I used to love Dilbert. The fact that Scott Adams turned out to be a MAGAT is one of my own personal minor tragedies over the last 5 years.
This touches (at least tangentially) on something that’s bothered me for some time about this episode: that it would have been easier — though no less problematic — to urge Raffensberger to “find” 11,780 tainted Biden votes and have them tossed out. Produces the same result, and fits in better with his ongoing claim that the Demonrats stole the election and he’s just trying to put things right.
If it makes people feel better to say that he just blindly stumbled into front of a half a country’s worth of imbeciles looking for a figurehead for an attempted overthrow of the republic, as opposed to that he spotted a large cohort of potential marks and chose to see how far he could ride that grift, hey, fine with me.
The one I remember along those lines was something to the effect that it would be hard to convict him of inciting a subversion because of a defense that he was sincerely (though delusionally) convinced the fraud against him had really happened.
Then again he’s been thoroughly and sincerely convinced that the whole world has it in for him and is trying to knock him down and anything that goes wrong for him is the fault of others since, like, forever. Him and his acolytes are to this day just so aghast that others supposedly on their side had the nerve to say “sorry, we need more proof of that than ‘I just know it must be so’ to do something about it”.
You know, we do allow insanity as a defense against other criminal charges, but in those cases, the person is still remanded into custody for treatment of their insanity.
I suspect most of us would be happy to settle for Trump ending his days in the psych ward after successfully using the “Too insane to be guilty of treason” defense.
It’s not just mail-in ballots - it’s ballots from larger (read urban, read highly African-American) jurisdictions where the polls are clogged with voters and sometimes stay open for a couple hours after the formal close because there are still people waiting in lines.
OK, last voter voted at 9, let’s get the boxes of ballots down to the counting center and into the queue for the machines. Didn’t get them through the machine by midnight? Sorry, everyone in that precinct just got administratively disenfranched, by law.
The ten smallest counties in Texas total 6408 inhabitants (by the last census). I’d bet there are entire precincts in Harris County (TX’s largest, home of Houston) which have more voters in them than the entire ten smallest counties. Who’s most likely to have their votes totalled by midnight on Election Day?
He was on the way for a while. Just read Chapter 14 of The Dilbert Future (preferably borrowed, it’s not worth the $) and you’ll see a lot of the New Thought woo-woo that underlays of lot of Trump’s psyche (and that of his followers).
Yeah. I read that and felt like I’d dropped into the Twilight Zone. I never read Adams after that.
How would this be a defense? If I’m sincerely (though delusionally) convinced that my bank has defrauded me, and I convince some friends to go rob it, I’m no less guilty than if my motive was to just steal some money.
I think the issue goes back to corrupt intent. Which has been at the heart of a lot these cases. If you can’t prove criminal intent, and corrupt purpose (such as with the DOJ firings, etc), then it gets harder to nail them with any sort of serious charges. So if he’s “sincerely convinced” as you say, he obviously isn’t doing it with malicious intent or corrupt purpose.
Like the whole documents thing, it’s one of the issues where you’re not allowed to do something, or shouldn’t do something, but the lack of written penalties in the law for going ahead and violating those rules just aren’t there. Which surprises me not at all, lawmakers don’t want to create hard rules by which they or their allies may be judged.
Because he really thinks that there were tens of thousands of votes for him that weren’t counted, or illegal votes that were counted. Telling Brad that he needs to find some votes (that really exist, and are there to find) isn’t the same as telling him to fake them. Is the argument that Trump’s lawyer might use.
I understand this is the case, and that the entire judicial system was arranged to avoid any possibility of convicting an innocent party and skews in the favor of the guilty. But eating, flushing, ripping up, hiding, and now stealing documents he knows to be self incriminating certainly argues against the delusional defense.
Sure it is impossible to to truly know what is in anyone else’s mind (and heart) at any specific moment-- but when they tip you off by purposely avoid following the rules by stealing call logs or other classified documents, when they continue to tear up documents despite daily warnings that it is illegal to do so – does indicate he knows damn well he is guilty and is trying cover it up. Like his Republican twin brother Tricky Dick Nixon, it seems the cover up might be what brings him down.
(Please note: While I am eager for Trump to be held accountable for his actions, I would prefer if it is delayed until he can cause further damage to my former political party. I am eager for him to cause a civil war within the GOP, continue to endorse outrageously insane candidates that have no chance of winning state wide elections, to undermine faith in the entire party, and also weaken the leaders of the party in multiple ways. Perhaps the best time for his very public criminal trial at the hands of the DOJ is after the 2022 mid-terms and just before the 2024 election. His trial would of course require a very strict gag order that does not permit speaking to the press or the public through the podcasts of his cronies. Let the voters see not only who Trump actually is without him having the opportunity to spin or refute the allegations in any public forum (only within the confines of the courtroom)-- but what other key Republicans have done in his service.)
This solution is fine with me. As long as his allies and henchmen end up either there with him or in prison where they belong too.
I wasn’t asking specifically about the Georgia thing, but about the totality of Trump’s actions from Nov. 4 to Jan. 6. But since the Georgia thing is the subject of the OP, I see your point regarding that one particular action.
So, do we know that the contents of the documents Trump destroyed or attempted to destroy incriminate him? I’m sure some do, in some crime or another, but from what news I saw of this activity from the first time Politico reported it in 2018, it sounded like he did this to every document whose message he didn’t like.
Certainly the committee wanted a lot of those documents, which means someone thought they might be incriminating, but I don’t think we know yet what those might be.
While I’m sure there’s quite a few in his inner circle who are just as crazy as he is, pretty much everyone else who ever tried to talk him down, but then folded under his scorn and helped him, have, by those actions, proven that they knew their actions were wrong, but that they did them anyways.
I’m okay with letting the courts sort the one from the other, and treating them accordingly.
Trump said: ‘So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state… There’s no way I lost Georgia… There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.’
The rest of the conversation indicates that he actually believed it.
Or that he can act.
As said, Trump has a habit through his life of saying things with sincerity and then, when it no longer matters, getting on TV, the radio, whatever, and admitting that he was lying that whole time. A prosecutor should be collecting those admissions for court.
Actually, I was going to say something to that effect; but I have a tendency to become wordy when I explain details and reasoning, so I cut it.
Isn’t “one more than we have” a weird way to put it?
Yes. He isn’t good with words. He’s poor at communication. His speech is inarticulate, full of malapropisms and anacoluthon.
“This is what makes covering Donald Trump so very difficult— what does he mean when he says words?”
- Zachery Wolf, CNN Journalist.
He should just use a sharpie and make a map.
That probably isn’t admissible in court, though.
You can’t say that because someone has a history of lying, they must be lying in a different occasion.