent, I suppose. The media reacts with hysteria when anything is done whether it's remotely effective or not so that's not a good way to gauge how effective he's been. When I've looked into most of his stuff, his actions are lots of acts made for media and then the follow through is lacking or just outright capitulation.

would he be able to replicate at the Federal level

oh, is that it?

The easy example would probably be vaccine mandates and re-opening in general.

It's definitely a big question, I'll give you that.

Desantis has roots on the PA-Ohio border. Maybe he can’t win the primary but he will know how to talk to people in that area. His grandparents were all part of the Italian immigrant wave (of which I’m a part of) to the region. His parents grew up there. Culturally he should be able to connect to all the ethnic whites that still exists there, and moving away from the region was extremely common when the steel mills closed.

There is zero chance he wins the primary against Trump in the midwest. Not "maybe" he can't, but zero % chance he wins a primary. I have seen nothing at all to think desantis knows how to talk to midwesterners at all and his record in Congress and comments since then are big turnoffs to midwesterners. The guy is not charismatic and he's not funny. He's the sort of dude who would pay $100,000 for someone else to write jokes for him to badly try to pull-off.

edit: Here's a good example of how Ron Desantis intends to connect with midwesterners. From "his" book:

I was geographically raised in Tampa Bay," DeSantis wrote. "but culturally my upbringing reflected the working-class communities in western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio — from weekly church attendance to the expectation that one would earn his keep. This made me God-fearing, hard-working and America-loving.

desantis caved quickly.

Uhm.

How?

https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2023/04/03/desantis-disney-reedy-creek-board-district-investigation/

He's actively attacked a core structure of the cathedral, and hasn't stopped advancing.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/02/ron-desantis-block-dei-program-state-colleges-florida

The colleges almost instantly showed their bellies, in response:

https://www.fldoe.org/newsroom/latest-news/florida-college-system-presidents-reject-woke-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-dei-critical-race-theory-ideologies-and-embrace-academic-freedom-.stml

How did desantis cave quickly against Disney or on the illegals flights? He quickly stopped the illegals flights. His "takeover" of the Disney leaves intact everything Disney cares about, e.g., exempt sales & property tax, tax-free bonds, expedited permitting, among others. Both are examples of heavy PR and lacking substance.

I will have to look into the newest PR blitz on college DEI program "blocks."

Maybe DeSantis can stop it, maybe not.

IMO DeSantis has a much better grasp of tactics than most other Republicans I see in that he recognizes this is both a legal and institutional fight and he supports people (Rufo) who do as well.

It's a low bar but...

A lot of Republicans are so bad at this they might as well be throwing the fight. A lot of their "strategy" might as well not exist besides whining about wokeness and Silicon Valley bias (basically trying to work the refs) and trying to meet people halfway (in their mind) with the plaintive talking point of "this isn't what MLK wanted".

DeSantis (and Rufo) understand that a lot "wokeness" takes place on a legal level and needs to be attacked by removing the support structures for DEI or taking over the institutions. Judging by the ironic complaints of his enemies, he also understands that somewhat vague or subjective laws are useful by having a chilling effect on anything that could conceivably approach the line of punishable behavior (which forces companies to innovate on woke - or anti-woke- measures just to be safe).

Certainly, I'd be willing to bet he's given it more thought than Trump. If you want to fight wokeness it seems like there's two options and one is more thoughtful than the other (which we already tried and it arguably made things worse)

Do you think DeSantis can deliver culture war victories? Republican presidents are notoriously poor in this regard. They are good at tax cuts and getting into wars, bad at everything else.

Hopefully yes. He seems to have bungled up the Disney thing but he did manage to bring Florida universities to heel. DeSantis just seems to project an aura of "I will fuck up the wokes and I know how to do it" that is sorely lacking in Trump.

I don't know if I can go so far as to say that "Trump supporters deserve the rod" because patriots have to stick together, but I think that you have to be smart in politics.

As you (effectively) say, this is about the future, not the past.

I couldn’t agree more. The contrast is stark. Trump is all sizzle. Yet he appeals in a WWE kind of way to the proles. But politics is full contact and DeSantis would actually advance the interest of the proles.

Trump is useless. The Red Tribe will deserve everything they get (and more) if they give him the republican nomination that he is very likely to go on to lose the general with, leading to 4 more years of wokism from above. Perhaps even a Supreme Court seat; Thomas is getting old.

Trump is ineffective at operating within the political framework. But he isn't useless. He is a great showman and very combative and that regardless of how effective he is at getting things done is a morale boost for the people he champions, if nothing else. Trump could beat Biden, he might have a better chance than DeSantis overall. Trump knows how to work a crowd and has a lot of support in areas that are likely to be competitive. Though DeSantis would probably be more effective in position I agree.

Trump is divisive but he does inspire a good deal of loyalty and enthusiasm in his supporters. With low Biden numbers and inflation still likely to be an issue, plus the political/cultural landscape, Trump has a good shot if he gets the nomination I think.

If I were still working in politics, and the Republicans were paying me for my opinion I would say that I think Trump has an edge over DeSantis in actually winning the Presidency as it stands right now.

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.

Hillary did something that, if I or anyone else with access to classified information had done, would have landed us in prison under the espionage act. I can forgive a former VP or President for having boxes with classified documents in their garage, locked store room, etc. Those guys live, eat, breath, and shit classified information for 4 to 8 years, the changeover is chaotic and shit slips through.

Actively sending classified information to a personally controlled server and effectively making digital copies of massive amounts of classified, export control, CUI, etc information is the kind of stuff they put people away for decades for. Let alone destroying evidence thereof.

What they are accusing Trump of doing would have netted a fine for the overwhelming majority of people and likely not prosecuted in the first place. Hell all of the charges are beyond the statute of limitations anyway and should be tossed on that alone.

Sandy Berger got a fine and probation for doing worse than what Clinton did.

Has anyone ever been jailed for merely mishandling classified information without improperly disclosing it?

ETA - a quick google found this list of example cases. It looks like big shots like Berger and Petraeus get off with probation and fines, but small fry can get 3 months in prison if they are unlucky. The multi-year sentences all involved at least the appearance of unauthorized disclosure.

I think it is pretty clear Clinton would not have been jailed if she was prosecuted. Similarly, it would be an injustice if Trump gets jailed for mishandling classified information (assuming, of course, that he hasn't been disclosing it).

Sandy Berger

Clearly did wrong, but not worse than putting classified information on the open Internet.

???

Are you saying that sending classified information over unsecure e-mail is equivalent to putting it on the open Internet? I suppose it might be in terms of possible harm (although in the case of Hillary Clinton's e-mails this would be mitigated by the fact that they were probably never routed outside the US), but in terms of legal culpability it definitely isn't.

Until quite recently emails between different domains would have been transmitted in plain text. It’s not persistently available like a website, but any hop between the servers could read the contents of emails.

This is accurate. It's certainly bad but definitely not equivalent in terms of actual expected cost to publishing it on a webpage for everyone to see.

I really don't know why @The_Nybbler thinks otherwise. Is there some law that treats them as equivalent or are they simply remarking on pure cryptography theory? idk

I mean, it's what we get drilled into us. I don't know if it's law, though.

This is accurate. It's certainly bad but definitely not equivalent in terms of actual expected cost to publishing it on a webpage for everyone to see.

I really don't know why @The_Nybbler thinks otherwise.

I don't. My words were "putting classified information on the open Internet".

Are you saying that sending classified information over unsecure e-mail is equivalent to putting it on the open Internet?

Yes. The classified information traveled (quite possibly unencrypted) over the public internet. They may or may not have been routed outside the US; Clinton's people had no control of that.

Actually we know that they were in fact routed outside the US - her private server was compromised and a copy of every email she sent from it was forwarded to a foreign power (most likely China).

I don't know about the state department but in the DoD or DoE they absolutely would be looking at jail time. I have seen it happen.

The average 64 year old in the state department absolutely wouldn't go to jail for decades for doing what Clinton did.

It's kind of an irrelevant comparison. The average State Dept. worker is not the boss of the entire State Department and can not have done what Clinton did. Clinton purposely implemented a system for transporting classified information outside of proper oversight and security channels. She didn't merely mishandle X number of classified documents; she intentionally ignored protocols in order to ensure that all of her classified communications were mishandled because she wanted to hide them.

To bring it back to the Trump/Biden boxes of documents, a more apt comparison would be if it were discovered that either of the Presidents had established an underground railroad that diverted all Top Secret docs away from the correct filing system and into a secret cave, and when the cave was discovered, all of the documents mysteriously caught fire.

https://www.burnhamgorokhov.com/penalties-of-mishandling-classified-documents-in-the-united-states/

For the average person with access to classified information they would absolutely face prison time, and additional time for every count.

And I'm more pissed about this whole thing because after it happened we had to go through a ton more training and start portion marking every freaking line and paragraph on emails sent over the classified networks. MASSIVE pain in the ass.

Those guys live, eat, breath, and shit classified information for 4 to 8 years, the changeover is chaotic and shit slips through.

It's not a new risk nor do we lack the resources to handle it cleanly. Why don't they have people making sure it's secure? Trump doesn't need to handle it personally, there are probably a dozen people he could get instructions from or fob them off to his staff.

I can forgive a college student for not having an immaculate room. People with money and people to make things happen correctly don't have that excuse.

Why are you limiting your criticism to Trump, when Biden was caught doing the exact same thing, and probably the only reason they haven't found anything like that on any of the previous presidents is that they haven't bothered looking?

Biden was caught doing the exact same thing

It was my understanding that Biden returned everything as soon as he realised he had it, while his predecessor refused to return documents upon notification by the National Archives, and repeatedly lied about having more things he wasn't supposed to.

Admittedly, I live in a fairly Blue-tribe circle; is my understanding incorrect?

It was my understanding that Biden returned everything as soon as he realised he had it

And then they found more.

Which, if I understand correctly, he also returned.

Were there any instances in which Mr. Biden either:

A: Denied possessing classified documents which he knew he possessed,

or

B: Refused to return classified documents which he was informed belonged to the government?

It was my understanding that Biden returned everything as soon as he realised he had it, while his predecessor refused to return documents upon notification by the National Archives, and repeatedly lied about having more things he wasn't supposed to.

Admittedly, I live in a fairly Blue-tribe circle; is my understanding incorrect?

Its roughly correct-adjacent. But it misses a few very important points, and is a generally irrelevant claim:

  1. Biden had documents in less secure locations (Mar A Lago is a decommissioned SCIF) for longer. It is also worse that the government didn't know Biden had the documents. Also, there were documents classified at SCIF level from Joe's Senate days, which means he illegally removed them from the SCIF, or someone else did and gave them to him. Unlike Mar A Lago, where the documents were there, and never moved until the FBI decided to go gangbusters.

  2. The cooperation line is silly because Biden is, essentially, cooperating with himself, while Trump was negotiating with a hostile DOJ.

Can you just ask me why I'm talking about the specifics before accusing me of being a partisan?

I'm talking about Trump because that's what the conversation is about. I said nothing about whether it is or is not okay for Biden to do the same. Gut reaction, no, it's not okay for him. But at least have the decency to phrase your accusation as a question.

It's not a new risk nor do we lack the resources to handle it cleanly. Why don't they have people making sure it's secure?

Because it's difficult, politically sensitive, and low priority. A few boxes of aging classified information in ex-official's homes is not a big problem. Having people with high-level clearances comb through politician's papers looking for things which shouldn't be there is expensive and more importantly annoys the politicians. And expecting them to do it themselves, or hire appropriately-cleared people to do it, is what we have now.

Can you explain what you mean by difficult or politically sensitive?

I understand that it may not be the most pressing concern, but it still needs to be done. Same with a politician's annoyance, that's an irrelevant factor and they should understand the need to have this done correctly if they care about their country.

Ditto with expense, the US wastes lots of money. How much is it going to cost to have some people on hand to deal with this? Even at 150k salary per person doing it, that seems like peanuts.

Can you explain what you mean by difficult or politically sensitive?

I've already explained "politically sensitive"; anything that annoys former high-level politicans is going to be politically sensitive. Whether it should be or not.

By "difficult", it's mostly about getting enough people cleared at a high enough level to comb through this stuff. You can't just call up an army of GS-7 clerks to do it. You need fairly expensive individuals cleared at a high level, who then have to be exposed to a politician's ire for doing their job.

I understand that it may not be the most pressing concern, but it still needs to be done.

For some not very stringent definition of "need". Classified information moldering away in politician's basements and garages is unlikely to be a significant source of leaks.

By "difficult", it's mostly about getting enough people cleared at a high enough level to comb through this stuff. You can't just call up an army of GS-7 clerks to do it. You need fairly expensive individuals cleared at a high level, who then have to be exposed to a politician's ire for doing their job.

And who likely have other functions/jobs to be doing as a function of their high clearance and don't want to be sifting through Politicians' papers for briefs that were of actual political sensitivity for 2 weeks 3 years ago and are yet still legally classified

Trump would spend the entirety of a second presidency narrowly pursuing revenge on those individuals who he believes have wronged him

At this point, that would actually be healthy for American politics.

I really, really don't think it would.

You might think it's deserved, but I don't see how it would make anything about the situation better. Dangerous precedent indeed.

Democratic politicians are, right now, using the criminal justice system to pursue their political enemies. That's already a bad situation. If the Democrats aren't going to do anything about that themselves -- and they clearly are not -- turnabout is the only thing that can get the US out of the situation.

Turnabout doesn't help! It just says "welp, this is the new normal." I agree that bending over and taking it isn't going anywhere, but the best outcome for America is if the Democrats get massive voter backlash for this. That doesn't happen if it becomes common practice.

Democrats are not going to get voter backlash for it because their voters support it. Turnabout may make this a "new normal", but such an equilibrium allows for a truce to be arranged. The Republicans just bending over and taking it and counting on the conscience of Democratic voters to stop it results in no equilibrium at all, just a spiral into further abuse.

Trump going after his personal enemies within the GOP (as discussed upthread) isn't turnabout - it's an escalation (viz-a-viz normalcy) or a distraction (viz-a-viz what Alvin Bragg is doing). Trump going after a druggie fuckup like Hunter Biden (which seems to be what most of the MAGA crowd away from this forum want) would also be a distraction. Turnabout would be Trump going after the key players on the other side of the table - particularly potential presidential candidates and key congressional leaders.

Going after the GOP wouldn't help, but attacking Joe Biden through Hunter would be useful turnabout. The biggest problem for that would be that Hunter may be too obviously legitimately dirty.

Trump punishing people who he thinks wronged him would do more for the rightwing and American politics than anything which has happened in 50 years.

Trump punishing and gutting establishment GOP leadership would do wonders for the rightwing and the GOP. Trump won because he saw a winning hand on the ground on a bunch of issues which were wildly popular but which both political parties were doing nothing about, e.g., Trade, Immigration, Wars. He was able to win because the GOP had been talking about those things-ish, for years and have done nothing at all to make them more in line with their voterbase.

Ridding the party of and making an example of cowardly backstabbers like Pence or corrupt out-of-touch derps like Mitch McConnel would be a huge boon to getting the GOP to actually align with their voterbase. Half the reason the GOP is such garbage is because GOP leadership have an army of entrenched allies in polling and consulting which strangles the appeal out of any potential candidates. Everything is structured in such a way as money is controlled by heavily centralized committees which then doll it out to candidates it likes which they exercise to their own benefit, the 2022 disaster being a good example of their strategy of preserving their own power at the expense of the GOP generally and the GOP voter. Removing these people or making them fear they could be held accountable would be huge benefit to bringing vitality back to the party.

