“You know they’re not going to let you go,” an old friend told President Donald Trump during an intimate Oval Office meeting in the summer of 2020. “They’re going to come after you, they’re going to come after your children. They’re going to come after your money. And they’re going to try to put you in jail.”
Later that day, he told me, the president seemed frightened and surprised, as if he hadn’t thought anything could be worse than defeat at the ballot box.
“It’s unfair” is a child’s protest. “It’s hypocrisy” is a grown-up’s protest. They are nice (to no avail) phrases hurled by the powerless at the powerful.
Underestimating the lengths opponents from all walks of society would go to to hurt him was a common quirk of Trump’s first term in office — one that the 45th US president was slow to realise.
position and Power These are not the same thing. And now, four years later, he has been convicted of bogus crimes by a man who came to power by promising to put him in prison.
You can feel cathartic To point out that Trump was convicted of disguising hush money as “legal expenses” and that Hillary Clinton covered up payments to a British spy to compile the far more damning Russia dossier. Cry “Hypocrisy!” on a friendly network and the host might nod.
It may feel like a nifty thing to explain how the judge clearly violated Trump’s Sixth Amendment right to be informed of the charges and reasons for them. Judge Juan Marchand actually told the jury that they didn’t have to agree on what “unlawful” things Trump might have done to upgrade a misdemeanor outside the statute of limitations to a felony. If you write “Not Fair!” to X, your friends might retweet it.
You may be relieved to know that the Supreme Court will likely intervene, and may do so soon. With Marchan clearly attempting to aid the prosecution, undermine the defense, and silence the Republican presidential candidate, the case for appeal is strong. The prosecution’s “novel legal theories” are also a prime target. Marchan may face a retrial and/or censure. Yikes!
But in Clinton’s own words, “What difference does it make?” “It’s unfair” is a child’s protest. My 8-year-old sometimes shouts it, but it’s no use. “Hypocrisy” is the adult version. It’s a nice word the powerless throw at the powerful, but it’s no use either.
Democrats were not about to let Trump go, and were leaving as little to chance as possible, filing lawsuits all over the country. They weren’t even interested in Bragg’s “novel legal reasoning,” which looked likely to succeed while other lawsuits had failed. “We’re going to get him at all costs,” said George Conway, a vocal Never-Trump lawyer.
I said last week“It’s fine for me.”
It’s a question of power and the will to use it. Marchand didn’t lack the will, even if it meant short-term suffering. “Marchan,” Federalist CEO Sean Davis
I have written“He’ll be falsely convicted, retire, have millions of dollars laundered from the left in the form of book advances, and become a CNN/MSNBC contributor.”
Trump’s legal team will likely appeal to the New York Court of Appeals soon to keep their client out of prison, but justice is unlikely to be delivered before Election Day. Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s social media team is planning to change the title of his political opponent to “Convicted Felon Donald Trump.”
Based on the response so far, it may backfire, but they’re going to try their best anyway. For them, this is all about elections, and elections that they care deeply about. More simply, it’s about power, and power that they want to hold on to.
Blaze TV Mark Levin To Trump’s lawyers: Next stop? The Supreme Court!
Federalist: Judge Marchan’s jury instructions prove Trump trial is about power, not law
Blaze News:Biden bets big on Trump’s conviction
Blaze News: What would happen if Trump was convicted?
Blaze News:Stefanik filed a misconduct complaint against Judge Marchan, saying the selection of judges in the Trump NY case was “not random at all.”
Bedford:There’s a reason why Democrats in Washington always win, even when they lose.
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In other news
Biden plunges into race war in desperate bid to win black votes
The White House knows it faces challenges. Poll after poll shows black and Hispanic voters leaning toward Trump, the Republican held a successful rally in the Bronx that drew attention from CNN and MSNBC, and seemingly every week brings new articles about growing panic among professional Democrats.
It’s rare these days for a president to appear anywhere with an enthusiastic vice president, but in Philadelphia on Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris was once again a useful presence, or at least that’s what her campaign hoped.
“What if black Americans had stormed the Capitol?,” Biden asked the crowd. “I don’t think so. [Trump would] I’m talking about amnesty.
“This,” he continued.
This is the same guy who tried to tear gas you for peacefully protesting the murder of George Floyd. This is the same guy who still calls the “Central Park Five” guilty despite being acquitted. This is the landlord who denies housing applications because of the color of his skin. This is the guy who won’t say “Black Lives Matter” and instead invokes neo-Nazi Third Reich jargon. We all remember that Trump is the same guy who pumped birther lies into President Barack Obama. [Obama].
