What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[Barrister]

But... Kavanaugh was in high school.  17 years old.  In this country at least if he was convicted of the offence his record would have long ago been held to be non-discloseable.  What does a serious misdead in high school tell us about Kavanaugh's ability to be a good justice now in his 50s?

I don't know the answer.

I'm not the one to condone persecuting someone for the rest of their life, because they're branded as a sex offender, but I that think forcible rape attempt at any age is a permanent mark against you as a human being.  I think expecting Supreme Court justices to not be attempted rapists is a reasonable requirement, apart from their legal record.

I found Yi and PDH's answers much more convincing than yours, to be honest.

[DGuller]

But... Kavanaugh was in high school.  17 years old.  In this country at least if he was convicted of the offence his record would have long ago been held to be non-discloseable.  What does a serious misdead in high school tell us about Kavanaugh's ability to be a good justice now in his 50s?

I don't know the answer.

I'm not the one to condone persecuting someone for the rest of their life, because they're branded as a sex offender, but I that think forcible rape attempt at any age is a permanent mark against you as a human being.  I think expecting Supreme Court justices to not be attempted rapists is a reasonable requirement, apart from their legal record.

I found Yi and PDH's answers much more convincing than yours, to be honest.

That's not an indictment on me.

[Barrister]

But... Kavanaugh was in high school.  17 years old.  In this country at least if he was convicted of the offence his record would have long ago been held to be non-discloseable.  What does a serious misdead in high school tell us about Kavanaugh's ability to be a good justice now in his 50s?

I don't know the answer.

I'm not the one to condone persecuting someone for the rest of their life, because they're branded as a sex offender, but I that think forcible rape attempt at any age is a permanent mark against you as a human being.  I think expecting Supreme Court justices to not be attempted rapists is a reasonable requirement, apart from their legal record.

I found Yi and PDH's answers much more convincing than yours, to be honest.

That's not an indictment on me.

[Eddie Teach]

This is gonna be a magnificent clusterfuck.

[garbon]

What does a serious misdead in high school tell us about Kavanaugh's ability to be a good justice now in his 50s?

Nothing.

What tells you about his ability to be a good justice is that when Clinton was President he advanced extreme views about standards for impeachment - e.g. lying to the public was grounds for impeachment (imagine applying that standard now!)  He masterminded an investigative strategy that involved using a civil deposition of the President and took the position at the time the President should have to answer such civil charges.

Then, during the Bush administration - he completely flipped 180 degrees to become an extreme advocate of Presidential power and now condemns the Clinton v Jones precedent he once championed.

If you want to rip the blindfold off Lady Justice, Kavanaugh's your guy.

As a career public servant, I find the argument that "positions you took on orders of your boss were inconsistent" to be less than persuasive.

Come on - your an attorney.  Unless you're instructed to argue an illegal or somehow unconscionable position, you argue the position you're been instructed to argue.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/09/17/kavanaugh-supreme-court-ford-sexual-assault-219983

Few prosecutors, it seems likely, would ever open an assault case—36 years later—on the basis of Christine Blasey Ford's account of being pinned down on a bed by a drunken Kavanaugh, then 17, and being aggressively groped until a friend of his forcibly intervened.

But few prosecutors in the 1990s would have pursued an extensive criminal investigation over perjury into a middle-aged man's lies about adultery if that person had not been President Clinton. In his zeal at the time, Kavanaugh, like Starr, may have worked himself into a belief that this was about sacred principles of law, but to many others—and ultimately to a clear majority of the country—it was obvious that the case was fundamentally about political power.

Kavanaugh's fate, too, now depends on precisely the same thing: Do the allegations change the calculation for the perhaps half-a-dozen senators—including Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska—whose minds were not already made up by earlier political calculations?

With the benefit of hindsight, Kavanaugh later concluded presidents should be shielded from criminal investigations of the sort he helped wage against Clinton. At the time, however, he was filled with righteous indignation. "It is our job," he wrote colleagues in Starr's office in an email, "to make his pattern of revolting behavior clear—piece by painful piece."

Can Kavanaugh and his supporters really be surprised that opponents of his nomination will feel similarly righteous in wanting to examine allegations against him piece by piece?

