(11-02-2023, 10:25 PM)mikesez Wrote:

(11-02-2023, 08:47 PM)Lucky2Last Wrote: I am not making a claim to Trump's innocence OR guilt. In this thread, I have said I reserve the right to change my mind based on testimony. I am arguing with other people who are starting with guilt, then conforming the narrative to that world view.

He deserves a fair trial and the jurors should presume innocence, but the intent of the law in Georgia was to punish any influential person, who has enough access to information to know better, who presents relevant but false information to a government official.   Trump's only possible defense, which you have repeatedly invoked, is that he didn't know better.  That he completely ignored many advisors, officials, and judges who told him there was no evidence, and only listened to the ones telling him lies.  But that's still a pattern of behavior that nobody in any kind of public trust should ever engage in.  

I know you're a reasonable person.  The facts in Georgia show that he either deliberately lied, or that he delusionally lied.  Either way that's criminal, punishable behavior per Georgia law, either way it was completely self serving, and and either way it's not behavior befitting a leader.  

I think we could debate the point about it being criminal if he believed it. Maybe delusions of this type aren't criminal.  I think they are, but maybe they're not.  But they're still not befitting a leader.  If a man kills someone but his lawyer successfully shows that the man didn't understand what he was doing, we agree that's no longer criminal, but the man still ends up in a psych ward. Not free to continue putting lives at risk.  If Trump really believed, 40 days later, that there was something to the stories of hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ballots, his attachment to reality is not corresponding to sanity.  Yet he shows few if any other symptoms of insanity, so it's more likely that he deliberately lied than delusionally.

Anyhow.

When do we get to move on?