The Convictions of Donald J. Trump: lol

[boredsocial]

I thought the Vornado partnership had already wrapped up? I’m also not at all sold that he isn’t effectively bankrupt and living hand to mouth every second of every day… and that a trustee will prevent a lot of the crime that makes it possible to keep up appearances.

[McTrollson]

All Trump has to do is delay legal consequences until after the election. Of course, if he loses, he’s cooked.

[Surf]

@MrWookie

It isn’t some new media meme that real Americans are rural white folk. That idea dates back to 1776.

But the interesting thing is now the median white rural people are poor living off government entitlements but have been tricked that Rs represent their interests

[TheHip41]

@McTrollson

All Trump has to do is delay legal consequences until after the election. Of course, if he loses, he’s cooked.

Narrator:

He wasn’t cooked.

[goofy]

@MrWookie

Well, for one, North Dakota, Alaska, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Texas are all in the top 15 states of GDP per capita.

What’s Nebraska’s story? The other four all have oil/coal right?

[MrWookie]

Was wondering the same thing. Figures like it’s got to be oil at least in part.

[Surf]

@goofy

What’s Nebraska’s story? The other four all have oil/coal right?

Berkshire Hathaway?

[MrWookie]

Their main interest is the racial hierarchy! It’s more important to have someone to look down on than it is to have an American dream lifestyle.

[Surf]

@MrWookie

Their main interest is the racial hierarchy! It’s more important to have someone to look down on than it is to have an American dream lifestyle.

My thesis is race is more a red herring as far as the actual structure of the government which is based on economics. The government is structured to favor “plantation owners” and Rs have tricked rural whites into thinking their race means they are in the plantation owner class. Over next 100 years will see more and more non-white “plantation owners” and the government will continue to favor them over rural whites.

[boredsocial]

I’m actually not surprised by Nebraska. It’s very developed. The agricultural operations are mostly the large scale commercial ones that generate good GDP per capita, Omaha is a real city, and yeah Berkshire Hathaway is based there so that might be contributing in some accounting fashion.

Decent freight market meaning there are more shipments coming out of NE than going into it.

[commonWealth]

@Surf

@goofy

What’s Nebraska’s story? The other four all have oil/coal right?

Berkshire Hathaway?

With a population of 2M people, it’s quite plausible Berkshire is actually contributing meaningfully to the GDP per capita lol… Like I think it’s adding around $5K per capita, moving them from ~16th to ~9th. Although that’s if their total earnings are attributed to Nebraska, and they may not be.

[boredsocial]

I’m fairly confident they aren’t. If that were the case the state of Delaware would have the highest GDP per capita in the world.

[goofy]

Written by Michael from 5-4, a review of floundering pundit + law professor arguments who think Trump shouldn’t be kept off the ballot:

Enforcing the Law to Disqualify a Violent Insurrectionist Is Good, Actually

In the opening scene of The Wire, a distraught young man explains to a detective that his friend, Snot Boogie, had just been murdered because of his habit of stealing money from the weekend craps game. Something about the story did not make sense to the detective. “Every time?” he asked. “If Snot Boogie always stole the money, why’d you let him play?” The young man replied, “Got to. This America, man.”

The show played it for grim laughs, but two decades later—after officials in Colorado and Maine removed former President Donald Trump from their state primary ballots, an issue the Supreme Court will consider later this year—the Snot Boogie Theory has been gaining traction in academic circles, and not just among stoned freshmen during late night bull sessions. Sure, Trump may have suggested the 2012, 2016, and 2020 elections were all rigged, and may already be claiming the 2024 election is rigged and threatening violence if he loses. And sure, the Constitution may say he is no longer eligible to be president as a consequence of his own actions. But, the argument goes, the country must nonetheless reckon with him at the ballot box once again. Got to. This America, man.

Of course, the voters writ large do not actually decide who becomes president, because the Constitution sets out plenty of rules limiting their discretion. For one recent example, the majority of voters preferred Hillary Clinton in 2016 by a margin of 3 million votes. The Electoral College is a particularly noxious anti-democratic feature of our Constitution, but curiously not one that generates a parade of editorials calling on the Supreme Court to write it out of existence. Similarly, Trump might not even be the favorite to win the Republican nomination were, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger eligible to run, but that is also forbidden by the Constitution, because he was not born in the United States.

The main difference between those restrictions on democracy and the insurrection ban seems to be that enforcing them right now does not risk inflaming an angry mob. This also betrays some thinking common in law and politics: the idea that there is a perfect way to do or phrase something that will not incite reactionaries. There are no magic words or magic processes to prevent right-wing reaction—not passing the Reconstruction Amendments, not passing the Votings Rights Act with large bipartisan majorities, not literally defeating them in a Civil War, and on and on. The only way forward is to fight them using every tool at our disposal, which includes holding them accountable when they break the law.

Making the Constitution and the rule of law contingent on not upsetting a right-wing mob is not saving democracy. It is ceding democracy entirely.

