The best reason to charge someone with a crime is because they’ve broken the law, injured others, and need to be held accountable and prevented from doing more damage. Donald Trump checks all those boxes, but there’s one more very important reason why he should be prosecuted: he intends to run for president again in 2024.
Trump has been spending his days largely on the phone, calling advisers, allies and friends. The president has been “trying to find people who will give him good news,” one adviser said.
Still, Trump has indicated in some of these conversations that he understands Biden will take over the presidency on Jan. 20, Inauguration Day. Rather than talking about a second term, Trump has been matter-of-factly discussing a possible 2024 campaign — an indication that he knows his time as president is coming to an end, at least for now.
“I’m just going to run in 2024. I’m just going to run again,” Trump has been saying, according to a senior administration official who has spoken with him this week.
To be blunt, this cannot be allowed to happen. Ideally, Trump will be formally impeached and convicted after he leaves office, precluding him from ever holding another position of honor or trust in the U.S. government. But since that’s currently a very remote possibility, the best defense is if he is behind bars.
To be sure, this isn’t foolproof. In 1920, Eugene Debs ran for president while in prison at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. His 919,799 votes were good for 3.4 percent of the popular vote. That was more votes than Debs had received in 1912 (901,551) but a lower percentage (6 percent).
It’s actually not that hard to imagine Trump exceeding the roughly 70 million votes he received in 2020 four years from now from a prison cell. That’s how Nazi-crazy this country has gone. But it’s much easier to imagine him winning the 2024 election if he’s coddled as an ex-president in the interest of “unity.”
He’s a menace and a mortal threat to our Republic. He must be exposed and held accountable. It’s what he deserves, but more importantly, it’s the best protection we have from him making a comeback.
We need to include his whole family and friends in any investigation.
Exactly. All of his family and entourage of grifters – including those who headed or still head different departments. Barr, Pompeo, Wolf, the backbenchers – Millers, Bannons, Shahs…
A quick google search indicates that during Denazification, the allies identified five classes of offenders: major offenders, offenders, followers, and exonerated persons. So we have the leadership and the hard-core (Trump, his family, etc), the base voters who will stick with Trump no matter what, low-info voters who for whatever half-baked reason supported Trump, and the Never-Trumpers.
There’s nothing we can do about the leadership and the hard-core. With a few years passing, perhaps a few base voters will drift away or die. We can also try to prevent new voters from joining the base. But most important are the low-info voters who might be convinced to support Trump or a family member again in 2024.
How are they likely to react to investigations into Trump or to Trump landing in jail? How likely are they to return to Trump if nothing changes by 2024? What if he’s just old and broken down by then? How will they react to a new media environment in which right-wing media are splintered between the “mainstream right” as embodied by Fox (yikes!) and a Trump network?
I’m inclined to say that it might be a good thing for liberal politics to have Trump around if he splinters an otherwise unified right-wing message. But it might be like fighting someone who is on PCP or meth. You might be thinking more clearly and have it together physically, but there’s no telling what the guy on PCP is going to be able to do.
Tax Fraud, insurance fraud, campaign finance violations, obstruction of justice. There’s plenty to put him behind bars for quite a while. Justice demands a speedy prosecution (I hope it happens but Im not holding my breath.) But even conviction wont keep him out of the spotlight forever. There are other right wing hacks with criminal records who are still making noise (Ollie North comes to mind, conviction vacated on a technicality). The grift will go on as long as Trump can draw a breath.
“Never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Napoleon
It could easily be the Biden campaign motto.
One would hope that Trump wouldn’t be nearly as daunting a candidate in 2024, without the benefits of incumbency and now that people know him. But then every time I’ve overestimated the wisdom, intelligence and good sense of the electorate, I’ve been disappointed. I remain amazed that so many folks were willing to sign for another four years.
