Obviously, Trump’s premise that he is being prosecuted by Joe Biden because he is running against him is false. Trump is being prosecuted because he is a career criminal, and there is no evidence any of the prosecutors taking him to court have communicated with President Biden.
But beneath this first lie, there’s a second lie: Trump only intends to prosecute his political enemies because they did it to him first. In fact, Trump has been planning to lock up his political opponents since he first ran for office, well before any of the current prosecutions began.
We are at the point in our political discourse that prosecuting criminals is preserved as a partisan endeavor. It’s wild to see the “law and order” party trying to protect criminals if they think it helps them gain power.
Not that wild, been going on since Nixon at least. Feels like they are getting more flagrant though.
It’s because it’s the same people. They aren’t getting punished, so they keep trying.
Less wild than you might think. “Law and order” is a dog whistle that’s been around long enough that people who don’t understand it have started using it. Law and order means using the state’s monopoly on violence to maintain existing social hierarchies, and when you understand this, the actions of the people who champion “law and order” makes a great deal more sense.
Law and order has always been a racist dog whistle.
If you have evidence and can prove wrongdoing in a court of law, I’m fine with prosecuting and punishing individuals of either party consistent with punishments other people get for the same crime.
The real problem is that there is evidence to prosecute Trump, and there is no evidence to prosecute any of his political enemies (Republicans included) that he supposedly wants to prosecute.
I think if you get into the “no YOUR guy is doing politicized prosecution” argument you’ve already lost. I don’t care if it’s a politician, I care whether there is evidence of a crime.
I wonder how different we’d find all this if Ford hadn’t pardoned Nixon and there were actual legal consequences for a President committing crimes in office
Oh, if only!
I just can’t agree that the man is actively reasoning out anything at all, which would underlie the premise of the article. He’s on a constant improv stream of malignant narcissism that is woefully demented and he’s a hugely damaged person to start with.
“Trump says” with the implication that he’s thought something through is just never true. It may have been something he saw on tv that someone else thought through - it may be the random final words of whoever he just talked to - but it wasn’t something he came up with, y’know, intentionally.
We know this. Let’s stop pretending. Let’s not give him any credit where we know he doesn’t deserve any.
I think his whole mission is “get elected, pardon myself”. He will do this in the most shameless way possible to highlight the fact that he “got away with it”.
People around him are probably sick of explaining state vs federal and all the other things he gets wrong.
I also think he’s just got an SOP to delay any legal proceeding by default.
So we’re back to an eye for an eye type of law and order.
Trump has not locked up a single on of his critics.
FTA:
In the spring of 2018, he told the White House counsel that he wanted to order Justice Department investigations of Clinton and former FBI director James Comey. In 2019, he repeatedly demanded investigations of Biden and attempted to extort Ukraine into announcing an investigation into the same. He commissioned intelligence agencies to find evidence that Comey, along with Andrew McCabe, Peter Stzrok, and Lisa Page, committed “treason.” In addition to insisting on prosecuting various enemies an unknown number of times in private, Trump made similar demands repeatedly in public on his Twitter account.
Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, resisted his relentless demands for politicized prosecutions. His next attorney general, William Barr, partially resisted. Trump wound up appointing John Durham to lock up his deep-state enemies, a task Barr assisted by working closely with Durham (in violation of department guidelines designed to ensure special counsels are independent of the AG). Durham, however, failed to find the promised conspiracy and wound up humiliating himself and his backers by having his two main targets acquitted in court.
So while it’s true that Trump has not locked up a single one of his critics, it’s not for lack of trying. If he gets another chance at it, he’ll make sure the people working for him will do what he says without any ethical concerns for the legality of his orders.
