Another analysis of the New York state election fraud trial: It is boring and about business integrity

A NYT opinion (not paywalled) by a New York City attorney, former Manhattan assistant district attorney Rebecca Roiphe, discusses the election fraud/hush money trial from the point of view of a person who has actually enforced the laws Trump is being charged with violating:

Now that the lawyers are laying out their respective theories of the case in the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump in New York, it would be understandable if people’s heads are spinning. The defense lawyers claimed this is a case about hush money as a legitimate tool in democratic elections, while the prosecutors insisted it is about “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.”

Yet this case is not really about election interference, nor is it a politically motivated attempt to criminalize a benign personal deal. Boring as it may sound, it is a case about business integrity.

It’s not surprising that the lawyers on both sides are trying to make this about something sexier. This is a narrative device used to make the jurors and the public side with them, but it has also created confusion. On the one hand, some legal experts claim that the conduct charged in New York was the original election interference. On the other hand, some critics think the criminal case is a witch hunt, and others claim it is trivial at best and at worst the product of selective prosecution.

As someone who worked in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and enforced the laws that Mr. Trump is accused of violating, I stand firmly in neither camp. It is an important and straightforward case, albeit workmanlike and unglamorous. In time, after the smoke created by lawyers has cleared, it will be easy to see why the prosecution is both solid and legitimate.

It would hardly make for a dramatic opening statement or cable news sound bite, but the case is about preventing wealthy people from using their businesses to commit crimes and hide from accountability. Manhattan prosecutors have long considered it their province to ensure the integrity of the financial markets. As Robert Morgenthau, a former Manhattan district attorney, liked to say, “You cannot prosecute crime in the streets without prosecuting crime in the suites.”

Lawmakers in New York, the financial capital of the world, consider access to markets and industry in New York a privilege for businesspeople. It is a felony to abuse that privilege by doctoring records to commit or conceal crimes, even if the businessman never accomplishes the goal and even if the false records never see the light of day. The idea is that an organization’s records should reflect an honest accounting. It is not a crime to make a mistake, but lying is a different story. It is easy to evade accountability by turning a business into a cover, providing a false trail for whichever regulator might care to look. The law (falsification of business records) deprives wealthy, powerful businessmen of the ability to do so with impunity, at least when they’re conducting business in the city.

Roiphe's opinion goes on to point out that prosecutors and New York courts have interpreted this law with its general purpose in mind. Because of that, the element of intent to defraud has a broad meaning. It is not limited to the intent of cheating someone out of money or property. And, as common with white collar crime cases, circumstantial evidence is often used to prove criminal intent. 

Prosecutors will ask jurors to use their common sense to infer what Trump’s intent might be for filing lots of false documents. Roiphe says that in similar trials, New York jurors often conclude that a defendant must have created a false paper trail for a reason. She asserts that jurors can conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump’s lies were intended to seek to commit a crime(s) or to cover one(s) up because as she puts it, “documents don’t lie.” In this lawsuit, Trump is accused of filing 11 false invoices, 12 false ledger entries and 11 false checks and check stubs, allegedly with intent to violate federal election laws, state election laws and/or state tax laws (34 separate felonies).

From Roiphe’s experienced insider point of view description of the case, it seems that Trump probably will be found to have committed fraud by most neutral jurors. At present, Trump’s main defense is that he was merely trying to avoid embarrassing his family, not trying to violate any law. The wild card here is one or more MAGA jurors who will probably vote to acquit Trump regardless of the evidence or “common sense.”

Trump is not even trying to deny the 34 documents were false. He did that. Period. He is arguing that the false documents were filed to protect his family. Nearly all MAGA people would probably accept his lie as truth and vote to acquit him.

I am a happy liberal but am I one of the rare ones?

 Consider:

Multiple psychological studies have reported that conservatives, on average, have greater levels of subjective psychological well-being than liberals. The differences were small in size, but those studies consistently found conservatives to be more satisfied with their lives, happier, and in better self-reported health compared to liberals. One of the explanations for this finding was that conservatives tend to be more satisfied with the social system and this alleviates the negative psychological consequences of perceiving societal inequalities.

