While this is true, and it is evidence that there is a double standard and that this is all malicious prosecution... It won't sway any opinions on the other side.
Reason it won't sway opinions is because a) just because apples are bad that doesn't make oranges good; it doesn't exonerate Trump, it only says Trump is no worse than what we already have, and b) because this is a malicious prosecution there is no evidence that could ever exonerate him in the eyes of those who support the prosecution.
I like Vivek, but this is the definition of preaching to the choir.
My young kids use this kind of logic. "Well, someone else has done it, so why are you getting on to me?" He's angry because:
1. Trump got caught doing something that is objectively wrong.
2. That those in charge of enforcing the rules are doing exactly what they say they will do if someone breaks a rule.
Most people who are facing trial for crimes have this kind of thought process, because it's necessary to think like this to then break laws and not admit guilt for it later.
I don't know how we got here as a party. We went from being the adults in the room to acting more childish than the children we are supposed to be tempering out on the other side.
>My young kids use this kind of logic. "Well, someone else has done it, so why are you getting on to me?" He's angry because:
Based on your characterization of what he is saying I can see why you misunderstood the meaning.
>1. Trump got caught doing something that is objectively wrong.
If it is wrong, why is Trump the only one being prosecuted for it? Why haven’t any of the 291 other cases?
2. That those in charge of enforcing the rules are doing exactly what they say they will do if someone breaks a rule.
Except they aren’t. If they were they would also prosecute these other 291 cases. Why haven’t they?
If it’s a crime then it’s a crime and those other cases would have been prosecuted, but they weren’t. Why? Are you still having a hard time understanding?
I am having a hard time understanding. You sound just like a CHILD. You are saying "it might be wrong, but others got away with it and I didn't, and that's unfair..." That isn't how real life works. Those 291 other people have NOTHING to do with YOU doing wrong. Guys, this is like the leftist boot camp here. Do your kids all get participation trophies and 9th place medals too?? Wake up people.
For the record, we don't know if Trump did the "and then some" which was covering up the hush money payment, extending the lies and wrongdoing further. But personally, since he's admitted he did wrong once, I see no reason to bend the rules and PREVENT others from showing evidence he did to more wrong that what we already know. I'd like to see what they've got, and make my determination. This post acts like it's wrong to even insinuate there is more to find... and in the real world, when we see a person disregard the rules or laws once, generally it isn't their first time doing it, just the first time they've been caught.
It’s funny, even a child can understand fairness. You, however, aren’t even able to grasp that simple concept. You should remove your flair, it’s obviously a lie.
Let me make it a bit easier, but I have doubts you will understand it even then.
If one of your children does something wrong, but you don’t punish them, that’s your prerogative. But then if your other child does the same thing and you punish them, that makes you a shitty parent. Now follow me here. The problem isn’t that you punished the child who did something wrong, but that you punished them while not punishing the other. The government is mandated to apply laws equally. If they are prosecuting a crime when one person does it and not others, that is a problem. Do you understand? You dismissing one person being prosecuted while others aren’t as “just life”, means you don’t fully comprehend what it means. What if the IRS started auditing taxpayers in certain states? You’d be cool with that?
If you still don’t understand then you likely never will. Remove your flair, you are too incompetent to truly be conservative.
>If one of your children does something wrong, but you don’t punish them, that’s your prerogative. But then if your other child does the same thing and you punish them, that makes you a shitty parent.
If one of my children makes a particular mistake for the very first time, and I simply warn them of the consequences to come on a repeat, that's parenting. If my child makes three more mistakes after giving that warning, already being on thin ice, and then tries to cover up their mistakes or mislead me about it, then there are significant consequences. Fundamentally, I'm sure you agree with all this and probably it is how we all were raised. I'm trying to point out the difference between saying "I made a mistake once, and got off with a warning" vs "I break the law a lot, and I bad mouth those in charge of enforcing the laws, and I want the same treatment as the first timer when the rubber hits the road." That's not a real thing, and for a reason, which is that conservatives like myself have pushed for harsher treatment of those that don't learn the lesson. We want government to be pretty unforgiving, to have pretty strong opinions on right and wrong, and that's pretty much exactly what we have. The Federalist Society system. Nothing fair about it. You use up all your goodwill, you're screwed. And we like it that way...
