Well, Now I HAVE to Vote for Him
If they can do it to Trump, they can do it to you.
I had been living my life these last two to three years, steadfastly ignoring federal level politics, turning up my nose at any and all mention of what the unhinged powers that be were attempting to do to Donald Trump as pay back for winning the 2016 election. (I mean, the audacity.) Not because I didn’t care about their evil doing, but because I care too much and can’t bear the nonstop news of it. But yesterday (Thursday), of course, it all rudely intruded into my life once more as I heard the news that the unhinged powers that be had successfully convicted the man of 34 counts of nebulous and difficult-to-explain crimes.
Excuse me for thinking that committing and being convicted of a crime is a fairly straight-forward process. There’s a law over here. You break the law. The police arrest you. You stand trial for breaking that law and you get pronounced guilty or innocent. But the thing that’s the most straight forward about this whole scenario is that the prosecutor and the lawyer and the judge and the jury knows quite unequivocally which law you broke.
The ways in which Trump broke the law seem quite “complicated” and “difficult to explain” according to news reports. So, this leads me to believe that Trump has not actually committed any crimes at all, that they know about or they would have got him for something a little more straight forward, and that this is all pay back for, well…winning that election. So now, doggone it, I have to vote for him. Because, you know, if they can do that to Trump, they can do that to anybody. And I can’t stand for that. Why? Well, because:
We get a little salty over here when Putin does it, you know. This should be a mainstream belief, but I guess it’s just not.
This is so annoying.
It’s annoying for me because I already have a complicated relationship with the idea of Trump as president to begin with, and I had just about made up my mind to vote for RFK this go around. I didn’t even vote for Trump in 2016! I voted for some third party schmuck back then, and woke up astonished the next morning to discover that Trump had won and leftists were completely losing their marbles over it.
When I first discovered Trump was running for the Republican nomination back then, I rolled my eyes and shook my head. Imagine my surprise at seeing him, immoral, profane, playboyesque fellow that he is, gaining steam with my fellow conservative Christians who wouldn’t shut up about Bill Clinton’s sexcapades. Anyway, Trump’s four years as president weren’t half bad, actually. We didn’t get into any new wars, direct or proxy. That was pretty great. He appointed some good Supreme Court justices.
Then 2020 and Covid happened. I fully blame Trump for allowing Fauci (who I hope will soon be held to account for all the whoppers he told during that time) to be the face of the pandemic response. I blame Trump for his part in enabling lockdowns, mask mandates and for Operation Warp Speed which paved the way for the Biden administration’s egregious and horrific attempt at mandating the vaccine by threatening people’s livelihoods. People lost their jobs if they didn't get it and some lost their health and/or their lives when they did.
And yet, I overcame all of that to vote for him for the first time in November of 2020. His part in the Covid debacle had not yet sunk in for me. But as Biden’s administration wore on with the mask mandates and the ever-present threat of yet another lockdown or some civil liberty of mine being withheld the longer I refused the vaccine, I realized that Biden had only built on the foundation Trump had laid. So, I blamed Trump.
I had hoped DeSantis would take the nomination, but that didn’t happen. He, at least, had a good track record on Covid.
After the primaries I thought, “You know, I could vote for Trump if he would just admit that the lockdowns and all the crushed civil liberties were a mistake and that they would never happen again.” But he didn’t do that. Instead, he doubled down on the great job he did during Covid with no reassurances, whatsoever, that a lockdown would never happen again. Adding insult to injury, after Roe vs. Wade was overturned, he started badmouthing pro-life legislation in the states.
I am an abolitionist when it comes to abortion. I will not be happy until unborn babies are afforded the same rights under the law as born people walking around right now. To hear the “most pro-life president we’ve ever had” talking in this fashion was obnoxious to me in the extreme.
To add insult to injury, the man didn’t pardon Snowden, Assange, or Ross Ulbricht when he had the chance. Who did he pardon instead? Rod freaking Blagojevich, the corrupt Illinois governor in prison for trying to sell Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat! He pardoned the swamp.
But they just couldn’t leave well enough alone, could they? If they’d just left it well alone, I wouldn’t be thinking the things I’m thinking now. Those unhinged powers that be began a campaign of political persecution so outrageous, they managed to and back their own selves into a corner. They’ve ruined it. They’ve turned me from a “don’t care” voter into a “you sniveling little cowards!” kind of voter. I don’t really love Trump, but I despise the entire passel of bullies who concocted this absolute sham of a trial. Now I feel like I have to vote for the guy because this sort of political intimidation absolutely cannot stand. Imagine this in the future! At every change in power, we’re seriously going to put the opposing power in prison because… “reasons?”
