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Then wouldn't it be wise for Trump to take steps to avoid being investigated? It seems at every opportunity he acts guilty enough to get investigated but is actually clean enough to get out clean. I don't think it's out of the question to think he benefits from the image of the establish going after him, and he knows it.
In the end you get a bunch of people complaining about how he was treated, and that's what he wants. That's why he acts the way he does, anything to make him look like more of a victim.
Why? It was a political persecution, not Justice. It’s like asking why blacks don’t just stop doing whatever it is that makes the cops shoot them more often. If the answer is “just stop being you and the cops leave,” it’s more like victim blaming than advice. And this was politically motivated, so the advice would have been “have you tried not having any platform positions Hillary doesn’t have? Maybe if you just stopped trying to drain the swamp and end wars the swamp would leave you alone.”
The point is Trump doesn't want to stop, and if he knows what's good for him he won't stop trying to get investigated, because they improve his political prospects.
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Trump is being investigated because of the same political positions that allowed him to gain power. The steps he'd have to take to stop being investigated would mean completely reworking all of his policy positions to be the same as the Bush/Obama consensus - more support for forever wars, infinite immigration, corporate welfare, etc. The moment he does that he'll lose all of his political power, because those positions were what earned him his initial support.
The moment he stops being investigated he also loses his political power. He's powerful because his actions feed the collective persecution complex of him and his supporters. It's not just political. He also always creates the appearance he is doing something shady behind the scenes, to bait investigations because they are good for him and his political prospects.
I disagree - I think that these investigations are actual, earnest and serious attempts by the Establishment to tank his administration and demonstrate to his followers that they have no say in the administration of the country. They're only "good" for him in the sense that a lot of people understand the attack on him to be a proxy attack on their own ability to influence the direction of their country, and hence get motivated to support him. He'd be doing better without the investigations, in my opinion at least.
There's no contradiction between these being sincere efforts to take Trump down, and also that Trump benefits from these investigations, and acts in a way to generally make them more likely to happen, and in my opinion, intentionally so. That's the point of a bait, to say "come and get me," and then turn that into an advantage. It's what DeSantis is trying to replicate, but he isn't so bold as Trump as to actually bait intelligence agencies, settling for the media and Disney instead.
Trump has only been doing better in the primary polls since people have been getting in the race, and the only noteworthy thing he has really done is get indicted. so it's not clear what evidence there is that these latest cases have caused any issues.
It's hard to say for me whether Russiagate overall harmed him because it was bored into everyone's brains, but it also imploded. The worst thing it did really was edge the Democrats who then went totally nuts, and some undecideds got swept up in it. I think there were other ways the establishment got their jabs in and actually made Trump's life worse. But I think the investigations are where Trump wins because that is actually where you have to put up or shut up, it's an actual game that Trump can play, and he's won every time.
As a long-term phenomenon I think the cases look even better for the anti-establishment right (and left even) because there's a immediate effect where people get swept up in them and want to see Trump lose, and then there's a tail effect where people become bitter and cynical towards the prosecutors who are bringing faulty cases they can't win. Biden's win was at the height of one of those anti-Trump pushes, but I think things look incredibly dire for the Democrat establishment going forward, since they have spent so much political capital on nonsense.
No, the investigation absolutely harmed Trump in a real way. The first and most obvious was that it prevented him from normalising relations with Russia, but the domestic effects were far worse. Crossfire Hurricane meant that his campaign was spied upon by the intelligence community for the majority of the election, and the head of the FBI (even though he was an incompetent buffoon) actively tried to intervene in the election to make sure that his opponent won. The exact same people running that investigation eventually moved on to the Mueller probe, which was effectively designed to hide the evidence of Crossfire Hurricane while also preventing Trump from hiring good people, by serving as a process-based punishment for anyone who decided to seriously join his team and help him achieve his goals. The investigation imploded, but it did actually achieve its actual goals - hamstringing Trump's presidency and covering up the crimes/mistakes of the intelligence community after they surveilled the communications of the successful presidential candidate while exchanging multiple text messages about how desperate they were to make sure his candidacy failed despite the wishes of the voting base.
Crossfire Hurricane, and the Mueller special counsel that it turned into (this is not hyperbole, huge portions of the exact same people were involved in both) were a massive problem for Trump, and I think it is extremely likely that the declassified documents he held onto and the government forcibly removed were the proof/evidence regarding what happened. It is true that he benefits in some sense politically from what are obviously nakedly political prosecutions, but I don't think those effects actually make up for the problems that those investigations caused. If you actually care about political prosecutions like this as opposed to "no bad tactics, only bad targets" then you are already most likely going to be supporting Trump anyway.
You can pick that out as an issue but I don't think it derails my argument. It just means Trump may have bit off more than he could chew. Ultimately I do think Trump baits these investigations and the broader elite ire as a way to foster the kind of indignation you see in this thread. Sure Trump gets treated unfairly, but he purposefully acts unsympathetically in order to bait out the unfairness. In other words, he's not acting in good faith and everyone outraged on his behalf are being played.
The people outraged on his behalf, perhaps, from a certain point of view. Unfortunately, the underlying problem didn't start with him and won't end with him.
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