Why Trump doesn't think he'll go to jail

Merry Christmas

This week we learned that Donald Trump will probably end up in federal prison, for his crimes of a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States of a free and fair election and of a government devoted solely to its interests.  The only question is before or after his presidency ends. (Given the state of the Senate, it's likely after).  Congress isn't in session until after the holidays, when Democrats will take over the House and chairmanship of its various committees.  In the meantime, all of the typical excuses/defenses/deflections made by Trumpkins fall apart under any sort of scrutiny.

So yeah, it's not a merry, merry Christmas for 45.

David Graham, writing for the Atlantic, made the most salient explainer on why Trump doesn't believe he's going to prison: Trump thinks jail is punishment for such crimes like murder or drug trafficking.  For brown people, basically.  Whereas collusion, according to him, isn't even a crime, because it's just creating synergies like in a business M&A.  It's a win-win for everybody!  And he's not exactly wrong, it's been like that for most of his life.

"The dirty secret about many types of white-collar crime is that they’re never prosecuted. In the top income brackets, it’s relatively easy to cheat on your taxes and, if you get caught, simply shrug, apologize, and write the IRS a check. The same is true of laws such as the Foreign Agents Registration Act. When Mueller indicted Manafort for violating the seldom-enforced statute, it triggered a panicked wave of new registrations, as people who’d been skirting the law rushed to avoid legal exposure. [...]

In 1991, with impending debt payments threatening to send Trump belly-up, his father, Fred, walked into one of his casinos and bought $3.5 million in chips, the equivalent of an interest-free loan—and a violation of state gaming laws. The younger Trump kept his gambling license in exchange for a $30,000 fine.

When, in a bid to save costs, Trump employed unauthorized immigrants from Poland to work on the construction of Trump Tower, he settled the ensuing lawsuits for $1 million. Even more brazenly, when he got into trouble with the city of Palm Beach, Florida, for violating zoning rules, he agreed to make a donation to veterans in exchange for dismissing legal problems. Yet rather than make the charitable gift himself, he directed his foundation, mostly made of others’ money, to do it. In other cases, Trump hasn’t even had to ante up to evade trouble. He has often stiffed contractors and simply refused to pay, guessing correctly that they won’t, or can’t afford to, sue him. 

For Trump, crime simply isn’t something that well-to-do men like himself, or Cohen, or Manafort do. It’s something that young men of color do. Businessmen can always find the right price to make trouble go away.

To see his former associates convicted of felonies, and the special counsel charging after him, must gall Trump, as though the earth has shifted under his feet and the rules have changed. Things that people used to be able to get away with are landing them in prison. But what has changed is not the rules, but Trump’s own position: Actions that might have escaped scrutiny for just another rich man in New York City draw much greater attention when they involve the president of the United States.

Time and again, Trump seems unable to grasp why it’s different being president. He riffs and improvises when speaking and on Twitter, the same tactics that made him a frequently entertaining guest on Howard Stern’s radio show, not recognizing that doing the same thing as part of delicate diplomatic negotiations can have catastrophic results. "

Even worse, Trump's supporters also don't believe he's done anything wrong.  Illegal, yes, but they think all politicians are dirty crooks anyways.  So when this orange guy says he'll bring coal jobs back, at least they like what he says.  Furthermore, he's doing the "right" set of crimes, as Peter Beinart writes for the Atlantic:

[...] Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley makes an intriguing claim. “Corruption, to the fascist politician,” he suggests, “is really about the corruption of purity rather than of the law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of the traditional order.” 

Fox News’s focus on the [murder of Mollie Tibbetts in Iowa by an immigrant instead of Michael Cohen's guilty plea] illustrates Stanley’s point. In the eyes of many Fox viewers, I suspect, the network isn’t ignoring corruption so much as highlighting the kind that really matters. When Trump instructed Cohen to pay off women with whom he’d had affairs, he may have been violating the law. But he was upholding traditional gender and class hierarchies. Since time immemorial, powerful men have been cheating on their wives and evade the consequences. 

The Iowa murder, by contrast, signifies the inversion—the corruption—of that “traditional order.” Throughout American history, few notions have been as sacrosanct as the belief that white women must be protected from nonwhite men. By allegedly murdering Tibbetts, Rivera did not merely violate the law. He did something more subversive: He violated America’s traditional racial and sexual norms. 

Once you grasp that for Trump and many of his supporters, corruption means less the violation of law than the violation of established hierarchies, their behavior makes more sense. Since 2014, Trump has employed the phrase rule of law nine times in tweets. Seven of them refer to illegal immigration. 

Why were Trump’s supporters so convinced that Clinton was the more corrupt candidate even as reporters uncovered far more damning evidence about Trump’s foundation than they did about Clinton’s? Likely because Clinton’s candidacy threatened traditional gender roles. For many Americans, female ambition—especially in service of a feminist agenda—in and of itself represents a form of corruption. “When female politicians were described as power-seeking,” noted the Yale researchers Victoria Brescoll and Tyler Okimoto in a 2010 study, “participants experienced feelings of moral outrage (i.e., contempt, anger, and/or disgust).”  Cohen’s admission makes it harder for Republicans to claim that Trump didn’t violate the law. But it doesn’t really matter. For many Republicans, Trump remains uncorrupt—indeed, anticorrupt—because what they fear most isn’t the corruption of American law; it’s the corruption of America’s traditional identity. And in the struggle against that form of corruption—the kind embodied by [the alleged murderer] Rivera—Trump isn’t the problem. He’s the solution.

Ouch.  Anyways, even if everything stinks, we should at least see what the polls say.

Source: CNN/Trump Univ. [duh], n=28,392