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I can’t believe this shit. The front running candidate is probably going to be in jail on election night, and the challengers are scrambling to find an angle of attack. It’s right in front of you ya imbeciles.
What good is hammering Trump for being the victim of obviously politicized prosecutions?
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According to supposed experts interviewed in radio shows I listen to, these court cases proceed so slowly that Trump will very much not be behind bars as of the upcoming presidential election.
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You may well not buy it, but many of the people that will be voting in Republican primaries (me included) regard prosecution of Trump as a purely political act and jailing him would increase my likelihood of voting for him. This may sound insane to you, but consider what your position is on leaders that have been made into political prisoners. Should the people on the same side as the political prisoner attack him and embrace the regime, or are they in a bit of an awkward position?
Look, I get it. The prosecution seems unfair and you want to struggle against it and fight back. Here’s the problem:
It’s a trap
They want you to vote for him in the primary. You really think the best case they can come up with is misreported hush money payments to his mistress? No. They’re hoping the Republican base bets all their political capital on Trump, secures him the nomination, and then they’re going to drop the hammer and make Republicans look like treasonous buffoons for supporting the guy again instead of adopting any meaningful policy platform.
You don’t have to throw Trump under the proverbial bus (like he did to his supporters on January 6), you just have to not nominate him to be the Republican candidate for President of the United States.
EDIT: Well well how the turntables. I suspect that these charges are at least legally sound, if not "fair". The argument that, "Everyone does it. These felony charges are bullshit." would be a lot stronger if we didn't all see over the last 8 years how differently Trump acts from normal politicians. You don't have to nominate this guy. DeSantis can run on an, "I'll pardon Trump, but he shouldn't be president," platform.
Actually, yes. They didn't come up with anything better in 2016 or 2020, why would they suddenly become good at muckraking now?
I don't believe anything the swamp creatures tell me, they're not going to make themselves more credible by being more lurid.
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Obviously. I'm currently hoping for DeSantis. But the Democrats are having Trump arrested and indicted, banana-republic style, to try to get Trump as the primary challenger. If it works, I can only hope it works so well it propels him through the general election as well, in which case whatever retribution Trump is able to dish out will be 100% deserved.
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Listen, I’m all for the American electorate switching to effective candidates instead of the loudest ones. That’s not going to happen because of some nebulous kompromat. Why wouldn’t they have deployed it in the first election? Or the impeachments, or the second election, or the three-ring circus of hearings after the Capitol riot. That last one is the closest we’re going to get to “dropping the hammer.”
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I've got to say, the idea that there are some powers that be that actually have the goods and they're just waiting for the right moment to spring them is the most Muellerpilled take I've heard in quite some time. My alternative explanation would be that the reason the actual charges look pathetic and political is because the only available charges are pathetic and political.
These don't have to be some new case; it just has to be enough drip-drip-drip of legal proceedings, bureaucratic reports, and other assorted smears to convince "independents" to vote Biden instead of MAGA. (Oh by the way, Alvin Bragg has set Trump's goofy-ass Stormy Daniels trial for early 2024. Oh by the way, Jack Smith, the Mar-a-Lago documents special counsel also will be releasing a report justifying his charging decisions, and I'll bet any amount of money you care to name it'll be at a politically-advantageous time).
The Democrats' goal here is not really to have Trump executed or whatever; it's to get and keep power so they can push their policies and reward their friends. The point of persecuting Trump is that the Dems can use his unpopularity among their base as a pinata for heightened turnout numbers and negative press about the GOP they can wave in the faces of status-conscious moderates and independents. They also happen to get the perverse side benefit that the more they target Trump, the more popular he gets with the core GOP base, locking them into a candidate who the Dems are confident they can beat.
I understand why this is viscerally frustrating - the Dems are pulling a lot of really nasty lawfare stunts on Trump (though he is also bad at avoiding unforced errors and bad at defending himself), and it feels extremely wrong to abandon him and let them get away with it. But tactically it is playing into the Dem's hands more than a bit.
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It's an uphill battle to manage to attack him while not managing to keep yourself firmly out of being perceived as part of the outgroup. Attacking Trump needs to be in ways that don't look like you're left-leaning, and the past 8 years have immunized Trump to whole classes of attacks, as they're often considered (not necessarily unjustifiably) to be politically motivated, and maybe lacking substance.
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Attacking Trump for his legal troubles is a sure way to lose the Republican primary.
I don’t think “he’s a loser, and he deserves to be in jail for being a pathetic loser who failed so badly his enemies could send him to jail” is a terrible argument. But agreed, it’s probably above the median GOP primary voter.
I think given how closely Trump's supporters have identified with his rhetoric, attacking Trump's legal cases would amount to alienating some sizable chuck of his constituency.
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The legal issues related to Trump don't seem particularly troubling. Trump has always been in a legal gray area with stuff like the Russia investigation, but Mueller cleared Trump of collusion when most of the media thought he would go down for sure. Counting on a legal issue to bring down Trump seems like a bad bet unless he does something particularly egregious.
I might be surprised, and this could turn into the speediest trial ever, but I'm guessing this is unlikely to end up in a conviction quickly enough to "bring Trump down", at least in terms of preventing him from getting the nomination. However, what is the argument for the various indictments swaying folks who would have otherwise voted for him? With the NY indictment, paying off a porn star for an affair was already baked in to at least his 2020 results, so that part won't do him much worse (and that election was quite close). The actual business records/campaign finance charges are ticky tack, strained, and at best barely technically supported. Regular Joe is barely going to be able to understand what the big deal is supposed to be. With this latest indictment, I think a lot revolves around, frankly, demographic change. 2016 was eight years ago. Most rightists who were politically mature back then are going to remember "but her emails" and remember how the narrative shifted on classified information and prosecuting political candidates, so it might not shift them much.
...and right as I was about to write the next sentence, I had a change of direction. I was going to say that Republicans are still more traditionally pro-nat-sec/military/etc. and would be more concerned about classified information. It would make sense politically that this issue would have more of a chance to sway some of those folks. However, I realized as I was writing the above, that the older righties will likely remember the "but her emails", and while the younger righties might not remember, they're generally much more skeptical of the nat-sec/military/etc., uh... "industrial complex". They grew up on the narratives of Assange and Snowden and think that a lot of that is bullshit anyway. So, maybe it won't really sway any of the right's voters, but perhaps for different reasons.
My question here is, even if they pulled it off, could it backfire if Trump went full Prisoner 9653 for President?
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The media in no way was some innocent or indifferent spectator, or had any impartial interest in the case. 'Russiagate' was a media driven campaign that was false, and people on the inside, in particular those like Rachel Maddow knew they were peddling bullshit from the get-go.
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