Trump reportedly wants to win re-election to avoid indictments - Polidicks

https://theweek.com/speedreads/827452/trump-reportedly-wants-win-reelection-avoid-indictments That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

He packed the court with people who dont believe he can be indicted while in office so yeah that is kinda how it works.

Current Justice Department policy as opposed to established constitutional law. Trump disregarded a huge number of things that were policy up until he took office, so why's it gotta be special for him now? ...oooohhh, right, deluded manbaby, I forgot. Unfortunately for Trump, he's doubling down on pandering to his base at the cost of giving everyone else the finger, and his base is not enough to win re-election. Even with the GOP's efforts to keep him from being challenged in primaries.

And this is why Cohen believes there won't be a peaceful transition of power in 2020 if he loses.

His freedom is literally on the line with his re-election. This will be the dirtiest campaign in history.

I bet he would start floating the idea of martial law if he thought he could use it to stay in office and escape jail...

everyone else's freedom is also on the line with his re-election

...not to mention, quite literally, the future of human civilization - climate change isn't going to get any better under more years of prolonged delays and anti-environmental practices.

The US also used to be a global trendsetter, leading by example and promoting changes in practices (for better or worse). 9/11/2001 marked the end of America holding a position of moral leadership on the world stage. What was once a global force for progress (at least progress as defined by America) turned into a vindictive racist bully after being stung by coordinated terrorist attacks. Those attacks were entirely successful, because they have terrified the collective American people so badly they voluntarily gave away freedoms and privacy to the state in exchange for the promise of being kept safe. America is a wounded, distrustful cornered animal after a beesting unexpectedly shocked it out of its blissful bubble of smug exceptionalism. The true cost of 9/11 has been America discarding its moral responsibilities in international efforts and getting angry and personal with anyone who crosses them. And that was before Trump was so offended by the notion of President Barrack Obama he lost his mind and turned into purified elemental everyone's-racist-uncle, and then ran for and won the election. America's moral authority had begun to reassemble, with difficulty, under Obama, despite the best efforts of the Tea Party-turbocharged GOP, and then Trump entered the race and made it all about MAGA and Mexicans are rapists and Muslim ban and everyone watched that play out. If Trump was impeached today and every US politician of any party on any level that engaged in improper behaviour with any foreign actor relating to Trump before or after the election was immediately indicted and taken into custody and removed from office with new elections called immediately that Democrats and purple Republicans won in landslides of restored sanity, I think it'd still be 5-10 years for America to recover enough international standing to firmly take the lead on climate change or other global problems and have a considerable portion of the world listen and follow. I really feel like the timeline fractured on 9/11 and we ended up in the mirror universe where everything will be going to shit permanently. I want a time machine so I can go back to 1990 and warn everyone about everything, about Russia, about Iraq, about how the US government is going to start lying about basically everything regarding its overt and covert foreign policy (as if it ever stopped), the memetic propaganda warfare age and the intense danger of Facebook and other Big Data companies disguised as friendly social media platforms, everything. I'd also totally buy Apple stock when they dipped to like $4 before Steve Jobs came back and rebuilt the company towards being able to release the iPhone and iPad and the stock price blew past $700, but never mind that. 90s kids were raised that the environment needs to be protected, it's not too late to save the Earth, and giant megacorporations are greedy-evil and the worst polluters on the planet and they need to be regulated. Fast forward to 2019 and the big corporations won by buying out the US government before the millenial generation could inherit office and are shitting up the environment with absolute contempt at this point, and on top of that we're being paid less than our parents were in the 90s when you account for inflation. Is it any wonder we don't want to mortgage the next 30 (realistically 50) years away to buy a house and settle down to start a family like our parents did?

Hopefully the Secret Service just escort him off the property for trespassing.

"Keep me out of prison" would be one legendary campaign slogan

Our generation, in 15-20 years, will oversee the largest departure from societal norms our history has ever seen, I believe. When global famine, insect collapse, and oceanic collapse all occur in a rapid fire timeline, the people(you know, us and our peers) will be the people most harmed by this, as we'll have overseen the transition and failure ourselves. I truly believe that when this happens, and the going gets tough, and push comes to shove, we're going to be seeing anarchist attacks, co-ordinated resistance movements primarly centered around violent methods, and this will happen in all corners of the globe. Why wouldn't it? Our future selves will watch the hard earned fruits of our labour almost literally turn to sand in our hands, and we'll have no one to blame but ourselves, and the society we inhereted. In the midst of panic, fear, and outrage, these people starving and thirsty, desperate for anything, will turn to the most violent methods they can to ensure what little survival they can. I fear for our future, and I don't know how to reconcile that with the reality that even if I got all the likeminded people who want to prevent this from happening, prevent climate change and etc, it's still going to be hindered by how damaged our societies dialogue has become.

well, I mean....he can't? AFAIK That's what the impeachment process is for. If there is sufficient evidence against the President to bring them to trial, Congress votes to impeach them. If they're removed from office, THEN the charges are brought against them.

