OK, hope you're sitting down.
I concede: Trump is not perfect.
I believe you. You've already said so and I have no reason to think otherwise.
Show me the man, I'll show you the crime. I think, and I've written this in this thread, you can find something to tie anyone to a crime. You create a totalitarian state when you then selectively prosecute. It's worse if the prosecutor gets "creative" which I think is what has happened here.
Firstly, I'm all for tight scrutiny of public leaders. I agree with you that if we over-scrutinise anyone they will eventually do something wrong so there must be limits, but it is also likely some politicians are evading investigations and charges when they should not, just as anyone in power can be able to.
There are also reasonable standards. The Clintons for instance had Whitewater, but they were investigated multiple times, including by the partisan Ken Starr, and not even Starr thought there was a compelling case against them. I think we should accept that the law did its duty on that, and let it rest. Beyond that, there's not very much which appears to meet a significant legal problem: Bill was a sex pest, and Republicans might claim he committed abuse of power, although that's a bit nebulous.
We can look at a host of other presidents: Biden, GWB, Obama, etc. Irrespective of mistakes they may have made in office, do they have any significant histories of shady dealing? Well, no. That's the problem with the Hunter Biden stuff: after all that's already been looked at without any useful implication of Joe Biden's complicity in crime, and a lack of anything else worthwhile, is this not the sort of thing you're complaining about of constantly following people round trying to catch them doing something wrong?
But Trump... Trump doesn't have a clean record or even close. He had a massive history of deception, dishonesty and fraud before he even set foot in office, much of which is already shown in court. I accept the NY charges are thin, but there's a wider context that Trump has committed serial infidelity, repeatedly paid hush money, and has many credible accusations against him of sexual harassment and even sexual assault going back decades. If a person behaves like that, some of it is likely to bring trouble - in fact, we can argue he should have faced
more legal peril before now. Likewise, he's on record asking a foreign leader to investigate his political opponents, and he's on record pressuring state officials to annul an election result without good justification, and he's on record calling a mob to Washington, asking them to march on the Capitol, and apparently doing nothing whilst they assaulted it. These are not small things, and a description of "not perfect" is a massive understatement to describe such a person. He's facing a lot more scrutiny and potential charges mostly because he's done a ton of stuff wrong, and I'm all for diligent investigation of it all.
