Every government lawyer in the country was investigating Trump since 2015 and the best they could find was he paid off a pornstar. You can’t accuse someone of being on the take for nearly a decade without eventually putting up or shutting up.
None of the predicate events of those cases had happened yet during the four years during which Trump was called a criminal daily by the media.
And no, I didn’t follow those cases, because I had closely followed all the accusations of tax evasion, receiving payments from Russia, etc., during the prior four years and those has amounted to nothing. As they say, “fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, well you can’t fool me again.”
I haven't read the Mueller Report, but from media reports I had the distinct impression that Trump would have been indicted had he not been the sitting president. But I suppose it says something that Garland and Jack Smith didn't indict either after Trump left office.
A lot of what Trump did was not really a crime, but is behavior that we don't want in a president.
It is apparently not a crime to meet with a Russian spy in your house, and to have a discussion about exchanging relaxed foreign relations for dirt on your political opponent. It's also not a crime for the campaign to share campaign data with a Russian FSB agent as the FSB carried out a psyops campaign against American citizens for which they are now indicted. Totally legal to lie about those activities to the FBI and Congress as well. Completely legal to use the fruits of the FSB hacking campaign to your political advantage, and it's also legal to publicly call for the FSB to continue hacking your opponent.
There just aren't laws against these activities and no one can actually prosecute them (if you break the law to become president and win, you just replace the people who would prosecute you with loyalists, so you can't get prosecuted for breaking the law while campaigning unless you lose), so everything Trump did with Russia in 2016 is now acceptable political activity.
It's now normalized that a candidate for president should, no, must lean on foreign governments to circumvent domestic campaign laws to gain as much leverage over their opponent as possible. For example, the 2028 Democratic candidate could make a deal with North Korea to hack the Trump campaign (he's already said he's running again) in exchange for relaxed sanctions, and that would be fine according to the norms of our time.
That’s my point. He was convicted of labeling a payment to a pornstar the wrong thing in the business records of his family owned company, to hide an affair. It was a nothing-burger compared to everything he’s been accused of.