No other GOP candidate has even the slightest chance of doing any of that. What they would do is kick the can down the road doing nothing (at best) and taking up time the GOP doesn't have. The GOP base is old people and boomers. Boomers' time is ticking and each year that goes by means fewer boomer voters and smaller voterbase. Every cycle wasted on some status quo dork like desantis will just mean the GOP voter or their issues is on even worse footing to mount anything resembling a "march through institutions" or at least gimping them in a way which makes them realize they could bleed too when they exercise their power on others.

Trump punishing and gutting establishment GOP leadership would do wonders for the rightwing and the GOP. Trump won because he saw a winning hand on the ground on a bunch of issues which were wildly popular but which both political parties were doing nothing about, e.g., Trade, Immigration, Wars. He was able to win because the GOP had been talking about those things-ish, for years and have done nothing at all to make them more in line with their voterbase.

He barely won. And, as others have said in this thread, it was arguably the case that any Republican candidate had an advantage on the ballot at the time.

Trump absolutely blazed a new trail.

But, truth is, we don't know how a neolib, "we love migrants now" (this was the suggested shift in the GOP's 2012 post-mortem iirc) would have done.

People can hold their nose and vote party line. Look at the Democrats; a lot of people prefer someone like Bernie but I think Trump putting three judges on the Court has broken a lot of sore loser/third party-adventurism.

simply writing "it's arguable" isn't an argument

Oh? Trump only barely beat the Clinton-Obama political machine?

Despite Biden's 81,000,000+ totally real and definitely legitimate votes, he "barely" won in 2020, too.

But, truth is, we don't know how a neolib, "we love migrants now" (this was the suggested shift in the GOP's 2012 post-mortem iirc) would have done.

we've seen those ryan-romney-bush candidates crash and burn since then so we have a guess

and we just watched yet another GOP candidate shy away from Trump in Dan Kelly in a Wisconsin Supreme Court election and lose badly

If you believe that, can you name one, single, specific punishment that trump is likely to do and would materially benefit the right wing? What does that sentence even mean?

stop mitch mcconnell's handpicked replacement (thune) when mitch retires

because he will accomplish nothing in power.

A libertarian's dream.

No, power accomplishing nothing.

It will be... it will be...!

In the absence of a strong executive forcing reform from above, the administrative state will simply continue to metastasize of its own accord. What we really need is civil service reform from Congress so bureaucrats can actually be fired en mass, Andrew Jackson style. But until then, the only way to keep them in check is through extremely energetic and focused leadership at the political appointee level. Trump was utterly incapable of staffing up his administration, so even though he had a shockingly libertarian deregulatory agenda, it was almost completely unfelt on the ground.

The current status quo is inherently un-libertarian.

Everyone I know just swapped back to Trump from Desantis. The establishment has shown themselves again and their target is Trump. These people need to lose and losing in a painful defeat and that’s by electing Trump.

Also the more I think about this case is Trumps the victim here. A former sexual partner was going to basically do revenge porn to him and do a tabloid write up on having sex with him. That’s revenge porn. Not on video by textually. So he paid her off. The lefts doing victim blaming that he just didn’t take it and have his sex life publically aired while he’s on the biggest stage of his life.

Hillary shouldn’t have been jailed. The word criminal is just a motte and bailey. You’re using it to mean someone who did a very bad thing. But all it means is state power got to put someone in jail. Now I don’t think Trumps a good man but he did nothing wrong here.

A former sexual partner was going to basically do revenge porn to him and do a tabloid write up on having sex with him. That’s revenge porn. Not on video by textually.

Talking about having sex with someone is your definition of revenge porn?

Surely "revenge erotic literature", at most.

Erotic literature is still porn and a textual depiction of a private sexual act without the actor's permission is just as much a violation of their rights as a graphical one. The resistance to acknowledging that is simply one more example of people refusing to take male victimization seriously.

Why would this specifically victimize males?

You have a good point here that I hadn't really considered. I jumped from "stereotypical male porn == bad, stereotypical female porn == not (nearly as) bad" to male victimization which doesn't naturally follow.

I'd resist acknowledging that for a female victim too. Text vs visual porn is a significant difference in my mind.

I mean, if I tilt my head sideways, I could kinda see the argument: evil ex telling a lurid and bawdy tale of a prior "conquest" as a way to damage the reputation of someone, and then amp that up with the high profile of this particular case. Still not the central form of the term at all, but...

Well, it was the OG form of hurting someone's social standing by discussing sex, see Othello etc.

Perhaps not, but "threatening to talk about having sex with someone then changing your mind when they give you money" is the central definition of a couple of things normally considered even worse than revenge porn...

These people need to lose and losing in a painful defeat and that’s by electing Trump.

You got that in 2016. It did nothing for you because your case rests on people seeing through the supposed illusion when the anti-populists attacked him. But Trump was very bad at eliciting that, he has said and done many things the people you're trying to court could find objectionable.

If he was meant to be Rosa Parks, then the part that's being forgotten is that you have to engineer him doing what he does. There has to be a strategy beyond just getting him in trouble as well. Parks wasn't the first woman to be denied seating, that went to a single mother who was passed over because people thought her status wouldn't look good. Where's the equivalent for Trump? I suppose DeSantis, but it looks like Trump has some serious followers and looks to be getting ready to fight for being the Republican nominee in 2024.

It would be one thing if Trump successfully punched out the establishment but he drowned in controversies of his own making instead.

No. No, no, no!

We're in this mess because of the number of people convinced that a vote for Trump is striking at The Establishment. That making the Hillaries and Pelosis of the world uncomfortable is, in some way, an end goal. Whenever he fails to deliver on actual policy, well, that's just the Deep State conspiring, right? And whenever he actively serves himself, his supporters aren't going to lose face by admitting that the shady, egocentric wheel-and-dealer might have some self-interest. That's a losing strategy, and we don't like losers around here. This stupid fucking tribal calculus completely dominates any assessment of whether Trump is actually effective!

Can't you see how this is the exact mirror of all that bullshit about "holding Trump accountable?" The only thing that matters is whether this guy wins or loses. Go team.

And whenever he actively serves himself, his supporters aren't going to lose face by admitting that the shady, egocentric wheel-and-dealer might have some self-interest.

Well, Trump is the only president to lose money in recent times. Maybe you can admit that Clinton, Obama, and Bush also "actively serve themselves"?

Whenever he fails to deliver on actual policy

People keep saying this, but Trump's policies meant my paycheck went up and illegal immigration went down. Maybe he could have done more if, cough cough, he hadn't been hamstrung by so many investigations and impeachments.

Meh. I've never been a Trump partisan, but this changes little for me. I still view Trump as the prole's middle finger, and his decline into persecuted irrelevance is part of the cyclical tragedy of class politics.

I called this right at the start. Trump is not Caesar, Trump is not Hitler. Trump is Tiberius Gracchus. He was, is, and will always be the failed aspirations of the working class projected onto an incredibly flawed cartoon of a human being.

We're not to revolution yet, but if and when we get there, the memory of how Trump revealed the depths of the deep state and baited the establishment into scrapping all their old norms will be strong.

The working class has been defeated, their champion will now be buried under every over-charging liberal prosecutor in every state and city where they have authority. The PMC cannot allow the threat that Trump poses to their hegemony to go without absolutely humiliating and destroying him (in their own minds, anyway).

So, when a competent successor appears, promises all the same things Trump did, and manages to get his hands on the military, he might well decide there's no point in comfortable retirement, because that won't be an option. If you want to lead the Populare faction, you must win or die in prison, poverty or both. The proles will not be allowed an equal voice in the operation of the country except by force.

The American Empire will have its emperor soon enough, and we will have Alvin Bragg to thank, in some small part. The senatorial thugs who killed the Gracchi rejoiced at their victory over the Populares. Sulla dug up the bones of Marius and threw them into the Tiber, and the senate rejoiced because they had reset the constitution to ensure the proles would never threaten again. And Julius Caesar watched it all, and when his turn came, he did not submit to the orders of the Senate. And yet he could not bring himself to kill them all, so they killed him.

Man has only two choices in government, autocracy or oligarchy. The people will support an emperor because the oligarchy is uncontrollable otherwise.

Does the working class actually prefer Trump, though? In 2020 Biden won among people who make under $100,000 / year. Of course that metric is not precisely correlated with any reasonable definition of "working class", but it is some indication that maybe the idea of Trump being the working class' chosen candidate is wrong.

Let's nuance the picture a bit. According to this article: "[I]n 2016 and 2020, CES data shows that the top two income quintiles (i.e., 80%–100% and 60%–80%) preferred the Democrat (i.e., Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden) over the Republican (i.e., Donald Trump) more than the twentieth through sixtieth percentiles did". Support for the Democratic Party by income is currently a U-shape where people in both the lowest and highest income quintiles are the strongest Democrat supporters - in fact, in 2016 and 2020 it seems that those in the highest income quintile have been a bit more pro-Democrat than those in the lowest. There's also the fact that in ZIP codes with a median household income of at least $100,000, Biden outpaced Trump in fund-raising, $486 million to only $167 million. In the rest of the country the two were knotted closely together.

The parties are switching bases, and I don't think this represents a shift in the beliefs of the upper class, rather I think this represents a shift in the parties and their policies. Over the years, the two parties have slowly converged when it comes to economic policy, and the ideological battleground has shifted to the social. Democrats have been adopting the brand of radical progressivism that has long had purchase with the upper class whereas their economic policy has slowly drifted moderate, and this serves the interests of their newly elite voter base.

Man has only two choices in government, autocracy or oligarchy.

Or a representative form, for those of us fortunate enough to have one, for as long as we can keep it.

And the Citizens of Rome kept theirs for just short of five centuries—and the Emperors were about a hundred years away from matching the stability of democracy when one of them broke the empire clean in half.

That's called oligarchy, and any investigation of the history of Rome will reveal exactly how "representative" the Senate was.

It’s not all or nothing. Plebs had a small amount of power, officially recognized. Every fighting man has a small amount of de facto power (though some, like rich men, generals etc, have far more than others), and when de facto power diverges too much from de jure power, it frequently results in civil war (“I guess we’ll see about that”).

The social war was near-zero power de jures getting their de facto power recognized. The end of the republic came about because the aristocrats had too much de jure power, relative to their actual power. English civil war and french revolution follow the same pattern.

The American Empire will have its emperor soon enough, and we will have Alvin Bragg to thank, in some small part. The senatorial thugs who killed the Gracchi rejoiced at their victory over the Populares. Sulla dug up the bones of Marius and threw them into the Tiber, and the senate rejoiced because they had reset the constitution to ensure the proles would never threaten again. And Julius Caesar watched it all, and when his turn came, he did not submit to the orders of the Senate.

I'm all for analogies between America and late Republican Rome. But one difference that gives me pause is that American elites seem pretty damn united. In Republican Rome, the consulship and other elected positions were the height of prestige, and elites would stab each other in the back to win them. Many populares were not true believers. They were opportunists. For example, Crassus, who bankrolled Caesar in his early career and became a triumvir, hardly screams "champion of the people".

In our timeline, political office is not particularly prestigious. Very few of the uber-elite aspire to be president, with Trump being a rare example of one who did. So while Trump was willing to take up the banner of rust-belters and hillbillies and come at the king, who's the next clout-chaser with his resources who will? Elon?

All this Rome talk puts Mike Duncan on the brain. I basically agree with him that "a unified ruling class is a tough nut to crack."

I agree, but I don't think our ruling class is nearly as unified as you do. They maintain position through directing the hate-stream of popular scapegoating, but it's only a matter of time before some smart and ambitious person points it at them.

The reaction to Trump is instructive. The man is a clown, and they lost! They then marshalled all their forces, cut all the deals, ran four years of propaganda, enlisted the CIA, changed all the rules, metastasized a pandemic and started a program of race riots, impeached him twice and just barely squeaked out a win the second time. That is not the performance of a unified and capable ruling class. That's the performance of a fundamentally incompetent pack of morons with a loose and loosening grip on power. If the US ruling class does not want to be the last one, they had better set their house in order posthaste, because at the rate things are going, I'm going to rule a significant fraction of the US before I die.

the memory of how Trump revealed the depths of the deep state and baited the establishment into scrapping all their old norms will be strong.

It is only because those norms have held that Trump's justice will be certain.

To the extent that norms have been violated, it is Trump who has violated them. There is no law saying we must commit suicide by holding to norms.

If your argument is that we cannot hold one person accountable, let me tell you: this is how you hold the system accountable. There is no universe in which the sane response to a part of the system being held accountable, no matter the story it has told about its persecution, is to complain about how the system is never held accountable.

Campaign finance law has been broken. The full facts of this case have already been read into the congressional record. Only terminally confused. Yes.

Welcome back!

Your arguments haven't improved, but welcome all the same.

As usual for themotte a beautiful comment that captures my thoughts written far better than my own. Thank you!

Nixon had the decency to step down when his time was up.

which explains a lot of why the next 50 years were such a disaster for anyone with even remotely similar politics

Nixon is the perfect example of what not to do. Cooperate-bot is a losing strategy. How many times and for how long will you lose before you figure this out?

Nixon didn't resign out of decency. His advisors had told him that the Senate would vote to convict, and he didn't have the kind of grassroots Republican support that Trump did that would allow him to seek revenge on the Republican senators that voted against him - the hard-core Republican primary voters already preferred Reagan to Nixon by this point.

Nixon didn't fight back because of decency and he rolled over instead of fighting back against a coup against his administration, too. He did it because fighting back would have entailed him revealing how corrupt, coopted and sick the US government was at that point. And the US was made strictly worse because of it.

Zero "hard-core Republican primary voters" supported Reagan over Nixon in 1974. But Nixon certainly set the standard for the GOP turning vast electoral victories into finding ways to lose.

What would "fighting back" involve? Are you suggesting that you know something Nixon's advisors didn't, and that he had a way of avoiding Senate conviction? Or are you suggesting that he stage a coup to remain in office despite the Senate voting to remove him? (SecDef Schlesinger and NSA Kissinger had already taken steps to prevent orders to stage a Latin America style coup reaching the military)

We now know that Woodward and Bernstein were stenographers and that Mark Felt (aka "Deep Throat") was a swamp insider trying to remove Nixon for swampy reasons. But that doesn't matter as a matter of law or politics - in 1974 the Republican caucus in the Senate wasn't prepared to support a President who swore like a sailor while plotting the cover up of an outrageous piece of ratfucking in an election he would have won anyway. If you are caught red-handed committing a crime, attacking the motives of the prosecutor is not convincing to anyone who wasn't supporting you anyway.

Nixon did find a way of turning a vast electoral victory into a way to lose - but that was staging the Watergate burglary in the first place. That is what I don't understand - why did he do it? With McGovern as the Democratic candidate, the 1972 election was basically in the bag without the information he was hoping to get from the bug tape. The trifecta of committing a serious crime, getting caught, and having powerful enemies is not usually recoverable, and I don't see how it would have been for Nixon.

What would "fighting back" involve?