There was ample talk Sunday of the political equivalent of a statute of limitations, especially with so many women who know Kavanaugh in a variety of personal and political contexts speaking on his behalf. But the people who plead for such a grace period now generally did not raise their voices in the 1990s when Juanita Broaddrick accused Bill Clinton of rape 20 years before or when Trump invited her to attend a presidential debate as a prop for him in 2016—nearly 40 years after the alleged events in question and as way of deflecting allegations about his own sexist remarks and alleged affairs.

[The Minsky Moment]

As a career public servant, I find the argument that "positions you took on orders of your boss were inconsistent" to be less than persuasive.

Come on - your an attorney.  Unless you're instructed to argue an illegal or somehow unconscionable position, you argue the position you're been instructed to argue.

He was the principal author.  He wasn't following orders. He was giving them.  This was a special counsel gig - not a permanent civil service position.  Volunteers only and you what you are getting into.
I was a very junior lawyer at the time and had an opportunity to interview - even though it would have been great experience I didn't pursue because of lack of comfort (the Lewinski story was just emerging). that's one of the criticisms of special counsels then and now - because they are self-selected, there is a bias towards zeal.

[DGuller]

You are right that I may not be able to provide a convincing argument against "even if he did it, could he have outgrown the rapist phase" argument/question.  To me it seem obvious on the face of it that forcible rape is not like underage binge drinking, it's not the kind of flaw that goes away with maturity, so it's difficult for me to understand how to build a convincing argument against that.  I don't know, maybe forcing yourself on women is just something that men did back then as a rite of passage, and now we know better than to do that, but I'd like to believe that wasn't really the case.

[Tamas]

This is the kind of thing you'll never know the truth of and will end up deciding based on your own personal opinion of the guy or his political impact.

Of course, if he is the kind of person who'd attempt to rape anyone at any point in their life, then that at the very least should reflect horribly badly on their reputation (legal concerns aside).

And of course, if the attempted rape indeed happened, then the lady would feel obliged to talk about it now. You can convince yourself for decades that it doesn't worth the hassle and pain but this guy can have a lasting effect on the US for decades.

Because of the above, I'd be inclined to believe the accusation.

On the other hand, politics is very nasty, and anyone who puts it beyond politics to entertain such degrees of false accusations is incredibly naive.

[DGuller]

It has to be a pretty long game, it must've been planned and kept in the pocket for at least six years.  I understand the danger of being naive when it comes to politics, but I think people vastly underestimate the danger of being cynical.  Cynicism is a potent poison against accountability.

[11B4V]

This is gonna be a magnificent clusterfuck.

Maybe. The gop will just jam him through IMO.

[Tamas]

It has to be a pretty long game, it must've been planned and kept in the pocket for at least six years.  I understand the danger of being naive when it comes to politics, but I think people vastly underestimate the danger of being cynical.  Cynicism is a potent poison against accountability.

As I said I do believe this accusation. Seems more plausible that it's true, than that it's not.

However, I am not sure it's good for society if unprovable claims can destroy somebody. As long as they can (true ones, even), untrue ones will continue to surface as they'll be just too useful.

[DGuller]

It has to be a pretty long game, it must've been planned and kept in the pocket for at least six years.  I understand the danger of being naive when it comes to politics, but I think people vastly underestimate the danger of being cynical.  Cynicism is a potent poison against accountability.

As I said I do believe this accusation. Seems more plausible that it's true, than that it's not.

However, I am not sure it's good for society if unprovable claims can destroy somebody. As long as they can (true ones, even), untrue ones will continue to surface as they'll be just too useful.

That's also a good point.  Unfortunately, malicious people or people not in firm touch with reality do exist, and no one found a way to decrease false negatives without increasing false positives.

[dps]

Ideally, we'd hear from the friend who supposedly intervened;  that could possibly clear up a lot.  But I'm not going to hold my breath.

[Razgovory]

I thought this article was interesting.

One of the many paradoxes of the Trump era is that our unusual president couldn't have been elected, and couldn't survive politically today, without the support of religious conservatives ... but at the same time his ascent was intimately connected to the secularization of conservatism, and his style gives us a taste of what to expect from a post-religious right.

The second point was clear during the Republican primaries, when the most reliable churchgoers tended to prefer Ted Cruz but the more secular part of the party was more Trumpist. But it was obscured in the general election, and since, by the fact that evangelical voters especially rallied to Trump and have generally stood by him.