I don’t think so. And I’m definitely not alone in my thoughts here. In one of Matt Taibbi’s recent pieces, Ding, Dong, the Witch Still Leads the Polls, he stated:
What do these people imagine will happen now? Where do they believe Trump voters will go? Do they think the anger that drove his campaign in the first place will evaporate? Do they realize Trump surged ahead in all the battleground states during this trial? Don’t they see where this is headed?
No. Washington pols always see elections through a rearview mirror, imagining candidates create supporters, not vice versa. It comes from the belief that voters are sheep and have no beliefs beyond what their political betters instruct them to feel. Therefore, one controls them by controlling leaders. But Gene McCarthy didn’t surge in 1968 by convincing people to oppose the Vietnam war. Voters were there. Buchanan and Perot didn’t inspire bitterness about the loss of manufacturing jobs, the unemployed did, and Bernie Sanders in 2016 didn’t invent post-bailout blue frustration. Voters lead the way. Politicians arrive to take advantage. It’s always how it works.
I read through his comment section and found example after example of just this sentiment.
I’m sure it would be frustrating to these people to know that folks are now referring to them as the vile, racist Confederates firing on Fort Sumter, but what this Kirsch says above helps remind me that all of this is so very familiar. That’s because something like this has happened to my husband. Something resembling it, though many magnitudes in severity below what Trump is dealing with right now. In Jonathon’s guest post here last week, he wrote about the pay back the SC Republicans exacted from him via the “Ethics Committee.”
Rocket Therapy
Good morning, friends! I have been so busy making my niece’s wedding dress, that I found myself extremely behind on practically everything else. So, sweet man that he is, my husband agreed to write a guest post for me. I have hinted here and there, about the toll politics took on Jonathon and me, with promises to write about it later. But this is much b…
They didn’t like the light he was shining on what they were doing in office so they used the long, winding and circuitous language of the Ethics Act, which is extremely easy to run afoul of due to the confusing nature of the thing, to nab him. (The confusing nature of it is a feature, not a bug.) They charged him with over a hundred ethics violations, because, you know, that looks exciting in a news headline. They were forced to drop all but twelve and the twelve were accounting errors, not deliberate attempts to mismanage campaign funds. Those little facts never made it into the headlines, though, oddly enough.
Now, granted, my husband is miles and miles high above Donald Trump in personal integrity and morality. But I can still smell a hack job, and frankly, justice is not only for the moral, it’s for everyone. And I can’t abide justice being used as a hammer against political opponents.
The comments continue…
There are a lot more.
And my personal favorite…
Look, you don’t have to love Trump. I am far from his biggest fan. But if you don’t want the jailing of political dissidents to become the new status quo, you better speak up now.
One last thought…
Our criminal code is vast. You have committed a crime. You probably don’t even know you have, but I can guarantee that you have. Nobody cares right now, because you’re not important. You’re small fry. You don’t have the ability to make waves or cause trouble. But if you ever do get to the point where you’re making waves and causing trouble for powerful people over, say…climate activism or some marginalized group’s rights… All those powerful people have to do is go combing through your tax returns, find the violation, and throw your butt in jail.
Because if they can do it to the orange man, they can do it to you.
That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…
P.S. If you enjoy reading what I write, please consider upgrading your subscription from free to paid so this newsletter can keep humming along without a hitch. Please and thank you. I’ll see you back here next week, everyone.
Trump is guilty, plain and simple. He created the problem (by sleeping with a pornstar when Barron William was 3 months old), had his crooked lawyers clean it up (he only surrounds himself with crooked lawyers), then went on to brake three more laws by lying about it, denying it and deliberately covering it up. The justice system worked alright this time. The judge is not crooked, the prosecutor is not and the jurors are not. However, not unlike the officers doing their jobs January 6, the well-being of each of those jurors will most definitely be in jeopardy from now on.
A common false argument about the Trump convictions is that the charges against Trump were "obscure" and "entirely unprecedented."
On the most basic level, this is false.
The same office has prosecuted dozens of cases of first-degree falsification of business records over the last 15 years.
It's the bread and butter of the Manhattan DA.
It is true that prosecuting someone for falsifying business records to conceal a campaign finance violation is uncommon — but that is because the crime itself is uncommon.
There are not that many people who run for political office in New York who also run their own businesses. And even fewer who falsify business records as part of a conspiracy to conceal violations of campaign finance law to help them win.
The idea that the prosecution is unusual is important only if it suggests that the government routinely lets others get away with similar conduct. There is no evidence suggesting that this is true.