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.
You are right and you are smart.
1) don’t confuse a liberal with your facts. ——Meanie.
2) don’t humiliate the writer for being a dunce just because you’re intelligent. ——Elitist.
“Cohen says he and Trump conspired to buy the silence of women who had information that could damage Trump’s campaign...”
My take is that Trump was blackmailed by the “women.”
And his base is getting bigger and bigger
I don’t hear much about how the congress has a multimillion dollar slush fund to pay off women who make sexual harassment or other claims against those in the senate and house. That’s taxpayer money, Trump used his own money to essentially buy off blackmailers. It’s interesting to see how the media/dems have come out in support of extortionists, MS13, illegal alien criminals, and open borders. How pathetic is that?
What difference does it make at this time anyhow???
Paul needs to wipe his red diaper with a wet rag.
There is no defense against his great crime of beating Clinton. He did it. He’s guilty. He wasn’t supposed to win and he won anyway. That is the crime garbage Waters and the other pieces of filth in the Democrat party and the hard left MSM want to convict him of.
And Hillary, the worst criminal in the world, continues to walk free.
You bastards at the Post don’t even give a weak defense of the Clinton crime syndicate
These journalists don’t even know how to spell defense in their headline!!! LOL, LOL, LOL, money wasted on a college education!!!!!
It’s the British spelling.
.
Is this writer any relation to ADAM Walkman, who is NECK DEEP in the Fake Russian Collusion?
“All arguments in defense of Trump are weak – but his base doesn’t care”
Of course we don’t care ... We Trump supporters quit listening to the lying leftist fake stream enemedia years ago because we know they’re nothing but a bunch of lying, anti-Trump propagandists promoting the Democrat Party ... so of course we don’t care what bullshit the lying leftist fake stream enemedia is spewing ..
the lying leftist fake stream enemedia has finally reaped what’s it been sowing for the last three years: namely complete lost of all credibility; no one who’s truly been paying attention listens to them anymore ... they can cry wolf falsely only so many times until no one believes them anymore ... and that time has finally arrived for the lying leftist fake stream enemedia: they’ve cried wolf hundreds of times every day for three years now and every speck of their credibility is gone forever and can never be recovered ... ever ...
Washington Post.
Nuff said.
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