More detail:

https://www.psypost.org/are-conservatives-happier-than-liberals-new-comprehensive-research-offers-fresh-insights/

Liberals, especially liberal women, are significantly less likely to be happy with their lives and satisfied with their “mental health,” compared to their conservative peers aged from 18-55. This is the big takeaway from the 2022 American Family Survey, a striking new poll from YouGov and the Deseret News, which found that liberals are about 15 percentage points less likely to be “completely satisfied” with their lives.

Two family factors have a lot to do with this ideological gap: marital status and family satisfaction. Given that conservatives aged 18-55 are about 20 percentage points more likely to be married, as well as 18 percentage points more likely to be satisfied with their families, the lesson here is obvious. Marriage and family are strongly linked to happiness and to personal mental health in particular. 

More detail:

https://ifstudies.org/blog/why-are-liberals-less-happy-than-conservatives

Academic research consistently finds the same pattern. Conservatives do not just report higher levels of happiness, they also report higher levels of meaning in their lives. The effects of conservatism seem to be enhanced when conservatives are surrounded by others like themselves. However, in an analysis looking at ninety countries from 1981 through 2014, the social psychologists Olga Stavrova and Maike Luhmann found “the positive association between conservative ideology and happiness only rarely reversed. Liberals were happier than conservatives in only 5 out of 92 countries and never in the United States.”

Yet more detail:

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/03/how-to-understand-the-well-being-gap-between-liberals-and-conservatives/

In the midst of an ongoing mental health crisis that is especially affecting children and youth, I found this headline interesting: “Conservative teenagers are generally happier than their liberal peers, study finds.” A group of Columbia University researchers studied the depressive attitudes of twelfth-graders from 2005 to 2018, comparing those aligned with conservatism and those with liberalism. They concluded that “conservatives reported lower average depressive effect, self-derogation, and loneliness scores and higher self-esteem scores than all other groups.”

In an extensive and deeply sourced article for American Affairs, Columbia University sociologist Musa al-Gharbi adds that “conservatives do not just report higher levels of happiness, they also report higher levels of meaning in their lives.” He writes that this pattern is “ubiquitous, not just in the contemporary United States but also historically (virtually as far back as the record goes) and in most other geographical contexts as well.”

https://www.denisonforum.org/daily-article/are-conservative-teenagers-happier-than-their-liberal-peers/

SNOWFLAKE'S PERSONAL OBSERVATIONS:

Regardless of the studies, both Liberals and Conservatives are so uptight about the other, I have a feeling neither side is any happier than the other side. Just a general observation.

I just know that I am fairly happy with my life. What about YOU?

The face of rising American radical right authoritarianism

A Slate article articulates it quite well:

A Supreme Court Justice Gave Us Alarming New Evidence 

That He’s Living in MAGA World

The Supreme Court heard arguments Thursday in Trump v. United States, a challenge to special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Donald Trump for election subversion related to Jan. 6. The former president argues that he has absolute “presidential immunity” for the “official acts” he undertook while attempting to overturn the election, rendering the prosecution against him largely unconstitutional. Despite the total lack of any known constitutional basis for this theory, the Supreme Court’s conservatives received it favorably, suggesting that they will further delay and undermine Trump’s eventual federal trial.

Dahlia Lithwick: Justice Alito trotted out this theme that was kind of bone-chilling: He said “we all want” a “stable democratic society,” and nothing could be worse for democracy than holding a president to account, because that will “lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy.” As if democracy requires giving immunity to criminal presidents because otherwise they won’t leave office. This was when I went through the looking glass—it literally felt like “don’t make me hit you again” democracy.

