I’ve run into a surprising number of progressives who apparently genuinely believe that if Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, that will be the last free and fair election that America ever has.
I'm not sure I understand the conclusion here. It is evident and obvious that Democrats have weaponized both federal and state governments to subvert the democratic process - in which they fear Trump may prevail - and are abusing the legal system to prosecute Trump for a series of invented charges, with the goal clearly being not letting the voters decide the question of whether or not he should be in power. Ironically, one of them mimics exactly the prosecution of Navalny by Putin - the infamous "Kirovles" affair where the state claimed fraud despite complete lack of victims, harm or any evidence of anybody being actually defrauded. And they are not hiding it either - many Democratic operatives openly campaigned on the promise of stopping Trump by any means necessary, including using their powers as officials to find whatever is needed to stop Trump from participating in the democratic process.
If one considers weaponization of the government by partisans a threat to the democracy - as one should - we are not in "could happen" right now, it is already happening around us right now. We're not "getting close", we're in the thick of it. "Where the ruling party stays in power by weaponizing the legal system against its opponents" is exactly what is happening in the United States, right now, before our own eyes. Removal of political opponents from ballots and prosecuting people for acts that threaten powers that be - such as demanding more secure and transparent electoral procedures - is happening right now, and not only to Trump either.
And, astonishingly, Trump - who, with his multiple faults both as politician and as a person, is clearly and undeniably a victim here - is responsible for that? It's like saying "Navalny is responsible for destroying the democracy in Russia by forcing Putin to murder him". Unless it's some kind of ironic take I failed to recognize - which, I admit, happens often on the Internet - I am totally dumbfounded how a claim like that could make any sense.
Let us keep the prime responsibility, if that happens, on the Democrats. They choose how they respond to their fear of Trump. Their repeated use of lawfare, behind the scenes censorship, attempts to abolish the filibuster, stealth rule through unelected bureaucrats, making law when a court has ruled it illegal, and pushes to pack the Supreme Court (or even abolish it!) makes them the main threat. Trump is awful but they are currently much bigger threats to democracy.
I have never been convinced by the claim that the 2020 election was decided honestly.
In the first place, if I propose to audit my business's books, and the accounting staff freely cooperate, that won't make me suspicious. But if they fight tooth and nail against the suggestion, that will make it seem likely that they have something to cover up. The Democrats were bitterly opposed to any call for a review of various vote counts, and that looks as if they had, and have, something to hide.
In the second place, virtually none of the courts actually reviewed the evidence and showed that the counts were fair. Rather, they came up with various excuses not to address the actual charges, along such lines as denying standing or saying that it wasn't the right time to bring such actions. So I don't think they cared about the integrity of the election; I think they were trying to avoid catching political hot potatoes.
And the treatment of Trump since 2020 has only reinforced those impressions.
There is a piece on lawfaremedia that goes through some of Trump's charges about the election, arguing that they were claims he could not have believed, since there was no evidence for them and he had been told they were not true by his people. It doesn't show that the election wasn't stolen but it makes that less plausible:
> At the indictment’s foundation are what I’ll refer to as eight anchor lies—specific, provably false claims about the election. These are the whoppers about thousands of dead people voting or noncitizens voting
And after that kind of BS, I see no reason to take anything else in that article seriously.
Oh, Jesus. Bill Barr doesn’t even buy this. He told Trump plainly, “You lost.” What will it take to accept reality? When Trump won in 2016 I didn’t like it but I knew he was our president fair and square.
I'm not inclined to be persuaded by appeals to authority, which is what this seems to be. I've stated my reasons for finding the outcome doubtful; I don't see you presenting grounds for setting them aside.
Most were lost by technicalities. Whether that's a conspiracy or not, does not matter. Losing by technicalities is not losing on the merits. 2000 is a good example; part of the reason for stopping Florida's recount was worry about it taking so long that it would delay past when the Electoral College was required to meet. IOW, a technicality.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but courts love to dismiss cases on technicalities when having to decide the merits would be unpopular regardless of who wins.
Actually, most of his law suits did NOT allege fraud, and his lawyers said so explicitly. The fraud allegations were only addressed to the public, not to the courts. The law suits mostly accused state legislatures and/or state election officials of not following proper procedures in modifying election procedures to handle the pandemic.
