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If he's put in prison for any of the stuff they're throwing at him now, he will be a shoe-in for the Republican nomination. You could not ask for a better way to get his base to turn out.
Come to think of it, might this be a viable strategy? Trump energizes the base, but is in prison, so his VP has to do most of the actual president stuff. So, they can run Trump for the devout Trumpists, knowing that they're practically running his VP candidate (presumably DeSantez).
No. If an elected President is in Federal prison, he just pardons himself. If he's in a state prison there's a constitutional crisis but unless Congress impeaches him I don't think there's any way it ends without him being released.
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Except you cannot actually do your duties as president from prison. You cannot leave the prison, so he can’t conduct diplomacy, you can’t call members of Congress to get your agenda passed, you can’t really do much. As such, I don’t see any viable way for republicans to elect a guy who can’t do the job.
Well, then he'll just pardon himself.
Can he do that? I don’t think he can.
For Federal charges he sure can -- statewise my fear is that this will turn into a "well come and get me then" situation long before he ever gets elected. (or imprisoned)
Trump rallies featuring standoffs between state and federal police trying to arrest him would be spicy for sure -- but not exactly great for the state of the Union.
Better for the state of the union than allowing the Democrats their coup.
Oh yes -- I've always thought that Trump is a very 19th century politician, and that's exactly the sort of thing that would fit right in in those campaigns -- so I'd support it on lindy grounds.
But ideally somebody on the other side would acknowledge the possibility that their actions could have unwanted side effects and back the fuck off -- not happening ofc (much less judges noticing that the charges are sovereign-citizen level bullshit and dismissing them with prejudice) so certainly better than ignoring the problem.
Not sure Trump has the balls anymore however -- he really needs an utter madman whispering in his ear for the next 14 months or so -- is he still on good terms with Bannon, I forget?
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I mean, at this point, I don't think any of us knows how any of this would work. If he actually won the election, even from prison, would they petition for a temporary suspension of his sentence, in order to carry out the duties of office? Would it go through? Who knows. There is zero case history here. Maybe some enterprising law profs are preparing review articles on this topic at this very moment... but yeah, I doubt we have any idea what would end up happening.
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I can't wait for Republicans in 2025 trying to figure out how they could have possibly lost with their candidate trying to campaign from a prison cell.
Probably they'll decide it was fraud again.
Too much "boo outgroup," not enough substance. More effort than this, please.
As you wish:
It may well be the case that the Republican primary electorate will react to a Trump conviction by rallying behind him even harder. But it's hard to see how such a course of action results in anything but a Biden victory. If Trump is in jail, he can't campaign. He can't debate. He can't tweet. He will be limited in his ability to do media. And of course, those Americans who have some measure of trust in the criminal justice system (54% by this poll) will see him more negatively by virtue of the fact that he's been convicted - and he's an unpopular guy to start with.
Perhaps the day after the election people wake up and ask themselves "Hey, why did we decide it was smart to hitch our wagon to this loser again?" But at this stage I feel like too many people are in too deep to ever find their way out. Trump is a winner, so if he loses, it's because they cheated. And if he goes to jail it's because he was unfairly targeted, definitely not because he committed a stupendous number of crimes trying to illegally hold on to power. So another loss will simply become even more evidence of how rigged the system is, and another reason to support Trump even harder, onwards into the mists of time.
That is a pretty abysmal number, TBH, especially when the plurality of the three categories you're counting was in the middle of the overall range (they essentially had a scale of 1-5, and you're counting the 38% who were the equivalent of a 3). Also, it has clearly been trending downward, which is a bad sign. People are losing trust, because they're seeing what is actually happening. They keep getting told that this case or that case isn't a perfect equivalent, so we can't really be sure that there is a double-standard in play, but such a position keeps becoming less and less plausible.
