Depends on the crime. Crimes based on fraud genuinely require either (1) actual knowledge of falsity or (2) reckless indifference to the truth or falsity of the allegedly fraudulent claim. Trump had, at best, conflicting sources of information on whether there had been any election fraud, but chose to go with The Big Lie and The Pence Gambit anyway to steal the election. That’s fraudulent intent.
Here’s the DOJ’s official take on fraudulent intent:
Trump took the Macbeth approach. Macbeth can become king if he kills Duncan, but he needs some encouragement because he’s not necessarily the most moral or courageous Thane in the kingdom. There are two people to whom he can turn for counsel: his best friend MacDuff, who he knows will advise against it, and the ambitious Lady Macbeth. So he turns to the advisor who’ll tell him what he wants to hear. And we know how that turned out.
My only question is who plays the role of the three witches in The Tragedy of Trump. There are so many possibilities.
And yet he was too big of a coward to run against Obama in 2012…which Obama probably realized when he called him out at the correspondents dinner. It’s really too bad Trump didn’t run then, he would have lost so badly to Obama that we wouldn’t have ended up with so much damage…even if Kasich beat Clinton he would have been your garden variety Republican instead of a walking impeachment generator.
The one thing Kellyanne was good at was polling data. By late April 2020, Trump had been doing his daily Covid briefings for nearly a month. They stopped when he educated us on huffing Lysol spray, ingesting bleach for like, you know, a good internal cleansing, and the curious use of UV lights. He was down double digits and it was pretty well baked in and unlikely to change. All that was left was attacking mail-in voting (enter Louis DeJoy) and degrading public trust in the election. Trump had been talking that BS in 2016. The only way he could lose was if he was cheated. Trump always falls back on the oldy but goodies. He is such an insipid, very weak man.
Would pointing out that after the 2016 election Trump was complaining about voter fraud? I mean it did stand out to me that he was whining about not winning bigly enough.
