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A coup. That's what was attempted. Everyone may not call it that now, but that's what history will call what Trump attempted.
Trump has to be held accountable and punished severely as a deterrent for the future.
It took 244 years for our first nearly successful coup. The next attempt may be much much sooner.
I heard this a couple years ago: The single most important predictor of a successful coup, is a failed coup
And he knows it too.
Another unfortunate thing is that surely rivals and enemies of the US noticed how unprepared we were for an event like that, and while as various pundits and news organizations pointed out, our institutions did prevail and were strengthened, they sure weren't rock solid. And we're still having to deal with this orange-painted douchebag, who is not only not in prison, but almost as popular as before and running for president. But anyway, it's a concern that someone like Russia or China could sponsor and a stage a coup by manipulating the crew of violent mouth breathers into it. I mean, I'd be surprised if foreign influence wasn't involved in the last one.
The people who stormed the capital were able to do so because intelligence was WILLFULLY ignored. Trump and his appointees downplayed the risk of violence and denied reinforcing the capital.
Without those loyal to Trump ignoring refusing to increase security for the capital, the storming of Congress would not have been successful.
Don't rule Saudi Arabia out either there.
Im willing to bet that this involved assistance from the Russians.
A coup. That's what was attempted
It pisses me off that I continually hear people call it a "riot".
It wasn't a "riot", that's a republican rebranding of what happened that day. It wasn't a bunch of people that got pissed off and suddenly decided to start breaking things.
It was a planned and coordinated attack on our nation's capitol with the specific goal of stopping the peaceful transfer of power and installing an unelected individual as head of government by any means necessary, up to and including the attempted assassination of members of both houses of Congress.
That's a coup d'etat, Not a riot. Normalizing the phrase "capitol riot" is rewriting history.
The attack on the capitol was just a small piece of the coup. It was a delay/scare/chaos tactic to use the alternative electoral certificates. There is no doubt or subjective interpretation here, this was a coup attempt, and there is a long trail of evidence due to the many layers of government they had to go through to make it happen.
It is past time caring how the members of this hostile faction are calling and interpreting it. They've been denying their intentions, crimes, and reality for a god-damned long time. They're even denying the weather of the day. You're right, and don't dignify their rebranding with a response, just call it what it is.
The Cline Center is responsible for categorizing and describing coups and what kind of coups those coups were. They called it a self-coup attempt. It was a coup. It's not up for debate. They are the authority on whether or not something is/was a coup/coup attempt.
https://clinecenter.illinois.edu/coup-detat-project/statement_jan.27.2021
I had not heard this before, thanks for sharing! Fascinating.
Hitler got a slap on the wrist for his first coup attempt (nine months in prison), we all know what happened next.
However, there have been less successful coup attempts in US history. The only other major one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
Less coup-y, but more successful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
I am genuinely concerned that a jury will have at least one person that will not convict Trump no matter what the evidence shows. There are people so brainwashed by Trump's big lie that getting an impartial jury will be neaely impossible.
I only have slim hope it will be ok since a grand jury did choose to indict him. I guess we'll see.
There's a reason why so many lawsuits end in a settlement instead of a jury trial. We all want to believe every trial is like 12 Angry Men, but the reality is that a "jury of your peers" is made up of the general public (ever looked around on a public bus?), so at the end of the day jury trial is basically a coin flip.
Same thing here. If it goes to trial, the outcome is going to basically be random.
None of what you said is true. I know what you mean, and it’s a good worry, but juries are not purely “random”.
They are heavily scrutinized and thoroughly checked from both sides. A large group of potentials are brought together (randomly) and a selection process takes place. Both sides form written questions of the potential jurors to ensure they aren’t a shoe in for the other side. Those questions are provided to a judge who validates that they are not bad. Then the questions are provided to the individuals to answer with the judges guidance. Then they are selected to serve or be alternates by all three parties. Yes trumps lawyers will be there and have a say but it can be countermanded by the other side and the judge focuses on the meat of the items.
In trump’s case the pool will be very large and the judge will be spending a very long time talking to each to ensure they will be impartial and fair. Above and beyond the simple questionnaire. They also have the capacity to double check for obvious issues like lying about their belief structure and the judge sets out the requirements for the case.
The judge 100% talks to the jurors directly and in general tries to engender a level of trust between themselves and the potential jurors. They will ensure neutrality.
Yes it could go sideways, but it is unlikely. The politics are so unbelievably polarizing it would be hard to imagine a juror lying through their teeth to get into there with the risk of being found to have lied through the process. And seriously lying on the juror question forms is.. bad. Really bad.
Btw lawsuits end in a settlement because the cost of the lawsuit is higher than the cost of settling and getting money now. Nothing more or less. You are conflating very different processes.
Be angry about the right things with the right information. It’s way more healthy and will help you energize others.
Have you ever served on a jury? I have, and my comment was based on my experience. It has nothing to do with being "right" or "healthy" lol. Its what happened to me in real life.
Yes and I know many who have. Your experience is not the norm for high profile cases.
Cases where there is no overriding community exposure is significant less invasive/picky.
It's a real shame it has come to this. If Trump was a normal person and just accepted that he lost like every single loser before him and not lie to the point where his supporters committed acts of domestic terrorism then he wouldn't have to deal with this.
On another note, how the ever living fuck would you find an untainted jury for that? Who hasn't seen it and is unbiased?
That's the problem with finding unbiased juries for extremely high profile cases or defendants. If you manage to find someone who hasn't heard of Trump or is actually neutral about him.... what has this person been doing if they've really never heard of him? or, , how could anyone have no real opinion about one of the most confrontational and aggressive politicians in recent history?
