I'm going to do even better. I'm going to give you Maureen Dowd's opinion column in today's NYT: [This won't answer your questions, as would the CBS News article that SunTrader gave you a link to. In fact, accurate answers to your questions are literally all over the net, along with an equal amount of disinformation. Of course it will take at least some education beyond grade school to know which is which. You are responsible for yourself. So whether you want answers to your questions, or just want to bathe in Trump's lies as a member of his ignoramus cult, is up to you. Accurate information is out there for any of us who want it. It's up to you.] From today's New York Times Holy Cow, 34 for 45! June 1, 2024, 7:00 a.m. ET Credit...Spencer Platt/Getty Images By Maureen Dowd Opinion Columnist WASHINGTON — At Nativity grade school, we grew up steeped in the lore — and gore — of martyrs. For their brave deeds and words, these men and women were stoned, crucified, beheaded, stripped of all their skin, shot with arrows and cooked alive on a red-hot griddle. So I’m a little surprised my siblings would somehow put Donald Trump in those martyrs’ sainted company. My sister and brother, disturbed by Trump’s constant chaos and slashing insults, saw their hopes for Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley evaporate. I called my Republican sibs Friday to see if hearing the word “guilty” ring out 34 times in a New York courtroom had finally severed them from Trump; they are, after all, children of a police detective. My sister, Peggy, said she couldn’t sleep all night. “You decided you can’t vote for a felon?” I asked. “I wasn’t going to vote for Trump,” she said. “But now I am because I thought this whole thing was a sham.” She tried to donate $100 to the Trump campaign, but so many people were contributing, she said, the site crashed. The campaign said it raised $52.8 million in the first 24 hours after the verdict on the Republican fund-raising platform. Peggy thinks Alvin Bragg, who boasted when he ran for D.A. that he had sued Trump 100 times while a federal prosecutor, conjured the crime by inflating the charges from a misdemeanor to 34 felonies because he was determined to bring down Trump. She’s furious the jury believed “that lying, stealing ass, Michael Cohen.” Like the CNN legal analyst Elie Honig, she questioned the judge’s small donation to a pro-Biden, anti-Trump political operation. How would Democrats feel if it had been a MAGA donation? And she feels sorry for Barron Trump, the former president’s 18-year-old son. “I couldn’t get to sleep,” she said. “I was dreaming that I was in jail after a sham court trial. I was thinking that if they arrest me, I’d be out of luck. My father’s dead and two of my brothers are dead. Who else would save me?” Holy Kafka! Trump’s line about how he’s being martyred for us always seemed risible to me, but I guess it works with some people, even some people close to me. My sister is not MAGA; she voted for J.F.K. in 1960, Jimmy Carter in 1976, Barack Obama in 2008 and wrote in Joe Biden’s name in 2012. But she thinks President Biden has declined significantly and should step aside for a fresh choice. She’s upset about paying over $100 for 10 items at the grocery store. And she is irked by the Democratic fervor to throw Trump in the clink. “They want to put him in jail three days before our convention?” she asked. “The man is surrounded by Secret Service. What will they do? Put him in a cell with four Secret Service guys around him?” She thinks that Alexander Soros and other Democrats who want Biden to call Trump “a convicted felon” over and over should be careful, given that Hunter Biden is going on trial in Wilmington, Del., on gun-related felony charges, including one that, as Trump’s lackeys have said about his own charge, is a paperwork violation. My brother, Kevin, said the moral of the story for Democrats is: “Be careful what you wish for.” “This reminds me of Republicans celebrating when they impeached Bill Clinton,” he said of Democratic glee over Trump’s conviction, predicting that the “farce,” as he called it, would give Trump a bump, as the G.O.P.’s pursuit of Clinton did for him. “The 12 jurors didn’t even have the decency to stay out long enough to show they had really considered it,” Kevin said. “You want to talk about election interference, take a look at this.” Unlike my siblings, I found the guilty verdicts bracing. A dozen Americans had finally sliced through Trump’s reality distortion field and said, simply, “You’re lying and cheating and it’s not right.” Even though the case was a stretch and not the strongest one against Trump, there was something refreshing about the jury doing what no one else around Trump has been able to do — not the inexplicably sycophantish Republican lawmakers, not the corrupt Supreme Court, not the slowpoke Merrick Garland. The jurors were not Trump’s peers because Trump has no peer in mendacity. But it was great to see the 12 just say no, you don’t slime your way into the presidency by having your creepy gofer pay off a porn star you slept with while your wife was home with a newborn and call it a legal expense. As Chris Christie told David Axelrod on the “Hacks on Tap” podcast, it may be more instructive to watch how the verdict affects Trump than how the verdict affects voters. Even though Trump has been styling himself as Al Capone — who also got brought down over bookkeeping sleaze — he seemed rattled by the verdict. A lifetime of slipping away from accountability made him think he was invulnerable. When Trump took the stage near his gilded escalator Friday morning — this time without Melania, who stayed far away from the Stormy trial — he kicked off his revenge tour with a scream of consciousness, pulling out all his old tricks. He summoned his favorite boogeyman, immigrants with darker skin, saying “millions and millions of people are flowing in from all parts of the world, not just South America — from Africa, from Asia, from the Middle East, and they’re coming in from jail and prisons and they’re coming in from mental institutions and insane asylums.” He said young men are pouring over the border, including terrorists, “from places unknown, from languages that we … haven’t even heard of.” He added, “It’s not like Spanish or French or Russian.” Migrants, he said, “are taking over our luxury hotels” and yet “our great veterans are living on the streets.” For Trump, the “thugs” were not the ones who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6; the “thugs” were the lawmakers who investigated the attack on Jan. 6. The master of Mar-a-Lago played the victim, saying the prosecutors were trying to destroy his life over “a legal expense.” Striking the martyr note, he said witnesses on his side were “literally crucified.” Anyone who isn’t a lickspittle must be cruelly belittled. Justice Juan Merchan is a “crooked judge” who “looks like an angel but he’s really a devil.” It’s remarkable to watch the luminaries of “law and order” contort themselves to undermine Trump’s conviction, dues for what Cohen called a “dumpster cult.” The party of law and order evidently doesn’t like any law it didn’t order. His puckered-up vice-presidential wannabe J.D. Vance evaded Wolf Blitzer’s best efforts to have him disavow Trump’s claim that we live in a “fascist state,” instead lamenting the effort to prosecute Trump for “a paperwork violation.” Speaker Mike Johnson called for the Supreme Court — “I know many of them personally” — to jump in and reverse the verdict. Trump, meanwhile, projected as always, deflecting criticisms leveled at him and boomeranging them onto Biden. Trump once more painted Biden, 81, as faltering and senile, ignoring the fact that he himself, about to turn 78 this month, has lost a few steps. The suzerain of dishonesty called Biden “the most dishonest president we’ve ever had.” Trump said we have a president and “a group of fascists” that are “destroying our country.” If Trump keeps railing about himself in apocalyptic terms, it could give Biden an opportunity. And Biden badly needs an opportunity. @MaureenDowd • Facebook [I'm going to surreptitiously slip this in, thinking you won't get this far --- obviously, I don't have much confidence in your abilities to think critically. One of the crimes that Trump was intending to cover up with false bookkeeping was his violation of Federal Election Law that he and Michael Cohen engaged in. You're likely unaware that Trump was named as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the indictment that, in part, sent Cohen to jail. Being unindicted would often mean that the prosecutor did not find sufficient evidence of a crime to justify indictment. That does not apply here however. Trump was not indicted by the DOJ for his violation of campaign law for an entirely different reason. Nevertheless the crime did not disappear. This crime committed by Trump, that he attempted to cover up, was, and is, real!]
My god some of you are so braindead. This place really is a political hell hole. No one gives two shits about DJT, just an excuse for some to shout their nonsense political views. I think I'm done with this place.
I don't see SunTrader's posts. You were correct on one count, Dowd's column - like so many others from your folks - doesn't really address anything factual or substantive about the charges or alleged crimes. It's all the same "bad orange man" stuff over and over. If the Feds had a chargeable offense for Trump I fully believe they would have brought it, but they didn't. The Feds had charges for Biden a few months back, but decided that he was too feeble to understand what he's doing and that a jury would feel sorry for an elderly man losing his faculties and they couldn't get a conviction - this is the guy you will be voting for to run the country later this year. You and your TDS friends could be provided with mountains of evidence clarifying all the legal issues with this case and you would still choose to take the Maureen route with flowing "orange man bad" as your mantra until the end of time. Trump took the high road in 2017 when he easily could have prosecuted Hillary and he said that it was wrong to chase down political enemies and prosecute them in the justice system. Biden has helped him learn from that mistake. You think he was an asshole 4 years ago... wait til next year. And now he has a LOT more people on his side after these shenanigans.
I know conservatives are pumped at the idea that trump will exert retribution and will do it with complete immunity. <sarcasm>Conservatives love America and the constitution and their platform isn’t just about sticking it to the liberals <sarcasm>
Trump has three more criminal cases, NY was the weakest. The Federal espionage one is the strongest ‘dead to rights’ one against him and has only not gotten to trial due to an inexperienced partisan loyalist judge he appointed slow walking the case. As a break in form, it’s the only judge he has not attacked in his rhetoric. At this point, your replies come across as disingenuous and characteristic of manipulative gaslighting. It’s a case study as why Mary Trump, states the appeal of Donald to loyalists is that “he gives them permission to be themselves for they are him.”