Now, though, a new survey reveals the extent to which a basic religious division still exists within Trump's Republican Party. The churchgoers who ultimately voted for Trump over Clinton still tend to hold different views than his more secular supporters, and the more religious part of the G.O.P. is still the less Trumpist portion — meaning less populist on economics, but also less authoritarian and tribal on race and identity.

The survey was conducted by the Cato Institute's Emily Ekins for the Voter Study Group, who analyzed the views of Trump voters based on their frequency of church attendance — from "never" to "weekly" or more often. The trend was consistent: The more often a Trump voter attended church, the less white-identitarian they appeared, the more they expressed favorable views of racial minorities, and the less they agreed with populist arguments on trade and immigration.

The differences were particularly striking on race. For instance, a quarter of Trump voters who never attend church describe being white as "very important" to their identity; for the most frequent churchgoers voters, it was 9 percent. Among non-churchgoing Trump voters, only 48 percent had warm feelings toward black people, compared to 71 percent of weekly churchgoers; the same sort of pattern held for views of Hispanics, Asians and Jews.

Churchgoing Trump voters were still more culturally conservative than Hillary Clinton voters — more likely to support the death penalty, more skeptical of immigration — and their views of Muslims, interestingly, seemed to have been influenced by Trump's own rhetoric, becoming more hostile between 2016 and 2017.

But in general, churchgoing Republicans look more like the party many elite conservatives wanted to believe existed before Trump came along — more racially-tolerant, more accepting of multiculturalism and globalization, and also more consistently libertarian on economics. Secularized Trump voters look more like the party as Trump has tried to remake it, blending an inchoate economic populism with strong racial resentments.

Interestingly in the survey the different groups make about the same amount of money, which cuts against strict economic-anxiety explanations for Trumpism. But the churchgoers and nonchurchgoers differ more in social capital: The irreligious are less likely to have college degrees, less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced; they're also less civically engaged, less satisfied with their neighborhoods and communities, and less trusting and optimistic in general.

This seems to support the argument, advanced by Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner among others, that support for populism correlates with a kind of communal breakdown, in which secularization is one variable among many leaving people feeling isolated and angry, and drawing them to the ersatz solidarity of white identity politics.

Meanwhile frequent church attenders, already a minority within the wider society, are also a minority within the Republican coalition. Relatively few Republicans are explicitly religiously unaffiliated (though that number has been climbing too), but only about a third of Trump's 2016 voters are in church on a typical Sunday, and almost half attend seldom or not at all.

This suggests a possibility that should worry both Trump's religious supporters and anyone who finds his style of conservatism racially toxic. Despite their resistance to that toxicity, the churchgoers in this survey did vote for him, making a pragmatic bet that his policies on abortion and religious liberty were worth living with his Caligulan personal life and racial demagoguery. To defend that bet, some historically-inclined believers have cited past cases where Christians accepted bargains with a not-particularly moral leaders — including the way the early church accepted the patronage of Roman emperors, from Constantine onward, whose personal piety was limited at best.

But the Constantinian bet involved a rising religion allying with a worldly power to accelerate its growth and gains. The bet under Trump involves the reverse sort of situation: A Christian community trying to make the best of its decline, and allying with a leader whose core appeal depends upon and possibly furthers the de-Christianization of conservatism.

Such a bet might be understandable as an act of desperation. But it's hard to see how it can reverse de-Christianization, and easy to see how it might accelerate it. Which, on the evidence of this survey, is something that secular liberals should fear as well.

[Barrister]

You are right that I may not be able to provide a convincing argument against "even if he did it, could he have outgrown the rapist phase" argument/question.  To me it seem obvious on the face of it that forcible rape is not like underage binge drinking, it's not the kind of flaw that goes away with maturity, so it's difficult for me to understand how to build a convincing argument against that.  I don't know, maybe forcing yourself on women is just something that men did back then as a rite of passage, and now we know better than to do that, but I'd like to believe that wasn't really the case.

We have really good science that the brain really does not mature until about 25.  The pre-frontal cortex is the region of the brain that is responsible for complex decision making, including determining long-term consequences for actions.  And this is the region that develops last.

I remember I had a court file where a teen had allegedly sexually assaulted a pre-teen.  I had an opportunity to speak with a forensic psychiatrist about the file, basically asking 'does this mean this kid is a paedophile'.  The answer was, of course "we can't tell".

Being a rapist isn't a phase - it's that being young is a phase.

Which is why I don't have an answer to the point "well he denies it now".  Because that has nothing to do with being young.