You knew this was coming sooner or later, I assume, regardless of the facts, the possible consequences, the further polarization of the nation and culture. It was inevitable the second Donald Trump shocked the establishment and stopped Hillary Clinton from becoming President the next step in the assumed progressive takeover of the government and American society. He had a target on his back even before he was inaugurated, and in the ensuing nearly seven years Trump was subjected without pause to contrived Big Lies proclaimed by “the resistance,” the Democrats and the news media designed to poison public opinion and prevent his re-election, dishonest impeachment theories (as well as two unethical impeachments), politically motivated raid on his home, and the unethical, relentless pursuit of prosecutors seeking to find a crime to charge him with, which is absolutely an abuse of the prosecutoral function.
Now victory, if you are warped enough to see it as that, is near. A Manhattan grand jury is expected to hand down the much awaited indictment this week, perhaps as early as Tuesday. No U.S. President has ever been indicted or arrested in or out of office, so I’m sure the sick hearts of the Trump-Deranged are bursting out of their chests with joy in anticipation.
Points:
1. “The New York case would be easily dismissed outside of a jurisdiction like New York, where Bragg [the Manhattan DA] can count on highly motivated judges and jurors,” writes Jonathan Turley. Translation: New York has enough biased judges and jurors to have a chance to make the charges stick. Amazingly, the case is the zombie claim that Trump violated election laws by covering up his dalliances with high-priced hooker “Stormy” Davis. The Justice Department declined to prosecute on the facts because the case is weak. Writes Turley,
I wrote how difficult such a federal case would be under existing election laws….It is extremely difficult to show that paying money to cover up an embarrassing affair was done for election purposes as opposed to an array of obvious other reasons, from protecting a celebrity’s reputation to preserving a marriage. That was demonstrated by the failed federal prosecution of former presidential candidate John Edwards on a much stronger charge of using campaign funds to cover up an affair.
In this case, Trump reportedly paid Daniels $130,000 in the fall of 2016 to cut off or at least reduce any public scandal. The Southern District of New York’s U.S. Attorney’s office had no love lost for Trump, pursuing him and his associates in myriad investigations, but it ultimately rejected a prosecution based on the election law violations. It was not alone: The Federal Election Commission (FEC) chair also expressed doubts about the theory.
2. Obviously, time is getting short, so Democrats and their henchpersons decided that Trump was too much of a threat to run and win again. The classified documents issue has been pretty decisively spoiled for Trump-haters after Biden’s trove was uncovered. The January 6 narrative has narrowed its audience to those who already detested the ex-President. Democrats take hope from the fact that the justice system has been thoroughly corrupted and politicized [See: Derek Chauvin] since John Edwards’ machinations to hide his affair and love-child were revealed.
3. Of course, Trump managed to do exactly the wrong thing, issuing an inflammatory and politically divisive response on Truth Social:
“THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE AND FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”
Then, two hours later, a Trump spokesman issued a statement saying, “President Trump is rightfully highlighting his innocence and the weaponization of our injustice system.” Like a response to a dog-whistle, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy posted on Twitter calling for investigations into whether federal funds were being used for “politically motivated prosecutions.”
Gee, ya think?
McCarthy could have legitimately asked for such an inquiry the minute he became Speaker. This way, it looks like Trump is calling the shots. McCarthy is an incompetent.
4. Former Biden paid liar turned MSNBC hack Jen Psaki asked the obvious question without honestly answering it–because, well, she’s an MSNBC hack. “Could a Trump indictment actually help him politically?” her column asks. Psaki can’t see beyond the fact that he will “try to weaponize this for political gain”and that we’ve “also “seen his base stick by him.” “But he’s never been indicted before,” the perceptive, objective analyst says, “and we’ve already seen some recent cracks in the armor …”
Psst, Jen, you idiot. The indictment will help and strenthen Trump exactly the way being arrested bolstered the Harvard student radicals who took over the college administration building in 1968. It will radicalize non-Trump fans who have been watching on the sidelines, and convince them that indeed, the “Get Trump” conspiracy—and it is a conspiracy—is an offense to democracy being engineered by a political party that will stop at nothing to hold power. It will make Trump a martyr, and to some extent, legitimately so. He’s a toxic force in American political culture to be sure, and we had a chance of ridding ourselves of him fairly and squarely.
