Being rich, he’ll never see a day in prison so I’m fine with fining his wealth away because of tax and fraud convictions. After all, he’s been grifting his entire adult life – the political bullshit is the cherry on top for him.
I’d be happy thinking of him living in a single-wide in DeSoto county, Florida because he can’t afford West Palm Beach anymore. He’s fit right in; it’s gone for the Pub Presidential candidate every year since 1976 and more people voted for him in 2020 than 2016.
It seems to me the case in Georgia should be a slam dunk. There is an audio tape of him asking an election official to find votes – he was even stupid enough to list the number of “found votes” he needed. It would be really nice if the inner circle would politely admit he KNEW that he lost fair and square and had planned to try use his influence to change that, but even without that kind of cooperation from co-conspirators it should be quite easy to make that case.
He cannot deny he said those things, they are indisputable. He CAN try to convince dumb jurors that he meant something else but no sane and rational person could honestly believe him. They would just have to weed out genuine partisan hacks who would vote to acquit no matter what.
He would be convicted, it would be a state thing so it would not be his successor or his government which convicted him and it would be a nice bit of business to start a whole list of “stealing the election” charges he could face. Once it is established he set out to overturn the election (even in part- Georgia) it will make other cases just part of the pattern he is known to follow.
And his henchmen and henchwomen can be convicted too. The perfect icing on the perfect cake as far as I am concerned. I would love for the January Sixth Committee to nail his ass by showing intent and knowledge it was wrong and illegal and his participation up past his elbows to his shoulders and beyond- but can they? Doesn’t Georgia have an easier case?
" More important to get the henchmen than Trump"
Trying to stop a snake by cutting off the tail?
Well put Czarcasm.
Snake can’t move forward without a tail. Make it clear that the bastards will suffer for their boss’s transgressions.
Dan
Except in this case the “tail” grows back fast and easy. When it comes to Republican wanna-bes, there is an almost unexhaustive supply of people ready to take the place of any henchmen you may take out of the picture.
A better analogy would be: " trying to stop a scorpion by cutting off the tail."
A scorpion uses its head to see and aim at an enemy—but It’s the stinger in the tail that kills you.
Let history repeat itself: send him to Club Fed until the syphillis takes over, then ship him off to Florida.
As in the snake analogy, cutting off this particular “stinger” doesn’t harm the scorpion because it is easily replaced.
OK, got it! Inexhaustible supply of monsters, so we should just put away the swords and let 'em flourish.
Get a grip on the fact that the Wicked Witch needs his flying monkeys.
Dan
Get a grip on the fact that this particular Son Of A Witch can come up with flying monkeys much faster than you can eventually put them down.
No, I am saying that Trump should be the main target.
The OP (me) didn’t say getting Trump was unimportant, just less important in the long run than nailing the henchmen. Less satisfying too, I know, but with Bannon and Meadows and Giuliani behind bars, he has no legacy or claims of leadership to make.
Nowhere have I suggested that the monkeys should be the only target, but rather that the next trumpling will need his own gibbons, and they should be discouraged. Indeed, if the smartest ones are discouraged, the stupider ones might introduce a useful fail factor.
I apologize if I gave the impression that the CFSG was less important - if he can be fried that might discourage some of the smarter aspirants, although I haven’t seen many of these. Yet.
Dan
Can you imagine stupider than Meadows and Bannon and Ghouliani? Trump and the Three Stooges might be entertaining.
No prob imagining stupider; lifelong SF fan here, suspending disbelief is my game.
Dan
I don’t want to help his lawyers, so I’ll just say that I think the prosecution will have a hard time unless they can find some evidence that Trump knew that he was bullshitting.
Once he’s gone to trial, the statute of limitations has passed, etc. he’ll probably start giving interviews saying that he knew all along that it was just BS to try and get things turned around - you do what you need to do to win - but, based on his history, I expect that he’s played it straight from top to bottom on feigning true belief in “the great steal” and you won’t be able to prove otherwise, no matter how many phone calls you listen to and no matter how many recordings of his meetings you read through. At best, you might prove to the jury that he’s a crank. But it’s hard to convict someone who’s just not aware of what he’s doing.
They used to get mobsters, who would speak on the phone in MUCH more elaborate code than Trump used that day, all the time. Juries may be skeptical, but they ain’t dummies either. The prosecutors understand that they need to convince the jury that his code can be easily and clearly broken–once they accomplish that, it becomes very hard for a jury to return a Not Guilty verdict.
Since when is “I didn’t know that was illegal” a defense?
Arguing which of these is more important seems to depend on some little-spoken assumptions that we should clarify: In particular, what do we want to accomplish ?
If the object is to derive maximal schadenfreude (a perfectly honorable objective, IMNSHO), then it’s gotta be Trump Hisself jailed for the next 500 years, and his crooked family (Jr., Eric, and probably Ivanka) even unto the 7th generation. Getting all his henchmen will offer plenty of schadenfreude as well, no mistake, but it’s gotta be Trump for the Max.
If the object is to protect the nation from history repeating itself, then I lean toward (1) enacting the necessary laws, at federal and state levels, to repair and enhance all the already-rickety “guard rails” that Trump has demolished. That will be the hardest task, but the most important. We’ve already seen extensive lists of the many guard rails that have been blown over, and extensive suggestions for new laws to fix them. (2) I think getting the henchmen is more important than getting Trump Hisself, though not to the exclusion of Trump Hisself.
If Trump goes down, sure there will be future demagogues, a few of which will be strong enough and competent enough to repeat, or even out-do, Trump. (Likely candidates, to date, seem to be DeSantis, Carlson, maybe Abbott.)
But if we can neutralize the henchmen and install enough laws, with adequate teeth, to put the fear into future henchmen, I think that will be a bigger deterrent than neutralizing future Big Cheeses themselves.
As for the prospect of future Trump-alikes like DeSantis et al, let’s remember the famous words of Karl Marx, commonly paraphrased as:
ETA: Bonus points if you know what a Brumaire is, and why there were 18 of them. 