Former president convicted? What are your thoughts on the trial and impact on election?

PrivateTechquity 🚀GME🚀

financeabc

Tbh, I really followed very little of the case but I am glad he got convicted. 

The average liberal in a nutshell, completely ignorant of all the facts of the case but will be damned if they're not cheering because "orange man bad". I can't even be surprised anymore lol

You feel very comfortable playing the tough guy online. You must be ridiculously desperate for attention. 

lake_michigan  

Not even trying to argue if he is guilty or not. I don't know enough about the details of the case. Just pointing out that your low IQ approach of simply saying there isn't anything to discuss based simply on the fact that he was convicted is intellectually lazy and shows your obvious tendency to bend your mental model of the world to fit whatever pre-existing bias you already have.

If you are not trying to argue one way or another then what it is the point of your comment?  If your purpose is to insult others then just go away and find another hobby.

lake_michigan

Following this logic, there was nothing to discuss after Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted. Or after OJ was acquitted. And you're implicitly saying that if Trump had been acquitted as well then there wouldn't be anything to discuss because it obviously means he wasn't guilty. Something tells me you wouldn't be so quick to say there is nothing to discuss in that case...

What is your point?  Kyle Rittenhouse was cleared of charges; he's not a felon.  Whether his actions were morally defensible (e.g. putting himself in harm's way for no real reason and then killing someone in self-defence once there) is another question, and one which we can discuss.  As far as Mr Trump goes, we know he's a sleazeball and an abuser, we knew that he had an affair with a porn star and paid her to keep quiet - if you want to discuss the ethics of that, lets go!

Sometimes bad people get away with criminal activity for various reasons.  When that happens, there is a perfectly good topic of conversation in the sense of "the law has constraints and procedures beyond 'punish the morally guilty' and we should discuss whether this person deserves opprobrium for their actions even if innocent."  That simply doesn't seem as interesting when the situation is "this person committed a deeply unethical act which was also a crime, and was found guilty."

If after this case someone said 'You can't claim it's a 'witch hunt' anymore, because he was convicted.' What would you have said?

https://www.aclu.org/news/capital-punishment/racist-jury-selection-hear…

I mean that case is a crazy one, and the allegations around jury selection are basically the most fair and reasonable part of the entire trial (seriously.... this is why people think the police as an institution are "racist").  However, there is one issue here which isn't addressed in this article - what the hell was Mr Gates' counsel doing during all this?  The assumption, I guess, is that he was being represented by a badly underpaid public defender who was stuck defending a person who had been coerced into a false confession, was being railroaded by a bigoted prosecutors office, and didn't have access to most of the evidence, which the police destroyed or fabricated ahead of time.

The point being, the fact that conservative Dixiecrats were bigoted pieces of shit more interested in punishing minorities than finding truth or dispensing justice isn't news; that's the backbone of the modern GOP, so we see this every day anyway.  What makes that different from this is that Mr Trump is the very definition of privilege; he has wealth and power beyond the dreams of most people, and if he's in danger of being represented by incompetent counsel that is his own fault.  His defense lawyers can also strike jurors from the pool, and are in a position to highlight if the jury selection process is unfair.  

Besides which, there is absolutely no evidence that the jury was "rigged" or unfair.  It returned a verdict you don't like.  This is the problem with Mr Trump and by extension conservatives in general at this point - if the only system you'll deem legitimate is the one that lets you "win" 100% of the time, then why bother having a justice system at all?  Why bother with elections?  Mr Gates has actual evidence that the jury which convicted him was constructed to be biased against him; as with all of Mr Trump's claims, if that was true for him, where is his evidence?  Just like in the 2020 election, the mere fact that he's claiming discrimination does not actually mean he was discriminated against.  Maybe the jury wasn't so hot on the fact that Mr Trump's repeated statements during the trial put basically everyone connected with it at risk from his more violent supporters?   I don't know, I'm making that up as a hypothetical, but you cannot make threats against a person and then complain when they don't like you.  Mr Trump simply cannot complain if his own words and actions are causing people to look upon him with disfavor; all he has to do is keep his mouth shut, and he refuses to do so.

