Honestly, I would love to see him put away in prison for the rest of his natural life, and see the fruits of his grifting utterly destroyed. But if I can’t have that, death by natural causes also works.
Nixon was the most important criminal prosecution that should have happened. I fully understand the Ford wanted Nixon out of the headlines so he could move on to governing. But at the same time, it established a glow of immunity (even impunity) around even former presidents. In so many ways, Nixon paved the way for Trump, with Reagan and Iran-Contra extending the principle.
Trump sucked but the tactics the media uses to make Trump supporters look bad only serves to push them farther away from what the author considers “good conscience”
Daytime reality TV drama following orange man’s prison escapades incoming. Just kidding, he won’t go to actual jail. More like a gated retirement home with all the perks.
The president in particular is very much a figure head - he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership, but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a fascinating character. On those criteria Donald Trump is one of the most successful presidents the US has ever had. He has already spent 4 of his 8 potential presidential years being investigated for fraud.
It’s not that qualities like leadership and morality are required for the Presidency, it is the implicit understanding that the American people, as a whole, would filter those men and women with the best qualities among the populace to the top. However, instead, we have a hijacked political system where only 2 lobby-chosen candidates do not need to convince the populace of their leadership skills, only that they’re not as bad as the other guy. The 2 party establishment killed the presidency.
…audio from Trump advisor, Steve Bannon, surfaced from October 31st, 2020, just a few days before the Presidential election.
Let’s listen. [Begin Videotape]
STEVE BANNON: And what Trump’s going to do is declare victory, right? He’s going to declare victory, but that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner. The Democrats — more of our people vote early that count. Theirs vote in mail. And so they’re going to have a natural disadvantage and Trump’s going to take advantage — that’s our strategy.
He’s gonna declare himself a winner. So when you wake up Wednesday morning, it’s going to be a firestorm. Also — also if Trump is — if Trump is losing by 10 or 11:00 at night, it’s going to be even crazier. Because he’s gonna sit right there and say they stole it. If Biden’s wining, Trump is going to do some crazy shit.
US governments should be tried for war crimes and other hijinks. Trump and his golf buddies Hillary, Obama and George and their respective Governments should be tried for drone bombing, civilian massacres (called Collateral damage when US military does it), concentration camps, carpet bombing, corruption on global level, one-sidedness in media reporting, history revisionism and similar fun activities. All paid by a bizarre, medicated, clueless, propaganda-fed nation that thinks a media-run and industry-sponsored dictatorship can be called an Empire, even though it has no cultural identity worth spreading or remembering. All the while calling it Democracy during the Superbowl halftime show while they sell you cheap shitty products and feed you industry high-grade sugar while you sing your national hymn and jerk off to Beyonce’s twerking… while saving the Amazon Forest and Hong Kong… and saving the Kurds and Palestinians (RIP)…
That would be the most important one. And a fun one!
As an outsider of US politics and stuff, it appears to me that all those charges against Trump seem to happen at the same time now. Is this intentional or simply because that’s how long it took? I guess it will be very expensive for Trump and it will also most likely result in him getting confused by his own lies in front of court. Let’s hope he will finally be prosecuted for at least some of his crimes and won’t be able to run for president again. He made enough damage to the US and the world in general.
Merrick Garland dragged his feet, more concerned with accusations of partisanship than the public good. FTA:
From the outset of his tenure atop the Justice Department, Attorney General Merrick Garland evinced little interest in mounting any such investigation, fearing that the GOP’s permanently aggrieved MAGA base would view it as a weaponized, partisan effort to hound Trump into political irrelevance.
I don’t think money is a concern for trump, given how much of it he extracted from American tax payers through Secret Service bills, and missing covid relief funds.
I don’t think he’s gonna try to lie that much at this point, at least not lies meant to portray innocence . I think he’s gonna focus on outrage, riling up the whackos who think this behavior is acceptable and warranted. I imagine we’ll hear a lot about the usual stuff like “witch hunt”, “deep state”, etc. He’s gonna be pretty blatant about his motives cause he knows he’s got. He will attempt to incite violence and perhaps even squeak out a few whatabouts to try and drag a few other corrupt rich people down with him. I dunno, it’s gonna be interesting, sadly.
This is still early in the process, so there may be a superceding indictment that includes that as well. But at this point, I think they're trying to go for the easy to prove shit to help flip his cronies so they can get an airtight case on it.
I’ll be honest, the fact that our “justice” system is on the fence about whether or not we should prosecute a former President just shows how much of a fucking sham the entire fucking system is. The fact that the DOJ sat on it at first and only decided to go forward because he kept committing fucking crimes because he can’t help himself is fucking disgusting. They did everything they could to let him go with a slap on the wrist. Fucking sickening.
We may as well still have fucking Monarchy if they’re not willing to actually prosecute prolifically criminal motherfuckers like this.
In other words, yes, I agree with the title. It’s the most important criminal prosecution in US history because finally after 60-some fucking years of non-stop corruption, we’re finally even considering doing something about it.
