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Which is irrelevant, because no other US Presidents have committed the crimes Trump is being accused of.
If the facts set out in the Jan 6th committee report are correct, then
The last time anything remotely like this happened was the Hayes-Tilden election in 1876, and the fact that nobody was prosecuted for the malarkey then (which included a 3-figure number of murders) was part of a pattern of letting white southerners get away with shit that started with the culpable failure to hang Jefferson Davis and ended up with the north cucking to Jim Crow.
"Unsuccessful coup plotters go down" (whether they get the rope or just a long jail sentence depends on national tradition) is the historical default everywhere - there isn't a directly on-point precedent in the US because nobody in US history has tried to do the kind of things Donald Trump did between the election and Jan 6th.
You can argue that Donald Trump shouldn't be prosecuted because consensus reality is incorrect and he is factually innocent. You can argue that Donald Trump shouldn't be prosecuted because he is so disconnected from reality that he is incapable of forming the mens rea to commit a crime of dishonesty - based on the publicly-available information there is reasonable doubt on this point - although I am not sure you can do so with a straight face while suggesting that he be elected President of the United States. You can argue that he should be let off for the same reason Jefferson Davis was - that prosecuting someone for serious crimes of which they are obviously guilty is nevertheless dangerously divisive if a large percentage of the population still support the perp - but the precedent is that that was a mistake (at least if you reject Jim Crow and the Gone with the Wind/Birth of a Nation school of pop-history).
What you can't do and expect to be taken seriously is to argue that prosecuting a coup plotter is a shocking escalation, or that Trump is being prosecuted (at least as regards the election-related prosecutions) for something that a Democrat or pro-establishment Republican would have skated for, because neither Democrats nor pro-establishment Republicans would allow the kind man who would think of doing what Trump did near the presidency.
Not that it matters very much given that the politics of all this is driven by Jan 6th, but the story with the other prosecutions Trump is facing are similar,
There is a lot of evidence, including from before Trump became a partisan political figure, that he is unusually dishonest by the standards of rich and powerful Americans. This means that you would expect him to have worse-than-usual post-presidency legal troubles.
Didn't a bunch of states create mail-in-ballot rules that undermine ballot secrecy just for that election in particular before some of them got taken out by courts due to their irregularity?
Wasn't the whole Covid psy-ops leading to these rule changes in the first place?
"We can't have ballot secrecy because there is a horrible disease with a 1% mortality rate for 80 years olds, oh we can still have massive protests against police brutality, but not ballot secrecy, no no"
If there was evidence of a massive conspiracy showing all level of governments and media building up the Covid scare with the ultimate goal to undermine the integrity of the elections, wouldn't that be some kind of coup, or at least conspiracy to commit a coup?
Thanks to the Twitter files we already know that federal employees were pressuring social media companies to erase opinions going against the media consensus on Covid. From the same agency that back in 2015 was building up an investigation against Trump to prevent him from getting elected.
Well yes, of course the average rich and powerful American is a honest guy. Not the kind of guy to end up on Epstein's flight logs. Oh wait, I still can't see them, so I'm gonna have to believe that he is a honest guy and it's pure coincidence that Trump is getting prosecuted and not Epstein's buddies. The judges are just doing their work, nothing to worry about.
Before 2020, nobody thought that mail-in ballots were per se fraudulent. In 2016, three states including one swing state had all-postal elections (Washington, Oregon and Colorado), and most other states had no-excuse postal voting for anyone who applied. 23.7% of all votes were cast by post (see pp 9/10 here). And nobody on either side of the aisle thought that this was a problem that would justify overturning a close election.
Trump made specific allegations of fraud which were not true. He could have made the purely legal argument that slightly easier postal voting introduced in an irregular way was grounds for tossing the election on a technicality (as of 2016, it was a colourable legal argument based on the independent state legislature theory, which wouldn't be rejected by SCOTUS until Moore vs Harper in 2022) and allowing Republican State legislatures to choose electors, but that wasn't the argument he made. He said that he won by a landslide, that there was "massive fraud", that Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines meant that the in person votes were invalid, and that rogue election officials had added large numbers of fake ballots to Biden's tally.
You mean the pandemic with an impact visible at the macro-demographic level? Or are you telling me that governments outside the US faked 6 million deaths (by official count) or 25 million deaths (based on demographic statistics) in order to allow slightly easier postal voting in a US election?
Yes, which is why it is good that there is no such evidence. The pre-2020 conventional wisdom was that easier postal voting helps Republicans (because of the military vote), so if there had been a large-scale conspiracy to steal the election for Democrats, the main goal of the conspiracy would not have been slightly easier postal voting.
I didn't say that. I said that by the (low) standards of rich and powerful Americans, Trump is unusually dishonest. Heck, even by the (even lower) standards of greater-NYC real estate operators, Trump was unusually dishonest, this was common knowledge on Wall Street, and was in fact sufficiently common knowledge that a joke about it got into Sex and the City.
Epstein's buddies like one Donald Trump, who allowed Ghislaine Maxwell to recruit girls at Mar-a-Lago, who was a frequent flyer on the Lolita Express, and who promoted the corrupt prosecutor who gave Epstein a sweetheart deal the first time he got caught? Even by the (very, very low) ethical standards of Epstein's social circle, Donald Trump went above and beyond.
