Donald Trump would have been convicted of crimes over his failed attempt to cling to power in 2020 if he had not won the presidential election in 2024, according to the special counsel who investigated him.
Jack Smith’s report (***the report is 174 pages long) detailing his team’s findings about Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy was released by the justice department early on Tuesday.
Following the insurrection on 6 January, 2021, Smith was appointed as special counsel to investigate Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. His investigation culminated in a detailed report, submitted to the attorney general, Merrick Garland.
Volume one of the report meticulously outlines Trump’s actions, including his efforts to pressure state officials, assemble alternate electors and encourage supporters to protest against the election results.
I actually believed this, I think the Supreme Court was actually waiting to see if Trump was going to be re-elected or not.
If he wasn’t they’d have played the “You have outlived your usefulness” card and thrown him to the wolves.
Since he won, well… “You gotta respect the office”
For the record, normally I agree with “Even if you hate the guy, you have to respect the office.”, well, in better days I did.
Now, if the person in question shows clear contempt for the office, you do not have to do any such thing.
For the record, normally I agree with “Even if you hate the guy, you have to respect the office.”,
The office has been disrespected by so many of the men who held it that I have never been able to respect the office.
Voted for Harris out of usual attempted harm reduction because this place is irreparably destroyed since Reagan, but let’s not kid ourselves, Donald Trump represents the United States as it is perfectly.
Proudly ignorant, proudly greedy, proudly gluttonous, obese, egotistical, explicitly judges others on net worth, perpetually drunk on cruelty and schaudenfreude, obsessed with image and his own ego score, demands loyalty and servitude while providing none aka a devout capitalist, obsessed with economic metastasis at literally any human and societal cost, proudly racist while still insisting he’s not, the embodiment of what Americans disgustingly praise: a hyperindividualist who revels in blaming people not born to wealth for their suffering and insists this is a meritocracy after a lifetime of spending daddy’s money.
Donald Trump is like the zeitgeist of the modern United States somehow took tangible human form. You can try to argue we don’t deserve him, or that we have the potential to be a better society than one that would elect him, but you can’t argue he represents who and what a loathsome society we are. A monument of all our sins.
He’s more American as apple pie or baseball ever was, and he’s at least as American as our current national pastimes of mass shootings and of course disgusting hyper-consumption.
That’s why he illicits such a strong response in both directions. Whether you are repulsed or see your own necrotic heart in him, He is an accurate mirror of the practiced culture of The United States of America.
I need this on a t-shirt.
“Schadenfreude” and “elicits.” Otherwise, I agree with you 100%.
(I’m just a pedant when it comes to spelling, grammar and punctuation.)
Always appreciated, FS. It helps me to improve!
One of the all time greatest comments on Lemmy. Bravo.
Killed it really. Bless us with the rest of your wisdom, I can never hope to word shit this well
Perfectly said, and I’ve been reaching the same conclusion lately.
I too attempted harm reduction while being disappointed in the democrats. And we all know plenty of people stayed home or went third party for some of those reasons.
But damn it, this country turned out to vote FOR Trump. The democrats didn’t just miss the mark and Trump got lucky or whatever. Trump won decisively because he’s the kind of asshole that a huge part of our culture loves.
Trump is America Personified, that is not a condemnation of him, but of the systems that created him.
I’m not happy about it but you’re right 😡👍
I’m not either. But I find peace in understanding, even if the answers suck, as this one does.
If I had an in anywhere in Europe, I’d leave and never look back.
I phone banked for Sanders twice, but have finally accepted this place would take generations of concerted effort to be anything less than cruel and inhuman. It’s too proud of the core causes of its rot (worshipped sociopathic “free to die in the streets market” economy, pride in individualism over community or society, social resentment of paying into Commons like public Ed, greed seen as virtue rather than character deficit and social ill, etc) to want to change.
Ask any therapist, if someone isn’t seeking change, you won’t get anywhere with them. We want things to get better, but we still want to dream of being millionaires and billionaires, and to remain addicted to harmful social opiates like social media, fast food, extreme consumerism, literal opiates, etc.
