Bill O'Reilly Has Good News for Trump 'Even if He's Convicted'
Will Donald Trump go to prison if he’s convicted of the crimes he’s charged with? Bill O’Reilly says no.
In an interview with a former Fox News colleague, Tucker Carlson, O’Reilly noted that “none of the things that he’s charged with would warrant prison” and that the legal proceedings would not be the end of American democracy.
O’Reilly’s sit-down with Carlson was released on X (insert statement about how the platform used to be called Twitter and, let’s face it, most people still call it that) as counter-programming to the second GOP debate.
Eventually, of course, the topic of Trump’s indictments came up as the two Fox vets talked about “the age of disorder,” as O’Reilly put it.
The relevant portion of the interview begins at roughly 28:30:
Ep. 26 The Bill O’Reilly Interview pic.twitter.com/yHabD7W9NO
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) September 28, 2023
“We’re in a presidential season now where the Biden administration has indicted their opponent, the front-runner in the race — Trump’s leading in the polls — four times,” Carlson said.
“And they’re going to try and convict him and send him to jail before the election and take his name off the ballot,” he continued. “So, I mean, if you’re willing to do that and just end democracy, then what aren’t you willing to do?”
“But thank God you can’t do it,” O’Reilly responded. “So, No. 1, he’s not going to be taken off the ballot. There’s no constitutional order that would allow that to happen.”
This is actually true. You can run for president from prison if you want — and some people have.
Socialist candidate Eugene Debs took home 919,799 votes, or 3.5 percent, in the 1920 election despite a 1918 Espionage Act conviction for giving a speech against U.S. involvement in World War I.
And: “No. 2, he’s not going to prison because even if he’s convicted, none of the things that he’s charged with would warrant prison, and the Supreme Court would rule, if it ever gets up there, that he’d be in a home of confinement, where he could run the government if he wanted to,” O’Reilly said.
“If he wins, he’ll be confined to the White House or whatever, but none of that’s going to happen.”
Furthermore, O’Reilly said that the American voter can suss out the fact that, at least on the classified documents charges, Biden did something materially similar by keeping documents in his garage.
“So the American people understand what this is,” O’Reilly said. “They understand that the documents in [the] Mar-a-Lago basement parallel the documents in Joe Biden’s garage.
“It’s the same thing, but one guy gets raided and charged.”
Alas, O’Reilly may be missing the real goal of all this. It’s not about justice or the rule of law. It’s about the catharsis on the left of seeing Trump in an orange jumpsuit. Sadly, that’s it.
O’Reilly may be thinking of a different era, one in which Democrats thought that putting their political opposition in prison was, at the very least, bad optics. Now, they simply don’t care.
In fact, the raid on the home of Sen. Robert Menendez almost felt quaint. It was like the old days, back when raids were conducted against people who had engaged in what looks like actual malfeasance.
One hopes O’Reilly is right and that the Democrats don’t plan on imprisoning their political opposition during an election year.
However, we’re in terra nova now — and, as Carlson noted, we’re a lot closer to “just ending democracy” than we ever have been.
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