As I understand it, most of the "technicalities" were either (a) Trump's team knew about this procedure modification before the election, and had plenty of opportunity to object to it then, but they didn't, so it's too late now, or (b) the "witnesses" have no first-hand knowledge of anything improper happening, so there's no evidence that can be presented in court.
I seem to remember there were also objections filed *before* the election, which were rejected because there had not yet been any wrongdoing, or something.
I thought the Supreme Court's decision in 2000 was pretty dubious.
Felix has stated what I find critical as well: Trump's cases were lost by technicalities, and not on the merits. When a court turns a case away without examining the evidence, or ordering it to be examined, that doesn't convince me that the claim has been falsified.
"Now"? When did I say anything either way? I personally would rather have a rule that if no one wins by, say, 55-45, the election should be settled by a coin toss just to avoid all the fraud claims. I'd rather have everybody screaming about fake coins than fake votes. You can always find something less susceptible to fraud than coins.
Actually, I'd rather such a puny government that no one thought fraud was worthwhile.
Fraud is fraud. If you think everyone else is a partisan hack, what does that say about you?
They could be all fixed, if the persons deciding them all had common interest of deciding them a certain way (let us see if we think hard enough - could we think of any interest like this?) Or some of them could be fixed, and some could be badly prepared or lost on technicality, such as the law not having a remedy for this particular problem in this particular circumstance.
I think there is a strong case while they might not have been fixed, they were definitely strongly biased and Trump's team didn't receive due process. I don't think he won (Trump) as regardless nobody is accusing the electoral college nor certification to be improper but doesn't change the fact he might have lost a couple states he actually won, or lost them by less a margin.
I literally wrote I didn't think it was rigged as that requires collusion. I think individual anti-Trump officials each individually denied him due process in the courts and possibly the pre-EC vote hence in the aggregate may have cost him the election.
I don't think any individual actor was sure of a Democrat victory hence they each felt the need to do their own part to make sure it happened; no collusion, no rigging, no fixing as a group necessary hence why never a leak to prove it.
One might ask the same question about why they would use lawfare against Trump to try to prevent him from running instead of just winning the election.
Although I don't think there was outright fraud in 2020, it seems undeniable that Democrats changed voting rules (citing covid, though the changes were often technically illegal) in ways that made it both easier to retain mail in ballots and easier/possible to submit fraudulent votes. I don't think the DNC would have ordered an operation to create fraudulent votes or engaged in that, but I have less confidence that individual representatives in local areas wouldn't do the same. Again, I don't think that happened, but due to the ways voting laws were changed, it is also very hard to persuasively argue that it couldn't or didn't happen.
It's very true that having more mail in ballots benefitted the Democrats over the Republicans, and that many of those changes in election procedure were illegally implemented.
Maybe you personally knew, but a real lot of Democrats didn't, a lot of them called him illegitimate, and a lot of them said he only won because of Russian influence and was working for Russia in concert with Putin. BTW, so far I don't think I heard any single apology for any of that. So, while you make credit to your party by avoiding any of that misbehavior, this is in no way a common pattern among other members of the party.
I'm not sure though how Bill Barr's opinion is supposed to be a definitive evidence here. Is Bill Barr some kind of oracle that if he says something about election security, that immediately makes it true? How did he acquire such powers?
That Bill Barr who knew, in 2019, about the H. Biden laptop, with lots of selfie evidence of crimes including bribery, yet remained silent in October when 51 other lying Intel Community bozos were falsely claiming the true evidence was Russian disinformation?
The B. Barr unwilling to tell the truth because it would hurt Biden, since he wanted Biden to win?
Yea, his DoJ was supporting illegal censorship of the truth, so he could say to Trump "You lost" (you're fired!). Most of the GOPe prefer the elite luxury beliefs of most college professors, and strongly dislike the vulgarity of some rich guy who brags about having a gold plated toilet.
Trump got some 61 million votes in 2016, then over 74 million in 2020. He believes, and I believe, the election was stolen. But most evidence was destroyed - the 65 million mail in ballots with poorly verified signatures.
Most normal Americans don't want to believe the Dem Deep State would rig an election, and I sure don't like it. But that's what I believe happened.