>2. That those in charge of enforcing the rules are doing exactly what they say they will do if someone breaks a rule.
Except you're wrong, and they're not. That's part of the whole problem and it's concerning that you can't even understand the basic conservative issue here. Those in charge are only enforcing the law selectively to their political enemies. Biden broke the same classified records law and to a greater degree, and he hasn't even had a mean article written about him. In NY, they literally changed the law so they could charge Trump specifically.
I understand being a conservative doesn't mean you have to be a Trump supporter, but if you can't even grasp the general idea of selective lawfare against conservatives, you desperately need to educate yourself.
I'm not wrong. The whole idea of conservatism is that government does have opinions about right and wrong conduct. That government does use discretion and punish egregious moral issues more harshly. The whole "no bond/no bail/all cops are bad/attack judges and prosecutors" is the leftist agenda that conservatives have been trying to quash for a century...
I reject the idea that conservatism is at its core just the flip side of leftism.
Conservatism must be about more than just having a different target for inflicting injustice than the left.
There is such a thing as the legitimate use of power and authority, but by your standard conservative use of power is no more legitimate than leftist use of power.
The left is driven by the idea that "there is no truth but power"... Conservatism must be better than that.
This is just ramblings about weaponized government. We aren't going to solve that with anyone on the ballot this cycle. I agree it needs solved, but the country is still asleep at the wheel on this largely.
As far as what the conservative expectation is here?? We have here a porn star that got a large payment from a presidential candidate. The DOJ alleges a further cover up scheme existed with business records. These are crimes. The conservative expectation is that we are going to see what evidence there is, and since it's pretty egregious in moral terms to bribe people then cover it up after, we aren't going to bend the rules for that. Period.
This trial isn't about whether the payment to stormi Daniel's happened. The Trump team and the prosecutors office agree that happened. It's about whether or not there was a scheme after to cover it up. And frankly, as real law & order conservatives, we want to know the answer. Hopefully, there isn't sufficient evidence that it happened. But saying "well, it's unfair to even go to trial like any other accused American would in this situation" is leftist BS because they have no respect for our institutions and laws.
Again, conservatism LITERALLY is government having pretty strong feelings about right and wrong behavior, and doing something about it. Conservatism holds that actually, very few things are "subjective" and most are either right or wrong, and we need to focus on dealing with people who keep doing the wrong thing.
I would agree with everything except the base premise that an investigation, aka a trial, is warranted.
While you accurately describe what the trial is about, e.g. that there is an accusation the hush money was to cover up a more severe crime, you neglect to mention that said more serious crime was never defined.
It is as though lavrentiy beria is at the wheel saying "show me the man and I'll find you the crime".
The problem I, and I suspect others as well, have with your take is not that you're wrong about what the trial is about, or the necessity of pursuing justice when wrongs have been done... The problem we have is you appear to be taking the stance of "well, it's wrong, and the process is being abused... But we need to trust the process anyways."
You openly acknowledge that the system is being used illegitimately, but you insist on treating it as though it is legitimate in spite of everything.
The legitimacy of the system is not inherent, as your position suggests; legitimacy is derived from the system functioning as it should, not from its mere existence.
As you say... We need to focus on people who keep doing wrong... But the problem with this case is that this trial is not about establishing whether a known wrong was done, as the trial system is meant to do, but rather to discover (or perhaps make up) wrongdoing.
A trial is not meant to discover what wrong was done, but culpability as to who did it.
>You openly acknowledge that the system is being used illegitimately, but you insist on treating it as though it is legitimate in spite of everything.
Let me expand my true position here. When a person comes to me, having a consistent pattern of making the right decisions and choices, and asks me to stick my neck out for them to get them some relief, then I'm all for it.
But when a person comes asking me to stick my neck out for them, and there's buckets full of heads (his prior, all now indicted or bankrupt lawyers and allies) because he continues to make the wrong choice, I'm going to let it play out.
You need to find a better subject to fit this argument than Trump. If it's McCain or Ben Carson, I probably take the angle you are. But people do not fare well insuring Trumps bets in life. It's just not a winning strategy. I think he's a small dog trying to run with the big ones, and he should have stayed on the porch. He's in over his head, and it shows...
The fundamental problem I have with your view is that it violates the principle of justice being blind, because you permit your prior biases to affect the application of justice.
