Why Trump Should Go Free
A former liberal explains that regardless of what leftist haters may think, The Donald really is above the rule of law. [Satire]
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Come on, Y’all. Let’s face it
Donald Trump has made more money for the media than any other president in history. The media breathed life into his candidacy before he was even elected. CNN alone raked in $100 million more than forecast during the 2016 presidential election. The media also made money by covering every sneeze, belch, and pimple of his presidency, including his two impeachments. And they’re making even more money now that a grand jury in New York has indicted him.
Since his arraignment for the alleged falsification of business records, legal scholars have joined the pundits and clowns of late night TV to float theories on whether the charges brought by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg will stand up in court.
The more people talk about Donald Trump, the more money the media makes from him. He is the cash cow par excellence of the 24/7 news cycle, the sine qua non of ratings-driven wealth. And because of that, he has acquired a Teflon coating that surpasses even Ronald Reagan’s.
In Reagan’s case, Teflon referred to the ability to avoid blame. Trump, on the other hand, gets blamed for everything from mocking the disabled to inciting insurrection. But no effort to hold him accountable for the things he’s blamed for has ever succeeded. Nor should it.
Here are 4 key reasons why any and all criminal charges against the former president should be dropped.
1. Presidents should be immune
Legal scholars are quick to point out that Article 1, Section 3 of the Constitution makes it clear that Presidents can be arrested, tried, and convicted for violations of the law. They mention that Vice Presidents Aaron Burr and Spiro Agnew were indicted and even President Ulysses S. Grant was arrested for speeding in a horse-drawn carriage.
What these people forget is that President Gerald Ford changed all that in 1974 when he pardoned Richard Nixon before he could be indicted and stand trial for crimes committed during Watergate. In doing so, Ford set a precedent based on his belief that putting a former president on trial would tear the country apart.
That precedent has stood for nearly 50 years. This is similar to the legal concept of stare decisis, a Latin term that means “stand by things decided.” It is now an established precedent that the president should be immune from prosecution. Not because he hasn’t done anything wrong—but because it would be bad for the country.
2. The judge hates him
How is it fair that Judge Juan Merchan will preside over Trump’s hush-money trial? It was Merchan who oversaw two other recent trials that found Trump’s real estate firm and his former CFO guilty of tax fraud. Judge Merchan will also preside over the criminal money-laundering trial of Trump’s associate Steve Bannon set for November of this year.
Steve Lubert, co-author of Judicial Conduct and Ethics, has suggested that Administrative Judge Eileen Biben should preside over Trump’s hush-money trial for two reasons. 1) To show proper respect for Trump as former president, and 2) because the optics of Merchan as judge in yet another Trump case look bad and risk further inflaming his supporters.
3. All prosecutions led by Democrats are inherently political
It don’t take no genius to know that half of America hates Trump—and most of them are Democrats. Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg is a Democrat. So is Fani Willis, the Fulton County DA investigating Trump for trying to influence the 2020 election results in Georgia. Another Democrat prosecuting Trump is New York Attorney General Letitia James, who heads up a $250 million civil fraud case against Trump, his three eldest children, and the Trump Organization.
Two remaining criminal investigations concern Trump’s handling of classified documents and his role in the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Jack Smith, who heads both, is registered as an Independent. Does it matter that he was appointed by the Biden administration? It shouldn’t. But once again, those darned optics tell a different story.
What comes across in all these investigations is a sense that the Democrats are hellbent on getting Trump no matter what. They’re really angry that he defeated Hilary Clinton in 2016, depriving them of an Obama 2.0 administration with the potential to appoint three left-leaning Supreme Court justices.
And they believe Trump wouldn’t have won without Russia’s help. Dems don’t like his plain-speaking style, the way he connects with regular God-fearing Americans who love the country as much as he does.
As long as that historic Democratic disdain is present, it’s hard to convince a disinterested party like me that they’re not trying to keep him from regaining the Oval Office—by weaponizing the judicial system. And that ain’t right. It just ain’t right.
4. The Clintons are free
Bill Clinton could have been indicted in 2001 for making misleading statements about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. But he wasn’t. That’s because he finally admitted to lying under oath, paid a $25,000 fine and had his law license suspended for five years. But he wasn’t indicted.
Ask anyone who knows the truth if Hilary Clinton should be in jail, and they will give you a list of everything she’s done wrong. From the 33,000 deleted emails, to the Uranium One conspiracy theory, to using her position as Secretary of State to peddle influence and illegally enrich the coffers of the Clinton Foundation.
What they may not tell you is that two special prosecutors appointed during the Trump administration investigated all of these allegations and found nothing of substance. That is why both John Huber and Michael Horowitz failed to indict her after more than two years of investigations.
There’s a good chance that half the country either does not know this or does not remember it. But that don’t change a thing. Cause everybody knows deep down inside that Slick Willie and his wife are guilty.
Perception is reality
When it comes to a court of law, you need evidence. And there’s a very good chance at least one of the Trump investigations will provide it. But even if he is found guilty, he should not go to prison. Because it would destroy the country. Half the nation would never accept it.
Gerald Ford was right. It would be wrong to put the country through an ordeal from which it might never recover. Incarcerating a presidential candidate supported by 8 out of 10 Republicans would harm the nation.
