Trump trial: hypocrisy and death threats not enough to dispel uncertainty
For the last few weeks, former president Donald Trump has been spending (most of) his days in a Manhattan criminal courtroom, metaphorically sweating through the trial regarding his hush-money payments to the adult film actress known as Stormy Daniels with whom he allegedly had an affair while his wife was pregnant with his child. Physiologically though, he has not been sweating, because it’s cold in there.
You can tell he’s anxious because he keeps attacking everyone involved in the case. The prosecutors and their families, the witnesses and their families, the jury and their families, and my personal favorite, the judge, and the judge’s daughter specifically.
Judge Merchan's unreasonable leniency
I invite you to imagine yourself in the position of the judge in such a case. You are looking at an individual who has personally threatened you, your health, your life, and the life of your daughter. I find two reasonable outcomes to this: One, you as the judge are outraged that someone would be so outright disrespectful and deal with the situation accordingly. Or, two, you are frightened enough to comply with the threats, because you do see this person as a threat.
Judge Juan Merchan, to my disappointment and frustration, has chosen a third option that I didn’t know was there. He expresses disgust and contempt, talks about how Donald is violating his gag orders to not threaten people, and proceeds to do nothing about it. Donald is getting little slaps on the wrist for each individual gag order. They had to have a whole separate hearing to determine the punishment would be a one thousand dollar fine for each of ten violations. Since then he has continuously continued to break the same rule, and another hearing has not been held or scheduled. If they deal with that at all, it might come up at sentencing time.
That honestly reminds me of a time I was 8 and my dad was explaining that he had caught me breaking the same rule five times. He asked me what i thought the punishment should be, and my response was, the normal punishment for breaking the rule one time, but times five. One for each violation. He laughed in my face. In his mind, the fact that I had broken the same rule a high number of repeated times over, constituted a new form of rule violation, and therefore a higher scale of punishment entirely. It may or may not have been appropriate in that situation, but that is a concept i believe should apply to this situation with Donald Trump.
His repeated violations of the very normal gag orders seemed to also inspire something somewhere about looking for details in procedural documents that could be misrepresented to, and misunderstood by, the public. Resulting in the disinformation campaign about how “President Biden tried to have [Trump] shot and killed during the ‘raid’ of Mar a Lago.”
What had happened was, the language authorizing “lethal force” in a SWAT raid is standard legal language that, when put into context, you can see it’s only for “appropriate situations,” like if the officers get shot at. That clause is always there. Trump is not special like he wants people to believe. President Biden did not “try to have him killed.” Which, by the way, that “raid” only happened because Trump held onto classified documents after leaving office, which you’re not allowed to do, because it’s a national security risk. Those documents have national secrets. If that seems like an overly-vague and somewhat suspicious idea, just think of how a corporation treats their trade secrets and all of a sudden the whole idea makes perfect sense. It’s the same thing.
Anyway, my key point here is that Trump is a huge hypocrite. His hypocrisy keeps happening faster and faster as he contradicts himself more frequently and about more things.
The core of what's bugging me right now
He frequently talks about how he’s not allowed to talk about how he’s not allowed to talk about the trial. I didn’t make a typo there. He is talking 1) about how he is not allowed to talk 2) about how he is not allowed to talk 3) about the trial. Yes. That’s what’s happening. He is complaining that he is not allowed to complain. He is saying he is unfairly prosecuted and persecuted, and that he’s not allowed to say that or talk about it, but he’s doing it as he says that.
So either a) he’s full of shit about being prosecuted unfairly, because they’re letting him say these things, b) he’s full of shit about the details of the gag order, which he has continually violated by making personal threats, and c) continues to threaten and intimidate almost everyone involved in the trial.
This is why I care so much about this stuff. Because the US’s legal system is, by and large, a joke. Everything is about money and if you have enough money you can play the court system to tie things up in your favor indefinitely. They had to have a separate hearing about how to handle his violations of the gag order and it was just a microcosm of the same “do-nothing court” that it was supposed to be a response to deal with.
The only result of him constantly interfering with the trial has been for the trial itself to go, “nah-ah-ah, you better not do that,” and they change literally nothing to enforce it.
The law is not supposed to be a fucking suggestion that you can choose wether or not you feel like following. For most people, that’s not how it works. For most people all it really takes is one drunken outburst in an airport terminal bar to put your life in the hands of the justice system for your foreseeable future. But for people with enough money to want everything they own to be solid gold, and not care about the logical implications of that, they can afford to do pretty much whatever the hell they want, up to and including being openly disrespectful in the courtroom, and the most justice we can reliably expect to see, is that he’s forced to be physically present in the courtroom, which is uncomfortable for him because it’s too cold in there, and he’s tired because he has to show up early in the morning.
Maybe the reports of the unusually foul stench coming from his bowels are a sign that he is indeed uncomfortable in there. And i’ll take that. Because as the days march on it has not become increasingly evident that he will face justice for this. And that is a sad thing.
The Voters
As the trial was starting, Gary Feldman opined that a lot of americans would follow this trial because it involves celebrities, politics and even sex. But that’s not what seems to have happened. Even given the high profile nature of the case, most people don’t consider it relevant to their daily lives. Because it isn’t. Trump supporters rarely pay attention to the shit he actually says or does, and the rest of us are just sick and tired of having to hear about him. But this stuff will have lasting impacts for years to come. It’s not just about Donald Trump and whether or not he wins the presidency again, it’s what he plans to do with it.
He outright said he would be a dictator for one day. No dictator ever cedes power willingly. If he’s a dictator for one day he’s going to be a dictator the whole time. And if you need to know more about the specific plan he has published to more or less overthrow the government, look up Project 2025.
If you wan a call to action from this post, it’s very simple. Vote for Joe Biden. Yes, he is old, yes he has occasional cognitive lapses in speeches, yes he is an establishment pawn. But a wannabe dictator he is not. And there are a lot of other criticisms we could make of Trump’s character, but to me the really important thing has always been the policies. And what few actual stances Trump takes on policy positions, they are bad for everyone. Biden could be better yes, but Trump could hardly be worse if he tried, and he does try.
Oh yeah, and Trump argued that he should be allowed to murder someone for no reason in public and get away with it, and the Supreme Court agreed with him. So there’s that too. I dunno about you but I personally wouldn’t vote for someone who said something like that, but I guess that’s just me.