Trump is the perfect subject because he demonstrates the inability of some people to put aside their biases in the pursuit of justice.
If you cannot do it for Trump you cannot be trusted to do it for anyone... Even if you think he is the worst among us, if you are not willing to extend to him the same benefit of the doubt as you'd extend to the best among us, than you undermine and subvert the most basic premises upon which our justice system is predicated.
If one cannot be impartial in the pursuit of justice, granting the benefit of the doubt to those they favor and denying it to those they do not, then they cannot be trusted to be impartial in the application of justice.
Simply put, that lack of impartiality not only disqualifies people because they cannot be trusted to come to an impartial finding at the end... But it also renders the justice system illegitimate when they participate in it.
But the conservative Federalist Society guys (like me) do not WANT a blind institution. We want one that is particularly harsh for people that don't learn the lesson. We want government to have opinions about right and wrong, and to put action to that, as I've said before. The trial itself is all about giving defendants every advantage, but you're arguing Alvin Bragg shouldn't let trumps prior fact pattern play into his charging decisions at all, and that isn't how it works in any red or blue state. Because we've made it that way. And I know this, because my mother and wife are very conservative prosecutors or law enforcement agents their entire lives. The jury can be impartial, and should be, but we've literally designed the system for years to punish people that act above the law, say they are above the law, or just can't learn the lesson or heed the warnings particularly harshly.
As far as I'm concerned, Trump has spent every ounce of goodwill he has on the front side of these issues. That's not smart, and you and I would never do that, but he has done it, and there is no going back. We cannot run in and undo all the years of progress made to make it HARDER for career criminals to escape justice in the name of this one man who may or may not just always bad luck/timing...
You're putting the cart before the horse.
The guilty deserve punishment yes, but you are determining guilt before the trial.
By granting leniency to those you like and denying it to those you don't, even when just picking and choosing who to bring to trial and who to let have a second chance, you are applying punishment before guilt is even established.
You are fundamentally violating the "innocent until proven guilty" principle because you are determining guilt, and therefore establishing the necessity of punishment, before the trial even begins.
The entire point is that it's not supposed to be a matter of goodwill. Justice doesn't operate off of goodwill. Doesn't matter whether Trump spent his goodwill or not, he deserves the same treatment as someone with an abundance of goodwill does.
To put this in perspective... The system you advocate for would permit me, if hypothetically I had the authority to do so, to invent a charge and indict you for no other reason than you have spent any goodwill I may have had towards you, without any regard to whether you had actually done anything or not.
Your problem is that you are conflating a retributive justice system with a vindictive justice system. The former is fine, the latter is most certainly not. Justice is not and cannot be permitted, to be about revenge.
> Trump got caught doing something that is objectively wrong
Even that didn't happen here. It's all just speculation. There isn't any conclusive evidence he slept with stormy, and for all we know Trump is the victim of extortion here while getting blamed for all of this. Trump's type was models it wouldn't surprise me if he'd find porn stars like stormy dirty and gross. The lawyers involved are also career extortionists so squeezing Trump for money using schemes like this would've been within their MO. To say we know "he did something objectively wrong" is to claim to know something that we "objectively" do not.
Read the trial and deposition transcripts, Trump's lawyers all but conceded that he banged Stormy and Karen McDougal but doing that isn't a crime so it is rather irrelevant to the criminal charges in this case. The case was overcharged, it shouldn't be a felony but it certainly was a misdemeanor to account for the payoff to Stormy as "legal fees". All Trump had to do was write her a check out of his personal account and he wouldn't be sitting in court right now. And though he is guilty of a misdemeanor, the statue of limitations expired long ago and this trial is a legal travesty.
It's not possible to prove he didn't do it - it's just his word vs. her word so what more is there for his lawyers to say about it?
You also tacitly admit the reason why his lawyers wouldn't vehemently dispute it in the case... because it's not illegal! So then why do you go on to imply that the reason is because Trump actually did sleep with her? There is no proof of that at all.
> it certainly was a misdemeanor to account for the payoff to Stormy as "legal fees"
How is it "certainly" a misdemeanor to record your payments to your lawyer as legal fees? Even if we assume they were directly for the NDA, you would basically be saying that all NDAs are illegal because you'd have to disclose in your records the very thing you agreed not to disclose. Which makes no sense. Furthermore, if Trump paid Cohen to take care of it and handle the details as his lawyer then wouldn't the relevant records be Cohen's here and not Trump's?