I’ve been grappling for insight. None of my thoughts or research has been entirely satisfactory. In fact, I’m not sure I’m any further along than when I began. I’ve just ordered this book and am hoping it helps explain the odd place where in to my satisfaction:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B084FLWDQG/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_d_asin_title_o00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
The mistake that I made, and probably a lot of us made, is that we think people pay a lot of attention to politics. But most people don’t. In such circumstances it generally boils down to direct impacts as to the voting choice. Today’s the weeds podcast was very informative on this aspect: a lot of people who were seemingly unemployable have gotten jobs over the past four years. These are overwhelmingly less educated folks and a lot of people of color. Labor force participation is the highest it’s ever been. For all intents and purposes most people were doing better pre pandemic than they were when Trump came to office. The Cares act also gave them money, so a lot of the sting of the recent economy was neutered. What does it mean? Well, if people ask themselves if they are better off than before, then likely the answer is yes, and they vote for Trump and give him high marks for the economy. I think this, paired with a non negligible racist vote that Trump is able to inspire to vote, explains the results. Covid handling is why he lost, and basically anyone else would have been comfortably re-elected. That’s my current read of the circumstances. It also explains why Trump got more voters of color to back him than before. And it explains the educated and uneducated divide.
Indeed. Turn the FBI loose on the Trump companies. Get the IRS involved in the fun, too. Between counterintelligence and tax fraud, there should be enough there to send him and a good chunk of the Trumpublican elite up the river for decades.
If we fail to do so, it basically codifies IOKIYAR.
It would sure be an improvement if you’d stop using his damn picture. Get a caricature from John Cuneo. Some really great nsfw ones there on his instagram. I just don’t understand why you and TPM use his pic everywhere. Sick of it.
He’s just a LOSER pining for one more hand. 75 million people voted against him. He’ll never win.
There’s no doubt that this threat of Trumpolini running again makes a thorough accounting of his 4 years of lawbreaking by a special prosecutor (with appropriate indictments) even MORE essential to the health of the nation. There’s also no doubt that Biden should engage in a Detrumpification of the executive branch, since Trumpites are serial lawbreakers, and by definition incompetent and unqualified to boot. As Jafnhar says, it should be likened to Denazification, given the general sympathy of Trumpists for Hitlerism.
The problem, of course, is the Gravedigger and his senate majority, who understand that they enabled Trumpism to the fullest degree and then were not meaningfully punished for it by the failed white electorate. It is clear to DC Repubs from the appalling election that extraordinary masses of white people have been totally poisoned into fascism and that Trump (and his horrid kids!) are their adored leaders–who will need to be protected from “unfair!” recrimination by the America-hating socialist left. Hell, we lost seats in the House, and one can now read analysts saying that the coming redistricting will end the Dem House majority. It’s hard to me to understand how this could happen to an urban/suburban coalition, but that’s now “out there”. If this is the case, our mutiny succeeded, but it seems clear that the ship we’ve retaken is going down, taking on water in a hundred hull breaches.
My guess is McConnell will inform Biden that should there be any real effort to expose the criminal misdeeds and misrule of Trumpolini and his “conservative” operatives during Trump years, then McConnell will shut down the government, refuse any more Covid relief (however inadequate) and effectively torpedo the Biden admin at birth. I suppose the counterargument is that the Gravedigger’s Ghouls will do that anyway, but unfortunately Biden does not seem to understand that, so he will likely take the threat seriously. Also, “healing”.
Hell, Biden seems to have informed the Dem leadership to treat Trump’s attempted coup as a hilarious joke, and to humor Trump’s final wrecking of the democracy and his sabotage of Biden’s presidency even before inauguration. There certainly is no thought that, after pulling this “election fraud” insanity, Trump will not be invited or be present at the inauguration, and there will be no final photo ops with Biden or any joint meeting on Jan 20. Can’t threaten that! Hafta humor Herr Hitler and his Herrenvolk!
All we can say is that no serious nation would fail to have a massive investigation into the admin of an impeached conman and serial lawbreaker(s) like Donald Trump and family. So we all know what that means if it doesn’t happen.
First, Trump is going to pardon himself and his family, so there will not be any federal prosecution of Trump.
Fortunately, Letitia James says “hi!”
Also, I just read today that Scotland may be taking a look at Trump’s purchase of the two golf resorts that now bear his name in Scotland. The specific issue is: where did he get the money, when at the very same time he was paying no taxes in the U.S., and was bankrupting companies he owned? The suspicion is that some big-time money laundering was going on.
I am optimistic that there will be prosecutions, but I do not see how any federal crimes can get prosecuted.