Posted on 08/24/2018 3:05:17 PM PDT by Ennis85
F YOUR job requires you to spin, some days are harder than others. And if you’re one of Donald Trump’s defenders, some very hard days are on the way. We may be at the beginning of a long and tortuous period for the president, with his former campaign chairman convicted of multiple crimes, his former personal lawyer not only pleading guilty to crimes but also directly implicating Trump, and who knows what else to come in the next few days, weeks and months. So rhetorical defences are already being erected.
Unfortunately for the US president, these arguments range from irrelevant to laughable, which is less because of the skill of those crafting them than because they just don’t have a lot to work with. Let’s run them down:
None of this is about Russia, so who cares?
This argument has at least a grain of truth to it. As Trump said in response to the Manafort verdict, “Doesn’t involve me, but I still feel, you know, it’s a very sad thing that happened. This has nothing to do with Russian collusion.” It’s true that the first of Manafort’s trials focused on tax fraud and bank fraud; his second trial, which begins next month, will begin to get closer to his work on the Trump campaign. But the essence of this argument is that because Manafort committed some crimes not related to Trump, that means Trump is innocent. Which makes no sense whatsoever.
The same thing is being said even about Michael Cohen’s guilty plea, in which the former Trump employee said Trump (inset) directed him to commit crimes. “So all this legal activity strange I see no ‘Russian collusion’ in any breaking news. Odd,” tweeted Trump ally Matt Schlapp of the American Conservative Union. “In the great scheme of things, most people recognise this had nothing to do with Russia, which was the whole point of the Mueller investigation,” said Mike Huckabee.
This crime isn’t even a crime!
Trump put it succinctly on Twitter: “Michael Cohen plead guilty to two counts of campaign finance violations that are not a crime. President Obama had a big campaign finance violation and it was easily settled!”
Actually, you can’t plead guilty to crimes that are not crimes. That’s not how it works. But it sounds good enough, so Fox News’s Gregg Jarrett, author of ‘The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump’, claimed that the payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, which occurred in the run-up to the election, were “not an illegal campaign contribution” because “he’s done it [paid off mistresses] in the past” and Trump didn’t realise he was violating campaign finance laws anyway.
What about all the crimes we didn’t commit?
The fact that the Manafort jury deadlocked on 10 of the 18 counts while convicting him on the eight others is being spun as some kind of victory for Trump. Here’s what the president had to say about it on Wednesday on Twitter: “A large number of counts, ten, could not even be decided in the Paul Manafort case. Witch Hunt!”
Trump’s campaign chairman was just convicted of eight felonies, and that’s supposed to be evidence that the whole thing is a witch hunt.
Everybody does it!
This may be the most creative defence of Trump. “Violation of election laws are regarded as kind of jaywalking,” said Alan Dershowitz on Tucker Carlson’s show Tuesday night. “Every administration violates the election laws. Every candidate violates the election laws.” This would be a curious argument to make in any context, but what’s important to understand is that we’re not talking about some paperwork error that results in a fine paid to the Federal Election Commission.
Cohen says he and Trump conspired to buy the silence of women who had information that could damage Trump’s campaign, spending hundreds of thousands of unreported dollars. The fact that there are other campaign-finance violations that are trivial doesn’t mean that this campaign-finance violation isn’t serious.
This argument is a relative of one Trump has offered to justify the fact that his son, his son-in-law and his campaign chairman attempted to get dirt on Hillary Clinton from people who they had been told were representing the Russian government. “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics,” Trump said – which is false, as anyone who has been involved in political campaigns will tell you. But it’s a bit rich from someone who said Washington was corrupt and he would drain the swamp: Hey, don’t blame me, we all commit crimes around here.
YOU may look at the arguments Trump and his supporters are making and say, “Do they really think anyone is going to buy that?” But that misses the point. These arguments are not about convincing anyone that Trump is innocent when they might be inclined to think otherwise. In a world where confirmation bias (our tendency to seek out and accept information that reinforces what we already believe) rules everything, your claims don’t really need to be compelling. All that’s really required is that you provide your people with something to say when the subject comes up, a counter they can make to the president’s critics. It doesn’t have to be persuasive or even coherent. It just needs to be something to cling to.