Short Circuit just linked to a case in the D.C. Circuit:
Extremely high-profile uses of real bureaucratic power in service of The Party get noticed. Suddenly changing COVID messaging to allow for political protests that serve The Party got noticed. Differential enforcement of laws got noticed. Some of those times, apologists can retreat behind claims that there could have been differences, but the Difference of the Gaps argument is running thin as examples are mounting and we're seeing even circuit courts have to admit that it sure darn seems like laws are being selectively enforced depending upon whether The Party approves of the viewpoint being expressed. I've seen a lot of your comments here, but I don't think you've ever actually engaged seriously with this challenge. Every time someone tries to allege disparate treatment, it just rolls off your back. If you still have "some" measure of faith in the criminal justice system, can you agree with the D.C. Circuit that at least this sure seems be a pretty plausible example of disparate treatment based on the political viewpoint of the "criminals" in question?
I mean, probably a lot of why Americans distrust the criminal justice system is not because they think that it is in service of The Party, by which term I assume you mean the mainstream non-populist political establishment.
For many it is because they have eyes and can both see and read that the criminal justice system is obviously dysfunctional on every level, from the often incompetent cops, to the drug war, to the overworked court systems, to the sardine can prisons. I think that plenty of objective observers can probably agree on such an opinion of the criminal justice system regardless of what political ideology they support
Add on top of that the people who genuinely buy into Black Lives Matter-type reasoning about how the criminal justice system is supposedly racist.
And yes, people noticing what looks like lawfare is a third reason.
If 54% of Americans have some measure of trust in the criminal justice system, to me it means that about 54% of Americans have been lucky enough to never have to deal with the criminal justice system, plus do not spend much time reading about it.
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Certainly.
Now we're cookin'! Do you have an opinion on why Paul Combetta wasn't charged for violating the same law that Mike Flynn was charged for, but in a way that was vastly more flagrant?
No, I don't. I don't even know who Paul Combetta is, much less the particulars of any alleged offences he may have committed.
Ah, so you're actually just ignorant of the examples people have of a double standard. That's why you think they're just mists of time. Perhaps you could check out the IG report on the matter, with choice quotes from agents who were sure that he committed the same crime, more blatantly, and had no idea why he wasn't prosecuted? Perhaps you could look in to some of the allegations before broadly declaring that they're all nothing but mist?
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Do you think that being able to create a situation where your political opposition must run their campaign from a prison cell counts as actual power? Is it actual power when Putin does it?
The person who created this situation is Donald Trump.
Would you say the same thing about Navalny?
No.
He broke the law, didn't he?
He may or may not have done. I'm not aware and I don't think it's particularly relevant. Putin controls the Russian system and uses any means at his disposal - legal, illegal, whatever - to crush opposition.
It's not realistically possible to stand for election as an opposition candidate and win in Russia. In America, it is - and it has been done in the last 2 Presidential elections.
You're mistaking what it means to be "opposition". I think everyone else is saying that "opposition" means "opposition to entrenched powers in the bureaucracy". But that mark, only one of the two last presidential elections was won by the opposition. We saw it happen the first time, and then we saw the entrenched powers in the bureaucracy absolutely freak out and go totally mad, we saw them publicly declare that they felt bad about not pulling out all the stops to prevent it, publicly declare that they were going to pull out all the stops to prevent it from happening again, and then we saw them actually pull out all the stops to prevent it from happening again.
It would be as if Putin somehow lost an election, spent a term essentially running the government from afar, saw that Navalny had zero success in wrangling any of the organs of power, and then saw all those organs of power ensure that Navalny lost the following election to Putin and was promptly jailed.
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If you convince people you can't be trusted, they won't play with you any more, and they won't work to convince other people to play with you even if those people have decided to stop playing based on erroneous information.
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I see we have a vote for the legitimacy of imprisoning the opposition.
Absolutely. The Trump supporters who chanted "lock her up" had the right of it, crooked politicians belong in jail.
Trump supporters who said this had a specific crime in mind. They didn't keep trying crimes until they found one that worked.
There's a difference between locking up someone mainly for a crime, and locking someone up for political reasons with crime as an excuse.
That's true, but an even bigger difference is that Trump didn't actually do it, or even attempt it.
I don't believe for a minute that any of the people supporting Trump's prosecution wouldn't be screaming about unprecedented norm violations if Trump had managed to get the FBI to investigate that laptop and get indictments of Joe Biden in the 2020 campaign season.
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EDIT: Never mind. I was going to ask a question but then realised I don't really care about the answer. So no point asking it.
Suffice to say, I think Trump did specific crimes and should be jailed for them.
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