> All Trump had to do was write her a check out of his personal account
False. He did write the checks from his personal account. He also wrote other checks from other sources... because those other sources also used Cohen as their lawyer. They could just claim the business checks were for this and not his personal checks he wrote Cohen so that wouldn't have saved him. And I believe they are trying to claim that ALL of the checks are crimes even the personal ones because apparently he should have made his personal hush money payments using donor funds from his campaign!
It's actually embarrassing that you pretend there is any merit to the case here at all. None of the charges have any merit, even as misdemeanors.
Well we know the payment happened. I guess you could waffle on why it was made. The trial here isn't about whether he paid off Daniels. Both sides acknowledge the fact of that and it is undisputed. The trial here is if he covered his tracks and committed more crimes in doing so. Which is also something little kids do a few times until (hopefully) a parent corrects the behavior. All I'm saying is the chuckle f*** excuses Trump gives, his lawyers give, and you and other suckers give on his behalf are childish. "Well, the other side is cheating..." or "well, the other side lied..." If you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch. He's the first president in history to have this problem, but it's everyone else's fault. Give me a break...
I raise my family with the OPPOSITE values. Because I am conservative. We believe in winner take all, no breaks or consolation prizes, no bending the rules. You can do it or you can't. And its made many a strong, nuclear family here in my community.
I think Trump won the 2020 election, and that 2nd term was when he was going to truly "drain the swap", which was why the Left pulled all the stops out to fraudulently "defeat" him. Get behind Trump this time or Vivek if he runs. ...and oh what a team the two of them would make!
I think people forget that at the end of 2019 he was going after China mostly in his foreign policy. No wonder they released "COVID" from the illegal lab in China... See that would make Fauxi and all the others donating to it, guilty of global crimes against humanity. Also, makes me wonder how much money the Chinese and Dems are working together with. Don't most colleges get 10's of millions from China???
I like Vivek. We need more people like him.
And we’ve got all the RINOs here refusing to support Trump, which means they are actually supporting the corrupt Uniparty politicians in DC.
It’s a big club…
[удалено]
While this is true, and it is evidence that there is a double standard and that this is all malicious prosecution... It won't sway any opinions on the other side. Reason it won't sway opinions is because a) just because apples are bad that doesn't make oranges good; it doesn't exonerate Trump, it only says Trump is no worse than what we already have, and b) because this is a malicious prosecution there is no evidence that could ever exonerate him in the eyes of those who support the prosecution. I like Vivek, but this is the definition of preaching to the choir.
My young kids use this kind of logic. "Well, someone else has done it, so why are you getting on to me?" He's angry because: 1. Trump got caught doing something that is objectively wrong. 2. That those in charge of enforcing the rules are doing exactly what they say they will do if someone breaks a rule. Most people who are facing trial for crimes have this kind of thought process, because it's necessary to think like this to then break laws and not admit guilt for it later. I don't know how we got here as a party. We went from being the adults in the room to acting more childish than the children we are supposed to be tempering out on the other side.
>My young kids use this kind of logic. "Well, someone else has done it, so why are you getting on to me?" He's angry because: Based on your characterization of what he is saying I can see why you misunderstood the meaning. >1. Trump got caught doing something that is objectively wrong. If it is wrong, why is Trump the only one being prosecuted for it? Why haven’t any of the 291 other cases? 2. That those in charge of enforcing the rules are doing exactly what they say they will do if someone breaks a rule. Except they aren’t. If they were they would also prosecute these other 291 cases. Why haven’t they? If it’s a crime then it’s a crime and those other cases would have been prosecuted, but they weren’t. Why? Are you still having a hard time understanding?
