Isn’t that exactly how prosecutors at all levels in all places in the entire modern history of our legal system get testimony in all complex cases in which plea bargains aren’t present?
If they tried to beat it of him with a sock filled with quarters, I’m with you.
If they told him that he’s in a world of trouble with serious charges, but those charges could be lessened if he cooperated in giving evidence against Mr. Trump, then I’m not with you.
If he’s saying the entire plea system itself is immoral, fair enough. I’m pretty sure I saw a 20-minute John Oliver segment dedicated to making that exact point. Seems a weird example to pick for dying on that hill, though.
To make up numbers, let’s say there are 1,000 Trump/GOP lie to every Biden/Dem lie, and the Post/Times talk about Trump/GOP lies 10 times more than Biden/Dem lies – they’re still favoring Trump/GOP.
Those numbers are clearly exaggerated to make a point, but there seems to be a difference between Trump/GOP lies and Biden/Dem lies, at least to this flaming liberal. Biden and the Dems do the normal political shading and fiddling with statistics, the kind that both parties and all politicians used to do – just the normal “all politicians lie” type of thing. Trump and the Republicans lie about things that are so easily and often refuted, so outrageous. For example, all of the election stuff, all the trans and abortion stuff.
Anecdote from a guy at dinner last night in NV
“Trump is doing an amazing job putting out his case, but the problem is that’s drowning out all the allegations about Biden.”
You can have your cake and eat it too.
I have a new reason why Trump’s indictment matters, or at least matters if he goes to prison. And with two indictments handed down and another two (Georgia and January 6) likely coming, he’ll probably be sentenced to prison at least once.
The reason indictment likely matters is that when a head government is sent to prison, it happens again in that country again within a generation or less. Check it out here, looking back about fifty years:
List of Heads of Government Who Were Later Imprisoned
Modern examples of repeat imprisonment of government leaders, on the list linked above, include:
South Korea
Taiwan
France
Pakistan
Thailand
Ukraine
Romania
Georgia
Turkey
Bangladesh
Macedonia
Kyrgyzstan
Fiji
Burma/Myanmar
French Polynesia
Vanuatu
Peru
Brazil
Argentina
Turks and Caicos Islands
Western Australia (not sure why Wikipedia includes Western Australia but not U.S., Mexican, etc., states, but they did)
Not mentioned above are many examples from Africa, some jailings without trial (coups), and communist leaders sent to prison post-communism.
What about the other side – countries where jailing the leader was a one-off event?
I found no perfectly clear examples, and the possibles I checked were mostly errors in my Wikipedia link.
You would think from Wikipedia that Israel was a one-off, but they missed Moshe Katsav.
And you would think Haiti was a one-off, but they missed Jocelerme Privert.
And you would think Philippines was a one-off, but they missed Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.
And you would think India was a one-off, but they sort-of missed Indira Ghandi (no prison, just jail).
Wikipedia also missed one or two examples, depending on whether you are asking about jail or prison, in Panama.
Most of the others that may be on-off are where the head of government was jailed in the last four years (Malaysia 2019, Colombia 2020, Yemen 2020, Tonga 2020, South Africa 2021, Honduras 2022). If I am correct, repeat leader imprisonment is in most of those nation’s future.
Real one-offs? I’ve been looking for 45 minutes or so, and haven’t been able to find any unambiguous examples. Maybe the closest is that only one democracy-era leader of Portugal has gone to jail. That was back in 2014/2015, and trials are scheduled/ongoing.
This requires more research. There may be a good one-off example where Wikipedia totally missed the imprisonment of a prime minister or president post-office-holding. But if so, it is rare.
So I think I’ve stumbled on a genuine political science finding. Take Trump’s lock-em-up threats as predictable future events. History says that when you send a national leader to prison, you’ve started something that will continue.
Am I saying to throw out the rule of law? No, this is research concerning the thread question, not opinion-slinging.
Any poly sci majors out there are welcome to test this hypothesis in their next term paper. Just credit my post in a footnote 
Weren’t those other leaders thrown in jail mostly for political reasons, or because the government of those countries just had tons of corruption?
This is in no way a political hit job, based on bullshit charges. These are real crimes.
At a lower level, we have lots of governors who end up in jail, but that’s because they commit crimes. For a while, it was like every other Illinois governor, or something like that. Again, those weren’t hit jobs, putting political opponents in jail – those governors were just corrupt.
Well, if not for the intervention of Ford, Nixon would have been prosecuted and likely sentenced to prison. So maybe Trump is the second iteration of the trend that you have identified.
Political reasons? That’s common. It would take a lot of research, and some judgment calls, to say if more than half the prosecutions were political, or less.
