Rambling and misleading
Convicted felon Trump gave a news conference packed with the usual lies.
Mr. Trump, in a rambling and misleading 33-minute speech, derided the trial as “rigged” and attacked the judge in his first public comments since a Manhattan jury found him guilty of all 34 felony counts of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to derail his 2016 presidential campaign. He also made numerous misleading statements about the case and what took place at the trial.
“Misleading statements”=lies.
Mr. Trump said he would appeal. Long before that appeal is heard, he will be enmeshed in the gears of the criminal justice system. A pre-sentence report, made by probation officers, will make recommendations based on the defendant’s criminal record — Mr. Trump had none before this case — as well as his personal history and the crime itself.
That’s very interesting, because his personal history is packed full of fraud and lies. Voters can (and sadly do) ignore that, but probation officers not so much.
Trump claims, implausibly, that he never thought of Michael Cohen as a fixer. He says he thought of him purely as a lawyer. In reality, Trump assigned Cohen to do many jobs that had nothing to do with lawyering, such as threatening contractors and trying to rig an online CNBC poll to make Trump seem more popular than he really was.
So Threatening Contractors isn’t Law 101? Who knew?
Trump is now talking about Michael Cohen, who was the prosecution’s star witness against him. He says Cohen was an “effective” lawyer who turned out to be a “sleazebag.” This is ultimately part of the prosecutors’ case against Trump: he was trying to blame Cohen for everything, but Cohen was who Trump himself chose to defend him for a decade.
It’s hilarious that Trump calls anyone a sleazebag. Trump is the sleaziest sleazebag who ever sleazed. Everything he touches or mentions or looks at turns into sleaze. He’s the mildew of sleaze.
Where Trump looked both dismayed and upset in his brief remarks yesterday, he is back to familiar form, essentially lecturing the news media, and the public, at length about his views on the case, the trial, the judge and prosecutors.
In terms of daily life as opposed to larger matters, that’s one of the worst things about him – how much he talks at us and lectures us on his views in his horrible grating voice using his short stupid words to say brutal stupid things. It’s as if a bratty 8-year-old child got to yammer at us all day every day.
I wouldn’t be quick to assume that probation officers will be hard on him. First, there’s a lot of MAGA types in law enforcement. Second, I don’t know how eager an officer would be to really dig deep and write up a report about all of Trump’s personal history, a lot of which is likely known to the judge anyway, and deal with all the resulting abuse and harassment. If you’re the officer assigned to his case, the easiest thing to do is just dutifully note that he’s a first-time offender but does have other criminal charges pending, is not likely to be a flight risk, etc., and let the judge take the heat.
Amazing that for all that, he’s a ‘first-time offender’
Aw darn it. I took “as well as his personal history” too seriously then. Reality bites.
Don’t take my ramblings here too seriously — I have no better basis for the predilections of NY probation officers than anyone else. But I would be surprised if it’s common for P.O.s to write a long report on the general goodness/badness of a convict, especially one with as long and controversial a public profile as Trump.
Screechy, I’m happy to ghost write one for them if it would help.
I believe being a sleazebag is among the minimal qualifications for the position of Trump lawyer.
Aren’t his remarks about Cohen yet another violation of his gag order? As I understand it, the gag order is still in effect at least until the sentencing hearing in July.
I assume that his legal team for this trial knew that Trump has a no win – no fee policy with lawyers.
Mind you, he also has a policy of win – no fee, too.
The trial was rigged. How do I know? DJT told me so.
How does Trump know the trial was rigged? Because every time he loses, it is because things were rigged against him. He knows that’s how it works because every time he has won, the field was rigged in his favour.
It’s all so simple to think like Trump.
My understanding of ‘theory of mind’ is as follows:
We all start out with very immature minds; unaware that we are even thinking at all, never mind thinking abou the fact that we are thinking. Then we realise that we have thoughts. “I think, therefore I am.”
Eventually, we should grow in understanding to the point where we realise that other people have their own thoughts; that not only do we think, but other people think too. We can even extend that realisation to our concept of non-human animals. “I have a mind of my own, other people have minds of their own.”
In between those extremes is a position that a lot of people get stuck on. “I have a mind of my own, and other people have minds just like me“.
I expect we have each encountered a lot of people just like that; people who assume that we have the same point of view, the same opinions, the same beliefs, the same attitude to everything that they do. The same moral compass, the same everything cognitive. It’s frustrating to argue with such people, because they seem to be intellectually incapable of entertaining the mere possibility of different viewpoints, let alone imagining them. Their first thought on any matter becomes their final thought. Trying to get them to see that ‘transwomen are men’, for example, is an enterprise doomed to failure because changing their mind feels like changing themselves into different people. This is why the thought experiment (imagine yourself waking up in an opposite-sex body; are you still you?) fails with them. Their immediate response is to empathise with the ‘transwomen’ in that scenario, because they truly believe the ‘born in the wrong body’ narrative, never mind that it has been debunked (and even though those who started that meme have withdrawn from promoting it; they don’t need to do it any more. It succeeded). Like prominent Christian apologists, they’ll continue to repeat debunked narratives their entire lives, because those are the ones that they hard-wired into their world view first.
The most extreme examples of getting stuck in an early developmenta stage are, of course, those with Cluster B disordered personalities. The supreme solipsists, they can’t think of other people as having minds of our own at all; merely reflections of their own minds, like toys to be played with. It’s instructive (if depressing) to listen to the way they describe other people, because they are describing themselves whilst blaming their behaviour on others. They reject all uncomfortable emotions and project them into what they regard as avatars. Guilt definitely belongs to someone else who did it first and was really, therefore, at fault.
Oops. Sorry for the essay!