China will survive and inherit the earth because their national culture places zero value in human life. China will close borders and shoot refugees on sight.

I can't wait to see some House of Cards election meddling bullshit going on. So much excitement to look forward to... /s

There's no law that explicitly states that the sitting President can't be indicted for high crimes, as far as I'm aware. Impeachment is there to snatch someone out of office who Congress feel isn't fit for the job or isn't representing the seat properly. It was done to Bill Clinton because he lied about cheating on his wife. That's ground for divorce, but it's not grounds for being arrested.

In 1973 Spiro Agnew was approached by the Justice Department with a 40-count indictment for corruption. In exchange for resigning, he was allowed to plead guilty to only one count. If he had insisted on remaining in office despite overwhelming evidence of corruption, at that point DOJ would have gone ahead and indicted him while in office. But because it didn't come to that, the limits of DOJ's authority are still untested. Basically, the threat of criminal indictments act as leverage to balance out an otherwise asymmetrical conflict. When the accused holds a high office, the office itself basically becomes a hostage. In the face of criminal prosecution, most rational criminals would resign from office in exchange for leniency. It's a delicate balance between serving justice and preventing damage to our political institutions. The problem is that the president of the United States is not a rational person. He has committed treason in all but name, obstructed justice repeatedly, and is now in a battle for his political life. He has no morals and he's getting more desperate by the day. It's entirely possible that he may refuse to step down regardless of indictments and incite violence against his enemies.

Trump's going to prison the second he ceases being the president, and possibly before. There's nothing that says he can't be arrested while in office, it's just a policy. You can run for president while in jail, I guess you can be president while in jail, too? Who knows. It's never REALLY been argued and settled before

I think about this a lot. I'm seriously thinking that I should prioritize teaching my kid survival shit as soon as possible just because I don't think it's that improbable that society could seriously shift so much it could even be called a collapse. As for me I have a chronic disease that will take me out as soon as my medication stops being available. I only hope my kid and wife are prepared to go without me by that point.

I've been thinking about this a lot too lately...so much so that all my friends are getting a red folder at a future party, being called the "contingency party", and the folder will have maps, potential meeting spots, a rough game plan... details discussed and finalized at one party, and final "editions" given our at party 2. Probably not geared towards anything specific, but some solid guidelines so that in the case of some kind of societal destroying disaster, I can still see my friends and "the compound" joke would, funny enough, become a reality. Also there's a book I discovered in Bar Harbor called Back to Basics that has a tendency ton of awesome, super useful things like "finding land" and building a house, making power from water, and storage and treatment of water, how to farm, what to farm where and when, it's wild. There's even a section on keeping the fruits of your labor fresh year round, it's crazy cool.

These arent the kinda of thoughts that shouldnd need to go through anyones head, especially from someone in a first world country.

Your link is broken

Every civilization has a rise and fall. Scientists warned us in the 80s and 90s to grab the brakes and pull. We're debating about whether it's profitable enough to grab on and pull even a little bit. Nobody should be thinking things but nobody should've been stupid and greedy enough to ignore an international scientific community consensus that carbon emissions were causing a greenhouse effect that would soon become self-sustaining beyond our control. They did and now it's quite possibly already too late. We're standing at the end of humanity's third act and the rest of the play is going to be pretty gruesome if we don't take action so drastic it would be considered insanely irrational in any other context. Everyone's lifestyle is going to change. For most people in the west the change will be a significant downgrade. We were warned and the greedy elite decided "nah" and threw a brick on the accelerator pedal.

All the easy natural resources that fueled the industrial revolution are gone so a pre-industrial regression probably won't reverse. Which is why they deserve to be damned for the rest of time, more hated than Judas, Hitler, or Stalin. Certainly helped kill more people.

Thanks. I fucking hate it when apps shove other text into a copied link, just give me the URL, please

i’m going through a similar mental crisis; i even discussed it with my wife last night. we don’t have kids, but i’ve wanted to my whole life, and my wife’s picked up a similar enthusiasm since we got together. but now we’re having doubts if we even should try to care for a child during a time of such potential suffering, especially considering we’re not financially stable enough to give ourselves a head start raising one now. it’s a real sinking feeling when the simplest life goal i could have set for myself, reproducing, might not even be morally attainable.

When I was 12, there was this religious segment on the television talking about this. All of this stuff that is happening now. They said Russia, China and Turkey were going to help end the world. Its stuck with me for years and I'm fucking scared