I don't think Trump scared his enemies into acting the way they did so much as they scared themselves into doing it. In an attempt to mobilize their base they genuinely promulgated dozens of lies about how dangerous trump was until there are tons of people who seem to genuinely believe he is a wannabe hitler
He isn't a wannabe Hitler, if only because he doesn't have the skills required for the job. But he could be the source of a major political shift which resulted in the people now in power, broadly enough defined to include the NYT, the Harvard faculty and the teachers' unions, being out of power for a long time. If you identify with the conventional political orthodoxy, that's scary.
Does it seem ironic that "the revenge of flyover country" is carried out by a guy born and raised in New York City who's never spent a day of his life as less than a multi-millionaire? Who _started_ his career with a hundred times more money than most Americans will earn in their lifetimes?
Not really. If you need to overthrow the king, because he mistreats the peasants and neglects his kingly duties, your best bet is one of the other nobles, and not some random peasant who has a rusted plow and a starved horse. You need somebody with resources, knowledge of the system and ability to navigate the system and build the movement to overthrow it (something btw Trump manages to be both very good and very bad at, paradoxically). It's not that it's not possible for a random poor person from Iowa to pull it off - it's just much easier for somebody who already has billions, name recognition and experience to do it. So, it looks like a highly probably event that the person who actually takes the flag of the flyover country is not one of them - just as it was highly probable that the US President who led to black slaves being freed, for example, wasn't himself a black slave - if only because effecting such change while being a President is much easier than effecting it while being a slave. There's no contradiction in this at all.
Instead of listing people who will be "out of power" say the specific things Trump wants... I put these in no particular order...
1. Put in camps and deport ~10 million people, most of whom have been in the U.S. for multiple years.
2. Trade the Ukraine for support from Putin and Russian oligarchs, including cash, intelligence, and direct intervention as helpful in U.S. politics. See, e.g., which company is funding Trump's $80 million bond.
3. Trade concessions with corporate interests, such as demolishing the post office (good for e.g. Amazon and UPS), providing drilling/mining leases on federal land at nominal or no cost, directing the military to intervene where American corporate interests face nationalization or other putative seizure by foreign countries acting on assets in their jurisdictions.
4. Criminalize most abortion.
5. Use the pardon power as a purchase-able commodity, available to high bidders, as Rod Blogevich attempted with the Chicago Senate Seat.
6. Sell American military assets and classified secrets for private profit.
7. Trade any accountability or restraint we could impose on Israel w/r/t/ civilians in Gaza for personal enrichment, impunity in American political/legal process.
8. Trade the personal security against assassination of U.S. Congressmen for Trump's personal impunity. (See Jan 6th!)
9. Criminalize political opposition.
10. Elevate political allies to be above the law. (See the misuse of the pardon power, which will also chill prosecutions and provide impunity to commit crimes at will to people who anticipate that support.)
I don't like some things about the direction the left is going. E.g. I think the ACLU has lost its way, is now a leftist purity club where it was previously a place of principled defense of *liberalism*. Union overreach in the public sector is a thing to worry about, sure. But the job of the Presidency is not to be a stick to punish domestic factions I disagree with. The President is primarily the agent for conducting U.S. foreign policy and protecting and defending the U.S. Constitution at home. Trump is fully unfit for that job; discussion of his candidacy should start there.
You say he isn't a wannabe Hitler, because he lacks the skills.
Lacking skills (but being otherwise similar) is the definition of a wannabe, not evidence that a person isn't one. You cited something that centrally identifies him as a wannabe, not something that centrally identifies him as "not hitler-like in ambition".
In a lot of these discussions, it seems that people have a congenital inability to conjure up any less-than-democratic figure OTHER than Hitler when making unflattering comparisons.
For every Hitler -- a revolutionary who had vast and detailed ambitions of restructuring society and the entire global order and who then repeatedly risked everything to make his vision possible -- there have been approximately 10,000 corrupt men who just want somewhat more power and security than they currently have and are prepared to bend the rules to some degree to get it, but who also don't want to push so far as to get in serious trouble for it, and who don't really have any grand vision other than "The status quo, but with me having somewhat more political power."
But everyone picks Hitler for their comparisons, not the 10,000. It's all so tiresome.
I once saw someone compare Putin to Napoleon III, instead of Hitler. Great comparison. Really made my day. In the history of the Internet, such a thing has only been done a handful of times.