Having the entire staff of FBI and CIA rounded up and shot for starters. I find it kind of telling that a inveterate leftist like Oliver Stone and pair of a life-long conservatives like my grandparents seemed to have come to a mutual agreement on who Richard Nixion was and who the real enemy was.

Having the entire staff of FBI and CIA rounded up and shot for starters.

Who by? The army wouldn't have obeyed the order, and the FBI and CIA comfortably outnumbered Nixon's personal militia. I agree that the plumbers would have made the hit on Felt if asked, but Felt wasn't freelancing - he was working on behalf of the Deep State. Given the high probability of getting caught, I can't see where in the scandal "whack Felt" is a better percentage than "try to retain the support of 34 Republican senators based on partisan loyalty". It is a minority view among Watergate scholars, but the idea that Nixon could have retained the support of 34 Republican senators if there was less "expletive deleted" on the tapes isn't fringe.

nixon did not stage the watergate burglary and didn't even know about it in the first place

your version of events isn't supportable any longer (and wasn't supportable at the time either for anyone in the know), it's time to update your understanding of what happened

The whole reason why there was a scandal is that the Watergate burglars were paid to do it by the Nixon campaign. I agree with you that Nixon didn't know that that specific burglary was being committed until the burglars got caught. But Nixon would have known about and approved of the high-level decision to hire Liddy and Hunt to ratfuck the McGovern campaign. Given their history as part of the Plumbers, he would also have known that they would commit crimes in order to do so. That is the decision I don't understand - why did Nixon (or his loyalists on the CRP) organise a criminal conspiracy to run up the score in an election they were going to win anyway.

One possible answer is that Liddy has claimed that the Watergate burglary was ordered for personal reasons by John Dean, but this doesn't make sense because the money came from the CRP, which Dean didn't sit on, and the only evidence for it is the testimony of crooks.

What would "fighting back" involve?

Burning all the intel agencies (Watergate was an op by one against him) to the ground.

That is what I don't understand - why did he do it?

Because everyone did it all the time. He was the first one who the FBI decided it was worth launching an operation to take out for what was, bog standard politics.

Hillary Clinton should have been jailed and she should still be in jail. ... I mean is there anyone out there who didn't understand why Democrats were in shrill hysterics about fascism?

You can't say that Hillary should have been jailed and then straight away imply that the Dems were right to think that trying to jail her was fascist. Do you not see your own contradiction here?

But the Dermocrats didn't make him give that speech on January 6th.

You mean the speech where he didn't say anything objectionable, and certainly didn't instruct anyone to storm Congress?

I regret my support for former president Trump

How do you feel about his time spent in charge of the nuclear codes?

You can't say that Hillary should have been jailed and then straight away imply that the Dems were right to think that trying to jail her was fascist. Do you not see your own contradiction here?

That's the mark of a concern troll who isn't able to keep the pretense up for more than a sentence.

alternatively, people are complex and emotions are raw.

Okay, your schtick where someone expresses views you don't like but you can't actually articulate a logical rebuttal so you call them a troll, is getting tired. Stop doing this. Point out the contradiction, but don't just jump straight to "Obviously this person doesn't actually believe what they're saying."

You can't say that Hillary should have been jailed and then straight away imply that the Dems were right to think that trying to jail her was fascist. Do you not see your own contradiction here?

Alternatively: Democrats are concerned about fascism with respect to Trump for reasons other than his desire to lock up Hillary Clinton.

This is the correct reading of my comment, which I admit was unclear.

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.

he's being charged with paperwork errors

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.

“Under New York state law, it is a felony to falsify business records with intent to defraud and intent to conceal another crime,” Bragg said in a news conference later Tuesday. “That is exactly what this case is about. Thirty-four false statements made to cover up other crimes. These are felony crimes in New York no matter who you are.”

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.

Let's say I love trump, and read this post. Am I persuaded otherwise? Even if I dislike Trump, do I gain anything?

Watching the press briefing Trump gave... something in me finally broke.

What press briefing? What broke? You changed your mind on trump - millions of people have. What made the difference? As it stands, not a good post.

20 posts , but he has been here for 6 months . so who knows if troll or not. probably a lot of new members are not well acquainted with the sub rules.

I remember gematria from reddit, they have never been a prolific poster, but they always read as honest to me.

That said, this post could definitely have used a link to the briefing in question.

Sorry, I was writing to process and I should have included a link.

I mean is there anyone out there who didn't understand why Democrats were in shrill hysterics about fascism?

Most people here.

All my friends and I who used to be Jon Stewart liberals and now aren't.

Political narcissism I'm sure was present in the past, but the way it's played up via our exposure to it is psychotically unhinged.

This is political theater and the state telling us we have no freewill.

You have no understanding of why Democrats are in shrill hysterics after a mob ransacked a building of our federal government? In reality it was a sad selfie party but don't let that make it impossible to understand why Democrats think the way they do.

They thought all of that, and more, and worse well before Jan 6th. That event was just the closest thing to an actual legitimate concern they could latch onto at the last hour, validating all prior fears that never came true - at least the one's they bother to remember.

I think I do understand why Democrats think the way they do; what animates their 'shrill hysterics'. It just has precious little to do with their stated reasons.

I didn’t watch the speech. Was there anything notable in particular?

We’re on at least five levels of “yeah this is technically bullshit, but it’s the only way he can get back at [other team] for [technical bullshit other team just did].” I felt physically ill watching the clip of Yudkowsky being cited at the White House press briefing. It hurt my soul to see something so high-minded, so nuanced become something so debased as a political gotcha question, but that’s how things have to get done in a democratic system. The most terrifying line in all of Orwell is, “If there was hope, it must lie in the proles.” This is what the people want.

The whole speech is here

I hate that Trump is once again a thing but lets not pretend that the system was worth saving before Trump. For myself, I voted for him in 2016 on the off chance that he delivered on some of his platform, then in 2020 because why not - let it burn. Not like there were any other choices for me besides not voting anyways. Honestly if he is the nominee, if I vote I will likely vote for him again. This system is a circus and I'll do my part to elect a clown it deserves.

I honestly don't even know where to go from here, since 2016 it's been validated time and again that the powers of the state and its zeitgeist are insurmountable and resistance is swiftly quelled through its institutions. I'll lay low, try to guide my child through the clown world, and hopefully stay out from under the eye of Sauron. In my fantasies Florida or some other red state becomes the first to secede and maybe in the new confederacy I can live a free man with a judicial system that defends personal liberty.

My only regret - which isn't in my control - was that the champion the right had was Trump, which is probably the champion we deserved.

I honestly don't even know where to go from here, since 2016 it's been validated time and again that the powers of the state and its zeitgeist are insurmountable and resistance is swiftly quelled through its institutions.

To me it seems like what has been validated is that if you elect a clown, you get a clown. The institutions aren't powerless and if you want change you need someone more competent than trump.

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.

This is definitely a good start but what are you doing now to prevent the diviseness from continuing? We are not too far away from a smarter American fascist creating a(n) (il)legitimate Constitutional Crisis.

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And an Abbott or Desantis who gives fewer shits could do so quite easily.

This feels like low-effort consensus building. You can't just pose hyperbolic, rhetorical questions and then ask us all to join you in your quest to slap the label of "criminal" on someone whose trial has yet to begin. That is antithetical to our justice system and to this rare sanctuary of online discourse.

It seems today is @07mk's lucky day! I'm pretty sure they'd appreciate whatever elaboration you could provide. I certainly would as well.

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 respectfully disagree. This bomb should be rode the whole way down, preferably while whooping and waving a cowboy hat. If Blue Tribe wants to jail him, they should jail him, but make them commit. Establish once and for all, beyond all denial, that this is what gets you prosecuted, tried and jailed: not burning kids alive for a political photo-op, not repeated forcible rape, not lying the nation into ruinous foreign wars, not running guns to the cartels or weaponizing the bureaucracy against political rivals, not lying to judges and abusing security powers, not normalizing organized, widespread political violence. I concede that this is a very ugly position to take, and submit only that reality is a pretty ugly place no matter how this goes.

I have a great deal of respect for the conscientious objectors of the Culture War, for the people who draw a line and have the character to stick to it. I have lines of my own, and hope I will stick with them when we run up against them. Unfortunately, war does not require individual consent, and proceeds regardless.

This criminal wasn't worth all of this divisiveness in our politics. Maybe the divisiveness was already there.

The divisiveness was even worse in 2022- a year after Covid and when Biden came into office, not pre 2022, which was bad, but not as bad as it is now and as bad as it will become as the 2024 election nears. Biden plus wokeness plus the whole Twitter mess or revolution (whichever you want to call it) is a bigger dividing force than Trump. Pre-2022 being pro-Trump still meant being part of a minority. Now Trump + DeSantis has created a much bigger force that is especially felt online like Twitter, with the backing of Musk (plus others like Tate, Rogan, and the whole alt-center/middle Substack crew) . Pre-2022 this did not exist. If you were pro-Trump you were stuck with crappy Chan sites or quarantined on some soon-to-be banned Reddit subs. 2022 was like the Chat GPT-4 equivalent of politics. When it seems like things were already getting extreme, it got turned up to '11' suddenly...from 0 to 60 instantly.

While I think this comment is consensus-building, I would like to add additional resolution on the "acceleration" bit.

At this point, the road toward acceleration is already lit, ultimately, time. I don't want to see the world burn. I'm not with CCRU-era Land, I'm not interested in the CCP saving the day, but I don't think there's any bypassing the fact that the road toward acceleration is has been paved, and that boulder doesn't seem to be stopping.

The US has been utterly impotent at limiting the CCP's (or Russia's) interference in their culture and elections, Fox News is the only prominent right wing television news source, I suppose there's TheBlaze. Talk radio makes me want to gag, and our alien god begins to come forth. Eliezer is either brain-dead or actively with the landians, I'm honestly not sure. But gridlock around ai progress is guaranteed thanks to his screaming. And in 2-6 years, most programmers will be out of a job or facing much lower paychecks than they do now.

As such, I agree with you- I wish Trump would withdraw from public life.

At least so that we have a chance of a leader who knows what they're doing and in place to capitalize when that boulder hits the bottom and crushes the silicon valley wasteland in 2-6 years.

Since my post last week for which I was explicitly not warned at that time, I thought I would address the particulars of the criticism, mainly that,

your substantive position (that the primary impetus for targeting Trump is purely political, as evidenced by the ceaseless barrage of unusual, contorted, or even spurious charges raised against him) seems defensible, but the way you raise it as though it were obviously true (implicitly building consensus), without furnishing either evidence or argument, brooks no discussion on the matter. That is antithetical to the foundation of the Motte.

First, there is nothing stopping anyone from disagreeing, but I figure I should present and defend my thesis.

Donald Trump is guilty of winning the 2016 election, and for this crime he will be hounded by Democrats until the end of his days. The crime of winning in 2016 was the rationale for the Russia collusion hoax, it prompted the Mueller investigation (which produced nothing actionable), it was the reason for his first impeachment (not the appropriate anti-corruption measures he was taking against his likely 2020 opposition), and it is the reason he was indicted last week.

Plenty of people commit plenty of crimes, and I'm sure Trump is technically guilty of many things, but the same can be said of Obama, Bush, and Clinton, as well as she-Clinton and VP Biden, though not themselves Presidents. The same can be said of many, many people at all levels of the legislative and executive branches. Presidents are not prosecuted, and for good reason, until now, so the difference cannot be the scale of the crime, but must be some other factor. The obvious and clear factor, judging on the last seven years of evidence, is that Trump is unduly and irrationally hated by the powers that be, and that he is specifically marked for destruction in a way most others are shielded.

From Victor Davis Hansen:

#1) Bragg promised in advance that he would try to find a way to indict Trump. His prior boasts are reminiscent of Stalin’s secret police enforcer Lavrentiy Beria’s quip, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Nancy Pelosi gave the game away, when in her dotage, she muttered that Trump had a right to prove his innocence as if he is presumed guilty.

#2) No former president has ever been indicted—and for good reason. Such prosecutions would be viewed as persecutions and render all former presidents veritable targets of every publicity-hungry and politically hostile local, state, or federal prosecutor. They would reduce the presidency to Third World norms. Gratuitously prosecuting former presidents would become a political tool to harm the opposing political party or to tarnish the legacy of a former president.

VDH goes on to list six problems with this prosecution, before 20 examples of crimes that have gone unprosecuted, from the people I've mentioned as well as various spooks and spies.

If we look at the indictment itself, and the person responsible for it, Alvin Bragg, you see more evidence of my thesis.

Here's the kind of thing he chooses to prosecute:

A Manhattan parking garage attendant who was shot twice while confronting an alleged thief at his business was charged with murder after wrestling away the weapon and using it to fire at the suspect.

This is the kind of anarcho-tyranny that one would expect when you view the world through a comprehensive lens that allows for understand my claim. That Alvin Bragg doesn't give a shit about the law, he's just there to settle scores and punish those he can find. The law is powerless to help, but boy can they punish when they get around to it. Alvin Bragg, for what's it worth, is another Soros-funded prosecutor. Soros at least gets his money's worth, as every single DA I've ever seen associated with him and his money is using their discretion is release violent criminals and prosecute normal citizens. The man has a type.

Everything about this perfectly fits the model that I've developed over the last seven years for understand what happens to people when confronted with Donald Trump. Trump engenders hatred and revulsion unmatched by anyone in my lifetime, the source of that hatred is his 2016 election win, and that people like Bragg can't help themselves but act on it.

Maybe one day events will not fit this model, but today is not that day.

For those of you who don't share this model, or don't share this view, how can you explain the lack of prosecutions of other executive branch employees in the past? How can you explain the two impeachments and long-lingering investigation? How can you explain the one-sided coverage by once-respectable media outlets? How can you explain anything that's happened since 2016? I didn't use to rely on this explanation, but after a certain amount of time, it becomes the simplest explanation, and I have stopped fighting it.

Trump engenders hatred and revulsion unmatched by anyone in my lifetime, the source of that hatred is his 2016 election win, and that people like Bragg can't help themselves but act on it.

What's missing from your argument is an explanation of why Trump engenders unprecedented "hatred and revulsion." The explanation cannot be merely that he won the 2016 election, since many of the other people you mention (Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden) also won presidential elections.

The standard pro-Trump explanation for why he's hated is something like "he's the only one who isn't corrupt and won't do what the deep state wants." The standard anti-Trump explanation is something like "Trump has shown a unique willingness to violate democratic norms, such as by calling on Russia to release hacked emails or stating that both the 2016 and 2020 election results were rigged."

It seems like the whole argument pivots around this "why is he hated" question. If Trump is in fact uniquely willing to violate democratic norms, it seems reasonable for his opponents to take issue with that and to argue he has forfeited the right to avail himself of those norms for protection. You and VDH raise good arguments for why the norm of "don't prosecute former presidents" exists, but many similar arguments could be made for why the norm of "presidents gracefully concede elections and don't challenge the results" exists. In game theory terms, if Trump consistently choses the "defect" option, it may be the optimal strategic choice for his opponents to do the same.

This is an interesting take. I've stopped trying to understand the why, since it never made much sense to me in the first place. Furthermore, I don't think I do need to explain why he's hated in order to take it as a given, and use that hatred as the basis for explaining behavior.

