Well, that was depressingly predictable, huh? Let’s hope this grifter has to face a real court — or ten — for some of his (alleged) other crimes, financial and otherwise.
Discuss!
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
I feel silly for crossposting this, but here goes.
Why am I not surprised Trump was acquitted again? If justice is to be done with him, there’s no way it can happen in the halls of a Congress too busy bickering over irrelevant minutiae and covering each other’s asses in the name of party loyalty and preservation of a status quo whose entire existence was a mistake.
If Trump is to be held accountable for anything, the people will need to take matters directly into their own hands and see that the government has no intention of doing what is right no matter who’s in charge. The wealthy always protect their own, even when they’re in allegedly different political parties. Even if he does end up in court elsewhere, they won’t be able to touch him simply by virtue of him being a rich old white man- the exact type of person the system was designed to protect.
Cowards. Forty-three Senators are cowards, and have publicly displayed their cowardice.
I am so fucking tired. And honestly, even more than the Republicans’ gleeful sadism, I’m disgusted with centrist Democrats yet again backing down, even on the mostly symbolic level of failing to call witnesses. I don’t have words for how fucked we are if they keep doing that, if they keep failing to deliver.
Talking to more center-left friends too, they were often like “McConnell said he’ll vote to convinct, it might actually happen! There is a sea change!” and I was like “You know he’s lying, right?” and basically got told off for being a know-it-all. It’s so exhausting. The naivety and denialism and performative civility is so potent it’s like a death wish.
Republicans, every time: “We are going to rape and murder you and your entire family.”
Democrats, every time: “Wait! Let’s negotiate! What if you only rape and murder my least favorite kid, can that be a deal?”
It’s enough to drive a woman mad.
I am not surprised in the least. At this point, I think the only way to hold Trump accountable is state courts. New York is probably the state that can get him on the most charges, seeing as Florida’s governor still thinks Trump won the election.
@Cyborgette
The willingness of centrists (and even some leftists) to still take conservatives at their word is disgusting. It’s just so exhausting that every time they think the Republicans aren’t going to pull the football away this time.
You would think that Democrats would have learned at least as early as the ACA, where they bent over backwards to meet Republican demands and then every last Republican voted against it anyway. They never, ever act in good faith.
@Banned@4chan
They didn’t aquit because they were afraid of anything but a country where people who aren’t cishet white men have rights. Calling it cowardice is excusing them for their knowing choices.
@Allandrel
Again, this is not being done out of naivete, it is being done as a deliberate pretense of opposition. They are behaving as they do because they agree more with Republicans than they do with decent people. Or, put more bluntly, they’re also fucking fascists, and are actively choosing to aid their fellow travelers who’ve stopped pretending they aren’t fascists.
What was Nixon so afraid of? surely not the kangaroo court that is impeachment? American “checks and balances” are a total joke.
Even his accomplices—those Senators who voted to acquit—admitted that he was guilty as the Seven Deadly Sins. And it wasn’t even about him being removed from office; he’d been out since shortly after his second impeachment (and we can thank McConnell for the trial not happening while he was still in office; apparently, they can rush seating a Justice, but will drag their feet on holding a crooked politician accountable).
No; the Senate was given a choice whether to put a restriction on his ability to stage another coup, or to demand that the country subsidize him and his immediate family for the rest of their lives. And they chose the latter option. In other words: Republicans’ claim of “fiscal conservatism” is as monstrous of a baldfaced lie as their claim of being the party of law and order; and he is essentially being rewarded for trying to undermine the country. God help America.
@Xennial Dot Warner
You just have to understand the American dialect: “Fiscal Responsibility” means “trillions for mass murder, not one cent for anything that might help Black or Native people”. “Law and order” means “imprison, enslave, and/or murder Black people under colour of law, and under no circumstances acknowledge our binding treaties with Indigenous nations.” Once you understand what Americans mean by those phrases, everything becomes clear as a bell.
So it has been confirmed that you can do anything, anything if you’re a Republican, including trying to get another Republican killed, and get away with it. We’re going to have to deal with a whole lot of shit down the road. They’re not going to stop. This is what they’ve been working toward since the heyday of the John Birch Society.
I hope Trump repays them this kindness by creating his own party and splitting the Republican party into the fascist party and the less-fascist party. That would be in character for him; like other narcissists, he only understands gratitude and loyalty as directed toward himself, and doesn’t comprehend offering it to others.
@PoM
If he does that, it’ll be the end of the less-openly-fascist one. 95% of Republicans voted for Trump.
This has cemented my desire to move elsewhere in the world once I’m done with my physics degree, either back to Australia or maybe to Canada or New Zealand… some other, more civilized country.