I’m not sure what to make of your statement about tons of corruption. The countries that are best in international corruption rankings, like those in Scandinavia, have no modern example of national leaders going to prison. Perhaps the U.S. is moderately corrupt by international standards.
Trump’s threat to lock 'em up is a corrupt attempt to obstruct justice done for political reasons. I was making a prediction in that last post, not making moral judgments about whether our second leadership imprisonment will be as fair as the first.
If my quick, and thoroughly amateur, political science research is correct, then Ford’s intervention helps explain why there the U.S. hasn’t seen a President imprisoned in the past 49 years. An implication is that if Nixon had gone to prison, there would have been a higher probability of Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton having gone to prison. You might or might not think that good for the country. But Jerry Ford would probably have been pleased.
If a poly sci student took my post seriously, they would have to look at the mean and median number of years between the first and subsequent leadership imprisonments, doing sensitivity analysis for different cut-off points. I suspect the relationship will be strongest with cutoffs a good deal less than 49 years but haven’t worked it out.
It matters because Trump’s supporters did not take up arms and start executing people. Again (EJC case being the first). After J6, reluctance of prosecutors/investigators to make themselves & their family a target was often cited as a possible reason they weren’t going after Trump. The possibility of triggering millions of Trump supporters into violence was a big concern. But it didn’t happen in NY or Miami, despite Trump’s calls to arms and a lot of online chatter from conservatives. Both times, the number of Trump supporters who showed up was minimal. This is a clear indicator that he just doesn’t have the devotion from his followers that he once did. He’s no longer untouchable, or dangerous.
I think this would be a very different situation if Trump had pardoned the J6 crowd.
I think he still has a lot of devotion. I also think that all of the J6 convictions are making people afraid of getting caught up in any bullshit.
That list seems incomplete. And would be dramatically bigger if you included those in cabinet positions or regional government. But it is very interesting and I thank you for posting it.
This is a great article. Hope it ain’t paywallled, but excerpts are in the next post.
Excerpt from above Globe article:
…The standard line in the commentary is to exclaim over how extraordinary it is, how unprecedented, that a former president should be charged with a crime – or rather with a federal crime, Mr. Trump having already been indicted for falsifying business records “to conceal criminal activity” by the state of New York, and as good as convicted of sexual assault in the [E. Jean Carroll defamation case.]
But that’s not really the story. There have been previous presidents who were crooks, even if none were indicted. And just about all of [Mr. Trump]’s behaviour is unprecedented and unthinkable, not just the crimes.
To focus on [his indictment] is to miss the larger story, which is his reaction to it. Consider: With the full power and might of the U.S. justice system ranged against him, Mr. Trump’s response is not to cop a plea, nor even, beyond a perfunctory “not guilty,” to contest the charges. It is to bring the whole U.S. justice system down around him.
This is not the reaction of a normal person. It is not even the reaction of a mob boss. It is the reaction of a Batman villain. It is the reaction not of a criminal but of a revolutionary nihilist, someone who is not interested merely in breaking the law but dismantling it. Mr. Trump cannot win his case on the evidence, but I’m not sure his behaviour would be any different if he could – recall his contention that not only the 2020 election was rigged, but also the 2016 election: the one he won.
And so, having convinced his millions of followers that American elections are a con, easily manipulated by the Deep State or magic voting machines or Italian satellites or what have you – the better to justify their own attempts to steal the last election, and the next – Mr. Trump and his acolytes have now set to work tearing down the rule of law…
…But then, it’s not as if they have any better arguments. The contention that a president, let alone a former president, can simply declassify documents with his mind; the premise that the law is only concerned with government documents that have been classified, and not with those, whatever their classification, whose disclosure would be harmful to the national interest; the claim that the Presidential Records Act allows former presidents to claim government documents, top secret or otherwise, as their personal property, and not, as the law actually states, the opposite: it’s all nonsense.
The rest is whataboutery. What about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails? What about Joe Biden’s records? What about Mike Pence’s – a Republican, mind you, but still. Even if these were remotely comparable, they would not diminish the gravity of what Mr. Trump is accused of. But in fact they are entirely dissimilar…
Yes, that was a great article, and devastating.
Remember when people kept saying how you can’t possibly diagnose this man as a malignant narcissist if you’ve never met him. How armchair psychoanalyzing is unethical?
Well, pretty soon we’re all going to become intimately familiar with what a person with a toxic personality disorder is like when under extreme stress.
And it’s not going to be pretty.
Surely not devastating to Trump? “A bloated, incontinent bag of every conceivable vice, belching forth at irregular intervals and covering everything within reach.”
To our country’s prospects?
To my hopes for the future.
And author Andrew Coyne is, in the Canadian scheme of things, right of center.
Old Frightful. Geezers are like geysers.