Pam Karlan: That was the moment where I felt like saying, “That’s what just happened!” This is not something that might happen in the future. It’s what already happened! And if you let people get away with it, what you’ve said to Donald Trump is, “If you win the 2024 election, don’t bother leaving office in 2029—just stay there.” I mean, that’s really what the Supreme Court would be saying: There’s not going to be any crime if you try to stay there. It wasn’t just through the looking glass. I thought, Did you hear what just came out of your mouth?

Mark Joseph Stern: This was a great example of Alito being fully brain-poisoned by Fox News. This is been happening for years; he used to ask famously great questions, but these days it’s just culture war grievances and stuff that falls apart upon even a little bit of scrutiny. He’s losing his edge. And that was clear in this bizarro question saying that actually, a functioning constitutional democracy requires us to let presidents off the hook when they engage in a criminal conspiracy to steal elections.

But it was also clear during his next round of questions with Michael Dreeben, who represented Jack Smith. Alito had Dreeben walk through the layers that protect a president from a frivolous or vindictive prosecution. Then he dismissed each one out of hand. So Dreeben said: First, you need a prosecutor who’s willing to bring charges; then you need a grand jury to indict; then there’s a criminal proceeding in open court where a jury of his peers decides whether he’s been proved guilty. And Alito just laughs it off as though it’s a big joke. Because we all know Justice Department attorneys are hacks who’ll do whatever they want, right? And a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich—nobody believes a grand jury will do anything worthwhile. And then, oh, sure a jury of his peers, like that’s going to do anything.

This is the justice who is, by far, the most friendly to prosecutors and hostile to criminal defendants in case after case. Who could not for the life of him find a violation of the right to trial by jury or due process. But when the defendant is Trump, he suddenly thinks this entire system of criminal prosecution is such a bad joke that the Supreme Court has to step in and essentially quash this prosecution, because we can’t trust the system to work. The system that is incarcerating so many other people whose convictions Sam Alito just rubber-stamps.  

Karlan: There was shock to it, but notice what’s underneath all of that. Which is Alito saying we’re worried about vindictive prosecutions and we haven’t seen any of this up until now, that no president has prosecuted the president who came after. For all of what Alito was saying to be true, he has to believe that this prosecution itself is vindictive. Which means he has to have bought Trump’s narrative of the case. And when he does this with Dreeben, he’s attacking the deep state, which is career-line prosecutors. Remember, Dreeben’s entire career has been as a nonpartisan civil servant who’s gotten up there and argued cases on behalf of the Bush administration, on behalf of the Trump administration, on behalf of the Obama administration.  

I mean, what Alito did is essentially say: “I’m living in MAGA world.” Which views this case as a totally bogus prosecution ginned up by totally bogus people as part of a vindictive prosecution by Joe Biden. And Alito is also implicitly saying that if Donald Trump gets reelected, you just know he’s going to prosecute people vindictively too. He really has lost faith in the entire system. Or at least he’s prepared to lose faith in the system enough to decide this case in Trump’s favor.

Well ladies & germs, there you have it. Full-blown American style radical right authoritarianism in all of its glory coming at you from the highest court in the land, the USSC. Unless you are a MAGAite, the hypocrisy, irrationality and sheer malice in it cannot be ignored, justified or denied. It is all right out in the open. But, if you are a MAGAite it is automatically ignored, justified and denied by default.

It is starting to seem reasonable to think that Trump is going to avoid facing justice in all of the federal trials. The authoritarian radical right Republican USSC is actually thinking about protecting him. 

Q: Is this actually a clear example of radical right Republican authoritarianism coming from the USSC, or is it merely idle, inconsequential chit-chat, or something else?