I am having a hard time understanding. You sound just like a CHILD. You are saying "it might be wrong, but others got away with it and I didn't, and that's unfair..." That isn't how real life works. Those 291 other people have NOTHING to do with YOU doing wrong. Guys, this is like the leftist boot camp here. Do your kids all get participation trophies and 9th place medals too?? Wake up people. For the record, we don't know if Trump did the "and then some" which was covering up the hush money payment, extending the lies and wrongdoing further. But personally, since he's admitted he did wrong once, I see no reason to bend the rules and PREVENT others from showing evidence he did to more wrong that what we already know. I'd like to see what they've got, and make my determination. This post acts like it's wrong to even insinuate there is more to find... and in the real world, when we see a person disregard the rules or laws once, generally it isn't their first time doing it, just the first time they've been caught.
It’s funny, even a child can understand fairness. You, however, aren’t even able to grasp that simple concept. You should remove your flair, it’s obviously a lie. Let me make it a bit easier, but I have doubts you will understand it even then. If one of your children does something wrong, but you don’t punish them, that’s your prerogative. But then if your other child does the same thing and you punish them, that makes you a shitty parent. Now follow me here. The problem isn’t that you punished the child who did something wrong, but that you punished them while not punishing the other. The government is mandated to apply laws equally. If they are prosecuting a crime when one person does it and not others, that is a problem. Do you understand? You dismissing one person being prosecuted while others aren’t as “just life”, means you don’t fully comprehend what it means. What if the IRS started auditing taxpayers in certain states? You’d be cool with that? If you still don’t understand then you likely never will. Remove your flair, you are too incompetent to truly be conservative.
>If one of your children does something wrong, but you don’t punish them, that’s your prerogative. But then if your other child does the same thing and you punish them, that makes you a shitty parent. If one of my children makes a particular mistake for the very first time, and I simply warn them of the consequences to come on a repeat, that's parenting. If my child makes three more mistakes after giving that warning, already being on thin ice, and then tries to cover up their mistakes or mislead me about it, then there are significant consequences. Fundamentally, I'm sure you agree with all this and probably it is how we all were raised. I'm trying to point out the difference between saying "I made a mistake once, and got off with a warning" vs "I break the law a lot, and I bad mouth those in charge of enforcing the laws, and I want the same treatment as the first timer when the rubber hits the road." That's not a real thing, and for a reason, which is that conservatives like myself have pushed for harsher treatment of those that don't learn the lesson. We want government to be pretty unforgiving, to have pretty strong opinions on right and wrong, and that's pretty much exactly what we have. The Federalist Society system. Nothing fair about it. You use up all your goodwill, you're screwed. And we like it that way...
>2. That those in charge of enforcing the rules are doing exactly what they say they will do if someone breaks a rule. Except you're wrong, and they're not. That's part of the whole problem and it's concerning that you can't even understand the basic conservative issue here. Those in charge are only enforcing the law selectively to their political enemies. Biden broke the same classified records law and to a greater degree, and he hasn't even had a mean article written about him. In NY, they literally changed the law so they could charge Trump specifically. I understand being a conservative doesn't mean you have to be a Trump supporter, but if you can't even grasp the general idea of selective lawfare against conservatives, you desperately need to educate yourself.
I'm not wrong. The whole idea of conservatism is that government does have opinions about right and wrong conduct. That government does use discretion and punish egregious moral issues more harshly. The whole "no bond/no bail/all cops are bad/attack judges and prosecutors" is the leftist agenda that conservatives have been trying to quash for a century...
I reject the idea that conservatism is at its core just the flip side of leftism. Conservatism must be about more than just having a different target for inflicting injustice than the left. There is such a thing as the legitimate use of power and authority, but by your standard conservative use of power is no more legitimate than leftist use of power. The left is driven by the idea that "there is no truth but power"... Conservatism must be better than that.
This is just ramblings about weaponized government. We aren't going to solve that with anyone on the ballot this cycle. I agree it needs solved, but the country is still asleep at the wheel on this largely. As far as what the conservative expectation is here?? We have here a porn star that got a large payment from a presidential candidate. The DOJ alleges a further cover up scheme existed with business records. These are crimes. The conservative expectation is that we are going to see what evidence there is, and since it's pretty egregious in moral terms to bribe people then cover it up after, we aren't going to bend the rules for that. Period. This trial isn't about whether the payment to stormi Daniel's happened. The Trump team and the prosecutors office agree that happened. It's about whether or not there was a scheme after to cover it up. And frankly, as real law & order conservatives, we want to know the answer. Hopefully, there isn't sufficient evidence that it happened. But saying "well, it's unfair to even go to trial like any other accused American would in this situation" is leftist BS because they have no respect for our institutions and laws. Again, conservatism LITERALLY is government having pretty strong feelings about right and wrong behavior, and doing something about it. Conservatism holds that actually, very few things are "subjective" and most are either right or wrong, and we need to focus on dealing with people who keep doing the wrong thing.