The indictment will remind people of why he won in the first place.
Ethics Alarms 
If Trump is indicted Biden better hope he dies in office because plenty of smoke exists around his Chinese communist party associations. I’m sure there is a DA from the other side equally as partisan.
An indictment will open the doors for every President to be hounded by partisan DA’s.
If money is fungible and an individual can contribute as much of their own money to their campaign how can any prosecutor claim that donated campaign funds were used. A payment of 130 grand is chump change for a billionaire like Trump. We knew rich guys pay hush money to their concubines so Trump doing the same is not News.
This is a big mistake, as Chris points out above. However, as we saw about a decade ago when Harry Reid nuked the filibuster so that Obama’s judges could sail through on a simple majority vote, the Democratic Party has a tendency not to think too much as to what will happen if the precedents it sets are still in place when the other party regains power, as it inevitably must in a non-corrupt system. A nation is not a city, and it’s not possible to get to the point on a national level where one party holds zero power or even disappears, or at least it hasn’t happened in the US on a national level since 1816, when the Federalist Party went out of existence. Prosecution of major political figures with a following usually backfires, even if it’s only a small following. There’s a reason Ford closed the book on Watergate. There’s a reason the whites locked up Mandela, only to have him later become president of South Africa. There’s a reason GWB didn’t try to lock up Clinton for perjury, and there’s a reason Trump didn’t “lock her up.” The Democratic party is playing with fire.
And in more ways than one.
From my perspective the United States is no longer a country. It’s a loosely defined geographic area with a criminal cartel ruling over it. The United States has no borders. Citizenship is meaningless. It effectively has no laws. The economy is fake. The currency is fake. It has no common culture. It has no common religion. It has no common language. There is zero respect for the law or the founding documents by the ruling criminal cartel. What exactly makes us a country? I see absolutely nothing.
“What exactly makes us a country?”
From the perspective of our federal overlords, this country is approaching the big government perfection that has been the objective of politicians since Hamilton first moved us toward empire, and Lincoln and the Radical Republicans advanced the federal hegemony against the interests of the states. State governments have been largely complicit as well. The South, of course, was forced to remain in the Union by force of arms, and only allowed to “return” to the Union (the one they supposedly could not leave) after they wrote new constitutions acceptable to the US government. The increasing centralization of power in Washington brough the states to line up like hogs at the federal money trough. Acceding to the popular election of US senators and not moving to counter the myriad instances of federal overreach decade after decade, has led us, like the proverbial frog in slowly warming water, to the boiling point we now face. The desired outcome is for us to capitulate our freedom for the “security” of a totalitarian socialist state.
Many of us, simply, will not comply. America is heading toward a de facto, if not de jure, Balkanization, with all the ugliness that implies. The United States have become the Divided Special Interests, with Big Brother pulling the strings and manipulating the factions and “useful idiots” needed to further advance federal hegemony as they further erode personal liberty. At some point (“…maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon…”) a state, or group of states or portion of a state will decide that the federal government has in fact committed, “a long train of abuses and usurpations,” which reduce it to the “absolute despotism,” which justifies revolution. I believe many totalitarian Democrats hope to provoke such a response as a pretext to a crackdown on the “MAGA Republican white nationalists” bugaboo they have conjured up, i.e., the rest of the country that doesn’t want to go along with their program. They should be careful what they wish for.
Lincoln himself upheld the right to revolution in 1848 when he stated, “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and to form one that suits them better. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may make their own of such territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority intermingling with or near them who oppose their movement.”
I believe the Founders would be appalled that we have tolerated oppressive federal power as long as we have, and that so many people today willingly embrace Big Brother.
Yikes.
Comment of the Day.
I was thinking a lot of what you said, but everything I typed was gibberish so I deleted it. Thank you for putting all of that into understandable form! I agree.
Thank you!
