"I see nothing. I know nothing."
“I would tell you, in my four and a half years serving alongside the president, I never heard or witnessed behavior of that nature. And so, again, I have no knowledge of those allegations or the truth or veracity of them and I wouldn’t want to comment on a civil judgment.”
Mike Pence
If you see something, say something.But presumably sober people of discretion -- U.S. senators -- alone and in a time of their own choosing -- also volunteered opinions on Trump's behavior, and sided with him.
Senator Rick Scott said "He said he didn’t do it. I don’t know the facts. It’s a New York jury, too.”
Senator Marco Rubio said, "That jury’s a joke. The whole case is a joke."
Senator Tommy Tuberville said, “It makes me want to vote for him twice. They’re going to do anything they can to keep him from winning. . . . a New York jury, he had no chance.”
Senator Lindsay Graham said, "I think the New York legal system is off the rails when it comes to Donald Trump.”
Apparently there is nothing Trump can do that crosses the line of inexcusable behavior. Some part of the GOP electorate is positively thrilled with Trump, in all his norm-breaking alpha-male willfulness. It proves his strength and independence. That group intimidates the others who take a blind eye.
Republicans are in a difficult position. They must deny what they see. The January 6 riot must have been a false flag or just a few rambunctious tourists. The New York defamation trial must have been a stacked jury. Trump makes denial difficult. Trump says he proudly attempted to overthrow the election and to bully the Georgia Secretary of State and that he would pardon the January 6 rioters. He slut-shamed E. Jean Carroll.
This blog writes about Trump because Trump is the whirlwind shaping American politics. Not Biden. Not Schumer. Not McConnell. Not Fox. Trump is shaping the issues at the center of the national debate. That is OK. America can survive and prosper amid vigorous disagreement over policy.
Trump is doing something more consequential. He is normalizing lawbreaking. He is saying the rules of a mature republic are for losers and saps. The writers of the American constitution assumed leaders like Trump would come along. They also assumed that sober men of prominence and discretion would take notice and object. Ambition would check ambition. My dismay is that those presumably ambitious people have willful blindness and obtuseness. They are setting a new norm for America. Nothing is too much. A demagogue can get away with anything.
In Sioux Center, Iowa in January, 2016, Trump warned us:
I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.
[Note: to subscribe to the blog and get it delivered by email every day go to: https://petersage.substack.com Subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.]
12 comments:
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(David Bowie, 1971)
Conservatives, by definition, do not like change (unless, perhaps, it makes them rich or richer). They are very unhappy about the social, economic, global, religious, you name it, changes that have occurred since World War II.
Hence they are very, very angry. The former Occupant taps into the anger and feeds it, like an addict shooting drugs into a vein.
Apparently we will just have to wait until his health, age and the grim reaper catch up with him. Then we will see what happens.
Fortunately there still are some decent Republicans who are willing to speak the truth. Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney are two prominent voices, but there others.
Being a trial court judge for 21 years, I came to appreciate juries. People come to the courtroom, sometimes with a lack of enthusiasm, but when they commit to jury service by taking the oath to "well and truly try the matter" they commit themselves to fairness and justice. I often met with jurors after trials and I was impressed with their sincerity and the efforts they had made.
Not all juries get it right, but my experience tells me that most do. Even the OJ Simpson criminal jury may have gotten it right because of the flawed prosecution case, after all, the issue in that trial was whether the prosecution proved the allegations beyond a reasonable doubt. We all accept that the civil case got it right.
Because of my experience as a judge, I didn't form a final conclusion about the E. Jean Carroll case until the jury verdict, but now, even close associates of the defendant should, and, I argue, must agree that her case was proven and that the verdict has established the facts, or, at a minimum, has established that those are probably the facts.
US Senators who assert that a whole state's jury system cannot be trusted, cannot be trusted to be elected officials. Do they now distrust or call "a joke" the verdicts which convicted terrorists? What about all those people who now reside in New York's penal institutions?
The jury system is a corner stone of American democracy. It is where we go to have many factual disputes determined. Once a jury has reached a verdict, the facts have been determined. Of course, it is okay to say, "I listened to all the testimony and I read and watched all the exhibits and I would have reached a different conclusion." Those statements from US Senators you quoted are not okay.