While I can't answer why, I have some theories. First, he's a genuine outsider that has resisted cooption. Second, he's personally repugnant due to manners and demeanor. Third, he's politically repugnant, and his pet issues (immigration, mostly) mark him as low-status or otherwise 'other.' Fourth, he's a genuine threat to the status quo (similar to #1) is ways that triggers reactions from those inside the system (deep state, anyone?). Fifth, the normal demonization of Republicans, but enhanced due to #2.

Of these, I learn towards #4. I think some people are afraid of him, afraid of his appeal, afraid of the way he acts and speaks, and their fear easily turns towards hatred and hyperbole.

I don't have a good reason why he's so hated. Trump Derangement Syndrome was coined for a reason, and I think it explains plenty even when it itself is unexplained.

but many similar arguments could be made for why the norm of "presidents gracefully concede elections and don't challenge the results" exists.

He was hated, and persecuted, before he contested the 2020 election. He was already impeached once and the entirety of the bureaucratic class was opposed to him by the time he walked in the door. It was this antipathy that caused the groups described in the famous Time article to collectively 'fortify' the election in advance. So I think this causation is backwards.

It’s worth noting that Clinton crazies were very much a thing, there was a definite bush derangement syndrome, and a decent percentage of the country literally believed Obama was born in another country.

Trump derangement syndrome is an escalation, but the blue tribe thought the Obama-Kenya conspiracy theories were a huge escalation and didn’t really distinguish between the randos who said it and the GOP higher ups who explicitly disavowed it. If Rubio had won the 2016 election we may well have been seeing the same level of derangement, admittedly with less ammo.

Trump derangement syndrome is an escalation, but the blue tribe thought the Obama-Kenya conspiracy theories were a huge escalation and didn’t really distinguish between the randos who said it and the GOP higher ups who explicitly disavowed it. If Rubio had won the 2016 election we may well have been seeing the same level of derangement, admittedly with less ammo.

The "randos who said it" included Donald Trump - who became a GOP higher up when he was nominated for President. Both Trump's popularity with the anti-establishment right and his extreme unpopularity with the pro-establishment left (and large parts of the pro-establishment right) start here. When Obama published his birth certificate, Trump claimed the credit for making him do it. Per Wikipedia, Trump didn't publicly acknowledge that was a US citizen until September 2016 - i.e. after fighting the Republican primary as an ambiguously-repentant birther.

Falsely claiming that a major party candidate is ineligible is an attack on American democracy. The GOP primary electorate nominated Trump despite (definitely) or because of (probably) his willingness to do it anyway. Trump's base within the GOP is people who think that Democrats always cheat, that they get away with it because the GOP establishment are cucks, and that Republicans should cheat back harder. This is more obvious post-Jan 6 than it was then, but Trump's opponents brought receipts in 2016.

Fundamentally, the scary thing about Trump is that he behaves as if American elections are kayfabe on top of an underlying system of raw power politics, and his supporters love him for it. If American elections really are kayfabe, this makes him someone who breaks kayfabe and gets away with it, which any wrestling promoter knows can destroy the franchise. If you think that American elections are not in fact kayfabe, then he is the worst threat to American democracy since elections really were rigged in 1960's Illinois. In either case, he needs to be stopped.

Fundamentally, the scary thing about Trump is that he behaves as if American elections are kayfabe on top of an underlying system of raw power politics, and his supporters love him for it.

It's pretty strange to see so much discussion here about why liberals hate Trump - a lot of "sore loser" theory - without Democrats or progressives pushing back on why they think he's particularly norm-breaking.

It actually makes me worry about the skew of this site and if we left a lot of left-wingers back on Reddit.

It's not just that "Trump wasn't supposed to win". He violated a lot of norms - not just red and blue norms like unconditional support for the nominee - starting with not releasing his taxes and escalating to things like playing footsie with not acknowledging the outcome of the election.

THIS was the particular red rag that was theoretically avoidable by a generic GOP candidate (as opposed to being anti-immigration - or rather: anti-some immigration)

There is obviously a thing where liberals (this can be of the left AND right variety - especially if you look at Europe) conflate their particular politics with democracy and freedom as such - which is how things like populism, Brexit, being anti-immigrant all end up being marked as "dangerous" or threats to freedom - but, in this case, Trump tied the connection himself.

We don't even need to look at the lib reaction - look at some of Tucker's leaked texts from the Dominion case if you think this reaction is purely lib derangement at a "blue collar billionaire".

It's pretty strange to see so much discussion here about why liberals hate Trump - a lot of "sore loser" theory - without Democrats or progressives pushing back on why they think he's particularly norm-breaking.

There aren't very many Democrats or progressives on this forum and I'd hazard to guess most of them view trying to push back to be a waste of time - most of these arguments have been re-litigated dozens of times since Trump's presidency and the assumptions gap has been found to be unbridgeable.

There aren't very many Democrats or progressives on this forum and I'd hazard to guess most of them view trying to push back to be a waste of time

This is likely true. But as a progressive Democrat myself, I wonder how many people here are like me in that I don't particularly want to push back but rather read and learn. It's pretty easy to see countless arguments that Donald Trump is a particularly norm-breaking POTUS practically everywhere I look, but it's harder to see arguments of the "sore loser" theory, especially any good or strong versions of those arguments. A large part of my motivation in reading posts in this forum is to see such things in the hopes that they actually challenge my biased perspective on various CW issues including Donald Trump, in the hopes that I can form a more accurate view of them.

For this particular issue, what I'd most prefer to see is a progressive Democrat make a case for the "sore loser" theory and a MAGA Republican make a case for the "Trump was a particularly norm-breaking POTUS in a way that was genuinely dangerous to democracy" theory, not out of charity but out of genuine, heartfelt belief. Because those are the arguments that I would find the most credible and most valuable for triangulating the actual truth of the matter. Unfortunately, such people don't seem to be particularly available, and so I want to see the strongest version of the theory I personally find distasteful or wrong on a visceral level, which is the "sore loser" theory.

I am a progressive Democrat myself, and I feel similar to you in terms of reading and learning. I myself have very little interest in “pushing back”; I find it would be absolute waste of time, and likely why you won’t find the discourse you are looking for. In my opinion, the value of a forum like this is that it allows progressives, at least such as myself, to observe a rich diversity of right-winged thinking to identify the more insidious and subtle dogwhistles indicating the traits of a conservative, so one may steer clear of them in IRL interactions.

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It actually makes me worry about the skew of this site.

Why? What's so worrying about it?

Also, how do you maintain your faith in democracy in the light of all the madness we could observe over the last 10 years?

Why? What's so worrying about it?

Because I don't want to be in an echo chamber - which splinter-sites of witches like this can be. It felt like the original motte was skeptical of a lot of woke points (since naturally wokes had a billion subreddits to hang around out) but you still got a pushback and back and forth. It is concerning if we've lost a lot of those people in the move.

Here we have a question of "why was Trump - the most polarizing figure in recent memory - hated?" and most of the answers seem to flow in one direction, as if it's obvious.

It's quite possible I'm just wrong and it is obvious. But it's concerning that something so divisive seems to swing in one direction.

EDIT: And yes, the fact that it's cutting against me may play a role. It's natural to not want to be outnumbered.

Also, how do you maintain your faith in democracy in the light of all the madness we could observe over the last 10 years?

Easy: I don't.

On reddit the participation of progressives largely felt like folks dropping by to sneer on themotte for a few comments rather than actual engagement. It felt as if a good number of them wouldn't have minded if themotte got hit by the banhammer.

That said, preaching to the choir on themotte while feeling nice doesn't give you much. But I do not have any ideas for how to improve upon that. People like places that echo their views back at them and enforce the ideological conformity for their worldview. For this use case reddit is strictly better especially if your views are aligned with the current zeitgeist.

A lot of people on themotte may want to convince progressives that their positions are not logically consistent and patently unfair. But progressives have no incentive to engage with you to be convinced or to try to convince you. Their views are already mainstream and platformed by institutions.

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Because I don't want to be in an echo chamber

EDIT: And yes, the fact that it's cutting against me may play a role. It's natural to not want to be outnumbered.

But it makes it all the more important to not be so worried. By being here and arguing against us, you're playing an important role in not making this place an echo chamber. Thank you for your service!

Easy: I don't.

Damn.

I think most of the main points are still present. Perhaps in a more autistic neutral way.

The big difference is on Reddit you would have one conservative and one leftist debate for 30 replies on whether Trump was serious or joking when he said Russia should release Clinton emails. Intent will never be settled. The big difference would be fighting over tone with depending on who you’re speaking with a greater emphasis on when Trump did x,y,z and it was really bad. Then a reply leftist did x,y,z on these occasions.

You would probably get some reply on HRC being the chosen one. I’ve never actually seen a leftist give that opinion but seems to pop up on right coded places.

I didn’t want to litigate all the reasons I think he’s a defector, a criminal, and personally disagreeable. Partly because it’s very clear that the OP starts from different axioms. Partly because I wanted to talk about what happens after someone is convinced that he’s a personal enemy.

Falsely claiming that a major party candidate is ineligible is an attack on American democracy.

This is begging the question. The only way to determine the truth of the claim is to make the challenge. McCain's eligibility was challenged, falsely as it turns out, and Democracy seemed to survive.

Obama published a certified copy of his birth certificate, authenticated by the State of Hawaii, in 2008. Trump was pushing birtherism in 2011-2, when "falsely" is appropriate.

Falsely claiming that a major party candidate is ineligible is an attack on American democracy

Oh come on, tone down the drama. Such claims existed long before. Exhibit 1: https://www.sethkaller.com/item/1415-23425-Claims-that-First-Republican-Presidential-Candidate-is-Foreign-Born-&-Ineligible&from=12

Important! to the Public ... The Republican Candidate for the Presidency, John C. Fremont, of Foreign Birth

That's 1856. Somehow, the American Democracy (R) (TM) has survived this attack, which can't be called the worse since Pearl Harbor or the Civil War only because it predates both.

Fundamentally, the scary thing about Trump is that he behaves as if American elections are kayfabe on top of an underlying system of raw power politics

So, he behaves as if what significant part of his electorate believes and observes is true - is true? What a scoundrel! The norm for a candidate is to pretend he cares about his electorate, and then once elected, wear a nice tuxedo or dress, show up at gala receptions, get the appropriate pork allocations from taxpayer's money and otherwise not rock the boat.

which any wrestling promoter knows can destroy the franchise

Now you're starting to get it. This franchise is no longer serving the people that are supposedly their clients (an apt metaphor, because most entertainment franchises, such as ones of Hollywood, also moved on from serving the people to serving a tiny sliver of increasingly bizarre elite critics) - so it's time to break some things.

I don't think I do need to explain why he's hated in order to take it as a given, and use that hatred as the basis for explaining behavior.

"Hatred for Trump is a significant motivating factor in these prosecutions" is I think an almost trivially true statement. The question is whether the hatred is justified and leading to socially desirable outcomes. Hatred for rapists is a major factor in why rape is criminally prosecuted, that doesn't make it illegitimate or inappropriate to prosecute rapists.

While I can't answer why, I have some theories. First, he's a genuine outsider that has resisted cooption. Second, he's personally repugnant due to manners and demeanor. Third, he's politically repugnant, and his pet issues (immigration, mostly) mark him as low-status or otherwise 'other.' Fourth, he's a genuine threat to the status quo (similar to #1) is ways that triggers reactions from those inside the system (deep state, anyone?). Fifth, the normal demonization of Republicans, but enhanced due to #2.

I would say a combination of your second, third, and fifth explanation, combined with the fact that many of Trump's detractors legitimately believe he has violated democratic norms. Putting aside whether he has or hasn't, I do think they sincerely believe this and are motivated by it.

He was hated, and persecuted, before he contested the 2020 election. He was already impeached once and the entirety of the bureaucratic class was opposed to him by the time he walked in the door. It was this antipathy that caused the groups described in the famous Time article to collectively 'fortify' the election in advance. So I think this causation is backwards.

There are many pre-2016 election examples of behavior that one could believe in good faith violates democratic norms. For example, calling on Russia to release one's opponent's hacked emails and threatening to "lock up" one's electoral opponent.

Well, now that we are actually having a substantive conversation about it:

The explanation cannot be merely that he won the 2016 election, since many of the other people you mention (Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden) also won presidential elections.

I personally think the character of the 2016 election matters a lot to this calculus. Hillary Clinton's election was supposed to not only be a sure thing, but the ushering in of a new era: America's First Woman President. And post-awokening, people didn't just want this to be true (as they perhaps wanted it to be true decades earlier)--a large number of people (especially young, especially female, especially college-educated types) felt entitled to it. When Al Gore lost in 2000, the brouhaha over Florida was wild--and yet there was nothing like this happening, at least not where I could see it.

It made for a sobering contrast with 2008, when America's First Black President won his own anticipated victory. Even country music stars were singing his praises. In a nation that has become culturally obsessed with "firsts," with shattering "glass ceilings," and with otherwise celebrating people not for what they actually contribute, but merely for their membership in politically important minorities, 2016 was not a defeat--it was a heist. No less important a figure than former president Jimmy Carter said:

There’s no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election, and I think the interference, although not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.

The much celebrated congressman from Georgia, John Lewis, skipped the inauguration, saying:

I don't see this president-elect as a legitimate president.... I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected. And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

No wonder there were peaceful but fiery protests come inauguration time. The list goes on, but the point is that Democrats did not respond to Clinton's loss in a normal way. Florida's 2000 problems were bad, but at least they were Florida's problems--they were not specifically cultural problems, or problems caused by one or both of the candidates seeking victory at any price. There was a legitimate dispute based on plausible evidence. What happened in 2016, though, was a defection; Democrats responded by abandoning even a pretense of respecting the rule of law. For them to lose was no longer a political setback, but a failure of democracy! Catastrophe! Devastation! Revolution!

The parallel case of 2020 simply cannot be understood outside that context. Reactionaries gonna react. When you slap the "defect" button in an iterated game, your opponent is all but guaranteed to follow suit, and in this case I think that is substantially what Republicans did.

Maybe Trump's personality makes this all worse, somehow. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if Clinton had lost instead to Rubio or something. But then again--would Clinton have lost, to anyone else? Trump's ability to rally disaffected blue collar labor and increase the Republican share of black and Hispanic votes proved important. So it's difficult to guess how things might have been different, absent Trump.

But it does seem to me that Democrats were much more interested in (and expectant of) a Clinton victory; until he won, Trump was, to them, a joke (at least mostly). Losing the election is one thing; even casting protest votes in Congress against certifying a presidential election has become old hat despite the breathlessness with which the media reported on it in 2020. But being denied the apparent moral victory of being personally involved in electing America's First Woman President was (for many) apparently so, so much more than just another loss. It was, one might say, a crime.

If any other Republican nominee had beat Clinton, they would have been hated, as Obama was, as Bush was, and perhaps even more due to social media turning up the temperature. But I think it's unlikely they would have been impeached or criminally indicted.

I mean, I highly doubt Marco Rubio would've tried to pay off porn stars, talk the governor of Georgia into finding some votes, or instigating an insurrection after he narrowly lost Arizona in 2020.

Why do you doubt it? Paying off hookers is probably the most archetypical thing a politician could do (and that's when they're being nice), and BLM shows insurrections are pretty common.

If anything, this shows Trump must really be quite clean, if this is all they can throw at him.

