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Trump Indictments 2
Jun. 9th, 2023 04:00 pmI think people should keep in mind the possibility that the Trump classified documents stuff is going to be worse than imagined. But it's already way worse than Trump's first round of indictments. Sure, the stuff from the first round of indictments is conduct that would have (and part of a scandal that would have) sunk any previous-to-Trump presidential campaign. But it's also not the sort of conduct that's likely to mean serious (or even necessarily any) jail time for a first-time nonviolent offender. The set of facts alleged in this second indictment is the sort of stuff that would mean serious jail time for anyone but Trump, and there's not much legally to distinguish Trump in that regard. Also, apparently Trump is on tape noting that the docs are classified, that he didn't declassify them, that he knows he can't declassify them, and that he's showing them to people he knows shouldn't see them. It is, as lawyers would say, a bad document.
Of course, every Republican will be round the bend with "what about [giant disanalogy here]", asserting that this can't be bad because everything is bad, and suggesting that prosecuting Trump for wildly obvious seriously criminal conduct is somehow unfairly harsh to Trump in particular. (That last in the apparent context of everyone bending over backwards in giving Trump a chance to get away scott-free; if he'd just returned all the docs when first requested, he probably could have papered over the whole thing?) Also, multiple Republican federal legislators (specifically Biggs and Higgins) have turned to overt sedition after the indictment. Just great, the best people, truly.
It's hard to imagine Trump facing serious consequences for anything because Trump is the opposite of serious. His anti-seriousness field is unsurpassed. He became the President of the United States and managed to never, not even once, take that seriously. And as usual, though I do't think Trump's electoral prospects are good to start, this might not make those worse (especially in the primary). Republicans like that shit now.
(To complicate the story further, the case has been handed to Aileen Cannon, a judge made famous for bending over backwards for the sake of Trump in wildly deferential and struck-down-on-appeal rulings about how the documents in question should be reviewed earlier in this same case!)
Of course, every Republican will be round the bend with "what about [giant disanalogy here]", asserting that this can't be bad because everything is bad, and suggesting that prosecuting Trump for wildly obvious seriously criminal conduct is somehow unfairly harsh to Trump in particular. (That last in the apparent context of everyone bending over backwards in giving Trump a chance to get away scott-free; if he'd just returned all the docs when first requested, he probably could have papered over the whole thing?) Also, multiple Republican federal legislators (specifically Biggs and Higgins) have turned to overt sedition after the indictment. Just great, the best people, truly.
It's hard to imagine Trump facing serious consequences for anything because Trump is the opposite of serious. His anti-seriousness field is unsurpassed. He became the President of the United States and managed to never, not even once, take that seriously. And as usual, though I do't think Trump's electoral prospects are good to start, this might not make those worse (especially in the primary). Republicans like that shit now.
(To complicate the story further, the case has been handed to Aileen Cannon, a judge made famous for bending over backwards for the sake of Trump in wildly deferential and struck-down-on-appeal rulings about how the documents in question should be reviewed earlier in this same case!)
