Americans Believe Trump Indictments are Political

Michael Tomasky @mtomasky writes in The New Republic:

The Big Lie, as it quickly became known, was that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election. He’s still out there peddling this nonsense, and a lot of people still believe it, though thankfully, they constitute a clear minority of voters.

But now there’s a new lie being peddled. Call it Big Lie Two. Trump has been hawking this one for a while too, but it has been, to my mind, oddly little remarked-upon. That needs to change: Big Lie Two is more insidious and dangerous than Big Lie One, for two reasons. First, it has nothing to do with the settled past, but rather with the unsettled present and future. And second, unlike Big Lie One, a majority of Americans believe it.

The lie is that the indictments against Trump represent a collective effort to stop him from running for president. ...

Trump is being prosecuted in these cases because there is very good reason to believe he broke the law. Period.

But most people don’t believe it. A CBS/YouGov poll from about a month ago asked respondents if they believed the indictments were “an attempt to stop Trump’s 2024 campaign.” And 59 percent said yes, to 41 percent saying no. ...

But the depressing reality is that three out of five Americans apparently believe that these indictments are politically motivated. About half of those, probably a little more, believe every word Trump says.

Yes, of course the indictments are politically motivated. I have read them, and I do not think it possible that anyone sincerely believes that these are legitimate criminal prosecutions.

I try to consider the other side, so here is what he thinks are smoking guns to prove Trump is lying.

It’s not true. What’s true is this. Credible evidence has emerged on a number of fronts that Trump may have broken the law: that he absconded with boxes of sensitive, classified documents to Florida; that he approved a hush-money payment to a woman with whom he’d had sexual relations; that he tried to influence officials in Georgia to rig the 2020 election; and that he led or directed an insurrection against the government of the United States.

He is presumed innocent until proven guilty in all these matters. Yet in each of them, there is ample enough evidence of guilt on these fronts for prosecutions to proceed, and a lot of that evidence is, as Orwell might put it, right in front of our noses. We’ve seen the photographs of the boxes of classified documents, and we’ve heard that audio tape of him admitting that, contrary to his public statements, he knew that as an ex-president he could not declassify them. We have the testimony of his former attorney that Trump ordered him (Michael Cohen) to cut the check to Stormy Daniels. We have the tape of him badgering Brad Raffensberger to find him 11,780 votes. And we have video evidence, as well as congressional testimony from former aides, speaking to the idea that Trump encouraged the January 6 violence and was enjoying it — and even, from Cassidy Hutchinson, that he so desperately wanted to go to the Capitol while the rioting was taking place that he reached for the steering wheel and lunged at the Secret Service man who blocked him.

Wow, this is all politically motivated. Cassidy Hutchinson has changed her story a few times, and was reciting hearsay about what is implausible and not criminal. She is now plugging a book.

Cohen was the one who made the decision to pay Daniels. Cohen was later convicted of various financial crimes. Cohen did bill Trump for services, and Trump paid him, but there was nothing illegal about that.

Yes, Trump did say that an ex-President could not declassify documents, and he never said otherwise.

Trump did contest the vote count in Georgia, and tried to show that he should have been credited with more votes.

Nobody thinks any of this is criminal. It is just a Democrat attempt to block Trump from running in 2024. Tomasky admits that the public believes Trump that the prosecutions are political. The term Big Lie is an attempt to say that Trump is the same as Hitler, for asserting his innocence. Really? Hitler started WWII and killed 6 million Jews, while Trump said an election was stolen and said he was innocent of some criminal charges. This is what passes for Trump criticism in the press.

Here is another Tomasky Trump-Hitler rant, from a week ago:

Poisoning the blood of our country. That’s straight-up Nazi talk. Don’t believe me? Here’s a sentence from Mein Kampf: “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.”

So is blood poisoning a good thing, just because Hitler said it was bad? Tomasky is not even Jewish. Jews are probably more against blood poisoning than Hitler was. A lot of Jews do not like these silly Hitler analogies.