Quick (not bloody likely) take: Donald Trump's legal loophole will be the stupidity defense

 During Sen. Mitch McConnell's (Trump-KY) attempt to salvage some dignity while continuing to bow to his godhead, he disingenuously asserted that Donald Trump may, in theory, be held legally liable for his conduct leading up to January 6.  Of course, if you believe that McConnell would actually advocate criminal conviction, I've got some peak-bubble GameStop stock to sell you.  Actually, I don't because I wasn't stupid enough to buy any, but you take my point.  May I interest you in some Dogecoin?  No?  Good.  You've been paying attention.

Anywho, Donald Trump will probably not be indicted, and he will not be convicted.  Knowing that, prosecutors will perform backwards induction, and decline to indict, as I have argued.  Instead, he will continue to bilk idiots out of PAC and superPAC donations while continuing to engage in domination games with Republican politicians as the party base goes crazier and crazier.  Yay.

With respect to incitement, as I keep telling you, he really cannot be prosecuted.  You may look at one use of the word, "peacefully," as little more than an afterthought and a joke, and morally, social scientifically, you're right.  Legally, though, that's all the First Amendment requires to shield him.  "No law" is some pretty strong language.  You may not like how strong that wording is, particularly if you are part of what some call 'the illiberal left," but that's what the document says.

Trump's real point of vulnerability should be that Georgia phone call.  And yet his defense?  The stupidity defense.  We saw this in the Mueller Report.  Do you remember why Don Jr. did not face criminal charges for the Trump Tower meeting?  This was fun.  You see, contrary to Trump's many lies, the investigation never touched "collusion," but instead, a very specific crime called, "conspiracy."  For some crimes, you can be convicted even if you don't know the law.  As a professor, I get to deal with this all the time!  Plagiarism!

You know, like Neil Gorsuch, Melania Trump, and plenty of others... including... Joe Biden!

The way academic integrity rules work is that when a student violates the rules on plagiarism by pulling what I call "the old comma switcheroo,"* or some similar violation, the student can't escape punishment by claiming to have thought it was within the rules.  No dice.  Ignorance is no excuse.  You cheated, and you face the consequences.  Universities let kids get away with a lot in the snowflake era, but fortunately, plagiarism is the one corner where we, professors, are still allowed to say, "no.  Bullshit.  This, we will not tolerate, you can't threaten to sue us, so we aren't afraid to enforce this rule.  Quit whining and deal with consequences for the first time in your life, you little cheater."

Conspiracy doesn't work that way.  So, when Don Jr. met with a Russian spy in order to try to get dirt on Hillary Clinton, he was trying to work with a foreign government to acquire material of value in the campaign, which would violate the law, but as Robert Mueller clearly wrote in his report, in order to violate the "conspiracy" statutes, a person must know that this is illegal, and Don Jr. could plausibly claim to not know that this was illegal!  In other words, the fact that everyone knows he's a fuckin' moron means he could plausibly plead stupidity, and it would actually work as a legal defense.  And... c'mon.  He's an idiot.  Also, he was actually just being groomed as an asset, and he was too fucking stupid to understand what was happening!  The stupidity defense.

That wouldn't work with lots of crimes, but conspiracy?  It actually is a legal defense.

So what about that Georgia phone call?  That's Trump's biggest point of exposure.  Here's the problem.  He almost certainly started his cries of fraud knowing that they were false, but here's how Trump's diseased brain works.  Remember that he is a) stupid, b) a fragile narcissist, c) paranoid, and d) lives in an echo chamber that feeds his own lies back to him.

So he starts by lying about fraud.  Why?  He doesn't want to admit he lost.  He's a fragile narcissist.  He then embraces a bunch of paranoid conspiracy theories, because he has no grasp on reality.  Since he exists in an echo chamber that feeds his own lies back to him, and he's too stupid to remember that this is what is happening, he forgets that it all started with his own lies, and he becomes convinced that he is being provided with objective outside information.  He then decides that his lies are true.

Hence, if you look at that Georgia call, it sounds as though Trump believes that bullshit about election fraud.  He is trying to get the Georgia Sec. State to commit election fraud, but in his diseased brain, he thinks he is telling the Sec. State to set the election right.  He is doing it in the procedurally wrong way, because he is a mob boss rather than a small-d democratic policy-maker, and he is wrong on the facts, because he is an insane, lying fuckwit who forgot that he was lying, but the question becomes...

What did Donald Trump imagine, and when did he imagine it?

*The lazy cheater's favorite.  It goes like this.  Take a paragraph with multiple clauses, separated by commas.  Change the order of the clauses.  Ta-da!  It's no longer an exact quote, so you don't need quotation marks!  Include a cite, and you're not committing plagiarism, right?  Wrong!  That's plagiarism.  The old comma switcharoo, as I call it.  Why?  You are claiming someone else's words as your own.  I fucking hate cheaters.  This, really, is a big part of why I hate Trump as much as I do.