It’s just too risky to stay here. They just gave a blank check to right wing extremists to have another coup as soon as some other Republican demagogue wishes to become dictator-for-life, and it may not fail next time. If that happens, “deviants” like myself and disabled people like my daughter will be among those slated to be removed from “polite” cis straight white able-bodied Christian society that Republican fascists want.
I wonder if this is going to become a trend before a larger problem hits the fan… much like the many scientists and intellectuals that left Germany when they saw the writing on the wall as Hitler took hold…
I have no idea how the USA can be fixed. Half of the population is lost, and likely for good. At this point Trump could literally walk into their homes and shit on their food, and they would thank him and gladly wolf it down. And Trump dying wouldn’t help, there’s enough replacements.
And the political system itself is in shambles. It simply doesn’t work anymore. Even the smallest changes to the constitution that might provide some relief are practically impossible now, and any larger changes might rip the country apart.
And I’ll be frank:
the best fix would be throwing the entire constitution away and writing a new one.
And that’s virtually impossible, I’m aware of that.
I’m very pessimistic about America for years now, since before Trump,but I never really talked about it. Everyone I personally know was just too positive. None believed that the Tea Party might be a proto-NSDAP (in the end they weren’t, but they morphed into the current mess). It’s not even just America, the world is standing before an abysss, and the soon unstoppable march of global warming won’t help, because no one is doing even remotely enough.
I have little hope left that our civilization has any future.
From here, yeIs it was predictable. If Trump had still be in power, I would have said that it proved that the republicans are a bunch of spinless cowards.
Today it is a bit different.
We have one party who doesn’t care about the constitution, one party that would be okay, if a murder happened, if the murderer was only a republican. (I am not sure if they would care who the victim was as long as the murderer was powerful enough)
The whole impeachment showed. It was a completly moreal bancrupty for a certain party.
Don’t know if it will work but it had to be done, even if their was no way to get Trump impeached.
And that is why I am not angry about the democrats. They got what was posible.
They even got the one whitness that I have heared mettered for them in the protocoll.
They have made their case, hearing 100 people who good a person Präsident Monster is wouldn’t have chanced anythink.
Sometimes you have to choose your battles and how long to fight them, and not even if it would be very satisfiing to fight until the end.
P.S: The first criminal investigation against the orange one has started and the GOP is now proven an enemy of the United Staate.
Meanwhile, American corona deaths are on track to surpass 500k by the end of next week.
@Herbert
It’s the same in the UK, Boris’s government has mishandled the COVID response in perhaps the worst way seen globally (aside from Brazil), leading to worse economic outcomes, mass death and a variant that’s thrown the rest of the world into further danger. And he’s still leading in the polls! While billionaires control the media we’re doomed.
The Democrats are cowards. We need a REAL force against the Republicans and white supremacist, misogynist and capitalist America! If this has to involve Antifa, so be it.
You know I don’t mean to be negative, but I keep seeing people say “I hope something happens in the real courts.”
Why do you (people who hope this) believe that anything will be different? There’s no way that a jury could be selected that hasn’t heard of Cheeto Benito and been influenced by the hearings: certainly it’s likely that partisans of either party will try to be on it, specifically to throw the jury one way or the other. You only need one assnoggin MAGA on board to hang a jury.
Re: courts
This is a long shot and may not be possible, but would there be any way to get Trump and his accomplices to The Hague? At the very least his negligence in dealing with COVID has killed 400,000 people minimum, and that’s before examining his other policies like forced sterilizations.
@ naglfar
No. The US isn’t a State Party under the Rome Statute. So the ICC lacks jurisdiction over the actions of US citizens within the US.
Even if the US was to ratify the treaty, and there seems no great enthusiasm for that, jurisdiction isn’t retrospective.
Boris isn’t just mishandling the virus, he’s engaging in Nazi-esque eugenics:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/13/new-do-not-resuscitate-orders-imposed-on-covid-19-patients-with-learning-difficulties
Stop the world, I want to get off.
As I have postulated many times, people in trumps socioeconomic group NEVER face consequences
@ Naglfar
It would also be very difficult for the fascist party to win elections. Splitting off even 5% of the Republican vote to a different party would ensure a lot of Republican losses. Many elections are won by smaller margins.
Of course this doesn’t address the coup problem. I’m not sure what could. Coups are already illegal but if you incite one nothing happens to you. Laws with no consequences are just suggestions.
I’ve heard the rumor that the 1/6 coup galvanized certain Republican lawmakers and bigwigs to seriously talk about forming a Right-Center party to draw off the folks who don’t like the state of the current GOP. What the effects of that move on the political landscape might be (if true/actually comes about) remains to be seen.