Appropriate punishment - 20 years in prison to be served in Louisiana State Penitentiary. It has a golf course on the grounds, for staff and visitor use. Inmates are not allowed to play. Trump to be given the prison job of maintaining the course. And it’s the closest he will ever come to a golf course again.
Realistic punishment - a couple of years house arrest at Mar-a-Lago.
Besides I wouldn’t put it past the GOP to lay his corpse on a slab, run some electricity through it, and renominate him/it for President.
I think it’s going to be impossible to prove* that any secrets that made it out there due to his possession of classified documents were actually due to that, and didn’t get out through some other means. So we are back to seditious conspiracy, which I think could be proved.
In addition. I think it is still quite possible that the government cases against his company can be very damaging to him financially. So I look for some prison time and the end of his “empire” as being suitable. That will either break his spirit or drive him insane (or more so).
*Standards of proof in this case would have to be very high, because of the high political profile of the situation. And the kind of linkage of events (he had the documents during this period, and during the same period the intel showed up over here) is still circumstantial. It would work against your average spy, but not an ex-president.
I think permanent deportation would be a suitable punishment. He doesn’t deserve to live here, and if he can get another country to take him, he becomes their problem, not ours.
Don’t think you can deport an American citizen.
Go after what he cares about-- MONEY! No jail time, but a $20 billion fine. That will expose how little of the real money he really has, how his properties are not worth nearly as much.
A large fine would constitute a massive sale of his golf courses and then they turn into wind farms for energy. Or houses for the homeless. THAT would enrage the hell out of him.
He can fundraise a few million every month for the rest of his life.
An no conjugal visits, either.
Exile–let him live out his days in the Moscow Trump Tower, make him “the man without a country”. Maybe a bunch of his Fascist followers will join him.
The more I think of it, some of these are just silly, not because they’re silly, which some are (Told yuz this would happen!) but because every punishment short of death would be pardoned the day a Republican gets sworn into office, either on the national or state level. So any pleasure or satisfaction I’m taking in contemplating a punishment for him gets wiped by this knowledge. The only way to punish him that means anything would be to execute him for treason, and we Dems are against capital punishment on principle.
Hopefully he’ll have to wait about 6 years for a Republican president. By that time he’ll be even more a blubbering sack of shit than he is now, and only his staunchest supporters will tepidly support him, and even then only out of pity.
I don’t know. If the evidence is damning and high profile enough, then Trump could very quickly go from darling of the GOP to, person non grata. All it takes a getting past a certain tipping point and everyone will start saying they never supported him. We’re already seeing Fox and some GOP members starting to distance themselves
As to recommended punishment, house arrest is the only practical solution to the secret service problem. I don’t like the “can’t run for office” thing because that makes it seem like the motivation was purely political, which is something we absolutely need to avoid. Just make it so that he is barred from social media and has his other outside communication monitored and restricted to a level that would be commensurate to that if he was actually in prison. If his support is strong enough that he can win an election without social media or leaving his bedroom, then he was going to get pardoned anyway.
Now as to the golf thing, my fantasy is that he would be allowed to play golf, and the secret service would live stream every one of his shots and where the ball landed. Trump doesn’t like to play golf, Trump likes to cheat at golf. Having his actual scores made public, and his handicap go from 2.8 to 17.8 would cause the game to quickly lose its luster.
Exile isn’t a legal punishment but it is appropriate and can be effectively sentenced if he flees the country when prison time is imminent. There is no way even a GOP president will pardon a fugitive, especially one under the protection of an adversarial government. My wish for him is to die as the neglected and unwanted guest of Putin or other some Trump ally.
I’m sure Garland is talking to his temporary lawyers about this now. Trump will carefully hint that he’ll expose secret material if he’s prosecuted. As it is there’s little to prosecute him for. The government protects itself from the consequences of their actions by writing laws that have impossible standards to prove. They won’t be able to prove Trump intended to violate any laws, he’ll say that everything he did was for what he believed was for the betterment of the country. If he agrees to plead to any crime that will keep him from running for office it may be the best we can get.
I agree with all this. It’s important, though, that the restrictions on communication match those that have been imposed on others convicted of stealing government documents (or whatever other specific charges are part of his indictment and trial).
This is genius.
Most of the ways of preventing him from running for office again are either on Constitutionally-untested grounds, rely on him keeping his word, or rely on his supporters having any standards whatsoever. There is one that would work, though: If he were found guilty of insurrection (possibly via a guilty plea as part of a deal), that would make him Constitutionally ineligible to hold any office under the United States.
Let him go the Pablo Escobar way. He can build his own prison, using his own money.
The Catch(es): It has to be in North Dakota, he has to put the money up front in an account controlled by government employees, and he can only use contractors whom he has previously stiffed on other jobs.
“Oh, your gold toilet is hooked up backwards? Maybe you shouldn’t have pissed off every plumber you’ve ever hired.”
I could see Putin announcing, “Yeah, he sold me secrets!”, just to fuck with the US even more. If it goes to trial, Trump likely never becomes president again, but he can still be used as a propaganda tool to sow dissent among the MAGA crowd.
Apparently, you can’t, so give him 30 years in a max security prison with no means to communicate with the outside world. That’s equivalent to a death sentence for someone like him.
This makes sense to me, though I would want it spelled out (belt and suspenders) in the guilty plea that he is agreeing to the ineligibility specifically, and also that he serves time under house arrest. I have some questions about house arrest that are probably more suitable for “Factual Questions” but as long as we’re talking about it here, I’ll ask my first: what are the limits to house arrest when dealing with a very wealthy convicted criminal? If you leave it up to Trump to decide what his “house” is, you can be very sure he’ll include more square footage than some small nations have, but are very wealthy house arrestees restricted to two or three rooms of their houses?