• superkret@feddit.org
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    5 days ago

    Interesting.

    When a rich man is sentenced to prison, and then actually has to go to prison, it’s called a “legal loophole”.

    • Miles O'Brien@startrek.website
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      5 days ago

      My first thought was “So we call ‘following the law’ a loophole now?”

      If the law meant a fucking thing, he would have been in prison decades ago.

        • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          In a word: Garland.

          In two words: Merrick Garland

          In three words: fucking Merrick Garland

          In four words: fucking Merrick “Slowclown” Garland

          In five words: establishment hack as attorney general.

        • winterayars@sh.itjust.works
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          5 days ago

          'The voters are going to reject him and then we don’t have to go through all this messy business if prosecution."

          It’s the moral elevation of inaction for its own sake above action for any reason.

    • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 days ago

      Its stronger on reddit. Front page is filled with “Biden should resign and make Kamala the first woman president to ‘break the glass barrier’” and “Biden should appoint Kamala Harris to the supreme court” and “Biden shoud make an official act to do X”.

      • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        I mean. Rationally speaking, shouldn’t Biden do something extreme at this moment?

        This is one core problem Kamala had. Her message was “Donald Trump is a Nazi,” yet the entire Biden administration never treated him like some existential threat to Democracy.

        You know all those hypotheticals about killing Adolf Hitler? Notice how no one ever discusses the legality of killing Hitler? It’s all discussions of temporal mechanics or the ethics of punishing someone for a crime before they commit it. No one ever says, “no, you obviously shouldn’t kill Hitler before he comes to power, as that would have been against German law.”

        Realistically, if Kamala’s rhetoric is factual, Biden should have had Trump arrested on day one of his term, charged in a military tribunal for treason, and convicted and sentenced before the first 100 days were complete. The debate should have been whether to give Trump the death penalty, not whether he had presidential immunity. And what about the Supreme Court? What ABOUT the Supreme Court? Did the Allies give much credence to whatever bullshit rulings the Nazi courts issued? Trump should have been pounded into the dirt, and any SCOTUS justices who dared to intervene should have been charged as accomplices. And anyone remotely involved in the plot should have been similarly purged from civil society. We should have seen hundreds, maybe even thousands, of life sentences.

        THAT is how you respond to a threat to democracy. You find absolutely everyone involved and throw the book at them. You move quickly and run roughshod over normal judicial procedure. Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus and imprisoned people for running pro-Confederate newspapers. That is what you have to do in times where democracy is truly threatened.

        Does Biden actually believe Trump is literally another Adolf Hitler? Then logically, if that is literally true, then Biden should order the military to take him out. Hell, he should do whatever is necessary, upend the entirety of American democracy, become a full dictator if need be. Better a centrist dictator than a Fascist one. In other words, if Trump is literally Hitler, than Biden should be acting right now like our hypothetical time traveler.

        • WoahWoah@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          In response to a post highlighting examples of pointless, hyperbolic copium, this guy walks in and says, “hold my beer” and then advocates for Biden to (“logically”) launch a cruise missile at Mar-a-Lago. OMG I’m dying 🤣

          • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            “Logically” in the sense that this is the actual logical response, if you take the Biden/Harris rhetoric at face value.

            I mean, maybe if you yourself are a Nazi, then you see nothing wrong with letting Nazis in power. But for sane people, if you actually believe someone to be Hitler, then you should do whatever is necessary, damn the law and Constitution, to keep them out of power.

            The point is not that this is objectively what Biden should do now. The point is that it is IF you assume Harris’s rhetoric is correct, then flagrantly violating the Constitution to keep him out of power is something that should be done. However, realistically, Trump is someone more like Orban or Putin. He does seek to degrade democracy, deport a lot of people, and purposefully immiserate targeted minority groups, but he’s not likely to get the Zyklon B off the shelf any time soon. He’s a monster, but realistically probably not quite at the level of someone like Hitler.

            And this is the problem Harris had in the campaign. If you run on a campaign of “my opponent is Hitler,” the voters will rightfully ask, “well, why hasn’t your administration already turned him into a fine mist?” You don’t put Hitler on trial. You kill Hitler. Running on “my opponent is Hitler,” when you haven’t treated him like you logically should treat Hitler, shows you really don’t believe your own rhetoric.

            • Dasus@lemmy.world
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              4 days ago

              You’re doing a bit of a strawman.

              “My opponent is a fascist” =/= “My opponent is Hitler”

              Did Harris talk about Trump being a literal copy of Hitler who will genocide millions of people in death camps, or did she assert he’s a fascist and a very real threat to democracy?

