Tag: Donald Trump

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

Richly Revealing

Donald Trump, gag order, censorship, courts, indictment

There is something rich in the latest gag order placed on Mr. Trump.

“Former President Donald Trump on March 27 criticized the New York judge overseeing his ‘hush money’ case and criticized the judge’s daughter,” explains Jack Phillips of The Epoch Times, “just hours after the judge handed down a gag order against him.”

Richly . . . ironic? 

Apt? 

Idiotic?

“This Judge,” the former president wrote on his own social media site, “by issuing a vicious ‘Gag Order,’ is wrongfully attempting to deprive me of my First Amendment Right to speak out against the Weaponization of Law Enforcement, including the fact that Crooked Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and their Hacks and Thugs are tracking and following me all across the Country, obsessively trying to persecute me, while everyone knows I have done nothing wrong!”

To them, Orange Man’s very existence is “wrong,” and the thing they most want is Trump to shut up. So, in the course of a trial upon a subject combining campaign finance regulations with more prurient interests, a judge gagging the defendant from speaking in public about his prosecutors is . . . well, convenient. For them. 

The prosecution is arguably an attempt to silence Trump; gag orders remove doubt. And allow the Empire State to exact the punishment before the trial concludes.

The prosecutors and politicians and major media propagandists who are aghast at Trump’s charges aren’t exactly saying that what Trump says about the judge’s daughter (that she “represents Crooked Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, and other Radical Liberals”) is false. 

They object . . . because . . . what he says makes them look bad.

And what they are trying to do is make Trump look bad.

Just rich. 

With meaning. 

More philosophically minded folks say we have a crisis of meaning these days. I don’t know. I see meaning everywhere!

But it’s not always meaning we like.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment partisanship

Caveat Preemptive

Donald Trump

Were Donald J. Trump an exemplar of strict Kantian honesty; had he a reputation for exactitude about his achievements and acumen; if hyperbole had not become his own very public modus — then, and only then, would the near half a billion judgment against him make even a modicum of sense.

But the former U.S. president and infamous branding entrepreneur is and has always been known to be something of a b.s. artist. No one has excuse to take what he says literally. Business partners and all who make deals with Trump should do their own diligence. Their watchword should be: caveat emptor.

Yet, last week, New York State regulators and prosecutors bent over backwards to find Trump guilty. “On Friday, New York County Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ordered Donald Trump to pay a staggering $355 million for repeatedly inflating asset values in statements of financial condition submitted to lenders and insurers,” explains Jacob Sullum of Reason. “When the interest that Engoron also approved is considered, the total penalty rises to $450 million. All told, Trump and his co-defendants, including three of his children and former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, are on the hook for $364 million, or about $464 million with interest.”

That is a lot of money to protect other businesses from Trump’s characteristic exaggerations, which so appalled the court. But not any of the banks Trump did business with.

No one has been harmed, for Trump repaid all the loans.

There is no victim — making Trump the biggest-name victim of victimless crime prosecution of all time.

We, the people, know that “honesty is the best policy” is not standard business practice, and that Trump doesn’t always follow it. But we are also not demanding that our governments insert themselves into every successful transaction looking for fibs and fakery.

That would be a recipe for selective prosecution.

Which is just what this case is: selective prosecution of a political opponent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access partisanship

Enthusiasm for Extremism in Action

Donald Trump, TDS, voting, election

She insists it’s about the rule of law. And not political. Not in any way.

“Maine Secretary of State Claims Politics Played ‘No Role’ in Booting Trump Off Ballot,” is how The Epoch Times headlined the story.

Secretary of State Shenna Bellows has unilaterally barred former President Donald Trump from the Maine presidential primary ballot. As in the Colorado case, the excuse rests with the January 6, 2021, protest rally and mob entrance into the capitol building. She says that “the weight of evidence” she “reviewed indicates that it was an insurrection.” 

Knowing what real insurrections are, and what words mean, and the long history of protests that get out of hand, including in recent times, most non-partisan people, as well as all Trump supporters, must conclude just the opposite: no insurrection was even attempted.

Bellows may actually believe that the January 6 events constituted an insurrection, that her job allows her to do what has never been done in American history, and that this would be good for the nation.

On the insurrection issue, she and Democrats rely upon motivated reasoning. People worked up in a cause can believe almost anything that would aid the cause. Still, the common-sense guess is that almost no one really believes her . . . but of course her Democratic comrades must pretend.

On the scope of her position, prudence would usually steer a partisan such as herself away from doing such a radical thing.

On the good of the nation, the clear hyperpartisan appearance would exacerbate tensions around the country, widening the divide into a chasm.

What may really be in evidence, though, is that leftists are mimicking the radicalism of the pandemic lockdowns, driven by the sheer frenzy of their vision of themselves as embodiments of righteousness . . . always to exercise arbitrary power.

An enthusiasm that spreads virally. As a mania. 

