Please don't perpetuate this myth. He was tried, and found guilty, for falsifying business records to cover up payments that he made for purposes that many of his voters would find objectionable in order to hide that objectionable information from those voters to prevent them from making an informed decision and affecting an election.

It's for lying about paying hush money to a porn star.

It is NOT for pushing money to a porn star. It is for marking the hush money as legal fees. That's ALL it is. They didn't even get him on the moral high ground, but nitpicked his books.

This country is so beyond fucked... Cannot even get basic details correct...

Actually, no.

It's for committing fraud while trying to hide these payments. It's tangentially related, sure, but it's not the reason why he was convicted.

Funnily enough though, I'd say this sounds like prostitution. Pay a girl after sex? If I do that I can go to jail, they should go for Donald Trump for that one.

And we got Al Capone on tax evasion instead of murder as well. So what?

He's also got 2 other criminal trials being held up by SCOTUS and Judge Cannon, which includes charges of Insurrection, so there is that to think about.

It's for electorial fraud

Really? Was your truth social account broken so you transitioned to Lemmy to try to minimize this historic event? The obvious difference was the tangible personal responsibility here. Not to divorce responsibility for all the other stuff, but I'm confident even you realize how complex it was to convict your precious Trump for things he personally did with a trail of direct evidence. Putting one person in jail for things like war crimes is a whole different level of grey and frankly there aren't readily available systems built to deal consequences for this things like there are for personal fraud.

I can never tell if these memes are astroturfing by monied interests/russian bots pretending to be progressives, if populism leads to the same brainwashed takes as the right, or if progressives are actually this dumb.

I consider myself a socialist and a progressive, and I understand that this was a case of defrauding electors and why the case was a felony. It’s not “paying hush money to a porn star”.

I can’t imagine someone on the right saying this in earnest, as they’d never care about Native Americans or any minority. Only thing I can think is that it’s the right trying to sow discord on the left by feigning moral outrage, or the populist progressives on the left being unable to understand how the world works at all. I honestly can’t tell who is making these brain dead memes.

So, for an European who hasn't been following this: criminal conviction does not bar him from running for president?

Shows what the priorities are in the us justice system.