I’m not aware of anyone (in this thread or elsewhere) claiming that punishing Trump and his co-conspirators will lead to improved government.
But it seems clear to me that not prosecuting Trump and his co-conspirators (and, yes, punishing them when they’re convicted) would open the door to far worse government than we already have.
The Trump gang found out pretty quickly post election what happens when you file suits without a factual basis. Some have been sanctioned. Some might lose their license to practice. If some crazed D.A. tries to indict Biden for “human trafficking,” it would end up even worse for them. (DeSantis, on the other hand, might have something to worry about in that regard).
We tried pardoning a president who broke the law, and 50 years later we got Trump. I’m willing to try prosecuting Trump and see if that works out better.
This. Ford’s motives might have benign, but they sure seemed corrupt at the time, and his point–that prosecuting Nixon would have driven us further apart --seems to have shown the opposite.
It is true that a former President was pardoned 50 years ago, but I’m not seeing a bright line connecting that to the election of Trump. If I may be allowed a tangent, I think that Newt Gingrich’s ‘Contract With America’ was the first domino. I’ll refrain from connecting the dots here because I don’t have time and it would be too much of a hijack.
Heres, Nixon’s case and Trump’s case are different. Nixon was never indicted. Nixon never faced criminal prosecution. Trump has been indicted four times (so far). He’s already in the criminal justice system. Based on publicly-available evidence, I believe Trump is guilty of most or all of the 91 charges against him, and that he should be convicted. If he is not, then we definitely will face the possibility of the end of Democracy. Giving him a pardon would be problematic, as We the People cannot be seen as being ‘soft on crime’ and letting someone who attempted to become Dictator for Life go free. He should not receive a pardon without serving a non-negligible term behind bars… especially in a state trial for violating state laws.
But in any case, I don’t see pardoning Nixon as leading to the election of Trump.
I’m not trying to suggest that Nixon’s pardon brought about the Trump presidency, at least not directly. Think of it more as proof by contradiction. When Ford pardoned Nixon, he may have believed that it would lead to reconciliation and unity in the country. That didn’t work out too well, did it?
So. I wasn’t trying to justify the prosecution of Trump. I was saying that there’s no justification for letting a president escape justice.
Nixon wasn’t indicted, but Ford, for years afterward, carried with him the text of a Supreme Court decision that acceptance of a pardon carried with it the admission of guilt. Nixon may not have been formally indicted, but there is some legal basis for calling him guilty.
Wikipedia is a little more murky on the subject. According to them, Ford wanted a statement of contrition from Nixon as a condition of the pardon, Nixon refused, and Ford gave in.
A federal grand jury will indict Willis for what capital crime? And a petit jury would convict? Please limit your hysteria to the realm of possibility.
He didn’t attempt this, though, did he? He attemped to take one presidential term by illegitimate means (violence + election interference, etc.). I’m not saying he wouldn’t ever have, but what he did is bad enough without exaggeration.
Trump did say he would like to be a dictator. And given his efforts to accomplish a coup, and his desire to deploy the U.S. military against U.S. citizens, I have little doubt that he would attempt to remain in office after a second term. Maybe my phrasing was hyperbolic, but I don’t see him not trying to nullify the votes of U.S. citizens to remain in power.
Not to Trump’s election, but to Trump’s decisions to break the law as he openly and repeatedly as he did once he’d been elected.
He thought, “What can they do to me now? I’m free to decide what’s legal and what’s illegal.”
I want every President, Democrat or Republican or Libertarian, to think every day of his administration, “I need to be very careful I don’t violate the law because sure as shit comes out my ass, I don’t want to spend my post-Presidency in the slammer like that stupid asshole Trump.”
Nixon probably would have plea bargained, and Trump would be attacking a dead man for it.
Or maybe our cast of political characters would have been all different by now. Ford may have beaten Carter, for a start. But what wouldn’t have been different is the international rise of populism, and other underlying causes of Trumpism, including right-wing cable news and the decline of middle-of-the-road local newspaper circulation.
I want to try answering this a different way than I did last time.
Your response implies that Trump is not an impulsive idiot, but actually clever. And that’s what some of my own Trump posts say!
So – I do think that Nixon having, long ago, gone to prison for a year or two, might plausibly have slowed down Trump’s felonious behavior. Maybe he would have, say, hesitated to steal top secret documents that were National Archives property, while keeping others. Maybe when he made his not-so-perfect phone calls he would have worded the request to find votes obliquely. Maybe the number of counts he is charged with would be just two thirds of what he now faces. But everything I know about deterrence tells me that it only works, if at all, on edge cases.
P.S. As I probably should include with any post like this: The specific charges Mr. Trump faces may be in error, and he should be regarded as innocent of those charges until proven guilty.
What part of “that stupid asshole Trump” gave you this impression?
I believe he is both.
Many people have both moments of stupidity and moments of brilliance (or at least moments of cunning).
Meadows must be scared shitless now that his request for removal to federal court was denied. He’s filing an appeal and calling for an emergency expedited hearing, as well as a stay on his prosecution. I strongly suspect he will get neither.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/11/politics/meadows-federal-appeals-court-intervention/index.html
I hope he gets 15 years in jail.
Trump said it out loud at a rally in South Dakota just last week:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/11/politics/trump-wild-rhetoric-2024/index.html
The relevant quote from the article:
They don’t include the part where Trump specifies that if they cannot find a valid charge they should make one up. But he said it. I’d link to a video of it if this board’s software wasn’t so hostile to embedding. TL:DR version is that Trump isn’t done breaking the law yet, not by a damn sight.
I’m pretty sure it’s the “executed” part that is being very justifiably pushed back on.
Fair enough, I’d love to be wrong about that.
Trump would prosecute her as relentlessly as he prosecuted Hillary Clinton.