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That's a perfectly reasonable position to have. Unfortunately, it's not one that makes for an easy defense of Trump. We're talking about a guy with a history of questionable business behavior who surrounds himself with the kind of people who, if not exactly operating within the criminal world, were squatting near the margins of it. He's been sued numerous times, and lost quite a few of those suits. Whether or not he actually did what the New York DA says he did is irrelevant in your world because he's already proven himself to be the exact kind of person who would do something like that. There's debate above on whether the hush money payments were campaign expenses and how was Trump supposed to proceed without getting into hot water but that's irrelevant; whether they were improper campaign contributions or not, I can tell you that what you don't do is have your attorney make the payments out of his own pocket and then create phony invoices and ledger entries as part of a reimbursement scheme. According to your logic, that alone should be enough evidence of suspicious activity regardless of his past. I'm personally not in favor of getting rid of plea bargaining because I don't think it's going to have the effect some people think it will, but if you're going to take the position that people who engage in suspicious activity deserve what's coming to them, I don't see how you can defend Trump in this situation.
In no way was it intended to be! I was responding only to @FiveHourMarathon’s specific point. I have always found Trump highly unsavory, and the boundless charisma everyone assures me he possesses is totally lost on me. I agree that Trump is an unscrupulous, unethical, slimy individual, and that he has almost certainly been involved in illicit/illegal activity at various points in his career.
However, the defense of Trump I will make is this: by dint of the fact that he is a politically influential figure with the genuine potential to harm the ruling regime and the individuals within it, he is inherently in a different class of person than the vast majority of normal run-of-the-mill individuals. The probability of him being targeted with arbitrary and unjust criminal proceedings is astronomically higher than the odds of any commenter on this site suffering a similar fate. It’s a concern for him in a way that is just obviously isn’t for the average person, because the government doesn’t really get anything out of persecuting some random Joe Schmo, due to the incentive structures in place.
The Founding Fathers, due to their status as political dissidents/revolutionaries, were acutely cognizant of the possibility of targeted political lawfare and unjust imprisonment by authorities. Many of the specific freedoms enumerated in the Bill Of Rights are expressly designed to guard against this particular scenario, and are more of an unnecessary nuisance in other more mundane criminal proceedings for non-politicized crimes. While I understand and appreciate why these liberties were held to be so important by those men in that particular context, I think that we simply do not live within a context wherein the likelihood of the justice system plucking up random innocent people and vindictively lying about them is worth considering for most people.
In the very limited contexts in which that probability is higher - for example, the context of a powerful and wealth political candidate widely reviled by authorities with direct control over criminal proceedings - I think we can afford to at least be more vigilant about those liberties than we would when considering the trial of DeVontavious the car thief, with four prior convictions for car theft, in his newest trial for car theft.
Isn't Trump's higher likelihood of targeting more than compensated for by his vastly larger resources to defend himself?
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