Thursday, December 13, 2018

He's not a criminal, he's just crime adjacent?

Wai-wai-wait, the President's excuse is that his lawyer made him do it? Because I'm pretty sure that's not even...oh never mind. Here, please enjoy the endless tap-dance that is the President's twitter:
Ok, bullshit, but if your lawyer does come to you one day and says that he
 secretly paid off a bunch of people to keep affairs you had secret, it's probably time
to reevaluate not just your choice of lawyer, but also your life up to that point.
"Michael! Hush money? Oh, you shouldn't
have! And I didn't get you anything!"
-Trump after spending hours working 
on his 'surprised' face in the mirror

Um...you know who's also supposed to have a passing familiarity with the law? The President. And failing that, maybe the dozens of advisors that he surrounds himself with. Or maybe the political party that looked at the goat rodeo that was the Trump campaign and said: That's our guy! and then let him run on their ticket. The point is of course he directed Michael Cohen to pay off his mistresses. I don't care how close he is to his lawyer, the traditional lawyer-client gift is a bottle of wine, or tickets to a show. Nobody creates an LLC, funds it using his own house as collateral and then uses that money to pay off some other guy's mistresses as a surprise.

We continued his Tweet in his typically aggressive disregard of Twitter's 280 character limit:
Oh, suddenly his lawyers know what they're doing?
"I didn't not say I didn't un-commit a
non-crime. Which wasn't not a crime
to begin with. Amiright people?"
-Trump, on how guilty he's not
So in fairness, I'm not a lawyer and don't know what I'm talking about, but since that's never stopped anyone on the internet before, I'm going to power through. First of all, which campaign finance lawyers is her referring to? Many? Name three. Secondly, of course the laws apply, or else we wouldn't be talking about this. And lastly, whether or not he accepts responsibility for it, Michael Cohen is going to jail for-among other things-making payments to conceal Donald Trump's affairs-affairs that, at least in theory, could have damaged his chances of winning the election.

These are not people
who make good choices. 
And sure, knowing Trump voters as we've come to over the last couple of years, I'm not sure they would have turned on him for having had multiple affairs and then paying the women involved-or tabloids as the case may be-to keep it quiet. There was the Billy Bush Tape, the dozen or so women accusing him of sexual assault and then that time he leapt to the defense of actual Nazis. Yet none of these things seems to have moved his base away from their rabid-foam loyalty. Like, whether you love him or think he's objectively the worst ever, I think we all kind of assumed he was a dirt bag, but the point is that the information was concealed from voters.

Anyway, behold Tweet the Third in which the President outdoes even himself:
Donald Trump isn't the one going to prison,
but in may ways he's the real victim here. 
And did he even get a 'thank you for going
to prison for me'? No. No he didn't not.
Wow...I mean, wow. The President is suggesting that Michael Cohen agreed to plead guilty to crimes that carried a prison sentence just to embarrass him. You almost have to admire the deft way in which the President can can roll narcissism, paranoia and victimhood all into one big ball of Trumpy tweets of insanity. You almost have to admire him. This is, after all, a guy who secretly got his lawyer to pay people off to conceal an affair from the American people which-whether or not his fans would have cared-is totally a crime.

I know he's not the most self-evaluative person, but does Donald Trump seriously not look around at all his former friends and associates who are either under indictment or on their way to prison and not suspect that maybe he's the problem here? That maybe most Presidents don't have to split hairs over whether or colluding with Russians or paying hush money is a crime? And not for nothing, but how many Obama administration officials went to jail? Is it none? Because I think it's none.
"I don't get it...every full moon more and more people I know turn up dead,
with wounds consistent with what the coroner describes as an enormous, 
bipedal wolf-like creature. What am I missing? What's the connection?"
-Some werewolf

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