After all, he was a real estate developer in New York in the 1970s and 80s. I would have expected way worse.

Either he's super clean or the real charges would implicate people that no New York prosecutor wants to implicate.

But I think it's unlikely they would have been impeached or criminally indicted.

Maybe! There were efforts to impeach Bush; probably depending on what you count as "efforts" there have been at least some efforts to impeach many U.S. presidents. I still see occasional digs from the American Left to the effect of "here's your periodic reminder that Bush and Cheney are guilty of war crimes and should be in prison." So what gets us across the threshold of "generic anti-opposition talk" to "concrete action," at this point?

The threshold does seem to be lower, now. It seems to me that, compared to 30 or 40 years ago, we spend a lot less time talking about what would actually be good for the country, policy-wise, and a lot more time insisting that the opposition's plans are actually illegal, that the opposition belongs in jail, etc. Trump certainly played his own part in that ("lock her up!") but he backed away from it after election. We're now more than halfway through his successor's first term and Democrats in power in New York (not coincidentally, I think, the state that elected Hillary Clinton as Senator!) are actually carrying through efforts to jail Trump on what so far appear to be exaggerated charges. Can a kangaroo court be far behind?

Watching the news media take shots at DeSantis in advance of his anticipated run at the White House, with headlines like "Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a Far More Dangerous Politician than Donald Trump" is interesting. Discussions of a national divorce are also not entirely novel in American political history. My worry is that the Left, which has for most of the 21st century been warning America of encroaching fascism, has decided to beat its opponents to the punch on the matter.

"Trumped-up charges" is looking to become the most consequential case of nominative determinism in American history.

It does feel like Trump might have been one of the first modern candidates that had a seething hatred aimed at him from both the base and the DC political class of the opposite party. Bush and Obama seemed hated by the bases, but it didn't seem like it was anything more than "well, your turn to lead for now and we'll be the opposition" other than that.

I am leaning in this direction that the biggest difference is the left changed after the 2016 election combined with Trump being especially good at owning the libs.

Why the left changed? Who knows. Maybe it was progressivism running about hard biological limits. They took over every major institution and still couldn’t solve things like low black academic performance. Unable to compete on substance they needed to find someone to personify why they were failing which fit perfectly for Trumps entrance. And a role he was perfectly happy to fill.

The left changed because they couldn’t understand the reaction to Obama.

Obama said things like ‘people in rural areas clinging to their guns and religion’ ‘I support abortion because I wouldn’t want my daughter to be punished with a baby if made a mistake’ ‘if I had a son he would have looked a bit like Trayvon’ etc, etc. these things are obviously horrible things to say to the red tribe; to blue tribers they might be things that you shouldn’t say on national television, but it’s inconceivable that someone could find them offensive or wrong. And so the red tribe reaction to Obama’s culture warring got interpreted as personal animus because he’s black, which meant that republicans needed a massive reaction because they’re all evil. And, what do you know, you have a Republican nominee that the blue tribe portions of the party are obviously uncomfortable with who routinely says boorish or offensive things.

One could argue that, before Trump, Obama inspired an unusual amount of resistance and hostility from the Right. You have the above-mentioned culture-war items, paired with slightly-less-culture-war things like the ACA, and the Republicans spent all 8 of his years burning political capital on opposing Obama, to the point of government shutdown. I find it hard to say why or how things got this heated after Bush II--buried culture war from Bush II finally coming home to roost, the simple fact of Obama being a progressive Black man, the Republican coalition starting to fracture at its seams, economic strain turning up the temperature of social conflicts, social media polarization already taking effect as far back as 2008, or some or all of the above.

All I can say is that it definitely laid the ground for what happened in 2016, and large segments of the left and center-left were wholly unprepared.

Isn’t government shutdown just normal politics? I don’t see how that’s anything like what’s going on now. It was a thing voted on in congress and ended up with a negotiated political deal. A lot like the Supreme Court striking down roe. We politicked to win a branch of government so now we use that power. It’s not like Capitol riots or arresting the other sides like Presidential nominee to stop him from running.

Republicans spent all 8 of his years burning political capital on opposing Obama, to the point of government shutdown.

Govt was shutdown for 27 days under Clinton (2 separate shutdowns), 16 under Obama, and 38 days under Trump (also 2 shutdowns). Clinton was impeached, Bush was not (in spite of many calls to "Chimpeach the Chimperor"), Trump was impeached, Obama was not. I'm not sure that things did get more heated under Obama - it's not like Bush Derangement Syndrome wasn't a thing prior to that.

Well yeah, there was an unusual amount of resistance from the right, and the GOP grassroots was so in favor of it because Obama kept saying quiet-part-out-loud blue tribe sentiments that progressives aren’t good enough at the ideological Turing test to realize would come off as callous and hideous to the red tribe. It doesn’t help that Obama decided to play hardball with the GOP in Congress early on and they returned the favor when he lost his supermajority.

If he’d delivered Clinton-level economic growth he might have gotten away with it, but he didn’t, and it was probably beyond his ability to do(objectively, fast and furious and the irs targeting conservatives weren’t as big a deal as ruby ridge, after all) so it blew up in his face.

I'd also remind you of OWS, the Trayvon Martin scandal and the Michael Brown scandal between 2011-14. From a leftist point of view, these were all obvious political flops. That must have felt deeply frustrating. There was also Gamergate, which must've generated enormous leftist resentment and bitterness.

Maybe Trump's personality makes this all worse, somehow.

"Somehow"?

Literally just take out his game of footsy with election denial and I would argue it'd lower the temperature.

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Literally just take out his game of footsy with election denial and I would argue it'd lower the temperature.

This seems like an odd response given my demonstration that it was election denial from the Democrats that was the serious political defection of 2016.

Honestly I think Trump's Twitter belligerence does far more to distinguish him from (most of) his opponents, than his so-called "election denial." I think there's a very real possibility that I'm just wrong about all of this--that my sense of the Democratic revolt of 2016 is pure presentism, that this is all "business as usual" in American politics, and I am caught in the same trap as many of the people I am criticizing: thinking that any of this is really a meaningful departure from business-as-usual. So I have done my best to make the case that the Great Awokening is a meaningful phenomenon, and that the first presidential election post-Awokening is meaningfully different. If it is in fact Trump himself who is meaningfully different, that would be interesting; I really do suspect he's a symptom rather than a cause, but I could be wrong about that, too. It's just that "election denial" does not appear to set him apart from any of his political opposition, as demonstrated with direct quotes in my post.

This seems like an odd response given my demonstration that it was election denial from the Democrats that was the serious political defection of 2016.

Democrats pushed Russiagate after they lost cause they hated Trump. But they hated Trump because...? That is a question people are trying to answer and I was touching on.

Trump offended the sensibilities of left-wingers, obviously - which sometimes gets coded as a "threat to democracy"*. I think though that certain things like asking Russia or especially raising the specter of contesting the election was a red rag.

Trump saying "I'll accept the election...if I win" was probably a funny response to hysterics in his base's eyes. I legitimately think it scared and then enraged Democrats - precisely because there were no consequences.

Honestly I think Trump's Twitter belligerence does far more to distinguish him from (most of) his opponents

It's all of a piece.

Trump's narcissism is why he can't stay off Twitter and be "dignified" (which offends sensibilities) but also why he can't just take the loss (any loss - which leads to problematic places)

I really do suspect he's a symptom rather than a cause

I tend not to believe in Great Man theory but Trump is the biggest counter-example that gives me pause. I do think a lot of the situation (e.g. polarization and the risk that a radical can capture the party as a result of combining that with primaries, discontent with the economic and cultural consensus) were built in but Trump's particular character and nature shapes how everything turned out.

For example: a different candidate might have just folded and went into obscurity when they lost, especially if pressured by power players (look at how Ted Cruz couldn't make even a token stand against Trump).

A political entrepreneur might have realized that they could push the issue and win points from their base eventually but it feels like Trump has the exact right personality type to push things past what even his fellow Republicans thought he can get away with it (they criticized him for a lot of moves that either worked or at least weren't fatal). Either he's a political savant (of the idiot variety or not) or his narcissism dovetails really well with the polarized climate.

* See anything smeared as "populist".

But then again--would Clinton have lost, to anyone else?

Yes, the fundamentals indicate that after a two term Democratic president with a not great economy and not great ending polls, the Republicans SHOULD have won. A generic Republican Candidate would have I think beaten a generic Democratic candidate all else being equal. Both Hillary and Trump were I think below par candidates. There's a universe where Trump never entered and X beats Hillary in a landslide I think.

Yeah, this is a neglected point. FYI, every election the journal PS reviews the predictions of elections models. Their summary chart for 2016 is here:

/images/16805601089851074.webp Note that some of the models actually favored the Dem candidate.

But I am not sure which of those is a pure fundamentals model

would Clinton have lost, to anyone else?

It seems so, because it looks from the vote totals in swing states that Trump’s victories there were driven more by antipathy for Clinton than by affinity for him. In PA, the Dem vote dropped from 52% to 47.5% (4.5 pts), yet the R vote rose only 1.6 pts (46.6 to 48.2). In MI, the D vote dropped 7.2 pts (54.2 to 47), but the R vote rose only 2.6 pts (44.7 to 47.3). In WI, the D vote dropped 6.3 pts (52.8 to 46.5), but the R vote rose only 1.3 pts (45.9 to 47.2). And, in FL, the D vote dropped 2.2 pts (50 to 47.8), while the R vote was essentially unchanged (49.1 to 49).

Trump's ability to rally disaffected blue collar labor and increase the Republican share of black and Hispanic votes proved important.

I don't know that there is much evidence that he had a particular ability to increase the R share of the black and Hispanic vote in 2016. According to the American Enterprise Institute, in 2016 Trump’s 8 percent of the black vote was rather low compared to previous elections in which there was no black guy on the ballot. Nor was his 29 pct of the Hispanic vote particularly impressive – it was less than Bush and McCain, for example. So, there is no reason to think that a generic R would not have done just as well among black and Hispanic voters.

In PA, the Dem vote dropped from 52% to 47.5% (4.5 pts), yet the R vote rose only 1.6 pts (46.6 to 48.2).

Also, for illustration, Trump underperformed state and Federal House Republican candidates in PA by 10,000 or 100,000 votes, respectively. To the extent you can talk about the 'generic Republican' candidate, it actually did outperform Trump.

While Toomey did underperform Trump in raw numbers, it was only a by 20,000 votes and 100,000 fewer votes were cast in the Senate race. Toomey actually beat his opponent by a larger percentage than Trump beat Clinton.

Probably any of the decent choices in 2016 would have beaten Clinton in PA and, thus, the race.

AAQC’d.

Please avoid low effort comments - you can just submit the AAQC without announcing it.

The standard anti-Trump explanation is something like "Trump has shown a unique willingness to violate democratic norms, such as by calling on Russia to release hacked emails or stating that both the 2016 and 2020 election results were rigged."

And this explanation is simply wrong. Trump has not shown a willingness to violate democratic norms. The norm violations were and are against him, starting from before he was elected with the FBI surveillance of his campaign. There's no norm that says "don't call on Russia to release hacked emails". There certainly no norm against complaining that elections are rigged, that's like claiming there's a norm against taking a dive in soccer. He talked big about an actual violation ("lock her up") but he never actually tried to do it.

There's no norm that says "don't call on Russia to release hacked emails".

There is no law. Just as there is no law that you have to release your tax returns.

I think it's more of a stretch to claim there's no norm against calling for a foreign entity to help you win the election.

There isn't now though, that's for sure.

There certainly no norm against complaining that elections are rigged

Yet losing candidates are expected to congratulate their opponents and concede (it was noteworthy that Clinton didn't have a concession speech).

Again, less of an expectation with Abrams' thing + Biden pre-complaining about the midterms.

There is no law. Just as there is no law that you have to release your tax returns.

The problem with most of these proposed "norms" is they either seem to have been made up entirely after the fact, or they end up being suspiciously gerrymandered to only cover Trump's behavior and not the very similar behavior of other politicians.

Just out of curiosity, which of those two buckets do you feel "don't ask enemies for political help" and "avoid calling elections rigged" each fall into?

Both of those are "made up entirely after the fact". The "don't ask enemies for political help" has the added issue of being obvious rhetorical flourish, not a serious request.

Given that the Russians did in fact hack and leak John Podesta's e-mails on behalf of the Trump campaign, why should I believe people who say he was joking when he asked them to do the same to Hillary Clinton? I think Henry II was probably joking when he said "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" but he doesn't get the benefit of the doubt after Thomas a Becket is murdered.

That's like saying Al-Qaeda did 9/11 on behalf of Bush.

The first can be disregarded, as it was an obvious joke. If he had actually intended to ask a foreign enemy for political help, he would have done it secretly, they way Ted Kennedy did with the Soviet Union in 1984. As for the second, I dispute that "avoid calling elections rigged" has ever been a norm, as you can easily dig up counterexample throughout history. Hillary Clinton herself has repeatedly suggested that Trump's victory was rigged by the Russians, and as was pointed out to you, both of Bush's elections had their authenticity repeatedly and vigorously called into question. Stacy Abrams has practically made a cottage industry out of challenging the legitimacy of her gubernatorial loss, to widespread acclaim and media adulation. So, if one were to posit that such a norm did exist, it would have to be heavily gerrymandered to exclude all these examples.

The actual norm is that losing candidates do not challenge the transition of power with force, but of course Trump didn't do that, so that's not helpful to criticizing him.

Hillary Clinton herself has repeatedly suggested that Trump's victory was rigged by the Russians

This is "words have meanings" pedantry, but Hillary Clinton did not accuse the Russians of rigging the election. A "rigged" election is one where the declared result deliberately does not match the votes cast. The Russians tried to rig the election (by hacking voting machines), but failed - the Clinton campaign and affiliated left-establishment groups had conceded this by the end of November. Other people, notably including Jill Stein, continued to run with the idea after it became clear that it didn't happen, but Clinton did not.

What Hillary said, correctly, was that the Russians improperly helped Trump by hacking and leaking John Podesta's e-mails. This is "interfering" with the election, not "rigging" it. Hillary Clinton and people speaking on her behalf have always been quite careful about this distinction, even if the broader left have not. The distinction matters because calling an election "rigged" is an implicit call to change the official result to match the votes cast, but (at least in the US) a complaint about interference is a call to punish (either judicially or politically) the people responsible without throwing out the validly cast votes.

There was no attempt by the Clinton campaign or anyone affiliated with it to overturn the 2016 election on grounds of Russian interference. Jill Stein requested recounts in several key states in accordance with state law, and they didn't find anything untoward.

The actual norm is that losing candidates do not challenge the transition of power with force, but of course Trump didn't do that, so that's not helpful to criticizing him.

Politics does not work by the rules of criminal trials. In the ordinary English meaning of the word, Trump (among others) incited the Jan 6th riots, which were an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the orderly transition of power by force. He should not have done this, and no other Presidential candidate has continued to publicly challenge an election after exhausting his State-law remedies since Hayes-Tilden in 1876. The fact that we can't prove the causal link between Trump's incitement and the events of Jan 6th 2021 means he probably can't be prosecuted for it (and in any case, he would probably be protected by the 1st amendment), but it doesn't mean that he didn't do it. As I have said elsewhere, if the King says "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" and Thomas a Becket gets murdered, he loses the benefit of the doubt.