Chris and Stevevare correct.
Is this any attempt to hurt DiSantis as he is a better candidate for them Republicans than Trump? By indicting Trump, Democrats will hope the Trumplodytes will jump on this Trump band wagon, denting Di Santis and his chances to challenge Barack/Michelle Ob . . . erm . . . sorry . . . Biden’s reelection chances. DiSantis is far more eloquent, savvy, and serious than Trump but supporting almost identical policy platforms as Trump.
jvb
John, that’s exactly what I think. They have to know that a chickenshit indictment like this will put wind in Trump’s sails just as he’s losing steam. His recent unprovoked attacks on DeSantis make him look weak and already beaten. This is just what he needs to re-energize his base, which has been showing signs of restlessness and a willingness to jump to DeSantis.
The Democrats feel somewhat confident they can beat Trump again (or at least prevent him from winning). They know that nobody in their party today is likely going to be able to beat DeSantis. Is it so far-fetched that they’d do something like this to give Trump a boost that would help him in the Republican primaries?
This will open the door fir other indictments including the Georgia election prosecution and the January 6th cases.
jvb
It could also open up the door for the indictment of Biden and a lot of other Democrats later on. It could also open the door for Trump to become the Nelson Mandela, or more likely the Eamon de Valera, of the American right. It’s unwise to try to destroy a movement or a political party, unless you are ruthless enough to destroy it completely or unless you can make it lose its support. Individuals lose support, true. Nixon was so far the only president to step down mid-term because of it, but the other one-term presidents can attest to it. There are a few Senators, Congressmen, stare legislators, mayors, and governors who have seen their support tank and ended up behind bars or pushed out. Cuomo was the latest to see that happen. In the end, though, he was just one more establishment Democratic politician trying to push things a little farther left. He was not a transformational figure, and ultimately his hypocrisy destroyed him.
The Afrikaaners thought they’d ended the ANC when they threw Mandela into prison. The British thought they’d put an end to Irish independence when they executed most of the leaders of the Easter Rising and threw De Valera and Collins into prison. The thing is, their support never wavered. You can look up what happened later. You can also look up the folks that did that. Is THAT the company the American Democratic Party wants to be in?
Is Trump going to go to NYC and surrender? Why? Why not stay in Palm Beach? He’d have to be arrested by local police, jailed, and then extradited to New York. Wouldn’t that make for great film. It would all take weeks. He’d have to sit in a Palm Beach County jail or be released (under a bond? ROR?) with an ankle bracelet. He could be transported to New York in his own plane, accompanied by officers from New York and his Secret Service detail. Will his Secret Service detail get adjoining cells? Are the Dems planning on having Trump executed while at Rikers like Epstein?
Does the District Attorney for the County of New York have the right or capacity to prosecute alleged federal crimes? I don’t understand the jurisdictional situation at all. Isn’t he limited to enforcing New York state laws? Is there a New York state law prohibiting settlements with sketchy people by sketchy people?
Oh, Trump knows going to New York makes him look innocent and heroic. This is right in his wheelhouse. I’d play it that way too.
Added: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/03/18/are-democrats-deliberately-making-trump-a-martyr-to-boost-him-with-gop-voters-n1679583
This is all so preposterous. Isn’t this a misdemeanor? If he’s convicted, won’t he get probation? Isn’t Bragg opposed to the White House to prison pipeline? Isn’t there some sort of diversion program for first time former president offenders?
I still think someone is going to sit on Alvin Bragg and prevent this going any further. Maybe Hochul at the direction of Susan Rice.
The risk, of course, is that this could put enough wind in Trump’s sails, assuming he beats the rap, to put him over the top.
That said, I seem to remember a lot of people on the left saying that both of the presidents from the Bush family should have been in jail for crimes against humanity or some other offense. Back then I thought it was what it was, overheated rhetoric posted on the internet by idle people boosted along by the anger industry of the early 2000s. Nowadays, who knows? Folks might actually try to put other presidents in jail too.