If we are not going to have juries determine the facts in a dispute, how are we to decide? Do we want people like those Senators to make all our decisions, off the cuff, and without committing to "well and truly try the matter?"
Treat jury verdicts with respect.
When a person brags about doing something, it is hardly a stretch to believe that he did it.
The people who defend him and attack his victims should be deeply ashamed.
CNN royally screwed up allowing the town hall event to become a rally. Let's hope all the media learned a lesson from this. The only way to responsibly cover this candidate is as straight news, one on one interviews with with journalists who will challenge the lies head on and in detail.
Our history is replete with scoundrels who captured the attention and money of the crowd for a time. Most ended up in jail, dying penniless and in disgrace. That's a tough trend to buck.
Those Republicans who say they don’t like Trump and resent being tarred by him are clinging to a party that has no use for them and are as much in denial of the obvious as the majority of Republicans who claim the election was stolen. As Trump made clear on CNN, he’s still an abusive sociopath and compulsive liar. And as his fans made clear, they’re as crazy as he is.
I’ve heard supposedly rational conservatives blame everyone for the rise of Trump except those who voted for him: from “Globalist Elites,” the latest name for the old “Illuminati” conspiracy theory, to Democrats themselves. That’s right, you evil socialists – by electing a Muslim from Kenya, you brought the racists out of the woodwork so it’s your fault they took over the GOP.
Some claim that Trump’s followers relate to him because, like him, they are just poor, hapless victims being picked on for no reason, and they have legitimate grievances: The Great Replacement theory, widespread voter fraud, etc. The truth is a lot simpler. Trump’s devotees, and by extension the Republican Party, has gone batshit crazy.
I agree with Phil. Not only are jury trials established in the Sixth and Seventh Amendments to the US Constitution, the concept that “no free man may suffer punishment without “the lawful judgment of his peers” stretches back to the Magna Carta, 1215. Juries apply common sense to disputed factual issues. Politicians just speak nonsense.
You can focus on the disease, or you can ask why the patient was vulnerable to that disease. You can treat the lung cancer without ever looking at the 40 years of smoking that preceded it.
What made so many voters vulnerable to a demagogue like Trump? Forty years of globalist elites exporting all the industrial jobs to China and telling coal minors to “learn to code.“ (How does that look these days, now that ChatGPT is writing so much code?)
Our politics are so tribal because the health of the body politic has deteriorated. You can blame the disease without ever looking at the medical history of the patient. But that’s not the right way to practice public health advocacy. And it’s also not the right way to practice political analysis.
A couple of years ago now, I enrolled in group sponsored by VA for some support with emotional issues I was having, primarily anger at what Drumpf was doing. The Facilitator was a disabled Veteran, with a Ph.D in social work. During our initial conference, I told him about my anger at Trump, and his response, which I can't forget;
"I don't like some if the stuff he says, but I do like a lot of his policies". I sat through the group session, 12 or 13 men, all Vets, all with that same mind set, and never went back, found a different group at VA, and had positive experience.
The first guy had shattered any preconceived notions I had about what was being offered, and more importantly, at least to me, removed any possibility my trusting him. And probably contributes to my avoidance of any contact, if possible with Republican leaning or supporting people.
There is a disease affecting our body politic. It's a mental illness afflicting those who think a lying sociopath has the answer to their problems. It's the same mental illness that has the same people believing the answer to gun violence is more guns.
These are people convinced that global warming is a hoax and Trump won the election. Since they're so good at making up an alternate reality, you'd think they'd create one where they don't have any problems.
As usual, Mike responds to a serious post with a torrent of angry denunciation. What’s your solution, Mike? How do you propose to deal with “those people”?
Where does yelling insults at the other side lead?
in 1980, Issac Asimov wrote "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”.
I wonder if the convergence of hyper-individualism (accelerated by social media) and the embrace of the post-modern idea that truth is subjective, has contributed to the cult following of celebrity over substance?
Mr. Trigoboff said, "Our politics are so tribal because the health of the body politic has deteriorated." I agree with him, yet he launches a gratuitous personal attack. I don't know what can be done about people who don't believe in facts, but I do know you can't reason with them.
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