In any case, the argument that Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election by force is not restricted to the Jan 6th riot. Per the evidence gathered by the House Select Committee, Trump held a meeting in the Oval Office on 18th December at which he suggested rerunning the election under martial law. Michael Flynn made the same suggestion publicly on multiple occasions, and there is reasonable evidence that he was doing so on behalf of Trump. Again, probably not enough evidence for a criminal conviction, but enough evidence for the establishment to conclude on the balance of probabilities that Trump would have overturned the election by coup if the military had co-operated.

I think "The President does not conduct coup plots in the Oval Office" is, and always has been a norm of American politics that Trump violated.

I think it's more of a stretch to claim there's no norm against calling for a foreign entity to help you win the election.

That was a joke. That was always an obvious joke. Vox even had an article saying it was only a joke in poor taste, and not a serious request, which was memory-holed two or three years later when the first impeachment began.

I think both proposed explanations I gave are wrong, or only partially correct at best. My point is simply that the degree to which hatred of Trump is legitimate, and the degree to which actions taken against Trump, such as this prosecution, are legitimate, in large part depends on the specific explanation for why he is hated and why the actions are being taken. This part of the argument can't simply be ignored or hand-waved.

I think it's important to compare Trump to the two previous Republican presidential candidates, McCain and Romney. In that context, what made him different was not only that he won the election, but also that he actually, you know, made a serious, undeterred attempt to win the election, no matter what crap the hostile media outlets threw at him. He actually competed, and tried to win, unlike those other two losers who tried to live up to their opposition's supposed standards. That explains most of the animosity.

who tried to live up to their opposition's supposed standards

Except it wasn't the opposition's standards - at least not on election denialism. The difference between that and "being racist" by wanting to deport people is vast.

The idea of accepting election results was uncontroversial on both sides until Trump talked. The benefits of polarization.

Hell, the Dominion lawsuit revealed that, even within Fox, people who didn't excoriate him in public were dubious but worried about their audience.

But I guess they were also playing by Democrat standards?

The idea of accepting election results was uncontroversial on both sides until Trump talked. The benefits of polarization.

I remember watching a documentary about how Bush stole the election with Diebold voting machines. Do you mean uncontroversial among politicians? I guess not since you mentioned Fox reporters.

Do you mean uncontroversial among politicians? I guess not since you mentioned Fox reporters.

Politicians especially are expected to concede publicly but, yes, I cited Fox to say that even they would were dubious about the path they were on. If it was normal why would they be?

But I just looked up that documentary and apparently it was Emmy nominated which is...shocking. Good counterexample.

If it was normal why would they be?

There were stats going around at one point about how the majority of Fox News employees donate to the Democrats, this old reddit post with a dead link is all that I could find about it now, but it could go some way to explaining the crew's selective memory about election legitimacy claims. Also the Republican establishment itself isn't all that hot on Trump either, so there's a potential reason for them to be biased even if they're Republicans.

I managed to find the blogpost, which the reddit post linked.

If the images don't work, they are: one and two.

@Tanista

Thanks

Accusations of unfair elections have always been around, but the politicians themselves are supposed to accept defeat. Consider the 2000 presidential election: Al Gore disputed 1 legitimately very close state with sketch election practices, and when he lost the court challenges, that was it. There weren't dozens of lawsuits filed against every state and election official where he lost, alleging far-flung conspiracies. There wasn't a riot at the Capitol. There was definitely a lot of double-think and crappy opinionating from the peanut gallery (e.g. is it a question for Florida state courts or SCOTUS; depends on who everyone thinks they'll side with) but I think overall I think he had a much better case than Trump for losing unfairly and managed to handle it more gracefully.

I could quibble about some details, but I don't really have anything against what you said. It might be a tone thing, but I can understand where someone saying "there was a riot at the capitol, and the way Trump was acting was the most likely cause of it. That's pretty damn bad compared to recent presidential candidates" is coming from, but when someone unironically calls it an insurrection, I check out.

I specifically used the word riot because of how charged "insurrection" is!

The extent to which said riot was even Trump's fault is... eh. I'm personally inclined to blame individuals for their own actions. The 1/6 riot was the fault of the rioters, not Trump. BLM riots were the fault of BLM rioters, not some academic writing a sociology paper on how riots are the voice of the unheard. Mass shootings are the fault of mass shooters, not the NRA. It's not so much that he's mostly to blame as that I think we should have a very high standard when it comes to "are politicians following rules and norms for a peaceful transfer of power." Trump's behavior was a contributing cause, but even if it's only 5% of the cause, it should 0.001% (numbers fabricated).

The idea of accepting election results was uncontroversial on both sides until Trump talked. The benefits of polarization.

This seems like a strange claim to me. Would you classify the two-year investigation of "Russian interference" by a Special Prosecutor as "accepting election results"? "Not My President"? Hillary - the actual losing candidate - calling Trump an illegitimate President? Sadly, the civilized norms had already been well eroded by 2020.

The question is not whether Trump is personally corrupt - to be honest, nobody cares much if he took or given a bribe or two. The reason he was elected is not because he's a saint personally, it is to try and break the whole corrupt system - where the problem is not personal corruption, which can be dealt with by replacing the corrupt individual, but systemic perversion of the whole power structure. So, for those who elected him, Trump defecting is exactly why they elected him - because cooperating hasn't been working for them for decades now, and they feel like the other side is already been defecting for a long while, and it's time to respond in kind.

violate democratic norms, such as by calling on Russia to release hacked emails or stating that both the 2016 and 2020 election results were rigged

These are good examples, because neither of them actually violates any democratic norms. It does violate the norms of behavior that the elite political class has set up - mostly not for themselves but for others - but that's, again, why Trump is there in the first place. Whining about elections being rigged is the staple of American politics - but when the Left has been doing it about Bush, that was par for the course. Asking KGB's Andropov to help with fighting Reagan was par for the course. Arranging with Medvedev to be "more flexible after the elections" is par for the course. Getting millions from Russian banks and oligarchs for "charity purposes" is par for the course. It's when the Right is suspected of doing a tiny bit of something similar by themselves - then it's a norm violation, they're not supposed to do it to us, we're supposed to do it to them! That's exactly the norms that the deplorables wanted to be violated.

why the norm of "presidents gracefully concede elections and don't challenge the results" exists

But does it really? Maybe the Democrat President did not have to personally challenge the results - he had hundreds of lieutenants to do it for him. The deplorables do not have the army of lieutenants that the systemic president, chosen by the system, has. So they can not rely on a network of proxies to do the job, if anything can lead this on the deplorable side, it's Trump. But the norm of "elections are never questioned" does not exist - it's all pretend. Bush results were questioned all the time, Stacy Abrams still claims her election was stolen and she is not seen as norm violator - I know her title as The President of Earth may not qualify, but she is still quite prominent to illustrate that this supposed "norm" is fake - it works only towards one side and not the other. Such are almost all "norms" that Trump has "violated".

So, for those who elected him, Trump defecting is exactly why they elected him - because cooperating hasn't been working for them for decades now, and they feel like the other side is already been defecting for a long while, and it's time to respond in kind.

Sure, but if this is the case you don't have standing to complain when his opponents adopt the same strategy. Arguing that indicting Trump is norm-breaking rings hollow if Trump himself was elected to break norms.

It's a continuation of the norm-breaking that led to electing Trump. Or, in other words, the supposed "norms" have been norms only to one side, but not the other - and the indictment is added to the long list of these one-sided norms, where Democrats are routinely doing things they claim shouldn't be done because of the "norms". It's not the new complaint, it's the same complaint over and over and over and over.

In game theory terms, if Trump consistently choses the "defect" option, it may be the optimal strategic choice for his opponents to do the same.

Seems like the best play is to defect while making it look like cooperation.

I’ll agree to a point. I think these are absolutely crimes, however, I don’t believe that anyone else of his social status would have been prosecuted on them. And I think a lot of it is that he doesn’t really fit the culture of the Washington Elites. He’s a Clampett, more or less. He’s the guy who talks in braggadocio, eats steak with ketchup, and does political theater in burlesque. He’s a White Trash President. He’s supposed to be understated, nuanced, culturally sophisticated, prefer Professional Managerial Class food, clothes, music, and entertainment. He’s not supposed to mock political opponents on Twitter like a 4chan troll, he’s not supposed to openly kill our enemies with drone strikes (although a plausibly deniable death carried out by the CIA that nobody knows about is fine, there are rules to kanly).

Had Trump had the demeanor of Desantis, I don’t think they’d have lost their minds, they’d have opposed him, but it would not have been as much of an open scorched earth warfare as it is with Trump. Desantis would have to deal with more quiet opposition, more subtle, and more fitting of another PMC cultured politician. He wouldn’t be investigated with a breathless “is this long nightmare finally over?”

I don’t think anyone else at all, trumps social status or not, would be prosecuted for failure to properly record invoicing a hooker. If it made it into court at all it would have been in the context of divorce proceedings.

I think someone who claimed a hooker payoff as a business expense on their taxes would be prosecuted for tax fraud if they had powerful enemies, which Trump does. But that would be a federal charge, and Merrick Garland is playing his cards close to his chest.

This particular indictment is driven by Bragg's ego and desire to advance in NY lefty politics, not by a desire to convict Trump. Hence the weak charges - Trump is guilty of a lot more serious crimes than misrecording the Stormy Daniels hush money, but nothing that is both media-friendly and chargeable in New York state court.

I suspect the federal indictments will be less bullshit and will include serious crimes of which Trump is actually guilty.

But that would be a federal charge,

Surely his company also pays state taxes.

I was responding specifically to the OP's claim; the reports I have seen have referenced business records, which might be something other than taxes.

I am not convinced that "legal expenses" is technically a false statement. How should he record payments to people when they sign NDAs?

We of course don't know yet precisely what the allegations are, but this does not strike me as particularly convincing. I would think that "legal expenses" are expenses paid for legal services. Why should payment pursuant to an NDA be a "legal expense" if payment pursuant to other contracts are not? Note that I am not arguing that Trump is or is not guilty, nor that the prosecution is or is not legitimate.

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If only there were some way to know what sort of taxes he paid!

Trump didn’t claim a hooker payoff as a business expense though, he’s being prosecuted for claiming it’s a personal expense. I have a hard time seeing anyone getting charged for that.

I think someone who claimed a hooker payoff as a business expense on their taxes would be prosecuted for tax fraud

Interestingly, in the indictment, it says that they plus-up'ed the payment to Cohen in order to cover the additional taxes he'd have to pay on the "income". So, like, weirdly, taxes were paid, probably more than would have been otherwise (he ended up paying $420k for what I guess he could have directly paid for like $130k). And the indictment actually doesn't allege tax fraud stemming from the allegedly fraudulent business records.

When reading the indictment, I couldn't help but think about how dumb/incompetent the whole thing seemed to be. Like, it mentioned how Trump was trying to delay payment until after the election, because then he could just renege on the promise to pay at that point, thinking it wouldn't matter. Honestly, unless there's some other game being played that I'm not aware of (and which is not pointed out in the indictment), almost the only thing I can think of is that he was planning on stiffing Cohen after the election if he had lost. Which is pretty dumb/incompetent. On the one hand, I guess he was purchasing a possible option on saving a couple hundred thousand dollars... and I guess this could have been considered a pretty 'cheap' option, given how strained you have to read the law to try to work your way up to felony charges out of the matter. On the other hand, maybe he just misevaluated where the biggest cost threat was, thinking short term about the primary concern being the election itself rather than any threat of prosecution by overzealous prosecutors with "novel" theories who are so blinkered by Trump-has-to-pay-ism.

I’ll agree to a point. I think these are absolutely crimes, however, I don’t believe that anyone else of his social status would have been prosecuted on them.

It's not social status which made him vulnerable, but his lack of political protection. You think people didn't want Bush that bad? But he had cover from his family and the deep layer of political allies and hangers-on built up over decades.

Remember the people moving behind the scenes are sharks. They don't operate on hate. They are dead eyed U-boat commanders with a battleship in their sights with no anti-sub destroyers getting in the way. Trump is being moved against because it is rationally the best political way to beat him. He loves a close in knife-fight, he has big guns, his populist support gives him armor, but he is weak in real political operative allies. His staff picks turn on him or go down in flames, his lawyers turn against him. His weakness is below the waterline not above it. That is what separates him from other modern presidents.

You don't sink the Tirpitz with another battleship, its too risky. If it lacks cover you send planes or subs. You only need a couple of good hits to take it out with little risk. If you lose a few planes or even a sub, who cares? It's a good trade.

Why move against Trump in ways, you didn't against other presidents? Because you CAN.

Interestingly, a Democratic nominee Trump would have less of this weakness because the DNC is very good at using its connections for the benefit of their candidates while the RNC is either less capable of this, or somewhat ideologically opposed to it overall (or both).

It's not social status which made him vulnerable, but his lack of political protection.

This is a self-created problem, and downstream of his social status. Trump doesn't have useful allies and the political protection they afford because he doesn't know he needs them, he doesn't know how they work, he doesn't know how politics works -- he just knows that as someone of low social status, he's suspicious of how the high-status system work -- and he's disloyal to the allies he has, losing them quickly.

I was watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest last night and it dawned on me how much of a McMurphy Trump is. He's a wildly charismatic rule-breaker, but he mistakes his charisma for substance and doesn't really understand why he breaks the rules. He has a child's idea of how things should work. He just has a resistance to the authorities, he gets off on poking them, and he mistakenly thinks he's smarter than them. He makes an instant connection with the discarded people that he thinks have been unfairly beaten down by the authorities, and he lifts their spirits by thumbing his nose at their oppressors... but he never really understands the true dysfunctions of his followers, and as an egotist, he's unconscientious about how he uses them in his own self-service. He also never really understands the system he's bucking, and by the end, he has made vulnerable and destroyed the weakest of his comrades and the system crushes him. He thought he was a righteous agitator, but he made everything much much worse in the short term, and didn't really matter in the long-term.

Of course, OFOTCN was a product of 1960s anti-authoritarianism (young people may not know that Boomers were fleetingly anti-authoritarian before they become the authorities), so we are supposed to view McMurphy as a tragic hero and Nurse Ratched as a fascist monster. We are also supposed to buy in to the popular counter-culture idea that "mental illness" was a social imposition on unfortunate people who are really no less crazy than you or I. But now the OFOTCN dynamics look very different to me: McMurphy is a fool; Ratched has control issues, yes, but she also has the near-impossible job of connecting with severely troubled people who are easily led to extremes by disruptive behavior. Compared to the Titicut Follies, this mental hospital is an ideal of order and serenity before McMurphy shows up. But because of Titicut Follies and OFOTCN, most of the people seen in this movie would soon be living in tents in downtown Portland, shitting on the sidewalk, and randomly attacking passersby. (Fittingly, Oregon, where the movie was set and filmed, recently declared OFOTCN its official state movie.)

There is merit to this analysis. On the other hand, you need some way to distinguish between "hey, it turns out rules, structure and hierarchy are valuable, who knew", and "rules, structure and hierarchy are valuable to the exact extent that my side controls them." The former could conceivably result in a positive outcome. The later cannot.

I'm not optimistic that such a distinction can be drawn, in the present case.