Not even trying to argue if he is guilty or not. I don't know enough about the details of the case. Just pointing out that your low IQ approach of simply saying there isn't anything to discuss based simply on the fact that he was convicted is intellectually lazy and shows your obvious tendency to bend your mental model of the world to fit whatever pre-existing bias you already have.

On the contrary, I happen to be better educated on the subject than you, and have just explained why your attempt to compare Mr Trump, a former POTUS, and an extremely wealthy and well-connected man, with a poor illiterate black guy in 1970s North Carolina is an absolutely absurd argument.

You want to undermine the legitimacy of the justice system without actually doing the work to show that it didn't work here.  We know, from Mr Gates' case and many others, as well as studies that continue to the current day, that the American justice system is horrifically biased against people of color.  Not maybe, not could be, not "one or two isolated cases" but an ongoing and systemic practice of discrimination.  I think we'd all agree that even if anecdotally, it's quite clear that the justice system is biased in favor of the wealthy, who can exploit procedural loophopes if nothing else.  Mr Trump is not at risk of being discriminated against.  He has the best lawyers his money can buy, so why should he fear the prosecution stacking the deck against him?  His counsel is there to make sure the jury is impartial.

Again, Mr Trump committed a crime.  He was found guilty of it.  There was never a question about the moral relativism of the crime committed, so it's not really an interesting discussion to say "should he have been convicted?" in the same way that there is about someone like OJ, where there is a really interesting question in regards to "this patently guilty person went free, lets talk about it."  Mr Trump had an affair with a porn star.  He falsified business records and violated campaign finance laws to cover it up; no one really disputes the basic facts, the only question was whether it rose the level of felony.  He was a sleazy guy doing a sleazy thing, which is no crime in and of itself but doesn't engender any kind of ethical sympathy in the way that someone killing another person in putative self-defense might (e.g. Kyle Rittenhouse).  The jury decided that his actions were felonious in nature.  What exactly do you want to discuss, then?

You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that I'm going to be as reflexively defensive of these things as you are of Mr Trump, but the difference between me and you is that I actually take the time to learn about this stuff, so I can discuss it.

financeabc

They do not like the verdict and as a result, they post memes and insult.  The jury was selected by both the defense and prosecutors. 

I strongly suspect most of the conservative leaning posters on WSO, and in America in general, do not actually know what jury selection is or that it exists.  To be fair, I doubt most people in general do!

Can you imagine if liberals started talking about Mr Trump in the way that conservatives talk about felons?  The "law and order" types seem to feel that punishment and mandatory sentencing and revoking voting rights and all that is for other people (usually minorities, it seems) and that leniency or questioning the legitimacy of the judicial process is the rule when it comes to themselves.

Sad to see how a bunch of conservative snowflake victims have decided that the core institutions of this country are illegitimate, unless they are required to return results that they want.  Democracy and elections?  Illegitimate unless they win.  Trial by jury?  Bullshit, unless they're acquitted and their enemies convicted.  And then our friends on WSO wonder why they're being called authoritarians or fascists.

I do not doubt that the prosecutors spun a case in their favor.  If the defense was better, they could have spun it their way but that is not what happened.  I think the trial was mostly a documents case and I guess the documents did not make Trump good.  

As I always say, if you are a conservative in 2024, then the world seems biased against you, because if you're that delusional then of course reality leans liberal.  Mr Trump is a criminal, and that is a fact, so if you are going to insist that he is not, that he's something other than a syphilitic blowhard grifter, then of course the things like "truth" or "facts" have to become meaningless or made an object of partisan disdain, because most people, and conservatives in particular it seems, would rather pretend that the world is basically a vast conspiracy designed to persecute them than have the intellectual and moral honesty of admitting they're wrong and changing their convictions accordingly.