There is a difference between not heard of it and willing to weigh the evidence laid in front of them. Both sides will axe all who have strong opinions.
It will be difficult, but not impossible. Even in the dc area.
I would imagine a jury of his peers wouldn't be hard to find but is that who you really want on the jury? I'd rather have critical thinking intelligent members of society.
What an enormous waste of energy and money this guy is.
Imagine spending all the time and effort on something that could have helped the world instead of his ignorant ass
As a non american this just feels like a stunt to promote Trumps election for president.
Edit: For the record I said as a non american cuz I dont know a lot about it. Lets be real, he is not going to prison, he deserves it tho, but he has too much power to go to prison. Only thing happening is his name is now everywhere, so if he was not popular enough already, people are talking more about him now
So the justice department should have just let Trump get away from it all and then he for sure wouldn't be re-elected?
There have been a lot of people saying that prosecuting Trump for crimes only helps him and never hurts him. I'm not sure that's true.
Even if it does help him, which I am dubious of, the alternative is to say "Presidents and ex-presidents can get away with doing whatever they want." Is that really the best thing for the country?
I think giving up on prosecuting him because it may help him would indicate a far greater forfeiture of USA's democracy.
We can't choose to do things or not do things based on "what will the 30% of Americans who are die hard Trump supporters think?" If we did that, we might as well just turn over all power to then and let them make our lives a living hell. (They certainly don't worry about what we think.)
Prosecuting Trump for his crimes is the right thing to do. Nobody is above the law and Trump needs to face justice for his crimes. If he doesn't, we're just begging someone else to do the same thing, but be more successful at it.
As an American I think that's insane... There are a lot of dumbasses here tho... Fuck that dipshit criminal motherfucker though.
Also the ugliest
I think the US vs Trump will be the trial of the century. Probably the Jan 6th case more than the documents case. Trump will be a case example on why the framers write our constitution for people like him. I only hope the laws of justice uphold. Even by the time a Republican does get into the White House (say 2028) and pardons him, the Georgia state charges still stick (if he's convicted) and he remains in prison the rest of his life
The civil war follow up just sucks
Yeah the first season was so much better I think its because they got rid of abe tbh
US v trump is existential in its nature. This is about whether the concept of the US, as envisioned by the founders, is still seen as valid. There can be no more important domestic trial.
Dredd Scott probably thought the same thing.
"*I don’t often get to use the term gobsmacked, but that is how I was rendered when I saw the film Jurassic Park. I remember the 1993 cinema trip vividly: clutching my popcorn, wide-eyed, as the first dinosaur, a brachiosaurus, ambled across the screen. Walking out with my parents, I jabbered with excitement: “Could we really make dinosaurs real again, Dad? Could we? Could we?”
These memories came flooding back as I read Natasha Bernal’s piece in Wired UK, exploring the world of biobanking animal cells. Bernal answers the question of whether extinct animals could be brought back with a tentative yes — science has long proved that “frozen cells from extinct animals could potentially be used to revive species” — but that is not what biobanking is about. The intention is to increase the diversity of living species, cloning to prevent further loss, rather than to bring back what is already gone. As a species dwindles, so does its genetic pool, and frozen cells from extinct animals could potentially be used to help prevent extreme inbreeding.
Bernal’s case study is Tullis Mason, a chap who sports “three-quarter length shorts” even in a lab coat. Matson runs an artificial insemination company for racehorses from his family’s farm in Shropshire, England. However, on the side, he is also planning to save the animal kingdom by building the biggest biobank of animal cells in Europe. It’s not always a dignified business, with Bernal describing Mason hooking an elephant penis into a device that looks like “a huge condom,” but the science and the ethics her article explores are fascinating. We may not be about to bring dinosaurs back to life, but with help from biobanking, life already on this planet might still find a way.
This is why, back at Matson’s farm, there is a tiny, black, felt-like ear and two bat testicles the size of olive pits on a lab bench. The Seba’s short-tailed bats at Chester Zoo are usually housed in the Fruit Bat Forest, where visitors can feed them as part of a £56 “experience”. Though not currently listed as endangered, with global biodiversity at a tipping point, it’s likely that no species is entirely safe. This bat died of natural causes, but its genetic material will live on.
The first thing that Lucy Morgan, a scientific advisor at Nature’s SAFE, does is shave the ear. “Ears grow to a certain extent throughout our lifetime, so they’re a cell type that’s already wanting to grow and regenerate itself,” she says. “So when choosing a sample that you’re trying to pick to culture in the future, it’s a good one.”
She puts the ear to soak in chlorhexidine to clean it from bacteria and switches on a timer. After two minutes, she transfers it to a petri dish, and starts cutting it into small pieces the size of chocolate chips. Using tweezers, she puts them in cryovials filled with cryopreservant. The tiny testicles will be preserved whole. They couldn’t get any semen out of them – a common problem for animals that are too small to preserve in the traditional manner.
Safely pipetted into a cryovial or straw, an animal’s tissue, semen or ova are deposited into the cryogenic tank, ready to be unfrozen when they may be needed for repopulation programmes in zoos or, if feasible, the wild. In the case of some creatures, whose anatomical challenges do not currently permit artificial insemination using sperm or ova, the samples may stay there for decades. For now, all of Nature’s SAFE’s samples are in one location, but the charity aims to build a backup so that tissue can be split into different places and safeguarded for the future.*"