Why the Biden Administration Won't Stop Israel

Protests and mass arrests all across the US have become the leading story in most media outlets. But often the coverage neglects to explain WHY the students are protesting. The following video explains, in part, why protests in the US have reached a boiling point in recent weeks. In a nutshell, the Biden Administration has failed to respond to public opinion or to budge an inch for 7 months. Meanwhile, the  media that delivers its message have failed to report the US' role in the ongoing genocide and forced-starvation in a fair and accurate way, and have cast doubt on the motives of protestors rather than focusing on the topics they raise. I think this video (clocking in at  17 min. ) provides a factual account of how we got where we are--i.e. why so many Americans blame the Biden Admin for the ongoing genocide. Of course, not everything can be covered in the 17 min window. Among other things, I would remind viewers of the US government's active role in the genocide by its  de-funding  of UNRWA which was, in effect, a death sentence to 10's of thousands of Gazans trapped with no food, medicine or fuel. There has been no evidence given by Israel for the charges it made. Meanwhile, an independent UN investigation  found no evidence for the allegations. The UN asked Israel to share any evidence it has. Again, none was given to substantiate Israel's allegations. While other countries have resumed funding, the US Congress passed a law freezing any funding for UNRWA for the next year with no evidence of wrong-doing on its part. While we talk about protests, which are also important, Gazans continue to die in the grip of an induced famine, and will continue dying even if by some miracle massive aid reaches them tomorrow. Here is an AP article detailing the latest on the UNRWA investigations. Other than that, I think the video, made by Al Jazeera,  accurately details a lot of important historic and contemporary facts that have shaped the current disaster, and in particular, the Biden Administration's decisive role in it. If you take issue with any of the claims put forward in the video, it would be useful to provide evidence of the falsity of those claims.

Can the US Constitution save us from Trump?

A law professor at Boston College, Aziz Rana, and author of “The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them” wrote an opinion essay for the NYT (not paywalled):

On Thursday, the Supreme Court gathered to consider whether Donald Trump, as president, enjoyed immunity from prosecution for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. Even if the justices eventually rule against him, liberals should not celebrate the Constitution as our best bulwark against Mr. Trump. In fact, the document — for reasons that go beyond Mr. Trump, that long preceded him and could well extend past him — has made our democracy almost unworkable.

For years, whenever Mr. Trump threatened democratic principles, liberals turned to the Constitution for help, searching the text for tools that would either end his political career or at least contain his corruption. He was sued under the Constitution’s emoluments clauses. He was impeached twice. There was a congressional vote urging Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to proclaim Mr. Trump unfit for office. More recently, lawyers argued that the states could use the 14th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6 attack.

Each of these efforts has been motivated by a worthy desire to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his actions. Each of them has failed. As we head into the heat of an election season, we need to confront a simple truth: The Constitution isn’t going to save us from Donald Trump. If anything, turning the page on the man — and on the politics he has fostered — will require fundamentally changing it.

It is not just that Mr. Trump would never have been president without the Electoral College. Think about why those previous efforts to use the Constitution to hold Mr. Trump accountable failed. Impeachment processes collapsed in the Senate because it lopsidedly grants power to rural, conservative states. The Supreme Court was able not only to keep Mr. Trump on the ballot in Colorado, but also to narrow the circumstances in which disqualification could ever be used, because Republicans have been able to appoint a majority of the justices on the court, despite losing the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections.

For years, liberals were squeamish about acknowledging these facts, perhaps out of habit. While most countries view their documents as rules for governing — rules that may become outdated and can be reworked if necessary — our own politicians routinely tell a story of American exceptionalism rooted in our Constitution. It is a sacred document that, as Barack Obama once put it, “launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy,” grounded on shared principles of equality, self-government and personal liberty.  

The shock to the constitutional system that Mr. Trump represents didn’t start, and won’t end, with him. The best — and perhaps only — way to contain the politics around him is to reform government, so that it is far more representative of Americans. The goal is to keep authoritarians from ever again gaining power without winning a majority and stacking powerful institutions with judges and officials wildly out of step with the public. But this requires extensive changes to our legal and political systems, including to the Constitution itself.

It now falls to Americans to avoid learning the wrong lessons from this moment. Mr. Trump may lose at the ballot box or be convicted in one of the four criminal cases he faces, including the one that started this month in Manhattan. If he is held accountable, it will not be because the Constitution saved us, given all its pathologies.

