Classic twisting of the thumb screws. The prisoners dilemma is functional of how trustworthy your co-conspirator is.
And its safe to say when it comes to people who seriously would consider trying to overthrow an election for personal gain, you cant trust any of em, so of course everyone is gonna crack. 10/10 this will be fun to watch
Except they've been achieving the optimal prisoner's dilemma outcome until now by protecting each other. Idk, I won't believe he'll flip until he does. For all I know, this is just a way to plead for Trump's help for funding legal fees out in the open.
It's easy to stay in line while it's working. The moment you are actually in court looking at years in prison, that's when the dilemma really becomes tough to stick to.
Also, in this scenario, there is no guarantee that everyone staying in line will mean they get away. Which makes the calculus much much more complicated as opposed to when it's just trying to avoid an indictment all together
It's not really a Prisoner's Dilemma when one prisoner doesn't have the opportunity to flip, though - it's not like if Trump agrees to testify against Meadows they're going to reduce his sentence.
Meadows made clear in his own testimony at last week’s hearing that Trump viewed the false electors as a significant part of his strategy to remain in power. He said he sent an email pushing the campaign to assemble those slates because he feared a tongue-lashing from Trump.
“What I didn’t want to happen was for the campaign to prevail in court action and not have this” lined up, he said.
“Why?” prosecutor Anna Cross asked him.
“Because I knew I’d be yelled at by the president of the United States,” he said.
Yeah…great reason to try to upend democracy, Mark.
At first I was mad at Mark Meadows for trying to destroy American democracy and rob me of my freedom, but, gosh if he faced the possibility of being yelled at, I guess he didn’t have any choice. So brave.
I'm so confused why anyone would be intimidated by traitor orange. The fuckin guy is a short fat turd who wears makeup and not in the cool way people wear makeup.
More accurate to say most are intimidated by drumpf's base. Not getting votes after he is no longer an option, getting death threats, etc. No one is actually intimidated by him personally.
The Nuremberg Defense probably works better if the person whose orders you claim to have been following is still alive and ranting on Twitter about how they damn well were his orders and he takes credit for the whole thing.
I hope Trump gets a friendly warden. Someone who will let him have contact with the outside world so his base can see how pitiful their caged buffoon is. I'm sure there will be vigils outside the gate, and maybe even an escape attempt...
Politico reported on Mark Meadows’ potential legal strategy as the White House chief of staff faces charges connected with Trump’s alleged conspiracy to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results. The report referred to court documents showing a strong likelihood that Meadows will join Trump’s other former allies who will blame the ex-president and portray him as the “primary driver” of the racketeering enterprise they’ve been accused of.
Do it Mark, don’t go to jail for the orange buffoon.
I don't see why all of them are not telling on Trump. Trump certainly doesn't care about them and I believe if Trump could blame it all on them, he would.
I think some of them are deluded enough to think that it really is like an impeachment and any jury is going to be hopelessly deadlocked between its Democratic and Republican members. Or that the deep state will work its magic, retire all the prosecutors, and there will never even be trials.
I mean, these are generally not smart people with firm grip on reality we're talking about.
Well, the Georgia legislature already has members trying to get rid of Fani Willis, and if they can stall them out that long, the federal cases will disappear under the next Republican president.
Yeah that's kind of what I expected. The prosecution wants to pin down Trump, so they let a few conspirators flip to make that happen. The rest will get buried alongside Trump.
It's gonna be really interesting how trump will address/ spin this publicly. If it's only one guy who flipped, he could probably just feed him to the wolves in the media, but this is gonna be a bunch of ppl turning on him. Idk if he can convince his followers to instantly switch to hating on them. There's gonna be a bunch of ppl on the fence about trump who will take any evidence to hop off the bandwagon.
Either way, having a public criminal trial while running a campaign is about as much of a PR disaster as it's gonna get. Remember: the goal of the prosecution is to pin him down with every piece of damning evidence they can get, it's gonna get dirty.
The bad scary deep-state government, run by Joe Brandon, threatened them with so much jail time that they had no choice but to turn on me. It makes sense. I don't blame them. What else can you do?
My parents appear to be trying to move on, but without saying that Trump did anything wrong. For them, it's basically just "let's ignore all those crimes... Hey, did you hear about these great candidates Rick Scott or RFK, Jr?" (And, yes, my father did try to tell me how great those two are.)
At this point, I don't get really what is gained by flipping people against Trump. The argument isn't that he did or didn't do something. The argument is (in the minds of the jury at least) is what he did against the law. Yes, it might seem clear to us that it was, but to some Trump supporter on the jury having someone else say 'Trump did a thing', doesn't change their mind that the thing he did and admits to doing is illegal.
Cooperation from co-conspirators is always helpful.
Trump's current strategy (or, at least what we can discern from his lawyers' TV appearances) is to blame the lawyers he had at the time of the election. If all these co-conspirators point the finger directly at Trump, that goes a loooong way to proving that he was the ringleader. Not some lawyer. Not some aide. Trump called the shots.
Just imagine someone close to the whole situation turns against Trump as a witness.They could provide the extra juicy bits that would make impressing the jury much easier.