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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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