I think you could make a case for either one. Wealth isn’t really an indicator of power though although all the powerful do have wealth. What I do know is that it certainly doesn’t feel like a democratic republic. How could it when the elected get to choose the electors?
We’ve never really seen an American President as criminal as Trump before. There is some precedent with Nixon and Clinton, but nothing to the level that Trump did.
There’s been precedent with nearly every president since Nixon. I’d maybe leave out Jimmy Carter, but even has skeletons in his closet. Reagan, Bush, Bush II, and Obama all had scandals and criminality that were minimized. I find it odd that people don’t realize that Obama continued some of the worst aspects of the Bush administration. It’s why I pegged it at sixty years. There was absolutely corruption before Nixon, too, but it became more egregious after him.
EDIT: Getting downvotes because I guess people have rosy memories of Obama? Obama told me whose team he was on the second he said “We need to look forward, not backward” at not prosecuting anyone in the Bush admin for lying to the world about WMD’s and leading us into an illegal and wasteful war in the middle east, a war that Obama ramped up drone warfare in. As if that wasn’t a precedent of ignoring Republican crimes that lead us to exactly where we are fucking now with everyone treating Trump with kid gloves. Bush and Cheney are literal fucking war criminals, and people cooed over how cute it was that Bush shared candy with Michelle Obama. Give me a break. That shit is precisely what lead us here, treating war criminals with kid gloves.
Honestly, it just goes to show that most American citizens don’t really give a shit about politics. So long as the person in charge has the right letter by their name, that’s all that matters to the majority of the US because then they can go “the guy in charge has the same letter I support and like, they can do no wrong because I can’t be wrong!”
I think most Americans would like to have a system that gives them real choice instead of the political duopoly. We just aren’t there in terms of having viable parties outside of a duopoly because of FPTP. There’s slow movement in the direction, but only very slow.
Yeah the guys who said “all men are created equal” while giving themselves rights to own other humans as property, and only allowing land-owning white men the right to vote, those guys were “good guys?” Right? Right?? /s
It would probably be more clear to say we had a handful in the middle (like maybe one or two really) who weren’t total complete utter pieces of shit. Like LBJ and maybe Ike (mostly for his farewell address and how prescient it was), but even with the good things they did, they were also pretty big pieces of shit in their own ways.
Leading nation-states isn’t a black and white thing, there’s always going to be decisions that have to be made based on the information those leaders have at that moment and sometimes those decisions have negative consequences.
However with that being said there has never been an American president that was an outright corrupt traitor like Trump was, he was purely out for himself and selling the rest of us out to the probably not even the highest bidder, probably more the bidder that was the best at sucking up to Trump or promising him the best stuff.
However with that being said there has never been an American president that was an outright corrupt traitor like Trump was
My brother in Christ, that’s literally my point. It took literally the most absolutely corrupt and endlessly shameless idiot on the planet to actually make our government consider prosecuting anyone in the upper echelons of government for clear crimes. It’s fucking sickening that it took this obscene level of criminality for it to become something worth doing something about, and they tried their hardest to softwalk it and give him chances to return the documents! Who knows if we’d even have the J6 case if it wasn’t for the documents fiasco!
He didn’t just ignore Bush’s crimes, he chose to continue them. He actively and consciously chose to continue the Patriot Act, unconstitutional imprisonment of American citizens, unconstitutional surveillance, and unconstitutional and illegal torture. Obama’s presidency was world’s better than Trump’s, but Obama was every bit the authoritarian police-state enforcer as his predecessors.
Ice is present in both my glass of water and the Arctic circle, but they otherwise have no similarities. The same is true for Clinton and Trump’s presidencies including their legal troubles.
Hard disagree. Far more than anything else, this is about audience capture and the failure of Burke’s “fourth estate.” What it shows is the efficacy of segregated information ecosystems that have near total audience capture. None of this would be even remotely possible if all Americans lived and swam in the same information ecosystem.
But we don’t, and we are seeing what this means for the health of democracy and the rule of law.
Conservatives, having the luxury of an unquestioning audience that’s fully captured by an information ecosystem that’s fully on-board with anything they say, are not constrained in any way by the truth.
The Press, with a capital P, no longer serves as a check against conservative lies because, due to the nearly complete segregation of information ecosystems, any facts that run count er to the conservative agenda can simply be ignored or twisted, and will accordingly never be seen by a conservative audience at all.
All of which is just to say that while our justice system is imperfect, the real problem is the corruption of Burke’s fourth estate which was always conceived of as necessarily existing in opposition to, or at least as a check against, governmental and private commercial power.
But we don’t, and we are seeing what this means for the health of democracy and the rule of law.
If you’re going to blame multiple news sources/commentators (that all Americans do not swim in the same information ecosystem), wouldn’t it then become a matter of whether or not democracy itself is a viable system?
As in, if the only way a democracy can remain healthy is if all citizen “lived and swam in the same information ecosystem.”, Then how would it be possible to have a democracy? Like, how do we have a free healthy democracy, and enforce the existence of a singular “information ecosystem” at the same time? That sounds impossible.