Because they don't have to be. Ballots can still be considered relatively secret with the exception of a few %age. When a large share of ballots get mailed in, then the mechanism by which these ballots get collected, who handles them and whether or not people influenced how they are filled becomes a bigger issue.
No, one side thought the Russians fixed the elections through Facebook ads or some such nonsense.
Maybe he got it wrong, doesn't mean that there was no plot to fix the elections.
Governments that are essentially vassals to the US, perhaps. Other governments could also independently find their own reasons to dabble in medical authoritarianism, and join in on the fun using the same existing justifications made-up by the most effective media in the world. "Look I'm not forcing you to stay home to cover up ongoing political issues, see Hollywood has the same problem"
And of course media control made it easy to dismiss outliers like Sweden which did not have any lockdown and was basically fine.
People all-over the world die all the time. I could see a strong incentive from less-developed countries to claim X number of citizens died 'from Covid' if that means they can get or simply maintain existing humanitarian aid from the West
There are only so many military votes you can get even if you made postal voting easier. On the other hand 'democracy'-supporting organizations used to hold ballot secrecy as important prior to 2020, so idk why.
How would they go about it? I'm not in charge of election-fixing for Democrats, so I wouldn't know but it seems you have some experience in their manner of thinking.
Oh man then if Sex and the City said it, it must be true. Out of all the real-estate scammers in the US, Trump is unusually dishonest. He was buying every judge to the point that it took him reaching the Presidency and suggesting defending the Southern border for somebody to finally decide, "that's enough, now we gotta get this unusually dishonest guy!" "Let me find the dirtiest dirt I have on this guy... Yes... This is perfect, the Russian President had some prostitutes pee on him!"
You have Epstein's flight logs? Why aren't you releasing them then?
Oh he promoted him but didn't hire him and was not in charge when the actual ruling happened. But he was in charge at the time Epstein almost saw consequences for his crimes.
If Trump was such a good buddy with Epstein, why are we investigating Trump over some paperwork issues or election quiproquo instead of Epstein? Why not investigate his role in the Covid masquerade?
Show us the flight logs, show us the Pfizer receipts, show us the meeting notes from the FDA, now that would be an interesting investigation.
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I'm not going to contest this point much, but I think there's ample reason to for people believe his misconduct is being handled with a particularly harsh hand for actions that, if committed by someone who has the favor of the elites, get away with minimal punishment.
If calling an election fraudulent and seeking to undermine or overturn the results is bad enough to warrant prosecution, Stacey Abrams should probably have been hit for this too. To her credit, she's quieted down considerably since she lost the rematch in a clear blowout. Not clear that Trump would do the same, granted.
If mishandling classified documents ranks up there, then we of course have Hillary, but yeah, we also have Biden storing them in his garage.
Sexual misconduct? Well Andy Cuomo resigned over that. Would they have brought these charges to trial and sought actual sentencing if he hadn't?
And we really have to remember that Hunter Biden very nearly walked away with a sweetheart plea deal except the deal was so good that it didn't pass the Judge's sniff test. So there's other reasons to wonder what kind of double standards might be at play that makes Trump such a target. REALLY seems like there's somebody's thumb on the scale in both Hunter's and Trump's cases.
Indeed, the fact that Hunter is being prosecuted at all is the main reason I'm willing to believe that there's any modicum of justice left in the Federal Justice system.
So I think your argument ultimately has to coalesce down to "No other person in high political office has committed every single one of these egregious/criminal acts over the course of their career so as to warrant a particularly hard smackdown."
And I'll let my own position on it be more clear:
I think the reason Trump is getting prosecuted is mostly because his political opponents control some of the legal systems which have jurisdiction over him, a weakness which most politicians would studiously avoid.
For example, even if Ron Desantis, in his capacity as Governor, wanted to strike back against those who have thrown political attacks at him, he'd be hamstrung by the fact that most of them don't have sufficient connections with the state of Florida to even be subject to the State's jurisdiction. He currently has the simultaneous advantage of being ensconced in a politically friendly state so if he confines any misdeeds to Florida he has a much better chance of avoiding an eventual prosecution.
Trump, with his lengthy career in NYC and his businesses being based out of New York effectively had his ass flapping in the breeze for politically motivated prosecutions coming out of a state where his 'allies' have no sway.
Similar with Fulton County, Georgia, although We'll see if Kemp steps up to assist on that one.
That's not why the judge rejected it. Plea deals are treated like contracts, and those require a "meeting of the minds" to ensure that both parties know what they're agreeing to. Hunter's plea deal was a confusing and ambiguously written mess. During the hearing, the judge very quickly realized that Hunter's defense attorneys interpreted it one way (expansively, covering Hunter from potential foreign agent charges), and the prosecutors interpreted it another way. This was very sloppy work by the standards of federal court, and it made sense for the judge to give the parties another chance to hash it out (they didn't).
Let's assume that Trump "did everything right" as he likes to say, and committed 0 crimes. How much would you estimate his overall prosecutions to change?
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