[goofy]

More Serwer on insurrection & the failure of other pundits’ arguments against it:

Gift Article: The Unwitting Trump Enablers

Earlier this month, the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat endorsed the liberal writer Jonathan Chait’s definition of insurrection as an attempt to “seize and hold the Capitol” or “declare a breakaway republic.” After I pointed out that this limited definition would exclude most insurrections in American history, Douthat tries a little historical research to distinguish the Whiskey Rebellion from the assault on the Capitol by insisting that the Whiskey Rebels’ use of “a six-striped flag representing claimed independence for five Pennsylvania counties” amounted to proof of the existence of an “incipient political formation in those western counties opposed to the authority of the federal government and the Constitution.”

This is a very thin reed for Douthat to hang his claim on, for a number of reasons. For one, as the historian William Hogeland notes in The Whiskey Rebellion, the six-striped flag “is unlikely to have been a flag of the rebellion—and might have been a regimental flag of the suppressing federal army.” The Whiskey Rebels made no declaration of secession, because the odd mix of radicals and moderates never developed a clear political program beyond violent opposition to the whiskey tax. It is strange for Douthat to insist on the importance of overt seditious declarations to the definition of insurrection and then, in his own example, fail to provide one. But at any rate, this definition continues to exclude many of the most famous insurrections in American history, from Fries’s Rebellion to John Brown’s seizure of Harpers Ferry.

As the writer John Ganz notes, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome, commonly described as an insurrection, did not culminate in a direct violent overthrow of the government. Rather, the violence and disorder from fascist militias persuaded King Vittorio Emanuele III to deny aid to then–Prime Minister Luigi Facta and appoint Mussolini in his place after Facta resigned. This was formalized within the existing political and legal framework, Ganz points out, even as the political violence provided the necessary external force. Mussolini was even sworn in by the king and took an oath to him and the constitution. Every counterrevolution imagines itself to be a restoration of a glorious past; that does not mean it is one.

We needn’t look abroad for examples of insurrectionary political violence that did not present themselves as the establishment of an alternative order, however. The 1898 coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, in which white-supremacist Democrats won office by terrorizing Black voters away from the polls, did not fundamentally change the structure of the local government. They “won” an election through force and fraud and then forced the local government to resign at gunpoint so they could be replaced. The false legalism was a crucial component of the assertion of legitimacy on the insurrectionists’ part; it did not mean that no coup had taken place. A coup does not cease being a coup because paperwork or procedure is involved; even deposed kings and emperors signed letters of abdication.

He also hilariously brings up a Douthat column from October 2020 describing a hypothetical coup (that he dismisses as fantastical and unrealistic) that was pretty fucking close to the one they actually tried:

Douthat understood exactly what a coup was, right up until the moment Trump attempted one. Once Republicans refused to convict Trump after January 6, and as Trump maintained his iron grip on the party faithful, it became necessary to forget. What is the alternative, after all? To acknowledge that the libs are right that the Republican front-runner is a tyrant in waiting who poses an existential danger to the constitutional order? This is how one ends up arguing absurdities, such as that violently disrupting the government’s ability to collect a whiskey tax amounts to insurrection, but trying to overthrow that government by force does not.

[Surf]

What the actual fuck, how the hell you going to think this going to go unnoticed when you prosecuting Trump
—-

A court filing from Joycelyn Wade, who is in divorce proceedings with the prosecutor, Nathan J. Wade, included what it said were statements for a credit card account belonging to Mr. Wade. The statements showed that he bought plane tickets for himself and Ms. Willis, including tickets to San Francisco from Atlanta purchased on April 25, 2023, and to Miami from Atlanta purchased on Oct. 4, 2022.

The release of the credit card statements follows a motion filed last week by Michael Roman, one of Mr. Trump’s 14 co-defendants in the Georgia case. That motion, which did not include any proof, claimed that Ms. Willis was having a romantic relationship with Mr. Wade that began before she hired him in 2021 to manage the high-profile case. The motion also stated that Mr. Wade, who has been paid more than $650,000 by the district attorney’s office, paid for vacations with Ms. Willis.

[goofy]

Willis should go to jail, she had one job of immense responsibility and fucked up cosplaying as Clarence Thomas

[Surf]

I’m really hoping the articles just making it seem worse than it is because I’m about to have a stroke about this. I mean we talking about a prosecutor literally trying to protect the institution of American democracy and can’t avoid doing corrupt shit. Like we can get a bunch of American kids to land on D-Day but we can’t get one fucking lawyer to behave for a couple years

[Surf]

@Jman220

What is the corruption? She was in a romantic relationship with a married man who had been separated from his wife for two years and they took trips together? That’s the corruption?

She hired a romantic partner as a government contractor? (That is what a special prosecutor is right? Maybe I just don’t understand)

[Jman220]

I deleted because I missed that piece of it.

[Danspartan]

She paid him roughly 1/4 of his going rate (I saw somewhere), so he was essentially losing money.