That’s the problem when increasingly overheated rhetoric becomes the norm rather than the province of the outlier. It’s the downside of the internet and social media. Anyone can say pretty much what he damn well pleases and send it around the world to like-minded and opposition alike in a matter of a few seconds. For most of GWB’s presidency, the only way that you could spread information or opinion on the internet was by email or by posting on bulletin boards. A lot of bulletin boards had rules against politics or overheated rhetoric. You could also avoid these places if you chose to.
With the advent of social media, everyone, including government agencies and public officials, got its own little page on the internet, and everyone’s reach became the entire world. What’s more, your ability to say whatever it was you wanted to say was not subject to the rules of bulletin boards, and subject to almost no regulation except nebulous “community standards” which were whatever the people who ran Facebook and Twitter decided they were in the moment. It also meant that the like-minded could get in touch and gather. As long as they weren’t naked hatred or promoting violence, they were fine, and eventually the people running these utilities decided that it was perfectly all right to use their utilities to promote violence as long as it was the right kind of violence.
These days, it’s impossible to get away from political discussion, almost impossible to avoid overheated rhetoric, and extremely difficult to be able to view anything through any lens except the lenses of politics and activism. For the last few years this has also been viewed as a good thing.
Frankly, it’s almost become the kind of cult-like state religion that was promoted in Maoist China and the early Soviet Union, combined with the omnipresence of the god of Islam or Orthodox Judaism. In Maoist China the first phrases children learned included “long live Chairman Mao!” Today the woke teach them land acknowledgments. In the early USSR, children who showed the proper attitude toward the superstitions of their elders were rewarded with a red scarf that supposedly signified good citizenship. Today teachers put pride and anarchist flags in the classroom and take down the stars and stripes lest anyone be uncomfortable. In Orthodox Judaism, it is customary to keep one’s head covered both for modesty and as a reminder that God is always on top of you. In Islam, it is customary to pray, at a minimum, five times a day, at sunrise, midday, afternoon, sunset, and nightfall, each time reflecting on how you are using your day in the service of God, resulting in the religion and its principles never being very far from your thoughts. Today, you are bombarded almost every time you look at television or turn on your computer or look at your phone with the message that Everything Is Racist and You Must Be Anti-Racist in All You Say and Do. So racism and the question of what you are doing about it can never be far from your thoughts, and you can’t be allowed to forget those issues for even a few minutes.
I think at one point I mentioned my grandmother’s book of the lives of the saints which I keep in her memory. It included daily devotionals to each of the saints and generally for each day. There was always the question at the beginning of each day what you would do in the service of God and the question at the end of how had you best served God that day. It wouldn’t surprise me if soon the internet providers add the questions of how will you be anti-racist today and what did you do today that was anti-racist to the page that pops up whenever you bring up your Internet search. The scouts used to say “do a good turn daily.” Before long the national slogan may be “fight racism every minute of every day.”
If that is the nation we are headed to, it should come as no surprise that a lot of folks would rather have Trump in charge.
Thank you all for your thoughts. I have been thinking about this looming indictment quite a bit since yesterday, wondering what to make of it. I appreciate very much the perspectives you have offered.
The political left has completely lost their mind over this foretold Trump indictment.
Read what this wackadoodle wrote: Inciting Protest Over Arrest, Donald Trump Again Seeks To Undermine Rule of Law
I posted the following comment but I’m sure it won’t make it through moderation because he has defacto banned me:
If Trump has actually broken the law then prosecute, but it sounds like there was a literal, show me that man and I’ll find you the crime kind of pure partisan witch hunt and they think they have found some obscure way of bastardize the law to pin some kind of “Mickey Mouse alleged crime” (Alan Dershowitz) felony on Trump, something that has never been done before.
I left this reply.
If the idea of using dubious legal theories to obtainn indictmentsd looks familiar, it is because it has been done before.
https://ethicsalarms.com/2014/08/17/ethics-dunces-abc-news-jonathan-karl-and-the-sunday-morning-roundtable/
I actually linked to an onli forum post where people were actually defending the indictment.
The whole “Patying off Stormy Daniels was a campaign contribution” was bullshit from the get-go.
Here is a tweet on this issue.