That jail threat
Then there was the part where he announced that if elected he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton’s email setup. Josh Gerstein at Politico reports that it “provoked a sharp blowback from former U.S. prosecutors, who said Trump’s view of the Justice Department serving the whims of the president is antithetical to the American system.”
Well ok but Trump doesn’t know much about the American system. He knows about real estate profiteering, and cheating, and bankruptcy, and pretending to be a Big Boss on tv. Oh and grabbing women by the pussy whether they want him to or not.
While presidents appoint the attorney general, they do not make decisions on whom to prosecute for crimes — and were Trump to do so, prosecutors warned, he would spark a constitutional crisis similar to that of the “Saturday Night Massacre” in the Nixon administration. In that case, Nixon attempted to fire the prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal, and the top two Justice Department officials resigned on the spot.
Oh well Trump would just have them executed, or sent to Russia, or something.
He said it again at a rally in Ambridge, Pennsylvania this afternoon.
“Special prosecutor, here we come, right? If I win, we’re going to appoint a special prosecutor,” Trump declared.
However, former Republican appointees to senior Justice Department posts used words like “abhorrent,” “absurd” and “terrifying” to describe Trump’s threat to use the legal system to imprison Clinton.
“For Donald Trump to say he will have a special prosecutor appointed and to have tried and convicted her already and say she’d go to jail is wholly inappropriate and the kind of talk more befitting a Third World country than it is our democracy,” said Paul Charlton, who spent a decade as a federal prosecutor before serving as U.S. attorney for Arizona under President George W. Bush.
Just locker room talk. No big deal.
It’s a measure of the general loathsomeness of the man that I’m now trying to work out if this is at all an _improvement_ from his simply having implied someone should shoot her…
Guess it depends how much you like show trials.
Seriously, I have lost count of the number of ways this man has, by my judgement, completely disqualified himself not only for high office, but, really, any office at all.
I’ve argued before and will again: it’s one of the necessary vulnerabilities of democracies that they must allow even those who would deliberately destroy them to run for office. It’s not a democracy if you say the fascists may not run. Ultimately, all you can do is hope enough of the voters are wise enough to see where it would lead, and vote them down.
But I am biting my nails, especially, in this instance, hoping they are and they do.
… the slightly more optimistic note:
It isn’t especially surprising to me Trump would say this. He’s been raving similarly at his rallies for months. Sure, far as I’ve heard, the ‘I’d appoint a special prosecutor’ thing is new. Probably just came out of some typically pathetically shallow ‘research’ he did into the Clinton years. Saw that, in his idiot scramble to come up with a big enough and dumb enough carnival to distract from his latest, probably fatal scandal, and being a bit addled, missed the bit it’s congress generally does that. And he’s too tone deaf to realize that sure, that’s red meat to his civics-challenged followers, but something not wildly off treason to just about everyone else.
Oh, related: I’ve always been prone to such conjecture, but: I figure it’s largely in fact _because_ Ms. Clinton’s alleged ‘transgressions’ here are such weak tea that he and his followers have become so very rabid about it. See also ‘doth protest too much’. People start to smirk, look skeptical, like maybe they figure he’s lost it, like listen, pal, we _are_ talking about stuff usually chiefly offends the IT department. So he just doubles down. So this is: no no, I mean it, really. Listen, I’ve learned this whole new phrase ‘special prosecutor’, from a pile of video bullshit some modern heir of the Arkansas Project just got me to pay $19.95 for… I’ll try that one out, and never mind my none-too-detail-oriented brain missed the bit about who usually appoints those… I mean it, see, I used that very technical term. I mean business! This isn’t just paranoid conspiracy theories from the fever swamps of alt right conspiracy mongering wherein I have too long dwelt, and I’m not totally talking this up to myself and everyone else past the point of absurdity because it’s one of the few subjects I think I can still rile my shrinking pool of extremists with; I’ve really thought about this, for all of 45 seconds…
… course, I figure that’s also how people talk themselves into all _sorts_ of incredibly appalling activities… So it shouldn’t assure anyone much.
The optimistic bit: I think enough of the American people _are_ seeing this guy for what he so clearly is. He will lose the way he should: on his utter lack of merit. And while it’s only reasonable people are wringing their hands he got this far (no, he absolutely shouldn’t have, and it does point to something rotten, but rotten mostly in the milieu that ultimately opened that path to him), there are nations that have allowed such monsters actually into office. Again: _if he is stopped_, the US can say, look, sure, we got problems, and looks like there’s double digits of people really not getting what this whole rule of law/democracy thing is about, but we’re still better than _that_, at least…
And it may make for an interesting civics lesson itself, by the end of this. Let’s face it, the McCarthy trials _were_ getting a bit overused.
This is the shit that I really want to see him lose the election over. Not that the “grab her ***” video isn’t worth losing a presidential bid over, but we’ve had women-abusing pigs in office before; he’s just more blatant on that front. But a Trump victory would be the installation of an actual fascist, and I desperately want to see him rejected on those grounds.
The fascism is an important reason to want him to lose, no question…but for me it fails to overshadow the others. Maybe it should, but it doesn’t. I just can’t stand the idea of someone so AWFUL in that job – such an open, shameless, dedicated bully. Such a bad man. I was thinking this morning how benign he makes Bush Junior and Reagan look in comparison. I detested both of them, but Trump…Trump is a moral monster. He enjoys bullying people, and he shows it.
That itself is fascism, of course – a boot stamping on a human face, forever. Anyway that reason looms extremely large for me.
But he’s been measured up to now. check out this little item (and read it when you’re done laughing):
http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/11/politics/donald-trump-paul-ryan-tweets/
Ophelia: I can certainly understand others prioritizing other reasons to disdain Trump–he really offers a plethora of options for disgust, after all, and for some, a lot of the traits you mention are going to hit closer to home. My concern is that if he goes down simply for being a vulgar bully, a more refined form of fascist would still be able to push most of the same policies while not triggering the alarms they should.
It’s very Orwellian that he should have the label of “law and order candidate”. But I guess it’s common like that when talking about totalitarians. See pravda, etc.