When brains and ballots fail, bullets are the last line of exacting justice.
Everything republicans do is based in fear, spite, and greed.
They fear brown people and immigrants, so they deport them, only to bring them back in as indentured servants, to spite the poor people that refuse to work for less than the minimum wage, to personally enrich themselves.
Greed, Spite, Fear.
If they had been born German in the early 1900’s, they wouldn’t just be nazis, they’d be enthusiastic nazis.
Well, I think we can all agree that Trump and the Republican party have certainly learned from all this and will in no way attempt to hold power if they lose another election.
I also predict that the Republican party will coincidentally lose fewer elections from now on.
Elections?
"Christians, get out and vote, just this time. “You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”
Shut up Susan Collins
It would be amazing for there to be a part of Canada with a decent climate. The awful climate is the main reason I can’t see myself moving to Canada.
Eh Canada’s going to sink to our lows, in some respects (MAID being used as an ethnic cleansing program instead of an end-of-life-care program is a big outlier)
-Life expectancy will go up from a world ranking of 48th (USA) to 20th (Canada).
-Education will get better from 31st (USA) to 19th (Canada).
-Math scores will improve from 34th (USA) to 9th (Canada).
-Robberies will go down from 98 per 100,000 population to 62.
-Traffic accident deaths will drop from 12.7 per 100,000 to 5.3.
-You will spend half as much on health care yet get better outcomes.
-Poverty in Canada is 1/3 the rate in the USA.
-Although Canada has fewer millionaires, we more fairly distribute wealth (better income equality).
-The minimum wage in Canada is double that in USA.
and most important you will be happier (Canada ranked 15th, USA 23rd in happiness).
(We couldn’t find a politeness index, but thank you for reading)
But the climate.
Yes, that’s what I posted. Good for you.
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to seem arrogant. Just thought I’d post the original source.
The awful climate is the main reason I can’t see myself moving to Canada.
That’s fine. We’re trying to cut back on immigration at the moment anyway.
But since I’ve got you on the phone, would you mind doing something about all the noise coming from downstairs. It’s getting hard to sleep at night.
Congratulations to the American people, for having the guts to elect a crazy criminal malignant narcissist idiot for president.
I doubt many places would have the guts to do that.
To be entirely honest, this makes me doubt we will make it as a species.The Covid response taught me we’re doomed.
If we can’t get people to wear masks and get vaccinated for a disease that’s actively killing millions we ain’t gonna do shit over climate change.
The empires will fall but the species will remain. We would have to kill the entire planet’s ecology for humanity to go extinct, we’re too good at adapting.
We would have to kill the entire planet’s ecology
We’re working on that. The methane hydrate problem is terrifying
Sure, but I’m unconvinced that would scrub the entire surface clean. Desertification of huge swaths not near the poles, ocean pH plummeting from carbonic acid causing a mass extinction of most plankton, algae, and the life that depends on them, and the end of countless evolutionary lines. But if there’s a temperate zone in Antarctica, or even a swampy tropical jungle, there’s gonna be humans eating snails and xylem for however long it takes something to start sequestering carbon again.
We bounced back from a 100,000 year bottleneck with a population of 1200. We’d seal that many in an underground cave complex with naught but lichen and crickets to eat before we rolled over and died out.
but I’m unconvinced that would scrub the entire surface clean
Not entirely. The wars over increasingly scarce resources (such as farmable land and water) will do a lot of the extermination as well.
Sure, but consider that North Sentinel Island has been mostly isolated for tens of thousands of years. 23 square miles. That’s how small of a rock we can cling to. Resource availability is the big question mark of course, and the exact nature of global ecosystem collapse and the water wars can’t be known exactly, but my money is on “at least one sustainable holdout” somewhere.
Hopefully they can eventually scavenge the good bits of our mountains of waste.
but my money is on “at least one sustainable holdout” somewhere.
That is a possible outcome. But far from a desirable one.
There is so much more we (as aspecies) could be doing to prevent a mass extinction event.
But instead we’ve got our collective heads so far up our own asses that we can’t even cooperate enough to do what could be the simplest things.
