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Notes -
Trump indicted with 4 counts over 2020 election
Why not?
Trump is perhaps the most hated man in America. He spent four years operating at the pinnacle of global power, an environment strewn with what are purported to be impartial legal tripwires placed to hinder abuses of power. He's incompetent and sloppy, arrogant, astonishingly vain, and defined by his contempt for anything that blocks his personal ambitions.
The people now indicting him achieved office through a population dozens of millions strong that uniformly believes that he's Satan incarnate, a criminal, a dangerous megalomaniac, a giant retarded toddler armed with a machine gun. They believe that his election was manifest evidence that our political system is deeply, perhaps irreparably broken. They see his Presidency as a disaster that needs to be cleaned up and then prevented from ever recurring. And again, he spent four years being, at the absolute best, sloppy and incompetent in an environment that purportedly is supposed to demand precision on pain of serious legal consequences.
Why not indict him, and jail him too while they're at it? How could doing so possibly be a bad idea? We're a nation of laws, right? He at least plausibly broke them, right? This is what the system does, these are the rules we all agreed to, what possible room could there be for complaint? And sure, there are some people, maybe even a lot of people who are too mind-killed to accept reality, and they're going to complain anyway. But what are they going to do about it?
Nothing, right?
The people doing this have the all the cards. They won the election, the bureaucracy is on-side, half the nation's voters have been screaming for this for four years. This is what power is for, to get good things done even when they're hard, even when bad people stand in the way! How could they not do exactly this, exactly now? If the bad people can't get it through their heads that they've fucking lost, then it becomes necessary to hammer the point, repeatedly and with vigor, until it finally sinks in. If they aren't getting it, then that means you aren't hammering hard enough. At some point in the escalation curve, they'll have to cave, won't they? That's how it works, isn't it? What possible reason could be imagined for doing anything else?
And if such a reason can't be imagined, why would you expect anything other than exactly this?
Also: What, should the entire apparatus of the civil state stand there, limp dick in hand, watching norm after law after precedent get dynamited?
The apparatus demands lubrication, and the only substance at hand is blood. It is good and necessary that blood should flow to feed the state. That is what the state is, that is what the state is for. The state is the threat of violence perpetrated against all by consent of all for the benefit of all.
There has been a defector; why should the government even exist if it can't punish one idiot failson of a fallen business empire?
Well, given that almost every rule in question has long since been broken by the ruling class, my question is why is this guy so bad? Hillary had an entire private unsecured email server outside the government firewall. We didn’t care about norms then. If you want corruption, how is it that a person can go directly from public office to a very lucrative job lobbying for industries that they sought to (not really) regulate months earlier? Or how they always manage to sell their stocks just before us plebs get bad economic news? Hunter Biden had been peddling influence in Russia for decades. We didn’t care about any of those things until Trump did them.
And there’s the ball game — this decidedly is not about laws, norms, or precedents. It’s about making an example of a man who violated the hidden social contract of having good decorum and toeing the social norms an$ keeping quiet about the grift. It’s completely about who he is and what he represents— he’s an outsider, and worse one that won’t play along. He was about the common man.
And to be honest here, I think he’s probably the only politician in memory that could have actually gotten a mob to do anything. Rubin or Cruz or Pence might draw a crowd, but not one willing to fight for their cause. I live in a red state, and I talk to MAGAs. I have never seen a group so enthusiastic about a political leader. For them, this is the first time in memory that a political figure has actually been on their side. The first time in memory that they feel listened to. They don’t trust other people as they’ve been stung too many times by promises that the government “would be there for them”.
I think he’s wrong on policy, but I will point out that the entire thing is absolutely about destroying him and him personally. Others have quietly done what he did.
What I don’t understand is why. Maga correctly hated the lockdowns. Yet they now support Trump over DeSantis? The latter was there for them in a real way; the former couldn’t even fire Fauci.
Once upon a time it was probably because Trump promised to do things for them (bring back factories, build the wall). Now they're behind him because he's under attack (for, they reckon, daring to stand up for them).
Funny thing is DeSantis is also under attack (albeit not legal attack though Gavin has floated the idea).
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