Belief Might Be a Sledgehammer but It Isn't a Defense for Treason

Trump's defense is the "Stand Your Ground" legal move

I believe Trump might actually be in legitimate legal peril.
I believe he’s running out of cash to both run for another four year term which he’d use as a Get Out of Jail gambit and to pay his extensive legal fees.
I believe a third of the country is going all-in with him and that is troubling given he’s so obviously not fit to lead.

Jack Smith’s 45-page indictment asserts that Trump and his associates disseminated lies alleging widespread fraud in the 2020 election, while convening slates of fake electors in key battleground states. The indictment also listed six co-conspirators who were not charged in the indictment.

“Despite having lost, the defendant was determined to remain in power,” the indictment reads. “So for more than two months following election day on November 3 2020, the defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the defendant knew that they were false.”

His lawyers seem to be teeing up the defense that he did not know these claims were false, that he believed they were true and thus his actions were blameless and his words protected as free speech. At first glance this appears weak. The belief that something is true despite all facts demonstrating the opposite does not make much sense as a defense for treason except that we entertain this defense in myriad cases.

One could argue in the most extreme case that the insanity defense is in the same ball park. The definition of mental illness has always been a crap shoot in terms of accuracy. In the 1970’s the multiple personality thing was used as a basis for a host of malfeasance and when it was debunked they merely rebranded it as dissociative identity disorder which is only more accurate in that it has more syllables. There was likewise a time when courts relied on recovered memories of trauma until that was discovered to be a bunch of shit. Today every person in America can claim trauma and use it as an excuse for all kinds of stuff.

The Stand Your Ground laws that allow for people to use lethal force if they reasonably believe they are in danger isn’t that different from Trump’s “I really believed the election was stolen” defense. Essentially Stand Your Ground is completely reliant on the concept of belief in potential danger and that’s some difficult stuff to disprove.

I believe, like the earliest versions of humans, we tell ourselves things to explain the unexplainable. We are creatures that demand that things mean something in the greater scheme. Most beliefs are simply stories we tell ourselves to justify the world and our actions within it. Of course, if you see a young black man in a hoodie with a bag of Skittles and an Arizona Iced Tea in your gated community and you confront then shoot him, you’re going to tell the story of your belief he was dangerous. In America, that fairy take can even get you out of being incarcerated.

Meanwhile, our former president (love the former part, hate the other) has been indicted for crimes both civil and criminal more than any former president in history. Yet his polling numbers are off the chain.

Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton county, Georgia, is “ready to go” with indictments in her investigation of Donald Trump’s election subversion. In Washington, the special counsel Jack Smith is expected to add charges regarding election subversion to 40 counts already filed over the former president’s retention of classified records.

Trump already faces 34 criminal charges in New York over hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels. Referring to Trump being ordered to pay $5m after being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation against the writer E Jean Carroll, a judge recently said Carroll proved Trump raped her. Lawsuits over Trump’s business affairs continue.

Yet a month out from the first debate of the Republican presidential primary, Trump’s domination of the field increases with each poll.

Why? Belief in the face of every possible reason not to believe. Belief in the exaggerated fears of progressive rhetoric, of a promise that America is better (or worse) than it is, belief that what government needs is a strong autocrat to spank the overly educated children of the next generation.

In the face of rapidly advancing technology, we have become a nation of rubes willing to believe just about anything said online and on video. Trump was an inevitability like Thanos. We will continue to blame each other but we are all complicit in this state of mass hypnosis because we have come to believe that belief is an end in itself.

The problem in plain sight with the shift to prioritizer belief over facts is that people lie all the time even when they don’t need to lie. Did Trump really believe the election was stolen? Perhaps. Does it matter if he did? I don’t believe so. I also don’t believe that people should use their beliefs as a bludgeon to shift reality, that we should take everything told to us with a grain of salt, we should be more skeptical of everything we hear and see than in any time in history.