The AP can file a lawsuit, but what's the End Game? All the courts and judges are corrupt, right? Trump is a convicted felon, but millions of people didn't care.
OK, while this is supposed to be a non-pure-politics board, I have to correct this; the whole issue involves a traditional media market, New York City, that is almost 100% Democrat; much of it is vocally anti-Trump.
The conviction was for supposed crimes involving valuation estimates on properties for the purpose of obtaining loans. I've been involved in doing loans with major banks going back to the 70's; everyone puts in their estimates and the lender evaluates during its due diligence process.
This is like my trying to sell my house for $800,000 when surrounding homes are going for $300,000. I listen to offers for less, and eventually "the art of the deal" lets us find a point where the seller and buyer agree. But in this case, the court thought that a certain property in Florida was worth well under $50 million and higher declarations were illegal lies. In fact, lesser surrounding properties were worth over $500 million and the one in question was estimated at over a billion by knowledgeable local real estate experts.
The local media treated the valuations as lies, not part of normal real estate deals. In reference to the valuation of Mar-a-Lago, terms like "exaggerated", "inflated", "unrealistic" were used in print and broadcast. Of course, in Journalism 101 at Michigan State they taught me that you don't apply flavored adjectives to news items; you don't say "a
crazy bystander yelled obscenities" but, instead, "a bystander yelled obscenities".
A nearly "pure blue" judicial system with nearly all blue jurors did not 1) understand business practices that all of us use and engage in, and, 2) disliked Trump for other reasons not related to the case and, finally, 3) they had heard from totally one-sided media that lies about valuations had been made.
This was an incident where nobody was injured, nobody was cheated and where a standard business practice was painted as a crime using a unique interpretation of an ancient statute.
He also encouraged a mob to storm the Capitol because he refused to accept the 2020 Election results.
I have listened to the audio and there was no encouragement to "storm" anything. In fact, the language used and available to hear online called for the crowd to peacefully protest, not to attack.
The Gulf Of Mexico has been around long before the US even existed. Trump's sick Orwellian strategy to change history and facts should have Americans very concerned. In "1984", those who didn't embrace the Party became "Unpersons" and were vaporized from history. That's where this is headed...
Yet there are many who see all these actions as a needed campaign to reestablish American credibility and influence, particularly in The Americas. The moves on getting the Chinese out of the Panama Canal (they were operating the ports at either end of the canal we built), on trying to bring the trade imbalances with Canada and Mexico to the forefront and the threats about our neighbors allowing nearly uncontrolled masses of people to use their territory to reach the U.S. border are all needed. Perhaps there is too much "showmanship" and a lack of traditional diplomacy, but many of us see a bad situation in need of remedy, no matter which party leads the charge.
To make this post have some semblance of radio and broadcast content, there have been numerous evaluations of the percentage of traditional media journalists who are registered to each party. All of those evaluations show a percentage in the high 90's that are Democrats, with a huge percentage who have actually made donations to that party at some level. So we have a media infrastructure in radio, video and print that is decidedly among the ranks of one party.
To me, that imbalance among journalists and their frequent employment of un-journalistic language is vastly more of concern than Trump calling Trudeau "Governor" and silly stuff like that.