Perhaps my wording describes most politicians, but let's at least acknowledge that Trump's "stop the steal" represents an escalation of bending the rules, or at least flagrantly violating norms, by US politicians in order to maintain power. But it's not nearly so far outside the normal range of bad political behavior by corrupt old men that we have to look for genocidal megalomaniacal revolutionary dictators to find the closest comparison.
Nor -- I would agree -- does it offer a clear basis for excluding him from the democratic process, except by the legal process of Congress doing so.
I also don't think bending the rules against political power grabs was necessary even to stop Hitler. Just give the man a proper punishment for the Beer Hall Putsch -- he a noncitizen at the time, who personally threatened Bavaria's leaders at gunpoint! Though I suppose bending the rules would have been necessary if Hitler had been overthrown later; the 20 July Plot is still to be lauded even if we have to consider it "illegal".
I just think they have a lot of nerve accusing Trump of doing the very things they've been trying to do for eight years. Our democracy has already been damaged by the censoring, the various health mandates, the orders from on high that certain "non-essential" businesses must shut down, and the sick and dying must do so alone and among strangers, because some idiot in a government position decided that family ties can be broken for the "public good." To call January 6 an insurrection, but not the months of rioting in Portland, Seattle, and Kenosha is hypocritical at the very least. Why is it not a threat to our democracy that our president can receive a disappointing decision by the Supreme Court, but then turn around and announce that he's going to ignore it and do what he wants anyway? And nobody is stopping him. And to be so furious that Trump supporters believed that there were problems with the 2020 elections after the Democrats screamed for four years that somehow the Russians rigged the 2016 election. Either it's possible to rig the elections or it's not. They can't claim on the one hand that our elections are clean and honest, and then on the other, that a few ads on Facebook somehow gave Trump an unfair edge.
I remain convinced that what sets Trump apart from almost every other politician is being an outsider who didn't need political shenanigans to get rich, and felt free to insult and denigrate the political class just for fun. It also helped that he (mostly) stuck to his guns, as in trying a zillion schemes to build that border wall, as contrasted with Obama who gave up on shutting down Gitmo after one half-hearted try was shut down by Congress.
As for his "dictator for one day" comment, you don't have to hear much of him to take it as a joke tweaking his opponents' noses. Every time his border wall schemes were shut down by the courts or Congress, he tried something else, which is hardly characteristic of real dictators.
As for his accomplishments, he did slow down regulations, but he's an economic ignoramus, he should have vetoed spending bills and forced Congress Critters to stand up on their hind legs and put their names to veto overrides, and he should have fired Fauci and Brix. About all he really accomplished was scaring the political class. I was half hoping Colorado and other liberal states (which he would never have won) would have kept him off their ballots and he had won enough votes elsewhere to win as President, just for the fun of it.
I agree wholeheartedly. It’s purely speculative and ridiculous to think Trump will take down the American system. Now, if Congress would get off its dead ass and start fixing the laws instead of wasting time spending all our money, I’d be a happy camper…
It was the one Senator James Lankford (R-OK) worked hard for, the one that Mitch McConnell said “We will never get a better deal than this even with Trump as president.”
What does any of that have to do with the 2020 election? Why blame only one actor in such a god-awful mess of a bill? Is everyone else an angel and only Trump a devil?
I encourage everyone to read “The Revolt of the Public” by Martin Gurri. It explains the response of the elites to Trump, Brexit, Arab spring, etc. Now it’s a war between the elites and the masses in many parts of the world. Trump is the leader of the masses here in the USA. He may not be the best but he’s awful good at revealing the corruption and bias in our elite institutions.
I found an interview with the author, from which it sounded as though he didn't believe there was such a thing as truth, as though we had more truth in the past because it was defined as what everyone believed and when there were few sources of information, all controlled by the elite, almost everyone believed the same thing. It didn't seem to occur to him that the reason the elites lost trust was that people discovered they didn't deserve to be trusted, were often lying.
Is that true of the book or just the impression I got from the interview?
Strange. Do you have a link to the interview? That wasn’t what I got from the book at all. I cannot recommend it highly enough. If I remember correctly, Bari Weiss thinks it’s one the most important books of the decade. He also has some good essays at Discourse magazine. Please consider reading the book and posting your review here.
"As for truth, that’s a tricky subject, because a lot of elites believe, and a lot of people believe, that truth is some kind of Platonic form. We can’t see it, but we know it’s there. And often we know it because the science says so.