On the other hand, you need some way to distinguish between "hey, it turns out rules, structure and hierarchy are valuable, who knew", and "rules, structure and hierarchy are valuable to the exact extent that my side controls them."

That is always the tension in centrist/civic politics. Trump is not a centrist/civicist though -- and, importantly, neither are many of his opponents; I don't see Trump as wholly unique problem, except for how he doesn't bother to cloak his extremeism -- he's a bull in a china shop that gets cheered by people who resent the mean owners and the social implications of the china shop. Rather than finding some way to ignore or replace the china shop with something more useful, they choose destruction. I have a good friend who, though he has soured a little on Trump recently, loved that about him, loved January 6, loved that he insults Elaine Chao for being Chinese, because he shares Trump's contempt for "the system" and all of the proprieties that make the system work. I don't think anything better than the current system comes out of that style of destructive performance, however.

I'm not an adherent of centrist/civic politics any more, because I've lost faith in the solutions on offer. At some point, you need a positive claim for your program, something beyond "anything else you try will be worse." You need this because politics is, in its most essential nature, about hope, about belief that action can lead to positive outcomes. If you can't offer that hope, if policy starvation has hollowed out your platform's credibility, people will find an alternative to invest their hope in, even if it's as simple and short-sighted as a riot. Even if you're right, they'll prefer learning the hard way to simply giving up without trying.

At the end of the day, it's too easy to claim that what has been delivered is the best possible. It's too easy for the establishment to claim, like an abusive spouse, that their corruption and mendacity, bad faith and petty malice must be eternally overlooked, lest terrible consequences result. At some point, it's on the establishment to either deliver on their promises or get the fuck out of the way. That point, for a lot of people on both sides of the aisle, arrived sometime around 2015. Destruction is costly and wasteful, but sometimes, rarely, it really is the only way forward. Sometimes compromise doesn't work, and you have to fight. And in the present circumstance, what alternative is there? What's the Grand Compromise this time around? What concerns of Trump's supporters or even of his opponents could plausibly be addressed, under the current conditions? What bright future can be plausibly projected?

The best I've ever come up with is that Musk gets Falcon Heavy running, and we get too busy asteroid mining to worry about all this nonsense. Maybe AI and automation materially alter peoples' living conditions for the better?

I mean, the alternative is usually, people die out, and so do their views. Like, there used to be a major Anti-Masonry party in many states in the US. Nothing was really done on a national level to appease those people. It's just that their kids and grandkids didn't really care.

Same thing w/ interracial marriage. Well, there were obviously some shifts by people, if you look at Gallup polling, which goes back to World War II, you see a steady rise until the 80's, then a big jump during that time. Which makes sense - a lot of people who would've been in their 40's by time Civil Rights were a live issue (post-World War II/Humphrey convention speech/Truman desegregation) were dying off, and being replaced by a bunch of Gen Xers who were like 95/5 for interracial marriage.

Ironically, the only issue where the win condition has happened because of actual shifts in people's views, as opposed to generational rollover is gay marriage. Obviously, there was some bit of 85-year old gay marriage opponents being replaced by pro-gay marriage 18 year olds, but the shift happened too quickly to be that.

But yeah, in another generation and a half or so, most of the current Fox News audience/Trump base is going to be worm food. At that point, just like the Right stopped with the overt racism, sexism, etc. in the 70's and 80's to win over younger voters (including winning the youth vote in '84 and '88), the GOP will either have to figure out how to appeal to a largely currently Democratic voting-base (again, yes, Millennial's are voting at lower rates for Democrat's than they did in 2008, but if I remember right, it's about D+8. That's still death for the GOP if the largest voting bloc is even D+4 or D+5, when the smaller, younger voting blocks are even more D-leaning), or they do actually die, outside of the Senate seats they'll hold in depopulating states, and then things get interesting.

It's a nice story, but I think if Blues collectively had the patience and discipline for this strategy, the world would look very different than it does. Also, it would probably help to have kids; I get that this is what big tech, social media and the educational system are for, but... eh. I'm skeptical it plays out the way they're hoping.

The more immediate problem is that Progressives want the future they've been promised, and there is absolutely no way it can be delivered. I think that's going to be a problem for them going forward, and increasingly more so as even their most extreme solutions simply fail. Meanwhile, trust in institutions erodes, and the tighter they squeeze with the consensus machine and social norms, the more society slips through their fingers. Trust in media, academics, elites, Science itself continues to erode, as does social cohesion generally.

In any case, we pays our money and we takes our bets, no? Maybe you're right after all. Time will tell.

More comments

But yeah, in another generation and a half or so, most of the current Fox News audience/Trump base is going to be worm food. At that point, just like the Right stopped with the overt racism, sexism, etc. in the 70's and 80's to win over younger voters (including winning the youth vote in '84 and '88), the GOP will either have to figure out how to appeal to a largely currently Democratic voting-base (again, yes, Millennial's are voting at lower rates for Democrat's than they did in 2008, but if I remember right, it's about D+8. That's still death for the GOP if the largest voting bloc is even D+4 or D+5, when the smaller, younger voting blocks are even more D-leaning), or they do actually die, outside of the Senate seats they'll hold in depopulating states, and then things get interesting.

While white Americans will be a minority then, the remaining ones will be the descendants of the based, unvaccinated alt-righters currently breeding like rabbits.

White liberals are going extinct, one booster, one contraceptive, one HRT pill, one interracial relationship at a time.

Sure, the Indians, the Chinese, the Mexicans are taking over, but they probably won't try to make your kids gay.

Interestingly, a Democratic nominee Trump would have less of this weakness because the DNC is very good at using its connections for the benefit of their candidates while the RNC is either less capable of this, or somewhat ideologically opposed to it overall (or both).

It's a bit of a trade off I think - the RNC don't have the sense of unity (and community) the DNC has, but they also don't have superdelegates confusing and overriding primaries - iirc this was one of the reasons Trump ran as a republican.

His staff picks turn on him or go down in flames, his lawyers turn against him. His weakness is below the waterline not above it. That is what separates him from other modern presidents.

Yeah this was the most demoralising part. It wasn't even that he was shitty at picking staff and counsel - a lot of his picks were great. But they were also targets with massive bullseyes on their backs, and it is a rare politician who doesn't have some skeletons in their closet. Pence was a good vp pick for that reason alone (although his in with the Christians was nothing to scoff at).

Had Trump had the demeanor of Desantis, I don’t think they’d have lost their minds, they’d have opposed him, but it would not have been as much of an open scorched earth warfare as it is with Trump.

The groundwork is being laid to declare that Desantis is Mussolini and will destroy democracy. At least they were able to pick a fascist other than the small mustache fellow from Austria, but I do suspect that the choice of fascist was mostly ethnic.

I do suspect that the choice of fascist was mostly ethnic

Trump is of German extraction, yet the claims re him were also that he was a fascist, rather than a Nazi.

Oh! I meant that the fascist of choice was Mussolini due to him being a co-ethnic of Desantis. Presumably Rubio would be RoboFranco if he ever managed to get near the Presidency.

I'm not disagreeing that it is probably not ethnic. But I don't the think the majority of people making claims that Trump was a fascist or a Nazi make any distinction between the two. It works the same way with people who call the other side communists and socialists. They're just bad words for people they disagree with.

In my experience, comparing someone to Mussolini is about making them sound more ridiculous than threatening, not about whether they look Italian or not. Trump is Hitler because he is a "fascist" and a winner. De Santis is Mussolini because he is a "fascist" and a cheap Trump knock-off. I don't think that the people writing these pieces know anything about Franco or Salazar, and anything they know about Peron comes from watching Evita.

The catch with DeSantis is that he’s angled for overlapping branding to pick up Trump supporters and national attention. Each time he does something that can be pattern-matched to Trump, a few more critics will jump on the Literally Mussolini train. In the hypothetical where Trump hadn’t gotten that train going, I don’t think it’d play out so dramatically.

I agree that his white trash manner is extra inflammatory to the PMC, but I thinking you're only 80% of the way to explaining their hatred. The final bit is that people like him aren't supposed to win. They're supposed to lose, they're relics of a backwards evil bygone era. If people like him win, it could undo all the salami-slicing, Nudges™, and demoralization works that has been wrought upon the plebs. They'll stop seeing the Glorious Technocratic Bugpod Future as an inevitability and maybe even stop feeling powerless, and then maybe they'll even finally try to do something about it all. And so Trump can't be allowed to get away with it, he has to be dealt with like Winston, and the old Party Members -- not martyred, but degraded, hounded, dragged through the mud, abused until he's a shell of his former self, so that everyone else can see that this is what happens to people who oppose Progress, even very rich well connected people who get elected to the most powerful office in the world. Any wealthy conservative considering a future presidential run will now be keenly aware of what happens if he should step outside the controlled opposition pen and will doubtless think twice.

Edit: Re-reading this, it sounds like I'm accusing my outgroup of being part of a vast conspiracy and bent on ruthlessly crushing an enemy for defying their power, but I'm not. Rather they're unwittingly part of an SSC-style prospiracy. The people who feel this way don't consciously think they're channeling O'Brien, they think they're Standing Up for Democratic Norms or whatever rationalization works for them.

Glorious Technocratic Bugpod Future

Re-reading this, it sounds like I'm accusing my outgroup of being part of a vast conspiracy

Res Ipsa Loquitur

Memes about eating bugs and living in pods sound unhinged to normies and non-alt-rightists in the same way and for the same reason that Handmaid's Tale memes sound unhinged to normies and non-wokists - it is a call to resist a non-existent conspiracy.

Re. bugs, I move in circles where people would eat a bug in exchange for a Davos invite, and I haven't met anyone who regularly eats insects, or who lobbies for other people to eat insects. I am aware there was once a WEF panel on the advantages of insect protein, but as of the current year, the "meat is animal cruelty and climate change" crowd are pushing fake-meat products like Beyond Burgers.

Re. pods, it isn't even obvious what this means - there was a long thread on this forum discussing the confusion where it eventually became clear that "living in the pod" meant that WEF elites wanted non-elites to live in much less square footage than American suburbanites would consider acceptable. There are two problems with this one - the first is that if it took a 10+ post forum thread to explain it to a sympathetic audience on this forum, then normies who hear "I will not live in the pod" are just going to be confused. The second is that, although "non-elites should live in something smaller than the cookie-cutter 3000 sq ft suburban McMansion favoured by middle-class Texans" is indeed an idea held by most WEF attendees, the smaller homes they are promoting do not fall within the ordinary English meaning of the word "pod".

If you look at the Tiny House Movement, only one of the pictures on that wiki page is podlike. The Berkeley shared houses where the so-called "Rationalists" have weird sex while reading overlong Harry Potter fanfics are not pods. A 700 sq ft apartment in a converted industrial building is not a pod. A 1500 sq ft New Urbanist rowhouse is definitely not a pod.

I'm not really sure what your point is other than that "Glorious Technocratic Bugpod Future" is a somewhat uncharitable phrasing, which I will concede. Would you prefer "Glorious Technocratic Soyshack Future" instead? I don't want to eat bugs or fake meat, I don't want to live in a pod or in whatever square footage that globalists deem adequate for plebians like me. We can argue over whether the Planet Health Diet must necessarily include insect protein, or where the precise line between "studio" and "pod" lies, but that doesn't seem very productive.

it is a call to resist a non-existent conspiracy

You literally cited the WEF in response to both points, so I think "non-existent" doesn't hold water. And the WEF is not some isolated crackpot think tank, they have many influential members and connections. Do I think that we're all going to be rounded up in FEMA camps next year where we will be forced to live in shipping containers and eat crickets for breakfast lunch and dinner? No. But do I think tha a subset of global elites wants to drastically downgrade my standard of living and my dietary health and, worse yet, feel themselves morally compelled to and fully justified in doing so? Yes, because they say so themselves.

I'm not really sure what your point is

You noticed that your post triggered your own "this is an unhinged conspiracy theory" buttons - I was trying to point out why discussion of bugs and pods triggers those buttons. I only mentioned the WEF because I have spent enough time on this forum to know that the bugpod meme originated with anti-WEF conspiracy theorists.

The socially conservative right in American really does want to roll back certain feminist achievements (notably abortion), and feminists are behaving rationally when they organise against this, but talking about handmaids sounds unhinged.

The establishment left really do want to change the world in ways which mean people eat somewhat less animal meat, and somewhat more people live in dense urban places (which usually implies a consumption bundle including less square feet of housing per person), and the Red Tribe right are behaving rationally when they organise against this, but talking about bugs and pods sounds unhinged, for the reasons I gave in the previous post.

Would you prefer "Glorious Technocratic Soyshack Future" instead?

Part of the point of this forum is that we write like we are having a productive debate (even if we are not) and not like we are having an unhinged vent (even if we are). In the context of your post, "ProgressTM" or "The Arc of the Moral UniverseTM" or "Total Blue Tribe Victory" would have got the point across.

In the context of your post, "ProgressTM" or "The Arc of the Moral UniverseTM" or "Total Blue Tribe Victory" would have got the point across.

This is a fair point.

They had principles. And that makes modelling and predicting their behavior by other power brokers effectively impossible, which is anathema to the aforementioned alphabet soup of the world.

Even granting the premise of your whole post, I have to make this one tiny quibble: shouldn't principles make someone predictable rather than unpredictable? If you have a devout Catholic, then you'll have a good idea of how much fish he consumes. If you have a devout Mormon, then you know not to serve soda at any party he'll be at. If you have a devout Communist, you'll have a good idea of what'll get him quoting from Marx. If you have a Wokist, then you can obviously predict their arguments in advance so long as you're familiar with the egregoric memeplex.

If anything, while Trump was unpredictable, I feel he was also rather unprincipled. The man switched political parties multiple times before he ran as President, and his sustained turn to the right almost feels like an aberration of the pattern. The only principled, predictable thing about the man in office was "if Obama did it, he was gonna try to reverse it." Trump was, and probably still is, a wild card soaked in chlorine trifluoride and gilded with a razor's edge of gold.

Sounds like Russell conjugation to me. I have principles, you have dogmatic identities.

But I think I see what you’re getting at. There’s clearly some trait that makes a motivated outsider hard to control and to read. Maybe a word like “obstinacy” or “agency” fits better?

One of the points made by the book Moral Mazes (also community discussion) is that Moral Mazes (the book is about the management hierarchy at large non-financial companies in the pre-shareholder value era, but the general principles apply to any sufficiently unethical bureaucratic hierarchy) are total institutions, and that anyone who has built a career in one loses the ability to understand people who are motivated by things other than office politics.

(Incidentally, once you understand the concept of a Moral Maze, the term Swamp as used by anti-establishment politicians clearly refers to the coalition of corporate, governmental, and machine-politics Moral Mazes that work well together because they understand each other in a way they don't understand startup founders, family-owned businesses, or charismatic non-machine politicians like Sanders and Trump).

Donald Trump has been a GC in his father's real estate empire, a real estate developer in his own right, a reality TV star, and a charismatic outsider politician. None of these careers involve working in a Moral Maze. If he is ethically compromised (and he probably is), it is about money and/or sex, not office politics. I can absolutely believe that a career bureaucrat or career machine politician would struggle to grok him.

Even granting the premise of your whole post, I have to make this one tiny quibble: shouldn't principles make someone predictable rather than unpredictable?