This wasn’t Biden’s first foray into racial politics: Back when wimpy mascots Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were the Republican Party’s standard-bearers, Biden, then vice president, whisper-bellowed to a black audience, “They’re going to put you back in chains.”
Fauci to testify before Congress on Monday
Blaze Media launches new documentary series exposing COVID lies, putting shy doctor back in the spotlight.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill on Monday. Every day a little more evidence comes to light that he and his team tried to hide, falsify or delete records of the COVID response to protect themselves and their friends from public and congressional scrutiny.
As the panic subsided, the doctor, who seemed omnipresent, grew quiet and withdrawn. Monday will be the first time lawmakers can question him since his closed-door testimony in January about the origins of COVID-19. It will also be his first public testimony since retiring as the highest-paid person in the federal government with the largest government pension in American history.
For several months, Blaze TV Host Matt Kibbe and the Free the People team have produced a fantastic multi-part documentary series investigating the lies and cover-ups of 2020. Episode 1 of “The Coverup” is available now.
Please see here.
Blaze Media Original: The cover-up exposes Fauci and his entire conspiracy
BlazeNews Original: Former New Jersey gym owner arrested for staying open during coronavirus lockdown wins major court victory
Fires Burn: City Journal: Can we return to tougher policing practices?
This isn’t the first time America has tried to liberalize policing and sentencing. In the 1950s, activists concerned about America’s prison population followed a similar path to the one we see today, destroying cities as a result of their tactics. By the late 1980s, summer blockbuster movies featured vigilantes finally beating down criminals and beating down reporters.
We fought our way out of it, and ended up with far more prisoners than the activist class had originally feared. And then, like Alzheimer’s, we’ve done it again. But this time it won’t be so easy, because the police know that Americans hate them. As Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute reports:
It’s been more than 40 years since the publication of one of the most important public policy essays ever written. Its title, “Broken Windows,” captures the essence of a simple yet profoundly insightful idea: that public order matters.[I]”When one broken window in a building is left unrepaired, it soon leads to all the others being broken,” the late political scientist James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, longtime senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, wrote in the March 1982 issue of The Atlantic. The visible signs of disorder were like a warning that the place was not safe. If left unaddressed, the disorder made the area vulnerable to further unrest, including serious crime. “‘[U]The authors argued that “unintended behavior leads to a breakdown in community control” and causes residents “to believe that crime, especially violent crime, is on the rise and to modify their behavior accordingly.” Neighborhoods where disorder is rampant become “more vulnerable to criminal infiltration” than “places where people are confident that they can regulate public behavior through informal controls.”
This theory was first introduced in a 1996 book by Kelling and his wife, Catherine Coles. Repairing broken windows — revolutionized American policing. With the direction of progressive officials like NYPD Commissioner and later LAPD Commissioner William “Bill” Bratton and critical support from political leaders like New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, police departments across the country adopted tactics and strategies that reflected these key insights in the 1990s and 2000s. Not only did proactive policing reduce street crime, it also produced unexpected results, like illegal firearms found during body searches of subway ticket jumpers and outstanding arrest warrants found during open container violation enforcement on the street. The historic, generation-long crime decline that resulted from the establishment of “broken windows” policing has broadly cemented Kelling and Wilson’s legendary status.
But this revolution in law enforcement provoked a vitriolic backlash from anti-police scholars and activists, in large part because the concept of broken windows policing was so frequently misunderstood and distorted that it annoyed its creators. These distortions gained power as crime continued to decline nationwide in the first decade of the 21st century, as big-city police departments focused on developing counterterrorism capabilities in a post-9/11 world, and as a new generation of urban residents came of age with little or no awareness of recent history. Progressive critics argued for the rollback of aggressive policing and the reduction of criminal justice penalties. And a series of police use-of-force incidents, beginning in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, both galvanized these efforts and intensified hostility toward law enforcement. The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 marked the culmination of the movement, sparking the deadliest urban riots in the United States since the 1960s amid widespread condemnation of police.
Perhaps not coincidentally, 2020 saw the largest annual spike in homicides in at least the past 100 years. Four years later, with crime, particularly gun violence, still well above pre-2020 levels in many U.S. cities, there are growing calls for U.S. police to return to the war on crime approach of the mid-1990s. Unfortunately, while this appeal is entirely legitimate, it cannot be realistically pursued in the current environment. Two major obstacles prevent a return to “broken windows” style policing: the police manpower crisis and the demonization of officers and policing itself as racist. Only by overcoming these obstacles can we return to the kind of policing that has delivered one of the safest generations on record for U.S. cities.