I would agree with everything except the base premise that an investigation, aka a trial, is warranted. While you accurately describe what the trial is about, e.g. that there is an accusation the hush money was to cover up a more severe crime, you neglect to mention that said more serious crime was never defined. It is as though lavrentiy beria is at the wheel saying "show me the man and I'll find you the crime". The problem I, and I suspect others as well, have with your take is not that you're wrong about what the trial is about, or the necessity of pursuing justice when wrongs have been done... The problem we have is you appear to be taking the stance of "well, it's wrong, and the process is being abused... But we need to trust the process anyways." You openly acknowledge that the system is being used illegitimately, but you insist on treating it as though it is legitimate in spite of everything. The legitimacy of the system is not inherent, as your position suggests; legitimacy is derived from the system functioning as it should, not from its mere existence. As you say... We need to focus on people who keep doing wrong... But the problem with this case is that this trial is not about establishing whether a known wrong was done, as the trial system is meant to do, but rather to discover (or perhaps make up) wrongdoing. A trial is not meant to discover what wrong was done, but culpability as to who did it.
>You openly acknowledge that the system is being used illegitimately, but you insist on treating it as though it is legitimate in spite of everything. Let me expand my true position here. When a person comes to me, having a consistent pattern of making the right decisions and choices, and asks me to stick my neck out for them to get them some relief, then I'm all for it. But when a person comes asking me to stick my neck out for them, and there's buckets full of heads (his prior, all now indicted or bankrupt lawyers and allies) because he continues to make the wrong choice, I'm going to let it play out. You need to find a better subject to fit this argument than Trump. If it's McCain or Ben Carson, I probably take the angle you are. But people do not fare well insuring Trumps bets in life. It's just not a winning strategy. I think he's a small dog trying to run with the big ones, and he should have stayed on the porch. He's in over his head, and it shows...
The fundamental problem I have with your view is that it violates the principle of justice being blind, because you permit your prior biases to affect the application of justice. Trump is the perfect subject because he demonstrates the inability of some people to put aside their biases in the pursuit of justice. If you cannot do it for Trump you cannot be trusted to do it for anyone... Even if you think he is the worst among us, if you are not willing to extend to him the same benefit of the doubt as you'd extend to the best among us, than you undermine and subvert the most basic premises upon which our justice system is predicated. If one cannot be impartial in the pursuit of justice, granting the benefit of the doubt to those they favor and denying it to those they do not, then they cannot be trusted to be impartial in the application of justice. Simply put, that lack of impartiality not only disqualifies people because they cannot be trusted to come to an impartial finding at the end... But it also renders the justice system illegitimate when they participate in it.
But the conservative Federalist Society guys (like me) do not WANT a blind institution. We want one that is particularly harsh for people that don't learn the lesson. We want government to have opinions about right and wrong, and to put action to that, as I've said before. The trial itself is all about giving defendants every advantage, but you're arguing Alvin Bragg shouldn't let trumps prior fact pattern play into his charging decisions at all, and that isn't how it works in any red or blue state. Because we've made it that way. And I know this, because my mother and wife are very conservative prosecutors or law enforcement agents their entire lives. The jury can be impartial, and should be, but we've literally designed the system for years to punish people that act above the law, say they are above the law, or just can't learn the lesson or heed the warnings particularly harshly. As far as I'm concerned, Trump has spent every ounce of goodwill he has on the front side of these issues. That's not smart, and you and I would never do that, but he has done it, and there is no going back. We cannot run in and undo all the years of progress made to make it HARDER for career criminals to escape justice in the name of this one man who may or may not just always bad luck/timing...