Only to people who understand those principles. My read of the political landscape today is that even the possibility of having them is just invisible to a lot of people, much less the details of any particular set.

Bernie Sanders would have been given the exact same treatment as Trump had he reached and been elected in the general.

That sounds very far-fetched.

Sanders was never going to elicit the same level and type of negative emotional response as Trump.

I find it somewhat plausible.

Normal, centrist voters were definitely more wary of Sanders than of basically any other Dem candidate. That leaves room to scapegoat him.

He doesn’t have nearly as much attack surface on culture/personality, but they’d still hit him on policy. Too radical for major corporate outlets. I’d also expect him to meet massive gridlock, at which point he gets nebulously blamed for not compromising.

It’s possible they’d close ranks anyways, if the ideological bent is stronger than I thought. In that case I’d bet on Fox and Friends to take up the market share. There is definitely a contingent of socialist-skeptics, ones who already pay taxes and own property, who were really receptive to Sanders criticism.

He doesn’t have nearly as much attack surface on culture/personality, but they’d still hit him on policy.

I've heard that he is extremely unpopular amongst people with whom he has direct contact; so unpleasant that he was kicked out of a kibbutz for being generally annoying and not pulling his weight in community work. He and his wife also have some financial issues that are potentially more than just unbecoming of a self-declared socialist. We've never seen a gloves-off campaign against Sanders, because Clinton had the 2016 primary fixed.

What you call a conspiracy in the Democratic primaries is called...people of the same general political ideology getting behind whom they believed was the strongest candidate. The moderates actually got along, while Bernie got knifed in the gut by Warren staying in the race. Even though, actual polling showed Biden as the 2nd choice of many Warren voters.

I think there's a normative implication to "conspiracy" that we can't ignore which explains why people duck the term.

Yeah but there isn't another suitable term we could use instead is there? So we're kinda stuck with the ambiguity.

Mayor Pete, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris all dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden, right before a primary in which Biden leans heavily upon the vote of what was then termed "low information voters."

Buttigieg dropped out after the SC primary (in which, btw, he got fewer votes than Tom Steyer). Harris dropped out in early December, and did not endorse Biden until after Super Tuesday. Warren dropped out after Super Tuesday.

African-Americans found themselves trapped in urban decay rather than a promise of continued economic prosperity.

If Trump's political life survives this prosecution into the next election, I really wonder how the whole thing will play with African-Americans and how he'll try to play it. He had already gone to great lengths in his prior campaigns and presidency, doing everything he could to give the appearance that he was working hard to embrace them as a constituency and draw their votes. Given that a regular concern of the African-American community is something along the lines of, "Vague police powers are abused to target us, suppress us, and keep us out of any sort of 'official' life," doesn't he immediately get to play that up even more? "I understand you; these people wield these laws and powers unjustly, targeting us unfairly just to keep us down, because they don't like us." Maybe it won't end up being effective in pushing numbers, and he'll have to balance it a little bit with the 'law and order' constituency that wants promises that he'll go after actual theft, murder, and rioting... but how does this not shoot up to being one of the top three-or-so issues of his campaign?

One thing we should have a discussion on is George Soros someday. I’ve read his books, he’s realistically seemed like an untenured professor type who got out of grad school but was not smart enough to get a job. He’s viewed as a financial market genius but to be honest the quality of market participants was far lower back then. There were guys who were plumbers one day and making $50 million the next year after showing up on stock exchange floor.

I have enough respect for Soros mental capabilities that I just don’t understand what he’s doing in politics. Things like bail reform and ending mass incarceration I was reading today that the Koch Brothers funded those activities too. George Mason and the other think tanks funded by the Koch always supported a lot of reforms. But some of the people he’s gotten in bed with like Chesa Boudin makes it feel like he’s literally bored and running social experiments. Perhaps to test his reflexivity theory on markets. That he could go too far and cause a counter and farther reaction the other direction. The Trump prosecution itself feels authoritarian to me and not Democratic and is reasonable justification for a lot on the gop to give up on the system. And yet Soros backed this guy.

What is characteristic to me about Soros, more than anything else, is that he's funded DAs. Plenty of money gets thrown around for the legislative branch openings, but Soros is synonymous with DA races, and specifically getting DAs elected who then go on to be soft on crime.

It reads to my mind as a market inefficiency he decided to exploit. Better RoI by spending money on the prosecutors so their discretion is your suggestion, rather than trying to fight for lawmakers who then still need to enact the laws you prefer.

This makes him distinct in my mind from other people attempting to spend money to buy results in democratic elections.

Problem with the inefficiency he found is it seems like it’s causing political dysfunction and adding politics into the administrative state.

For markers I believe Millenium and they may have got in from ren tech were Arbing some mutual fund rebalances. Mutual funds lost a little bit everyday. Eventually mutual funds need to prevent that so instead of having a cheap way to do their fund they need add personal to rebalance which just adds an extra costs to system.

Yeah, I feel like I actually know approximately nothing about the guy. My impression has always been, "Well, he's made a bunch of money, and he leans left with that money, so that makes him a boogeyman to the right, but that could be consistent with a variety of pretty milquetoast actual behavior." The only thing that has sort of shocked me on the topic was reading a translation of Chinese-language publication that was presumably written for consumption by Chinese bureaucrat types, and it just very casually threw in something along the lines of, "...and of course, we have a clear example of financial warfare conducted by George Soros..." pretty much without justification, as though that perspective was just a commonly-held belief for, uh, Chinese bureaucrat types. I'd be pretty interested in a deep dive that actually looks at what he's done domestically and internationally and breaks down why people view him the way they do.

and it just very casually threw in something along the lines of, "...and of course, we have a clear example of financial warfare conducted by George Soros..." pretty much without justification, as though that perspective was just a commonly-held belief

It sort of is, even in the west. They're most likely referring to Black Wednesday and it's not that long ago that lefties were seeing the whole episode as a neoliberal plot to force privatization, dismantle welfare, and whatnot. Of course since populists started hating him, they had to cozy up to him.

One of my casual past time is reading the biographies of famous / wealthy traders and hedge funders. The two major themes I've discovered are first, a lot of these guys (and, as of now, it's only men) are entrepreneurs, meaning that they did something fundamentally different than anyone else. Second is that, failing actual entrepreneurship, they took a massive contrarian position, went all in, and it paid off. You could call the latter group "gamblers" but I don't think that's fair. Warren Buffett - he of the "kindly old man who likes coke" public image - has explicitly said that when you are really convinced of an idea, you should go all in and even borrow money.

It's important to remember that Soros originally wanted to be a philosopher and actually studied under Karl Popper in England. He used a lot of Popper inspired thinking on falsification and applied it to the market. Now, I should point out that this is almost always a stupid idea - trying to transplant an integrated way of thinking from one wholly independent domain to another. But, unfortunately, it sometimes days work incredibly well. Soros' MegaTrade was when he "Broke the Bank of England" in what is now seen as a blindingly obvious opportunity. The Bank of England publicly announced they would buoy the currency vis-a-vis the Deutschmark. What do you do when a sovereign entity announced unlimited support for an asset? You short the shit out of it. That's what Old George did and made about one billion dollars in single day.

I'd argue that, like Buffett, the rest of Soros' success largely came from the fact that he was seen as successful. In public markets, this is especially potent. The Buffett Bounce is a real thing. Also, when you have that much (i.e. billion(s)) of float capital, you have options that other players don't. People don't understand that a "normal" hedge fund cannot simply hold capital out of the market. In a lot of cases, if they don't deploy their capital within a certain timeframe, LPs can take legal action. Soros, Buffet, and a couple others can spend a lot of time hanging out on the sidelines and then bet on the game when its 42-0 in the 4th with 10 seconds left.

On Soros' politics - this is just his billionaire's fantasy. Some rich dudes buy an NFL team because they always wanted to play ball but we're 5'8 and 160 lbs. Soros wanted to be this great philo-political mind, but wasn't, and is now investing in all of the political things! to, in my opinion, brute force his way into that role.

The most notorious speculator in the world is a hack to you? Seriously?

He is one of the most respected figures among the best traders in the world. These are people who not only beat the markets, they beat the crap out of them. And I'm not talking about the average Goldman trader. I'm talking about the desks that don't even consider taking your money unless you put 10 million on the table, no questions asked.

Everythin was easier in the old days, yes. That's what a loser would say.

From Victor Davis Hansen:

#1) Bragg promised in advance that he would try to find a way to indict Trump.

I don't know if it matters to you or not, but this appears to be a flat out lie. Cheers.

“Promise to indict this guy” is a pretty specific claim, though, and I’d rate it as much more damning than gesturing at “holding people in power accountable.” So would VDH, presumably, since he clearly wants to get his shots in at Pelosi and especially Hillary.

Did you get your quotes from this Examiner article? They follow it up by really assuming the conclusion. Apparently, a “longtime voice in liberal circles” at WaPo tweeted something about this representing “accountability.” The Examiner takes this as proof that “It does not have to involve a specific charge or punishment for a specific act.”

Imagine the bizarro-world where VDH is cheering Hillary’s indictment for e-mail crimes. Might he use words like “accountable,” given that he’s sure she actually did it? Somehow I doubt the Examiner would be holding that up as evidence of systemic bias.

Do you have any evidence for it being a lie, like you can't find it mentioned anywhere, or someone shows that it was quoted out of context, or something like that?

No, Bragg did not specifically pledge, "If elected, I will indict Donald J. Trump." But he promised to pursue Trump and hold him "accountable," which is liberal code for going after Trump in any way possible.

From this article. As with most coverage of this topic, it milks that word “accountable” for all it’s worth. The rest of it is spent explaining the “liberal code.”

For the record, I’m inclined to believe the prosecution is politically motivated. That’s a low bar to clear.

I was looking into this today. I can’t find him saying “he would indict trump”. But he did repeatedly say he’s sued trump numerous times and is proven successful. A different DA or prior DA did specifically use the term indict trump in election material.

So it seems like he wisely didn’t directly declare he would prosecute but did imply he was the best man for the job.

I’d rate “flat out lie” to not be true. It certainly was part of the election.

https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/mar/31/alvin-bragg-made-his-tough-trump-record-central-hi/

From direct quotes being able to prosecute Trump was an election issue.

The crime of winning in 2016 was the rationale for the Russia collusion hoax, it prompted the Mueller investigation (which produced nothing actionable), it was the reason for his first impeachment (not the appropriate anti-corruption measures he was taking against his likely 2020 opposition), and it is the reason he was indicted last week.

Also don't forget the "classified documents".

No need for scare quotes. There were documents, and they were classified.

Resentment towards Trump may well be the reason for media absolutely running with it where they wouldn’t for Biden. It’s not why the security apparatus got involved in the first place.

No need for scare quotes. There were documents, and they were classified.

You are correct. I should have scare-quoted something like "classified documents crime".

You are correct. I should have scare-quoted something like "classified documents crime"

The crime shouldn't be scare-quoted either. Sandy Berger was prosecuted for mishandling classified documents as Clinton left office - he got a plea deal for a $50k fine plus probation, and lost his security clearance. The Trump case seems analogous. I agree that trying to jail Trump for the document-related crimes would be an escalation, although jailing him if he refuses a plea deal and loses at trial would not.

Donald Trump is guilty of winning the 2016 election, and for this crime he will be hounded by Democrats until the end of his days. The crime of winning in 2016 was the rationale for the Russia collusion hoax, it prompted the Mueller investigation (which produced nothing actionable), it was the reason for his first impeachment (not the appropriate anti-corruption measures he was taking against his likely 2020 opposition), and it is the reason he was indicted last week.

Donald Trump very clearly and purposefully often said outrageous things to get in the news cycle. He intuitively understood the toxoplasma of rage and harnessed it. Other politicians occasionally say the wrong thing and the sound bite follows them around(Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables", Gary Johnson's "What's Aleppo?"), and they're always constantly watching what they say to try to avoid that. Donald Trump put something new out there every week on purpose. A couple of his policies were a bit more extreme than other Republicans(border wall, Muslim ban), but not that much I think, especially when you look at how they were actually implemented. But what makes him different is that he purposefully said things and framed his words in a way to make himself sound outrageous. I think you can only get so upset when you try your best to make half the population outraged, and then they stay angry at you. Personally I think the left should be the bigger person and not prosecute Trump over tiny, irrelevant stuff. But I think it's dumb to pretend it's because Trump just doesn't fit the coastal elite stereotype. It's because he says things in the most inflammatory way possible, and he doesn't stop. Pre-Trump, politicians would insult and mock their opponent a couple times an election cycle. Trump would tweet out some new mean(and funny) nickname every day.

There's a Finnish saying, mostly used in political circles, that translates to "You shouldn't get provoked when being provoked", which basically is like what you are suggesting here. However, thinking about things like this, when someone is provoked all the time purposefully, it's all too natural they get provoked! It's the expected thing! One should at least not be befuddled when that happens. Trump provoked, well, everyone expect his supporters all the time, so people got provoked. Hardly inconceivable.

Exactly. I think trying to come up with strategies about how to behave intelligently even when being provoked, or trying to tell people that the provocations weren't so bad that we should break democratic norms over them, is fine. But acting all confused like "why could liberals possibly hate Trump more than other Republicans?" is just silly.

Here's the kind of thing he chooses to prosecute:

A Manhattan parking garage attendant who was shot twice while confronting an alleged thief at his business was charged with murder after wrestling away the weapon and using it to fire at the suspect.

This is what one gets when one uncritically relies on media sources, esp from tabloids like the Daily Mail: This guy clearly was never charged by the DA. He was ARRESTED by the POLICE on Saturday, along with assailant, and the very next day the DA said that the police made a mistake and that he would not be charged.

Did this happen before or after the "mistake" drew public scrutiny?

His crime was winning the 2016 election. It was the crime that prompted two impeachments, and now an indictment. Trump cannot be allowed to get away with it, and so Democrats have overreached at every opportunity, grasping at straws, to get something, anything, to stick to him.

That strikes me as a perverse sort of applause light. It belongs in the same category as "They hated Him because He told the truth": a zinger designed specifically for people who already buy into the premise. I'm sure plenty of readers saw it, immediately thought of examples like you've provided here, upvoted and moved on. Please clap. For those who disagreed with your premise, there wasn't a lot to work with. This version of your argument is way better.

With my whinging out of the way, I want to riff off of @ActuallyATleilaxuGhola. Well, I want to go further than 20%. The vast majority of Trump Derangement Syndrome, political prosecution, Congressional mummery--it can be explained with the phrase "he can't keep getting away with it!"

People don't like to admit that. They'll prevaricate about eroding norms or unpresidential conduct or reduced credibility abroad. But those are symptoms. Hatred and revulsion are reflexes to the perception that justice was not served. It's not that he won, it's that he won after doing something that was supposed to disqualify him. Something that theoretically would have sunk a less charismatic campaign. There were a lot of "somethings," each an opportunity for political opponents to board that train, and once they were on board, they had a direct route to becoming personal opponents. Trump offends people more than Ted Cruz or Jeb! ever could, because he hits their sense of fairness.

It's important to note that this is near orthogonal to any actual, you know, guilt. People who play the game surely "get away with it" more often than those who don't. I could believe they commit more crime, given their greater means, than normal citizens. How might real estate moguls stack up?

That's all you need to explain the constant baying for Trump's head.


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