Q: Does Rana make a convincing argument to you that the Constitution cannot save us from Trump? 

Reconsidering the moral and legal culpability of bad political acts by well-meaning but deceived people

Mostly unknowingly, tens of millions of average American voters are seriously considering whether to get rid of democracy and the rule of law and replace that with comforting false promises from authoritarian demagogues and kleptocrats. The false promises include protecting democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law. The core deceit is that those people sincerely believe they are acting in good faith to protect democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law, but in fact are doing the opposite.

By now, evidence from social science is overwhelming that when it comes to politics and religion, most humans are usually more irrational than rational about many or probably most issues. These comments by expert scientists summarize the situation reasonably well:

“Republicans understand moral psychology. Democrats don’t. Republicans have long understood that the elephant [the biased, moralistic unconscious mind] is in charge of political behavior, not the rider [the often-deceived conscious mind], and they know how elephants work. Their slogans, political commercials and speeches go straight for the gut . . . . Republicans don’t just aim to cause fear, as some Democrats charge. They trigger the full range of intuitions described by Moral Foundations Theory. .... Western philosophy has been worshiping reason and distrusting the passions for thousands of years. .... I’ll refer to this worshipful attitude throughout this book as the rationalist delusion. I call it a delusion because when a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds. The true believers produce pious fantasies that don’t match reality .... We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment. .... The rider is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done, and it is good at finding reasons to justify whatever the elephant wants to do next. .... We make our first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments.”

“.... the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. .... cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. .... the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.”

Or, are most people cognitively incapable 

of dealing with inconvenient truth?

If one accepts the argument that most people who support Trump and his Republican Party are decent and well-meaning but fundamentally deceived, then one question that pops up is what are those people? There is a lot of empirical evidence that supports my assertion of profound deceit and false beliefs by most average Trump voters. My estimate based on poll data, at least about 70% hold one or more significant false beliefs, e.g., stolen election, the Great Replacement Theory, Democrats are responsible for the immigration mess, despite Trump and congressional republicans successfully blocking efforts to fix it, or one of a slew of debunked crackpot conspiracy theories that Trump says are true.

Some Trump see themselves as decent middle class folk who just don't like the direction of the country. Does that absolve them of culpability if they hold significant false beliefs about it and act accordingly? Poll data indicates that most of those people are seriously deceived about something or another. Is it possible to be decent and support an authoritarian monster who clearly intends to take the country where they claim to not want it to go? 

Or are they some combination of fascists, bigots, deceived fools, intolerant Christian nationalists, conspiracy theory crackpots, etc.? From a cognitive biology and social behavior point of view, one can see that their own minds can convince those supporters that they are patriots defending democracy, truth and the rule of law, all of which is solidly false. 

Exactly what are well-meaning people who literally support corruption and immorality or evil (in view of solid evidence) but act in sincere, good faith belief that they are supporting good against corruption and evil (contrary to solid evidence)? Are adults not responsible for their actions? Or, is democracy, reliance on truth and the rule of law morally no better than authoritarianism (dictatorship, theocracy, plutocracy), lies and the rule of the kleptocratic dictator, plutocrat and/or Christian Taliban elite? 

Most Trump supporters, probably ~95%, consider themselves to hold the moral high ground. Most think that most or nearly all liberals and Democrats are immoral at best, evil at worst. Moral superiority is part of the thinking behind support for Trump and his morally rotted party, despite Trump's proven track record of immorality and evil. Some poll data indicates that Republicans believe Trump represents their moral values either "some" (41%) or "a great deal" (38%). One can only wonder what those moral values actually are. Respect for inconvenient truth? Nope. Respect for democracy or the environment? Nope. Respect for political opposition. Hell no.

Then what are their political moral values exactly? Respect for authoritarianism parading as democracy? Yup. Virtue signaling to the tribe or cult, e.g., bigotry directed at the LGBQT community? Yup. What else? 

Q: How do you personally define or characterize most Trump supporters, or is than an unfair and/or counterproductive question?