Donald Trump defied the government with a type of tenacity rarely seen from competent defendants and succeeded in ways this author could not under similarly circumstances. Donald Trump opposed his enemies at every turn, didn't win every battle, but ultimately won the war He did so by following a playbook I tried to use when attacked by the government many years ago only to fail due to being dependent on inferior people. With his success Donald Trump proved that attacking the other side on all fronts inside and outside of the courtroom is the way to go.
WHAT HE DID RIGHT
The first thing he did right he started doing long ago. He surrounded himself with solid loyal people unlikely to throw him under the bus at the first sign of trouble. This is the most important thing you need to survive an attack from the government. Trump is both a single strong person and a person surrounded by strong supporters willing to stick by him but more importantly follow his lead regardless of what his enemies say. It is not uncommon to find defendants as headstrong as Trump but it is rare to find defendants with so much support in the community that locking him up could just make things worse for his enemies.
The second thing Trump did right was attack his enemies on all fronts inside and outside of court. Those working for the government and the court are always afraid of resourceful defendants willing to do whatever it takes to win their case or at least damage the government as much as possible trying. Trump did this well by targeting his enemies online the same way I targeted mine with this website when I launched it in 2017. I took the names of most individuals responsible for helping the government's case (witnesses, cops, judges, FBI agents, etc.), looked up their home addresses, published them online, and used the revocation of my supervised release to promote this website to its target market which of course includes anyone not absolutely 100% completely satisfied with law enforcement like inmates. I was able to keep this site up despite being locked up for over a year on fabricated new charges of assaulting a federal officer made by bonehead local corrections deputies in response to the realization that their system had no by the book remedy to counter my tactics.
The third thing Trump did right was exercise enough self control to avoid being incarcerated pre-trial. That might not sound like much but it is. Had he been denied pretrial release like I was and banned from making non-attorney calls from jail like I was it would have been difficult for him to communicate with his constituents. He would likely have had to hire his own lawyers and investigators whose sole jobs would have been to get his words past the jail staff. This would have been expensive yet affordable for Trump because he would have to pay lawyers and investigators a lot to make breaking the rules worth the risk.
The fourth but not necessarily final thing he did right was attack the system itself rather than conform himself to it. He was bitter to the end (see video below article). When I was locked up, I read several books by an author named Robert Greene which apply lessons from history to the battlefield of daily life. One of those lessons is that if you don't think you can win within the rules of a system to attack the system itself. Trump attacked the system so well that he earned the support of millions who like myself believed him guilty of violating the laws of the current system but recognize the illegitimacy of the system. I created a Twitter banner that said "smash the system 2024" for that reason because this time around it was Trump not Antifa or BLM giving the system hell. I supported the left last time because they attacked the temple of tyranny where my rights were taken away, so the enemy of my enemy was my friend in 2020. Unfortunately, I can't support many of those people these days because they turned around and supported using the same system against their enemies.
WHAT I DID WRONG
I relied on automation, failed to build an adequate support network in the community, and conducted myself in ways that significantly lowered my ability to seek pretrial release.
I was targeted for operating a fleet of legal websites that primarily marketed to anyone with a grudge by providing them the opportunity to confront their enemies online. My technique was modeled after Jerry Springer quite a bit but instead of having a talk show I had websites. I received a lot of negative publicity back when all publicity was good publicity, however I pissed off liberals including Anderson Cooper, now former Congressman Joe Crowley, and many others. About three months after appearing on Anderson's now defunct daytime talk show and about a month after Congressman Crowley sent the Justice Department a letter requesting an investigation, a deranged stalker who'd been harassing my family for months finally provoked me into responding with a drunken death threat of my own. After dragging their feet for three days the local cops brought me in on fake charges and got my bail increased to $1,000,000 as an "imminent threat to the victim" in order to give the feds time to investigate my operation. Eventually the state dropped all charges, I was moved to federal court, denied bail as a "danger to the community" and sentenced to 24 months for threatening communications (18 USC 875(c)). This was after I refused to plead guilty to an internet stalking charge that would have made me the first person convicted of a crime for operating websites known to be used by others for the purpose of inflicting emotional distress on people across state lines. Despite not proving any criminal activity involving the business model itself, I was ordered by a liberal judge not to run my business while on supervision for three years on the grounds that the business model created the conflict which led to my threat. He even implied that people like my stalker needed to be protected just in case they showed up to confront me in home or in public because I might defend myself. In the end it was obvious that I, like Trump, was prosecuted mostly for who I was and not what law I actually broke. For that reason I've felt a strong sense of solidarity with Trump ever since he started fighting back.
