I think at this stage removing it would be equivalent to tattooing “assassinate me” on his forehead.

Look I hate the guy too and he doesn’t deserve his freedom, but there’s a large number of people in this world who would love to merc a former POTUS regardless of who that POTUS is or what they did. And frankly Trump is more dangerous as a martyr than he is alive and alone on house arrest for the rest of his life.

From what I can gather, the Former Presidents Act mandates lifetime protection for all former presidents unless they were removed from office under Article II. So the only current way for Trump to lose Secret Service protection would be for him to decline it.

someone with presidential-level knowledge and no protection would be a prime target for abduction. trump would dump everything he knew at the first mention of torture, or maybe if he was just slipped a $20.

The Secret Service being tasked with protection of president et al. is written into law, so it literally is their current right. The original purpose doesn’t really matter.

But obviously it should be stripped away for treason etc.

Remember that they only get their information from pro-Trump sources. Imagine if you didn’t listen to anything but FOX News, OANN, Newsmax, and the like. All the “news sources” you listened to told you that this was a witch hunt and that anyone who disagreed was a traitor to this country.

You’d likely wind up shouting about Trump’s innocence and how this was all political retribution.

They’re wrong when they say this, of course, but the root cause is a refusal to listen to anyone who tells them a contrary position.

This reminds me of the scene from Narcos where Escobar is sitting in his “prison” with no one around.

Lostlemmings gets my vote.

lol there’s a bug in Lemmy right now where sometimes somebody’s comment will appear on another post. It almost happened to me but I noticed the instance switched posts before I clicked “reply”. Had to refresh the page to get back to the right post.

Edit: That being said I like “lostlemmings”

Lostlemmings is perfect!

I’m willing to bet they clicked the right link, but Lemmy sent them too the wrong place. It happened to me

I’m new to Lemmy like most of us are, and so far that comment is the first one I’ve seen that feels like a malfunctioning bot. Can someone with more tech knowledge than me explain if we are going to have a bot problem on Lemmy like we did on Reddit?

I’m going with lostlemmings.

Comforting to hear :)

i dont know if it looks that much better to me but it looks about the same, which is good for me personally

im just happy its workin to some degree at all. im kinda psyched on my first day poking around here

yeah, I think comment OP got number of times indicted (I think twice so far?) confused with number of charges (37 or so for this indictment, more in the past and more forthcoming)

Sure it is, you’re forgetting the felony indictments in New York.

71 indictments / 46 presidents. Each individual indictment was counted separately.

Does the SS have any reason to control him? I thought they just followed him around like puppies.

Because then he would quite literally be escaping justice.

because crime should be punished even when the criminal is rich.

Plus do you really want him running a presidential campaign from Russia or something and deal with his blind cult still maybe voting him in or repeating a January 6th at airports?

What we outside fail to realize is these people live in a wholly different reality.

I haven’t watched television with any ads in years. So when I go to a hotel and I’m lounging watching cable and seeing commercials it is jarring just what a different world it is from what I remember before. And for people who never left it, it isn’t jarring at all. It’s their normal.

Now imagine you only watched Fox or OANN. It’s your very reality that’s twisted all askew. It’s hard to hold that against many of the MAGA crowd and speaks to just how influential misinformation campaigns can be.

All this was in motion long before the 2020 election. If you want to trace it back to an election it would be Nixon, he’s the entire reason Fox news and the far right movement exist at all, But there’s a reason they were already stooping to the level of breaking into the Watergate hotel in the first place. The whole alt-right movement has been a slow moving coup starting with Prescott Bush (Yes, that Bush) who invested heavily in the republican party and, coincidentally, also directly helped Hitler come into power in Germany.

Sure, and that’s what’s so dangerous about Trump and the Republican party’s rhetoric surrounding the election. But you also have a patriotic duty to start with some actual solid evidence of the election being stolen. You don’t get absolved for playing out a “save the country” fantasy if it’s clearly based on, well, a fantasy.

“I may not know what an ANTIFA is, but I knows I hates it.”

I’m sure there’s at least gonna be a couple of eyes looking out for that because they are exactly the kind of people who’d show up to this expecting no one’ll arrest them.

he wanted to give some classified information, but instead of just handing them a document and saying “here’s that thing you asked for” they literally have him on tape saying ‘this is classified, I know it is, I could have declassified it but I didn’t, now I can’t, it’s totally classified and I’m not supposed to have it and I’m definitely not supposed to show it to you so don’t look too close’. Dude is terminally desperate to feel cool and important and it’s quite literally gonna land him in federal prison.

Yes definitely. Don’t pander to his need for theatre. Mugshots and handcuffs are exactly what he wants. His own press team released their own mock mugshot last time. He’d absolutely love it.

haha holy shit

They’ll give him money either way; it would be great campaign material for Biden though.

Automatic upvote for the Niven reference. I don’t think anything would stop Trump from grifting money from his supporters. It’s like the kobayashi maru, the only options are the least bad ones.

In this case I think they’ve opted to split the difference and take a mugshot proving he’s still being treated like a criminal (although it would have been better to have forced him to wear handcuffs), but not release it to deny him as much free fundraising fodder as they can.

Ultimately as you point out it won’t really matter, they’ll just photoshop something, but at least this way someone will need to put in the effort to make the image and we’ll all get some entertainment about how horrendous of a job they’ll inevitably do.

Oh, I’m sure they’ll be wearing masks, but not out of consideration for others’ health.

Fun fact! COVID gave us a huge dataset of faces with masks on. Facial recognition software beats masks now with 99% accuracy.

Mask up seditionists, you’ll be fine! Trust me!