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Don't you mean the justice-involved individual, Donald Trump? Kidding, kidding. But it really is Russell-conjugations all over the place.
And famously our lawbooks are groaning with such a profusion of them that we each, on average, inadvertently commit three each day. Seriously, criminal laws are often rather vague, and great power is entrusted to the hands of prosecutors to not go off the reservation and become little tinpot tyrants, using their awesome powers to for personal grievances. Unfortunately, this often doesn't work.
Moreover, which act works more harm on the commonweal - Donald Trump classifying payments to Stormy Daniels as "legal expenses" in his personal books, or a mob of 34 people ransacking a convenience store like a swarm of locusts? Because the first is a 34-felony indictment and got millions of dollars in legal resources thrown at it. The latter is a 34-misdemeanor nothingburger that ruins people's livelihoods and blights a neighborhood, but goes ignored by the progressive legal system. I'm not going to bitch at anyone who looks at this and concludes that the law is more than a bit of an ass these days.
The evidence in the case was highly publicized, and other fellow citizens are fully capable of disagreeing on the proper conclusion to be drawn. This isn't a new or controversial point. It's not a defection against the commonweal to argue that Sacco & Vanzetti or the Rosenberg were actually innocent, or on the other side that OJ or Alec Baldwin are actually guilty.
There's law and order, and then there's law and order. I'd actually argue that Trumpian tendencies are much closer to the original understanding of the term, given Trump's hostility to public disorder.
Definitely the one where the mob goes into the government building to try and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
Stable institutions of power transfer and robust checks and balances against those who would hijack that are among the only thing that prevents us from sliding into third world style governmental dysfunction.
Someone who would throw wrenches into that system to try to make it malfunction is a “bad person” like the OP claim, and one of the bigger societal risks out there. It’s a much more important case than a street felon.
This may be news to you, but society did not collapse overnight when the halls of power were threatened. There were no repeat attempts. Everybody eventually went home and retreated back to grumbling from their keyboards and patiently waited 4 more years for their next shot. You may argue that the consequent ill will towards Democrats was therefore misplaced and avoidable, but that sentiment was generalizable towards their entire party both before and after J6. It's baked in.
As bad as J6 was and could have been, watching various leftist riots and harassment campaigns treated with pillows while they spill their anger and hostility onto their fellow citizens did more to damage my trust in institutions than any march on the capitol. Your sacred system means fuck-all to me if it's not going to protect me and mine from street felons.
Sure I can definitely agree that the fact that the attempt to overthrow the peaceful transfer of power eventually fizzled out was a good thing.
Society doesn’t tend to collapse from this sort of thing, so I wouldn’t be surprised at that point. The majority of countries in the world today probably lack a tradition of peaceful transfer of power to varying degrees. But once you interrupt that process, it’s hard to put it back together.
I highly prefer to just vote rather than “I take power illegitimately then you take power illegitimately then…”
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Unfortunately that's not what he was convicted for.
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