Like most entrepreneurs in their 20s, I had little in terms of financial resources. As a result, I never hired employees and relied on automation for stuff I didn't have time to do myself. Part of this included hosting my sites offshore with companies unlikely to cooperate with the U.S. government. The servers typically required no intervention from me to operate as long as the company got paid. This made automated payments the ideal solution. Unfortunately, the hosting company I had been using didn't use automated payments and required up front payments. On top of that I needed a new server faster than theirs, so when I got arrested I was only paid up until the end of the month. The king's ransom and a phone ban kept me from being able to get anyone to transfer my funds for me, so the sites went down.
When I lost the server I lost my only leverage. It then became a situation where the government knew they could probably keep me offline simply by getting me as much time as they could and denying me computer access once I got out. I tried my best to get my own people to help me from jail but it did not work. It did not work because unlike Trump, I did not surround myself with solid loyal people willing to help me in the face of threats from the government. If I had to do things over, I would have recognized lack of bail as a reasonable threat and would have prepared myself in 2012 the same way I did in 2017.
I prepared for 2017 in a couple ways. First, I made it clear to my people that failing to support me under certain circumstances would make the likelihood me being locked up longer more likely. I did this by begging my people to help me fight back near the end of my custodial sentence, threatening to lash out on my own if I felt it necessary to make a point, and backing that up by assaulting a federal employee at a halfway house. I did make a big mistake however that was largely due to not being able to research the law online. I thought a civilian contractor was a civilian and didn't realize that federal funding made this employee of a locally registered non profit group a federal employee under the law. Instead of getting what would have probably been 6 months in county jail for misdemeanor assault, I got two more years in federal prison. I was later the victim of a classification error that caused me to be shipped out of state to a high security United States Penitentiary instead of simply sending me back to the medium security Federal Correctional Institution they sent me to the first time.
The assault made it easier for me to fight back from jail in 2017. Despite setting up auto-payments properly my server went down a few months after I was arrested on what would have been just a six month revocation. I contacted someone I know who was able to get the hosting company to fix the server at no extra charge. Turned out they had installed a trial version of the Windows Server operating system that needed to be activated after a few months. When they activated it I was able to constantly market this site to convicts in jail. I did this so effectively that threatening to do it to jail staff if disciplined resulted in me being taken to a solitary cell where my arm was intentionally broken. Then they made up a story about being "assaulted" during a cell extraction earlier that evening. An expert debunked their theory as being medically and scientifically impossible, so I was offered time served, got out for the last time in 2018, and got off supervision in 2021.
When I got out for the final time I had secured my right to run this website, but was still banned from the old ones in my old case for a couple more years. I made the most of this site because until a few months ago I had Google Ads running which made this site a profitable hobby. Then they flagged the domain for "dangerous or derogatory content" and refuse to complete the review process on their end despite the snitches section they cited as the reason being moved off-site to a new domain. They also penalized the site so that it ranks below inferior content in search results simply because some visitors might become upset when reading it. As a result, I don't bother posting here much anymore. I have a better source of income these days anyway but I keep the site up just in case the government kidnaps me again so that I can promote it to inmates for as long as they keep me.
To this day I consider the move I made with this site to be an important one which helped keep the government off my back during my final supervision term. They realized that holding me would not get them the results they sought. On top of that I gave them a good reason to not get the site down by any means simply by censoring home addresses. That censor is conditional on me being able to login every two weeks. If I am prevented from doing that for any reason the block is programmed not to work anymore. This resulted in a surprise visit from probation when I forgot to login one time. Under those circumstances it was in the interest of public safety not to find fake excuses to revoke my release. I can't help but think that if I took this down they might bring new fake charges just to keep me from putting it back up.
As someone that has never lived a criminal lifestyle, I found it easy to complete federal supervision the second the government stopped telling me not to exercise my First Amendment rights. It seems that it is in the interest of public safety for the government to uphold the Constitution.
CONCLUSION
When you're attacked by the government you should use every tool at your disposal to fight back. If the government cries foul you're usually on the right track as a long as you don't waiver. The system can break most people, so you need to prove yourself better than most to get the best result.