It’s frustrating to see this disaster coming directly at us and being prevented from taking meaningful action by politicians who refuse to cooperate, by billionaires who hoard wealth and sculpt public opion toward self-destructive ends, by religions that gleefully anticipate their scriptures version of Armageddon.
To be entirely honest, this makes me doubt we will make it as a species.
On election day when he didn’t lose by a landslide I had the same thought even before all the results were in. The level of idiotic selfish spitefulness required to keep him from losing by a country mile after all that’s happened is absurd.
IDK why you are downvoted, maybe it’s the double negative?
But just to make it clear, keep from losing = winning.
So corrected for double negative:The level of idiotic selfish spitefulness required for him to win…
And yes I agree completely, it’s insane he even had a chance, and it says a LOT about the American society as a whole is mentally ill.
Not everybody, but enough to make it a systemic problem throughout everything in society. It must be hell to live in USA as a normal person!
Thanks, yeah I’m not sure. Maybe my wording is confusing… it’s early here. And I’m pissed. I don’t want to live in a world where a person is rewarded heartily for being all the horrible shitty things we were all taught not to be. It almost feels like morality was invented to keep everyone from having the balls to lash out against these absolute sociopath types.
Americans are indoctrinated with values of individual freedom to a degree where Malignant narcissism has become a virtue, and it shows throughout all aspects of society.
Everything that benefit common good is demonized. Like food stamps, social welfare, healthcare for all, protection of minorities, lack of union rights, insane gun rights, and abolishing free abortion, and even sex education.
It’s in everything American in society, and USA is so far removed from other developed countries it’s more like a very poor developing country in many aspects.
It’s all about oppressing the non privileged, to give more privileges to the already privileged.Now people are even getting away with claiming slavery wasn’t so bad!!
You’re right. It’s sold as “believe X if you like freedom” when the reality is “believe X to keep the rich’s boot on your neck, necessarily decreasing freedom”. It’s not a freedom for your kid to die by a school shooter, but somehow millions believe it is.
Looks like you also got a downvote for your helpful reply for whatever reason. How people vote on this site is one of those things I’ll never understand.
Yes but the post I responded to completely turned around. So that’s fine for me. Probably someone thought my comment wasn’t necessary, but obviously it was for some, since it changed the voting both instantly and completely.
Congratulations to the American people, for having the guts to elect a crazy criminal malignant narcissist idiot for president.
Twice!
You had 4 years. 4 years.
Yeah, that’s just a lame excuse. It just conveniently took too long, ah shucks, if only he hadn’t won, gosh darnit.
We have to distinguish between Jack Smith who started in 2022, and was extremely unlucky with respect to court decisions, and Garland who wasted 2 years before appointing Smith.
canon delayed it, not smith. did everyone forget about all that?
did everyone forget about all that?
Well, yeah. There’s too much stuff going on deliberately to keep track of everything and remember the details months or years after the fact.
Blame Garland
Blame Garland
And Biden, and democrats in congress for not pushing to fucking get it done for 2 years.
And Pelosi for preventing any action and protecting Trump while he was president, and she was majority leader.
And Mueller for making a mockery of the special investigation, dragging it out for years, and then having done just about the narrowest investigation possible, and letting traitors walk despite clear evidence.It’s fucking incompetence all the way through, to a degree it must be perceived as maliciousness, and that both parties are in on it.
Goddam I’m happy to live in a country that doesn’t effectively have a 2 party system. I cannot fathom how Americans tolerate their idiotic flawed democracy for almost 250 years now! Isn’t it about time to modernize? And yet American politicians boast of their democracy and claim to protect democracy around the world, when they fucking can’t even figure it out for their own country!
Mueller cited a dozen times where Trump committed obstruction and specifically said it was up to Congress to impeach him.
But a corrupt AG released a summary of the report that just fucking lied about what was in the report and people believed it.
Interrupting the peaceful transition of power should have been the Day 1 job of the justice department. Not the second year job of Jack Smith.
Literally above the law.
So if we commit a crime we can just ask for enough time to run for president and win. If we win, we go scott free? Got it!
