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I saw the following exchange between Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, and it made me angry. So instead of getting over it and going and doing normal things like a well adjusted adult, I decided to complain about it on the internet.
First of all, I'm at least glad to see that reality is starting to set in. Trump is going to get his nonsense "absolute immunity" claim promptly rejected 9-0 by the Supreme Court. He's going to go on trial on March 4, he's going to get convicted, and he's going to go to prison. This has all been obvious for some time, and people do need to come to grips with it instead of telling themselves "it can't happen, so it won't".
But there is a stark mismatch here between the acceptance on one hand that the jury will convict Trump but the insistence on the other hand that "the charges aren't real". DC is an overwhelmingly democratic voting jurisdiction, but you would need to be cynical indeed to think there is no chance that even one Democrat juror would refuse to imprison a political opponent on obviously baseless charges. But of course, the charges are not nearly so baseless as Carlson suggests.
No, the reason that Kelly and Carlson know that Trump is going down is not because they think there is not one honest soul to be found in DC. They can have confidence Trump will lose this case because both his conduct and the law have little mystery about them. On the facts, there's little if any dispute about the actions that Trump took. On the law we have seen similar charges applied to many January 6 defendants, and it has not gone well for them. If Trump is to get similar treatment for similar conduct, he must be convicted.
Carlson and Kelly know that he's guilty and yet they pretend otherwise. Carlson rants about how outrageous it is to render people's votes meaningless, and yet when Trump is charged for conspiring to do exactly that he flatly states it's "not even a real crime". I emphasize that his contention here isn't even that Trump didn't do the awful thing he's accused of - he's saying that the things he's accused of aren't awful. This lays bare how empty and fake Carlson's feigned defence of democracy is. You can believe that it's outrageous to deprive people of their democratic rights or you can believe that conspiring to deprive people of their democratic rights isn't a "real crime", but it's incoherent to claim both.
But worst of all is the "warning" of violence. Carlson tells us that the man who incited a riot must not be punished or else we'll get more riots. This is the logic of terrorism. Give us what we want or there will be blood. Sure, he phrases it as a prediction rather than a threat and says he detests violence... but he knows full well that many of the people who might actually commit it could well be listening to him, and he knows he is fanning the flames of their resentment and putting the thought of violence in their heads. This would be irresponsible even if Carlson were sincere, but the fact that he's obviously being cynical makes it worse. This is a man who passionately hates Trump and couldn't wait for him to get kicked out of the White House - and yet here he is inventing excuses for him, pre-emptively trying to discredit the verdict he knows is coming, sanewashing Trump's "rigged election" claims, stoking anger, and telling people that violence is the inevitable response if Trump gets locked up. All, one presumes, so he can maintain his position in the GOP media ecosystem. What a worm.
Smith and Chuktan will obviously not allow themselves to be swayed by threats of violence, so we will unfortunately get to see if the dark talk turns into action. I for one hope Trump's most volatile supporters will at least recognize the truth that Carlson acknowledges - it will go extremely badly for anyone who takes it upon themselves to shed blood.
Interesting comment, and your opinion is very firmly stated. I'm not American and I only have a passing familiarity with US political shenanigans, so I'd be very interested to hear why you are so certain Trump committed an "awful" crime and is going to jail. Are we talking about Jan 6th here? My impression is that nothing he did was worse than the what the Democrats did in 2016 and during BLM (including disputing the election, calls to violence, riots and the storming of the White House during BLM), and that prosecuting political opponents is another step the US is taking toward being a failed state. But I'd be very interested to hear you lay out why this impression is wrong.
Yes, the federal Jan 6 case scheduled to start on March 4 is the one I'm talking about. I think he's completely screwed in the Georgia case and the documents case too, but they're more logistically complicated and are unlikely to go to trial before the election.
I think he went way, way beyond "disputing" the election. He actively tried to stay in power despite losing the vote and despite the courts rejecting his false claims of fraud. He had no legal avenues remaining to stay in power, and he tried to use illegal ones.
Jan 6 was effectively a failed coup. It was an egregious attack on American democracy. Heinous crimes like that should not be tolerated simply because they are committed by political opponents.
The federal case against Trump seems to boil down to if you challenge an election then you have to be correct or you are going to jail. That doesn't seem to be a good precedent to set. He is being prosecuted for things that are entirely legal and people have done before in the past and have not been prosecuted for.
Wait, who's the other president who tried to get their VP to reject legitimate election results?
... Were you not awake for 2016 or 2000?
Apparently not if I missed Obama trying to prevent the transfer of power to Trump after the election! Can you give me any more details about it?
They did extra legal things to harm the Trumps administration ability to do anything. General Flynn having to answer Logan Act violation issues is a big deal to me since no one has ever been prosecuted under the Logan Act so the fbi attacking him for it was extremely extra-legal.
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I seem to recall this big controversy about the crossfire hurricane thing.
And you know that SCOTUS case in 2000.
There is a big difference between using recount laws for the purpose for which they were intended (even if those recount laws later turn out to be unconstitutional) and filing lies with the court. Neither Bush nor Gore was ever accused of filing briefs containing false factual claims - the key facts of Bush v Gore (that recounting punch card ballots accurately was sufficiently difficult that there wasn't time for an accurate statewide recount before the electoral College deadline, and that the margin of error of the original count exceeded Bush's margin of victory) were never disputed.
Trump's State court challenges to the 2020 election are criminal if and only if they were based on knowingly false factual claims. Both the Federal and Georgia indictments promise to bring evidence that they were.
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Tell me more about crossfire hurricane. What did they do to keep Obama in the White House and prevent Trump becoming president?
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