Chesebro,Powell and Others in Trump's Orbit

Thought about putting this in the Georgia indictment thread, but it might sort of derail it.

And these two fools probably deserve their own thread anyway. Haven’t seen one.

A question -
Has anyone asked/discovered WHY these two clowns committed multiple crimes in an attempt to put Trump back in office?

  • I don’t think they are typical MAGA cultists. But could be wrong there.
  • If Trump promised something in return, well, they are fools. But they are fools anyway.
  • Did they just want to be part of Trumps administration if they could pull it off?
  • Are they just really, really stupid?
  • Perhaps a complete blind spot when it comes to right and wrong? But they’re attourneys for crying out loud.
  • Blackmail perhaps?

There were plenty of people on Jan 6 that should have known better. LEO’s military and such. But I feel like these two, and the other 17 would have a little bit better grasp on the law, and aren’t wild eyed cultist.

I know that the public has a short memory, but it stuns me that these professional, highly educated people would throw their careers and any respect away for a mad man.

Just plain ordinary people lacking any moral fiber and willing to do anything to win. They’d behave the same way to win a presidential election or a game of tic-tac-toe.

IMHO it was a combination of your 2nd and 5th bullet points plus a few other things. They likely believed that they would never actually be hauled to court, much less end up having to plead guilty. Add in a dash (or more) of good old fashioned greed, and there you have the recipe.

ETA. There’s also the bizarre charisma, or whatever you want to call it, that Trump has. These two were clearly not the first two to fall under his “charm”. Trump’s whole life has been convincing a long string of people to make stupid decisions to further Trump’s interests rather than those of the people who decide to help him. And yet each subsequent person, despite likely knowing about those that have been previously screwed over, for some reason decide it isn’t going to happen to them.

Trumps ‘charisma’ could use a thread of it’s own. I’m baffled by that. Obama and many other have charisma. I don’t see a dash of it in Trump. He’s just a blundering buffoon.

I’ll open this thread to talk about this idea of charisma if any one would like to contribute to that idea.

The difference, IMHO, between Trump’s charisma, and that of Obama, Bill Clinton, JFK, etc. isn’t that he has more of it, it’s that he’s willing to employ it ruthlessly to screw over other people, like Powell and Chesebro, and a long line of others. People who, due to tribalism, think that they won’t get screwed over by “one of their own” and so are willing to give Trump a pass. What they don’t realize is that Trump thinks of himself as a tribe of one, and as such he feels no loyalty to those who throw themselves under the bus to do favors for Trump.

So ultimately it comes down to Powell and Chesebro and others like them thinking “it won’t happen to me”.

There’s been intermittent discussion of the nature of trump’s quasi-charisma in this thread:

Search results for ‘charism’ in that thread. There’s more back and forth nearby these posts that don’t user the terms “charism…” but are still on point about his (highly poisonous) secret sauce.

Some of these posts are recent enough that that might be the place to take that discussion rather than here. Or open yet another “why … about trump?” thread.

Trump is using the same selection process that stage hypnotists use. Just get rid of the people who don’t do what they’re told. It’s not charisma, he just collects fools.

Chesbro, Powell, Rudy, and Pillow. They were all fairly successful in life and enthusiastically threw it all away for the likes of trump. Will we ever know the source of this power? It’s more than “he lets me be an asshole”, which is a lot of it. I’m just glad I’m not susceptible to his “charms”.

In the case of Powell, she has her own history of declaring that computers caused her to lose an election. I don’t remember what position the election was for (and Wikipedia doesn’t mention it), but it was in Texas.

I am equally puzzled over how a snake like Trump keeps hypnotizing chimps to walk into his mouth.

Here’s an article from Glenn Kirschner about how their plea deals and information might be used against Trump. It lays out how entangled they were with Trump. Would we believe them if they said they “got in too deep” and couldn’t escape?

Thanks LSL.

Like most of us here on the SDMB (Fighting Ignorance), my BS meter is finely tuned, and turned up to high.

Good point @FlikTheBlue

Maybe it’s something like this - “I’m just the getaway driver for a bank robbery, I won’t go into the bank”

There was a Texas based group that had been pushing the “rigged election, voting machines flip votes, Venezuela, yada yada” theories for around 20 years….but until 2020 they had never been successful in their attempts to recruit a major losing candidate to claim fraud.

Powell and Lin Wood had attended events held by this group, which originated the wackiest of the “rigged election” theories.

Well, Trump is a salesman. And once they are hooked, many go all the way. He’s like a shady used car salesman. “You love the car, RIGHT? What’s another $50?”

Yeah, he sells gold-plated lemons.

Yeah, Powell’s been a nut for a long time.

For all of them, I suspect that there was a huge dose of “We’re all going to jail, if we don’t get him re-elected, one way or the other” fear going on, after Jan 6. It’s a little bit conspiratorial on my own part, but I don’t believe for a second that they were free and clear right up until the elections in November, and then just chose to lose their minds during/after the elections. It seems like more than that to me.

For some of them, sure. But Chesebro & Powell are lawyers; they knew how illegal all this was. And that’s why they’re making plea deals now- they know they’re dead to rights, and that the best option is to plea guilty and have some wiggle room, vs. getting nailed to the wall hard if they fight it out.

That’s what’s weird to me. They aren’t your average MAGA. Just wonder if they saw ANYTHING good for it for themselves.

Perhaps they got so deep into this, they just kept digging. Pretty standard GOP MO.

Perhaps not having their own faces eaten by the leopards?

Yeah it’s not that complicated they were immoral people that wanted something, namely for Trump to carry on being president, presumably for the same combination of reasons as motivates all political actors, a combination of: a ideals (very bad racist ones in this case), personal advancement, and personal loyalty*.

And being immoral (and implicitly and explicitly following Trump’s desires in the matter) they the did immoral, illegal stuff to try and make that thing happen, in violation of both the written and unwritten protections in the US governmental system.

Seeing as “we are going to do illegal immoral stuff to make sure we are elected, regardless of what the electorate says” is now pretty much the official platform of the GOP, it’s really important Trump and his enablers do serious time, at the very least. So next time this happens the mental image of Trump and Giuliani rotting in prison cell is in the back of th mind of the next GOP politician to try this (though I fear that will just mean they are cleverer about not leaving evidence of what they do)

    • Whether you choose to call or charisma it is definitely true that Trump does have a knack for inspiring personal loyalty in people despite (or maybe because of?) showing absolutely none in return.

True, but instead of walking away from the leopards when they could, they got into the cage all while the ring leader of this circus stands aside and watches.

I am starting to think that it is a blind spot. Any educated person that didn’t see what was going on has some phycological disabilities.

Or they thought that this was gonna be big payout. They would be some sort of hero, or very rich.

Chesebro is different from Powell. She’s nutsy.

Chesebro had a pretty solid resume, and a good rep as a lawyer. He has a JD from Harvard, worked for Laurence Tribe, clerked for the federal judge who ruled for the Washington Post in the Pentagon Papers, and worked on Bush v Gore for Gore. He was registered as a Democrat.

Then in 2016 he re-registered as a Republican.

I wonder what happened?

ETA: his wiki article indicates he got divorced in 2016. Sounds like something was going on in his life around that time.