If he does go to trial and is found guilty, the jury should consider his service to the nation as Commander-in-Chief. They should also recall how he created Operation Warp Speed to fast-track the Covid-19 vaccine, saving millions of lives in the process.
And in light of these things, they should sentence him to time already served in the nation’s highest office. Which, when you stop to think about it, is really a kind of prison of its own.
©2023 Andrew ‘Jazprose’ Hill
Thanks for reading/listening
Hello Andrew. This is Matthew Thomas. Haven’t commented in a while - had a health scare but all is well now.
I enjoyed your column as always. I wish I could be as concise as you are in articulating my thoughts - I’m certainly no writer - but here goes.
This is not satire.
Absolutely you’re right the media was happy to both debase and promote Trump solely for his ratings value. CNN, MSNBC, FOX etc… made a ton of money off him and he in turn, received loads of money from them in the way of free publicity. The idiom ‘‘there is no bad publicity,” certainly applies.
Then, a funny thing happened on the way to the office…Trump actually got elected. Again, Trump proved to be a ratings bonanza. But then in 2019 Trump lost and without him to drive their news cycles, the networks ratings and earnings fell off a cliff.
But luckily for the networks, Trump is still hated intensely by his political opponents and hating him still pays big dividends for both them and the media. For example, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and NY Attorney General Latricia James ran their campaigns on the promise to indict Trump. They won. Bigly. Of course they ran in heavily Democrat districts but they convinced voters they hated Trump more than the other guy.
Trump remains the elephant in the Democrats’ brain. They are unable to get over their loss to him. It’s no secret that the Democrat elite wants to kill him politically by any means necessary, destroy his family and, as Rome did to Carthage, sow his fields with salt. Carthago Delenda Est. So, the indictment of President Trump was predictable.
That a political party that controls the levers of power has indicted a former opposition president on spurious legal grounds and especially now that he’s the front runner in a new campaign for office, is terribly and horribly dangerous to our country. The President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele is correct when he recently tweeted, “Think what you want about former President Trump and the reasons he’s being indicted.
But just imagine if this happened in any other country, where a government arrested the main opposition candidate.
The United States ability to use “democracy” as foreign policy is gone.”
Trump, love him or hate him, won and was the president of OUR country. Politics is just another name for war without violence. Once, most all of us agreed with the axiom “you may have beaten us this time, but we’ll get you next time.”
When the personal is made political and the political made criminal, we’ve got a whole new paradigm to deal with. If and when the Democrats do this, the Republicans will reciprocate - and it’s already long since started.
The people pushing ‘the political is criminal’ both right and left, better be damn careful just exactly what it is they’re hoping to accomplish and exactly what their end game is. The media better wake up to the hostility they inflame for ratings and money.
We the people need to understand that Trump is not the reason, he’s just a symptom of our corrupted, power mad, win at all cost politics.
Democrats may believe they want to end six years of failure in getting Trump and what all he stands for and by extension, all those who support him. Trump understands this and uses it to further inflame when he openly states to his followers, “they’re not after me, they’re after you.” Democrats assumed that all they needed was character assassination to bring him down. Polls that show majorities believe that he is guilty of something as proof that he did something. Maybe it does, but throwing everything believed criminal at the wall to see what sticks has left a very bad odor that we are all forced to smell.
Republicans have made note of what the Democrats are attempting with the Trump indictment and have made their own calculations. Speaker McCarthy is laying the groundwork for the prosecution of the present Democrat administration. Committee chairman are already holding hearings to put on record what they think they know are indictable offenses of Biden, the Biden Administration AND Biden family. Gone are the days of leave my children out of it.
James Comer leads the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into the Biden family. According to Comer, everyone in Washington knew for decades that Biden was on the take - note how similar this is to Democrats’ and the intelligence agencies specious claim that people in the know knew that Trump was a Russian spy?
On March 16, Comer announced, “Today, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability issued a memorandum revealing new evidence resulting from the investigation into the Biden family’s influence peddling and business schemes. Subpoenaed financial records show that from 2015 to 2017, Biden family members – Hunter Biden, James Biden, Hallie Biden, and an unknown Biden — and their companies collectively received $1.3 million in payments from accounts related to Rob Walker, a Biden family associate … it appears that the Biden family… received the money obtained from…China… ”
There it is, spurious indictable offenses. And the Trump voters say “$1.3 million? They sold us out to Red China for a lousy million and a half? Hang the bastards.”
All this prosecutorial stuff is just the steak that sizzles. It’s toxic at best and exceedingly dangerous to all of us.
What should perhaps, concern us most of all, however, is that the government paid Twitter and leaned on Facebook and others to censor Trump supporters and the Hunter Biden laptop revelations just ahead of the 2020 election. That is fascism — the marriage of government and corporations. For if they censor one, they censor all.
That abuse alone should scare the hell out of us all and add one more reason to work together, respect one another, argue and debate our ideas and visions and at the end of an election cycle simply nod and say “you may have beaten us this time, but just wait until next time.” Otherwise, politics end and we’re left only with violence. I pray God these fools stop digging the hole that will eventually bury us all.
I always learn something when I read your articles. Thank you again!