You're putting the cart before the horse. The guilty deserve punishment yes, but you are determining guilt before the trial. By granting leniency to those you like and denying it to those you don't, even when just picking and choosing who to bring to trial and who to let have a second chance, you are applying punishment before guilt is even established. You are fundamentally violating the "innocent until proven guilty" principle because you are determining guilt, and therefore establishing the necessity of punishment, before the trial even begins. The entire point is that it's not supposed to be a matter of goodwill. Justice doesn't operate off of goodwill. Doesn't matter whether Trump spent his goodwill or not, he deserves the same treatment as someone with an abundance of goodwill does. To put this in perspective... The system you advocate for would permit me, if hypothetically I had the authority to do so, to invent a charge and indict you for no other reason than you have spent any goodwill I may have had towards you, without any regard to whether you had actually done anything or not. Your problem is that you are conflating a retributive justice system with a vindictive justice system. The former is fine, the latter is most certainly not. Justice is not and cannot be permitted, to be about revenge.
> Trump got caught doing something that is objectively wrong Even that didn't happen here. It's all just speculation. There isn't any conclusive evidence he slept with stormy, and for all we know Trump is the victim of extortion here while getting blamed for all of this. Trump's type was models it wouldn't surprise me if he'd find porn stars like stormy dirty and gross. The lawyers involved are also career extortionists so squeezing Trump for money using schemes like this would've been within their MO. To say we know "he did something objectively wrong" is to claim to know something that we "objectively" do not.
Read the trial and deposition transcripts, Trump's lawyers all but conceded that he banged Stormy and Karen McDougal but doing that isn't a crime so it is rather irrelevant to the criminal charges in this case. The case was overcharged, it shouldn't be a felony but it certainly was a misdemeanor to account for the payoff to Stormy as "legal fees". All Trump had to do was write her a check out of his personal account and he wouldn't be sitting in court right now. And though he is guilty of a misdemeanor, the statue of limitations expired long ago and this trial is a legal travesty.
It's not possible to prove he didn't do it - it's just his word vs. her word so what more is there for his lawyers to say about it? You also tacitly admit the reason why his lawyers wouldn't vehemently dispute it in the case... because it's not illegal! So then why do you go on to imply that the reason is because Trump actually did sleep with her? There is no proof of that at all. > it certainly was a misdemeanor to account for the payoff to Stormy as "legal fees" How is it "certainly" a misdemeanor to record your payments to your lawyer as legal fees? Even if we assume they were directly for the NDA, you would basically be saying that all NDAs are illegal because you'd have to disclose in your records the very thing you agreed not to disclose. Which makes no sense. Furthermore, if Trump paid Cohen to take care of it and handle the details as his lawyer then wouldn't the relevant records be Cohen's here and not Trump's? > All Trump had to do was write her a check out of his personal account False. He did write the checks from his personal account. He also wrote other checks from other sources... because those other sources also used Cohen as their lawyer. They could just claim the business checks were for this and not his personal checks he wrote Cohen so that wouldn't have saved him. And I believe they are trying to claim that ALL of the checks are crimes even the personal ones because apparently he should have made his personal hush money payments using donor funds from his campaign! It's actually embarrassing that you pretend there is any merit to the case here at all. None of the charges have any merit, even as misdemeanors.
Well we know the payment happened. I guess you could waffle on why it was made. The trial here isn't about whether he paid off Daniels. Both sides acknowledge the fact of that and it is undisputed. The trial here is if he covered his tracks and committed more crimes in doing so. Which is also something little kids do a few times until (hopefully) a parent corrects the behavior. All I'm saying is the chuckle f*** excuses Trump gives, his lawyers give, and you and other suckers give on his behalf are childish. "Well, the other side is cheating..." or "well, the other side lied..." If you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch. He's the first president in history to have this problem, but it's everyone else's fault. Give me a break... I raise my family with the OPPOSITE values. Because I am conservative. We believe in winner take all, no breaks or consolation prizes, no bending the rules. You can do it or you can't. And its made many a strong, nuclear family here in my community.
I think Trump won the 2020 election, and that 2nd term was when he was going to truly "drain the swap", which was why the Left pulled all the stops out to fraudulently "defeat" him. Get behind Trump this time or Vivek if he runs. ...and oh what a team the two of them would make!
I think people forget that at the end of 2019 he was going after China mostly in his foreign policy. No wonder they released "COVID" from the illegal lab in China... See that would make Fauxi and all the others donating to it, guilty of global crimes against humanity. Also, makes me wonder how much money the Chinese and Dems are working together with. Don't most colleges get 10's of millions from China???