But that’s not really how truth works. Truth is essentially an act of trust, an act of faith in some authority that is telling you something that you could not possibly come to realize yourself.
I would perhaps add a little bit more: for 200 years Latin Americans have always agreed in democracy as the source of political legitimacy, but they were always unable to agree about the results of individual elections. That is the fire the United States is now toying with.
That outcome would be fitting and ironic. Just as the 911 bombers succeeded in damaging the US primarily via the US's insane reactions, Trump may indirectly destroy American democracy via driving those with TDS to corrupt the US beyond repair.
On the other hand, a wise man once said "there's a lot of ruin in a country".
Oh well, we had a better run for nearly 250 years than we had any right to expect. And we've all learned something in the process.
Eh, as bad as things look now and as bad as they might get, we've survived worse.
The Civil War is obviously way worse than anything we might deal with here, and the *severe* consequences of that lasted at least 30 years (taking a few years before the war through most of the rest of the century).
Then there's the less catastrophic but still significant issues around WWI and WWII (censorship, rationing, unconstitutional laws), mass terror bombing campaigns on US soil in the 70s, etc.
To pretend that Trump did not try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power by illegal means (just for starters) is as delusional as anything found in any hard leftist publication. The writer and commenters aren't the fenceposts wearing orange hats, who can claim the low IQ excuse. You are the large class of educated people who helped Hitler into power in Germany just about a century ago. You peddle multiple and obvious falsehoods on behalf of a psychopath, yet think you can sit in judgment of the cultural Maoists of the Left. The mirror image of that woke madness is right here, not where the quoted Republican apologist fancies it to be.
> You are the large class of educated people who helped Hitler into power in Germany just about a century ago.
Wow, that's really weird accusation, especially weird since apparently "we" - whoever we are - managed to do it before our own birth.
> You peddle multiple and obvious falsehoods on behalf of a psychopath
While it is possible that there are some people working for CNN, MSNBC, Reuters, AP, NYT, WaPo and other similar outlets, I am not sure what makes you think everybody you address works in the corporate press?
> yet think you can sit in judgment of the cultural Maoists of the Left
Anybody human can sit in judgements of movements that collectively murdered hundreds of millions of human beings and caused decades of misery, unfathomable suffering and destruction of wealth unparalleled by anything in human history. It's not hard. It's like throwing a ball and hitting Earth - you practically don't have any alternative.
> The mirror image of that woke madness is right here,
It if were true, we'd witness Biden removed from ballots in 2020 in Republican states, yet we didn't. We'd witness multiple prosecutions initiated against Democrats by Republican DAs, which we didn't. We'd witness academic institutions where non-Republicans are physically attacked if they want to speak - which we didn't. We'd witness Republicans in FBI, CIA, NSA, DOJ and other government structures abuse their positions to suppress the opposition and subvert the elections - which we didn't. We'd witness constant calls to change the congressional rules, abolish the Supreme Court and destroy any other institution and convention that does not directly serve Republican ideology - which we didn't. And so on, and so forth.
Overall this appears to be a good stress test on American institutions. A lot of institutions have worked well within some margin of error. They have failed to actually put Trump into jail or disqualify him from any race though this matter reached to SC.
They will eventually though. It's extremely hard to actually win most felonies as a defendant given how broad they are written. They will just keep throwing cases at him until one sticks. They haven't even gotten down to the low hanging fruit yet that nobody in government can incidentally avoid like falsifying government records, fraud/waste/abuse, etc.
He did not concede. Either the election was stolen and Biden is a usurper, or the election was not stolen and he was an aspiring usurper. Having knowledge of Sharia, probably you will appreciate the following argument more than others:
I think it is considerably overstated. I'm not sure Trump actually believed the election was stolen but it isn't impossible that he believed it and was wrong.
Oh, so we can feel reassured because the US President, having the federal government sources of information at his disposal still falsely believes the election was stolen. That is the “overstatement” part.
It is not a national emergency, because the first presidential non concession (ever? since the Civil War?) perhaps was only an unfortunate confusion.
You underestimate the bubble any president lives in when the 5th estate (bureaucracy) is actively working against you in a uniformed manner. I worked in a Federal office that refused to even put Trump's picture, or anyone else he appointed, up as you do with every other current president. They just left Obama there, and intentionally so, immediately putting up Biden's VP portrait in the presidential spot the day he won the primary.