That will be vitally important as the Trump omniscandal continues. The president believes that if he can hold on to his base, he’ll be safe. He just has to keep feeding them.
More commie agitprop. So far, we haven’t heard a single thing pdjt’s done wrong that he needs to “defend” against
No, 'F' YOUR job. And 'F' you too, waldman.
Do you remember how despondent the left and media were on November 9th, 2016, when they had been told that there was no way in hell Clinton could lose? And yet, there was Trump. How much sweeter it will be when all of their hopes are dashed again, after all of their intrigues go astray. I don’t think that Trump will be impeached at all, but this week will be the turning point of his Presidency. The left will become suicidal when they realize that it is God who chooses rulers, not them. All of their arrogant vanities will be turned against them.
And Sen Ben Sasse just announced that he would never vote for any AG to replace Sessions. When is Sasse’s term up? We need the Republicans in the House and the Senate to understand that America supports Trump! Will someone ask Sasse WHY Hillary isn’t in prison after compromising National Security?? And why is the Awan family not seeing any prison time after sending countless classified documents to Pakistan?? The Left isn’t BULLETPROOF! They need to be held accountable, too!
That's not how you spell faggot.
Actually thats a typo, I forgot to include the “I” in the “if your” when I copy and pasted.
The only thing I care about is if I boiled my hemp rope long enough...
washington comPost. garbage news.
by the way to see this hack Paul Waldman try to pretend he knows more than Alan Dershowitz is HILARIOUS.
i am so glad the comPost is a dying media entity.
I realized that, but thought I’d run with it, as it fits the narrative.
Yeah. That's what I thought. And THOSE truly WERE crimes.
We care about what the Compost thinks because...
Notice the innuendo that "we've got him now!" He can't escape this mess!" "This is the beginning of the end for Trump!"
The Left, always thinking every dangling participle is a high crime and misdemeanor to impeach Trump with.
This will never stop. These people will never give up. These people are deranged.
I can’t understand why anyone posts from this fake news Deep state operation. They never ever print any truth.
This guy is a fool.
In what country do we arrest the lawyers of politicians we don’t like? Over what? They shredded attorney client privilege. So this is the new norm.
This fraud doesn’t see the double standard.
Hillary’s lawyer, Cheryl Mills, was not only a direct witness to a very serious federal crime but was also a participant, and the FBI let her claim attorney client privilege so she would not be questioned. Comey granted that!
I am too stupid to read this so I will vote Republican to support Trump. It’s deplorable of me, I know, but I don’t know what else to do. I am too stupid to think for myself or to understand what others are telling me when they are giving me really good advice for my own good.
I think what he meant to say was this...
“All accusations against Trump are weak, so the base does’t care.”
By the way,the argument “everybody’s doing it” came to full bloom for someone named William——Jefferson——Clinton.
In the 1990s it infuriated me to hear the media say “everybody’s doing it” to say that all husbands are adulterers, all men are rascals who are cheating for sexual quickies at work like Bill,everybody knows the Bible is outdated and passe and no one actually lives by its laws and rules from God and neither does Bill Clinton.
I clearly remember that stuff.
The only legitimate case in which the lawyer-client privilege may be broken is if a crime has been committed.
There was no predicate that had established any crime had been committed between Trump and Cohen! They simply raided all of Cohen’s records to go on their fishing expedition, essentially illegally seizing and using President Trump’s private records to testify against him.
And what have they come up with? Nothing that is a crime beyond that for which Clinton lawyer Lanny Davis has been able to use criminal-like language to construct a deal with a prosecutor for Davis’ client, Cohen. (One has to imagine there might have been some Clinton-cabal-originating coercion to get Cohen (an experienced lawyer, obviously) to fall for the idea that a non-crime is in fact a crime and something to which he should make a guilty plea to lessen a potential penalty—which, since it’s not a crime, should already be relatively minimal (as in a fine for not having the Trump Campaign make a filing).
Without an established crime, even one after PDJT’s records have been illegally invaded (which can only be fruit of a poisonous tree), the prosecutors have nothing but propaganda. They must desist from moving against Cohen. Those who ordered the seizure of Cohen-Trump records should be punished and Cohen’s plea bargain should be thrown out.
(OK, IANAL.)
The WaPo and NYT are both a waste of printer’s ink.
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