              Because your rhetoric really only works if you know for a fact that Trump is a literal Hitler. We all know him to be a literal autocrat though.

              flagrantly violating the Constitution to keep him out of power is something that should be done

              So break democracy to save democracy? Ends justify the means? Hindsight is 2020, so if someone tossed you in a timemachine and you found yourself in the 1920’s, you could have the confidence to actually kill Hitler without any qualms, because you’d know what would happen. But no-one has that. We can confidently say Trump is a demented child-rapist who will fuck shit up and make things worse for everyone except his oligarch friends (which very much includes Putin.) We don’t know how bad it’s gonna get, but it’s clearly a downhill the world is facing with a US president like that.

  • Asafum@feddit.nl
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    5 days ago

    Yeah fucking right. Jesus Christ. We need to just accept that it’s over. He’s never going to face any consequences and NY is not sending anyone to the White House to drag him out…

  • Stovetop@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Fun to think about, but I can promise that Trump will never see consequences for his actions. Everything just miraculously slides right off of him.

  • abracaDavid@lemmy.today
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    5 days ago

    This country will never, ever prosecute a president because it would set a precedent of holding our politicians accountable. Ain’t happening. We’ve all been watching Pelosi do insider trading for decades.

    • Nick@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Except he’s already been prosecuted and found guilty. This is the sentencing. Now the question is will New York state sentence and imprison him before he takes office.

      • Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works
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        4 days ago

        It’s gonna be interesting because we are clearly at a level of manipulation where the sheer act of being held accountable will 100% be called persecution. From here on out any attempt to hold a politician accountable will be met with resistance and end up being theatre.

      • SailorMoss@sh.itjust.works
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        5 days ago

        He’s just not going to show up and will stay in FL till after inauguration. If you think they’re going to hold politicians to the same standard as you and me you’re incredibly naïve.

  • Furbag@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    You know how I know this is bullshit? Because even if Trump got the maximum sentence for each of his felony counts, which is three years of prison, they can all be served concurrently, so he would be out by November 2027 with more than a year left of his term.

    If Judge Merchan proceeds with sentencing, Trump’s legal team will just appeal and push it back until after Jan 20th.

    Nice wishful thinking, but Trump winning erased the chances of him ever being held accountable for his crimes against the American people. A majority of Americans felt like he should get away with all of it. On day one he will appoint a sycophant to the DOJ who will drop all of his federal cases, and the state cases will get paused because the President is immune from state prosecution while on office.

    If anybody here wanted to see justice done, you should have shown up on the 5th.

      • volvoxvsmarla @lemm.ee
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        5 days ago

        I’m from Germany, so my exposure to US politics is limited (yet still way too much). So, I happened to watch/listen to the new york times podcast interview with vance about 1-2 weeks before the election. Mind you, before that I assumed he was an awkward idiot because all I knew about him was the doughnut thing, laughing at his own joke, and the couch thing. So I basically only tuned in to hear that weird ass man speak for once.

        Apart from the shitty interviewer, I was shocked to find that he would charm me every couple of minutes. Saying people change their minds, people make mistakes, explaining where he is coming from, talking about his wife. This was not who I expected. And I had to remind myself a couple of times: this dude is up to no good. Listen to what he is not saying. Don’t get sucked into this madness.

        But damn he sounded so normal. So human. (Especially in contrast to the stuff I heard about him before.) And since then, I am honestly worried about this guy. I am definitely on the left spectrum politically speaking, and I still found some stuff relatable just by the way he talked. This scared me so much.

        So I agree with you, I think he is an opportunist. And he actually knows what he is doing. I think he knows how to act and speak much better than the left US media tried to portray. They try to ridicule someone who is a very elaborate politician, and this can backfire so much, it’s dangerous. Don’t ridicule the devil in power. I believe if he wanted to, he could wrap a lot of people around his finger.

        • mm_maybe@sh.itjust.works
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          4 days ago

          If you look at the election prediction history graph on Nate Silver’s substack, you see an upwards trajectory for Trump/Vance ever since the vice-presidential debate. That was also when the “Republicans are weird” narrative that was working so well for Harris/Walz abruptly left the discourse. And I believe that what happened was that Republicans who were embarrassed by Vance as well as Trump had a moment like you describe where he suddenly didn’t seem so unrelatable and that right there sunk the Dems… as much as it pains me to admit it, because I’d much rather have a party that wins on the issues and communicates clearly how insane and risky it was to vote for literal autocracy, the Harris campaign probably made the wrong choice with Walz and never should have stopped mocking Republicans for being “weird.”