Thus does extremism work.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access election law judiciary

Democratic Mountain High

Donald Trump, Colorado Supreme Court, election, insurrection

How to spark a civil war?

“A divided Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday declared former President Donald Trump ineligible for the White House under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot,” wrote David Knowles for Yahoo News. This will, of course, induce a “showdown in the nation’s highest court to decide whether the front-runner for the GOP nomination can remain in the race.”

The idea — half plausible, I suppose — is that President Trump’s actions on January 6 spurred an insurrection attempt, therefore he is ineligible to run for any federal office.

But emphasize the half-plausible, since, no matter how often Democrats repeat it, the rally-turned-mini-riot-turned-incursion into the Capitol Building did not amount to anything like an insurrection. Capitol Hill interlopers on January 6 were neither prepared nor demonstrating a plan to overthrow the peaceful succession of power. 

They certainly didn’t try to take over the government.

Nor has Mr. Trump been convicted of any such thing.

But, as we all know, this is a controversial matter falling mostly on partisan lines (the Colorado State Supreme Court being made up entirely of Democratic appointees) . . . which makes interpretation of the third section of the 14th Amendment rather tricky.

The state-by-state lawsuits have been sponsored by progressive interest groups trying, desperately, to stop Donald Trump from pulling off a Grover Cleveland: returning to office after a fluke one-term “pause.”

Yet, even if the Supreme Court balks at putting down this too-clever-by-half-plausible scheme, the best Democrats could hope for is preventing Trump from running in blue states with blue courts. Trump might still win despite not being on some state ballots. 

Or lose in an election obviously rigged because he is barred. 

A recipe for deep distrust, resentment and anger.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights judiciary

Untruth Speaker, Untruth Speaker

Donald Trump

“You can’t call anyone a liar?” Judge Patricia Millett asked federal prosecutors, “with a tone of incredulity,” according to The Washington Post report.

Millett, along with Judges Cornelia T.L. Pillard and Bradley Garcia, serves on the three-judge panel of the federal Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. This week they devoted two hours to the appeal of a federal district judge’s gag order placed on former president Donald Trump.

Under Millett’s questioning, federal prosecutor Cecil VanDevender agreed that under the order Mr. Trump could say that someone testifying against him was “an untruth speaker” but not call that person a “liar.”

“He has to speak ‘Miss Manners’ while everyone else is throwing targets at him?” inquired Judge Millett. “It would be really hard in a debate, when everyone else is going at you full bore.”

She noted that the First Amendment importantly protects inflammatory speech, adding with some exasperation: “Your position doesn’t seem to give much balance at all to the First Amendment’s vigorous protection of political speech.”

Trump’s attorney argued that the current leading Republican presidential candidate has taken advantage of the order’s stay, pending this appeal, by “posting about this case almost incessantly since the day it was filed and they haven’t come forward with a single threat that’s even arguably inspired by any evidence in his social media posts.”

The three-judge panel, at least as The Post reads the hearing’s tea leaves, “indicated it may narrow the order prohibiting the former president from attacking individual prosecutors . . . or from calling potential witnesses against him ‘liars’ in the heat of next year’s campaign.”

It should. Unless the speech is specifically criminal it should be freely allowed. Orange Man should have the same rights we all rightly possess.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights partisanship too much government

Insane in the Meme Brain

Hillary Clinton, conspiracy, Donald Trump, deprogramming, cult

Sane Republicans do exist, says Hillary Clinton. Even in the House of Representatives!

We know this because they voted to continue federal government operations by raising the debt limit. Or so Mrs. Clinton says. It’s just “common sense”!

Talking with Christiane Amanpour on CNN, last week, the former presidential candidate explained that these sane Republicans are “intimidated,” adding, “they oftentimes say and do things which they know better than to say or do.”

To get to common ground with these compromised GOP folks, however, the measures that intimidate them — while exciting their extremist, insane MAGA proponents — must be roundly defeated. 

No compromise.

In times past, our representatives in Congress could work together; but back then, argues the former First Lady, U.S. Senator, and Secretary of State, “there wasn’t this little tail wagging the dog of the Republican Party.”

That is, conservative representatives would kindly admit defeat every time the green light was given to more and more spending. Now they won’t cooperate.

It’s extremism, in Hillary’s judgment, to oppose the ceaseless growth of the warfare-welfare state.

But, Hillary being Hillary, she had a corker to unleash. “Maybe at some point there needs to be a formal de-programming of the cult members.”

Just like Mrs. Clinton to generously offer re-education camps to her opponents.

Followed by an admonition: “we have to be smarter.”

How is it smart (or sane) to continually grow the federal debt, its mere service now larger than the defense budget?

By talking about formally deprogramming MAGA extremists Hillary Clinton skillfully deflects her supporters’ attention from the real need: informally deprogramming their own insane debt-piling status quo mindset.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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