Let’s do this thing! C’mon we need suggestions? Illegal high speed forest fire? Can do! Oh we could steal money yeah, I guess. From the poor? Hmmm, nah Donnie, why don’t you pay a prostitute, I gotta fix the faucet.
Is there a law in this country or is it everything a fucking popularity contest? USA is just a crazy distopian tv-show at this point.
It’s a reality TV show called America’s Got Oligarchy
They say the US justice system moves slowly, but this is incredibly slow. I’m not an American, but if I was I would be very disappointed.
Investigations of Trump reliably conclude just after it becomes impossible for them to have any effect on him. It feels a little deliberate on the part of both Republicans and Democrats.
Looking in from the outside I don’t think that’s what’s happening. It’s just the US legal system being very pliable if you have enough capital. Which isn’t great.
Democrats: Takes forever to get around to doing what they need to do until it’s last minute. The last minute passes them, they’re throwing a fit about it.
Republicans: Starts pulling strings and tapping connections to throw as much shit around as possible and orchestrate theater to pad the time it takes.
It’s only slow for some. For others it’s fast.
I am very disappointed.
You can still be disappointed.
Sure. I can, but I can’t vote in the US so I find that spending my emotional energy on that has fairly limited effects.
Even if you could vote, our system is designed to prevent your vote from having an impact in multiple ways. Fuck this country.
I mean, yeah, lets not even get into your weird way of weighing votes and then throwing the actual decision to a panel. You’ve got some work to do on that democratic aspect too. As a nation, I mean.
I still find it sad that we live in a world where a large amount of people praise felons
It’s not great, is it
Would he fuck. The cunt is rich, white (under his orangutan) and an ex-president. That’s an echelon that don’t go to prison under any circumstances.
Well that sucks. Harris winning would have been nice.
But don’t you understand? The genocide totally would’ve been worse or even the same. Something something duopoly! /s
Edit: to be clear, if you argued against voting for Harris, this is partially your fault. And I’m done with you. Write me a shitty reply here to be added to the blocklist. I’m all out of patience for your types.
if you argued against voting for Harris, this is partially your fault
IMO Trump reelection is entirely the fault of people who argued against voting for Harris. Partial blame is being too nice to them.
Well yes. I guess I was just assuming here on lemmy most people making that argument are claiming to be on the left, which is a smaller part of the problem.
Prior to the election, it seemed to me like there was a lot of astroturfing going on here; comments encouraging protest votes against Harris since she was “guaranteed to win anyway” and “one vote doesn’t matter”. I’m not sure how it was in other places, but it seemed like a concerted campaign to discourage voting for Harris, and then after the election, no comments on actually what to do now to help Palestinians.
Yes, exactly yes to all this. There are still a few third party people lurking and all those plus the astroturfers can fuck off
To be clear, I agree with you. However, I’ve been saying that the Trump Campaign didn’t win this election, the Democratic Party lost it. The Trump campaign was a fucking mess. Trump rallies sucked. Their policies sucked, and I don’t mean they were evil, I mean when you polled people, objectively, virtually every major policy the Democrats held polled better than anything the Republicans did.
The major difference was that the Democratic Party gave people the impression that they cared about propriety and institutions more than they did about normal people or even winning the election. They tried so hard to seem normal that nobody believed them when they talked about the threat posed by Republicans, and how can you blame people? If you were facing an apocalyptic threat, you would be fighting, not issuing high-minded press releases and carefully-worded and narrowly-defined policy papers.
Harris didn’t run a totally garbage campaign, but when Trump and the Republicans were in full rabid dog mode and the Democrats couldn’t figure out how to get past the tut-tut stage, it was never going to work.
I agree with most of what you wrote here but I have a response to one phrase…
how can you blame people
I mean, for me to not blame anyone, I’d have to assume that the vast majority of people are way stupider than I ever knew, or had no access to information to the contrary. And I’ve always thought people are dumb as fuck.
How can I blame people? Well, even if we assume that people knew nothing at all about the past decade, republicans made it blindingly obvious what a shit option they are. The democrats could’ve come on the stage drooling and babbling about space lasers and only in that case should the choice have been unclear.
