March 01, 2024

Very Cursory Thoughts by a Layman on the New York Situation

My opinion of Donald Trump is summed up here. I think he's crass, ethically fraught, and unlikely to win. However, if one wants to beat him, one needs to make the case, to the American people. 


That ought not to be hard.

However, the Democrats have taken his 2016 success as an affront and are trying to destroy Trump via lawfare. They are attempting to keep him off the ballot in several states (an unprecedented bit of chicanery not seen since the lead up to the civil war). And in New York, they are attempting to destroy the man for the crime of existing. 

Specifically, they are fining him 355 million ( now over$400 million) Dollars for allegedly overvaluing his properties, in order to secure better interest rates for loans. While judgement has been reached, I say "alleged" because not only did the banks allegedly defrauded by this alleged overestimation actually testify ON TRUMP'S BEHALF in the matter, and denied that they had been wronged in any way, but the judge summarily declared Trump guilty. Now he is being charged interest every day he does not pay the fine, despite the fact that the ruling is being appealed. 

Some idea of how bad this is is that what Trump has been accused of is such established past practice that real estate developers, even those who dislike Trump, are fleeing the state because this seems to be such a bullshit verdict, based on politics, & in an era of cancel culture that's a real threat. 



The purpose of this is clear, bankrupt Trump, and make it impossible to win the election. This is third world level crap and it unleashes a huge Pandora's box when such a fine, so completely out of line with sentencing guidelines is leveed due to political animus. 

The results of this are likely to be quite dark.
When the sum total of the law becomes " I think he's bad! GET HIM" society does not become better. The history of my own part of the U.S. (the southeast) is illustrative of why this is, but it has rarely been articulated so eloquently as by Paul Schofield here...




Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 06:36 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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1 Yeah, this was obvious from around January 12th, 2021, when a bunch of law school heads signed a letter that incidentally impeached some of its own claims, and invented a novel and wide reaching theory of professional liability. 

Every day that those people do not resign adds further credibility to the notion that they have decided to conspire to violate civil rights of voters, and that JDs will not fairly act as agents in resolving disputes by litigation. 

That was in my view more or less the death of the University, and a fundamental reordering of how we need to think about professions.  I have been appalled at how few people, seemingly, are doing that analysis.

I'm actually fairly optimistic about things. 

I mean, it is not good, but it is very clear now that the basic fundamentals have been a bit bad for a while.  There are no short, fun routes to an excellent state of affairs. 

The more we can persuade that some judges are crooks, the more we can persuade to pay closer attention to state politics, and to oversight over public universities. 

Posted by: PatBuckman at Fri Mar 1 23:48:16 2024 (r9O5h)

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