I’d imagine that continually sitting on the fence becomes uncomfortable after a while.
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The Right: “Immigrants are literal vermin and will kill you given half a chance”
The Left: “It’d be nicer to call people the name they want even if it’s not the one they were born with”
The Centre: “Both of you are so damn extreme, you’re basically exactly the same! 
”
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Finally accepting and understanding that not everything is good on one side and not everything is bad on the other side. Taking the best of both sides is such the obvious way to go but yet the rhetoric is always we have gone too far to go down the middle in American politics. Yea sure as if continuing to bark at the wrong tree will help anything.
What Trump did in the hush money case is clearly illegal, the law says it is, the majority of people say it is, including most Republicans, but then his Republican base backpedals and says, “Well, since it’s Donald…”
This points to the serious disease we have in this post-truth world, especially when politics in the United States is the topic.
Trump has been dividing and sowing discord and distrust all along. Politics. Judges. Lawyers. The great structures of our democracy. None of it can be trusted! Believe me. Listen to me…
I think it is ultimately in an effort to protect and preserve himself, but if we can just see it for what it is, it is crystal clear.
The man is a wrong ‘un and should be in jail. He is a fraud. He has ducked and dived his whole life. In a way it doesn’t matter if he’s just another crooked businessman (it does, but it’s not all that consequential).
But in this instance he has conned a sizable portion of the American public, and has made political discourse more toxic and more divisive than most have ever seen.
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Yeah, but they’re all the same so it’s ok.
I’m not 100% on the details. Is hush money the same as a non-disclosure agreement? Is the issue where the money came from, and not that there were payments?
Spot the Koolaid drinker.
Democracy is a fairly loose and poorly understood concept where @gasband comes from.
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This confuses me. You’ve responded to this thread repeatedly and made very clear that you don’t believe these charges against Trump are really that important and that Democrats are hyping them up for political reasons… but you don’t know the details of what the charges are?
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No.
The issue is that Trump concealed the provenance of the payments (by falsifying business accounts) and lied about it because he knew that he would be breaking campaign finance laws if all was revealed. That’s why he’s in court.
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To be fair, there are 34 discrete charges in that case alone. That’s a lot of detail to know.
Of course. I concede that. And gladly too because if this is how democracy looks like in the US and Europe which to me looks to be in the dumps, then I am rather happy with what I have.
Democracy doesn’t seem to be a properly understood concept even where US is concerned.
Its just strange to me to be so stubborn in the argument that these are exagerrated charges done for political reasons and then ask “is hush money same as an NDA?”
When you step back and look at the overall situation, the venality of the man is staggering. The majority of the charges would simply not have happened if he actually just paid the money in his personal capacity (only the ones that related to concealing an illegal act would persist). But he just had to find a way to make someone else pay, in the form of classifying payments as a business expense and violating campaign finance laws.
Of course, when you are accustomed to using charitable donations for your personal expenses, this must seem like penny ante stuff.
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Someone else always pays for him. It has been the modus operandi since his dad started him off with a fortune. He hasn’t learned any personal responsibility. He just doesn’t pay. Which is why his whole life a litany of lawsuits have followed him for not paying for contractors, goods and services.
Somehow this behavior is championed, and he is lauded as a self made man by half the population, but it’s just another example of how fraudulent he is, and has been, his whole life.
College. Military service. Charitable giving. Casino business. Real estate business. The lot.
He’s a fraud. But actually worse than that, as he has conned half the country and is doing his best to ensconce himself in the top seat again to scoop the rewards he is devising for himself personally. And obviously he wants to punish his perceived enemies too.
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You shouldn’t put the US and Europe together. They are a completely different kettle of fish.
And Europe is a mosaic of different political backgrounds and cultures anyway. In every country, democracy is understood and handled differently.
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Well, 3 of the 4 cases are related to crimes committed while president, crimes that a regular citizen would not have been able to commit without the access of the presidency, so that is a fairly accurate albeit meaningless point.
The one exception is this case he is in court for now, but even this is based on evidence only found as part of the muller investigation, which was predicated on his conduct as president (firing Comey without cause). There was an existing FBI investigation that touched his orbit, but it is not likely that would have got anywhere near this had Trump’s actions as president not forced DOJ’s hand.
The lesson here is not “Trump’s political enemies are coming for him because of politics”. It is that the arms of justice, typically reluctant to act in ways that can be perceived to be political, can be forced into action when someone is so brazenly criminal. And even then they give him enormous leeway not afforded to normal people in a desperate attempt to not appear political. But this is a conversation had on this thread 100s of posts ago. You made these claims then, were challenged on the factual basis of your assertions, you acknowledged you didn’t really understand the details of the cases and and seemed to accept the counter claims. And here we are, right back there denying the merits of cases that are self evidently justified to anyone who thinks looking at the details is a better idea that being ideologically committed to the middle ground of “both sides bad so lots of the criticism must be politics as usual”.
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This is a word used to describe him here now twice in a couple of days. Now think about one of the primary arguments made for his 2016 run - he is so rich he cannot be bought the way normal politicians are.
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Surely if anything, he’s been shown to be even cheaper than “normal politicians”…
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