Well I can leave with that: in the argument of the Takfir candidate there is a leak: perhaps Trump was an accidental Tekfir…. He was in a “bubble” and he did not concede by mistake.
Nothing of this is necessary: perhaps the election was really stolen and he is simply right. Perhaps you shall vote for him if the election was stolen and for Biden if was not, as in the main argument!
Not at all, I wasn't even addressing that. My comment was purely in respect to "having the federal government sources of information at his disposal still falsely believes the election" in that Arturo ascribes some magical weight the President has access to that, or even he does, it's even accurate.
Let’s see the declarations (any link). I am quite interested, because I saw her conceding. I did not know even about the electoral fraud accusations for 2016.
"Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election in a CBS News interview to be aired Sunday."
Trump does lots of dog whistling, but he aims them not at his supporters, but at reporters. "General Lee was a great general." has a literal meaning to his supporters, but to reporters it means "the confederacy was good" and they go bananas. For Trump, a hyperbolic anti-trump article in the NYT is worth 10 Trump apologias in RW news. MAGA obviously loves triggering those folks and it creates anti-anti-Trump people who mostly dislike trump, but dislike unhinged resistance -types even more.
'Trump is a competent demagogue but an incompetent administrator'- I disagree with our host on both counts. Trump's knack for snappy patter amuses and reassures his base but inflames his opponents. A competent demagogue arouses his base while soothing his opponents. Obama's knack for speeches that rouse his supporters and leave his opponents somnolent is the ideal rhetorical skill for a politician. And an incompetent administrator in the snake pit of New York real estate would have bankrupted himself long ago. Trump is incompetent to administer your rent money, but if you have a flashy gamble that can hold his interest, he might pull it off. Trump Tower is built. Operation Warp Speed succeeded. When he loses he's fine with it. He's proud of being a high roller comfortable with big losses and people who hate him.
The Democrats have called every R politician since 1932 a fascist threat to democracy, but let's steelman the case that Trump is a danger to America. Nate Silver is smart:
'I am not prone to hyperbole about Trump, but he very much is not in that [respectable conservative] tradition, obviously. January 6 was a dangerous, radical insurrection that undermined the rule of law and the democratic process. A second Trump term would at the very least almost certainly entail a *massive expansion of executive powers* and — although I’m more optimistic about the checks-and-balances of the American system and particularly the role of the courts than some commentators — potentially even push the Republic to the brink.'
Okay, the stuff about outgroup riots being dangerous, radical insurrection while ingroup riots are fiery but peaceful is flag-waving. But the 'massive expansion of executive powers'?
Nate Silver gives a link:
'New presidents typically get to replace more than 4,000 so-called “political” appointees to oversee the running of their administrations. But below this rotating layer of political appointees sits a mass of government workers who enjoy strong employment protections — and typically continue their service from one administration to the next, regardless of the president’s party affiliation.'
Trump's last-minute Schedule F would have attacked civil service immunity, and the Democrats think he might actually carry it out if elected. Why would R-Trump attack civil service immunity? Because D-FDR, D-JFK, and D-LBJ made civil service a D party monopoly.
Nine decades of D party, one-party, rule over the federal civil service is long enough. Silver knows it, he knows D patronage is unpopular, and he knows he has to lie about it or face D party youth wings backed by D party courts.
Would the Democrats accept election results that threaten their monopoly over federal patronage? Some of them, youth wings like antifa or BLM, will not. The rest of the Democrats may well back them, from a mixture of loyalty and justified fear. This is indeed a threat to democracy.
Basically when the left talks about "democracy" they mean technocratic oligarchy, when they speak of "fascism" they mean rule according to popular will.
I'm not sure I understand the conclusion here. It is evident and obvious that Democrats have weaponized both federal and state governments to subvert the democratic process - in which they fear Trump may prevail - and are abusing the legal system to prosecute Trump for a series of invented charges, with the goal clearly being not letting the voters decide the question of whether or not he should be in power. Ironically, one of them mimics exactly the prosecution of Navalny by Putin - the infamous "Kirovles" affair where the state claimed fraud despite complete lack of victims, harm or any evidence of anybody being actually defrauded. And they are not hiding it either - many Democratic operatives openly campaigned on the promise of stopping Trump by any means necessary, including using their powers as officials to find whatever is needed to stop Trump from participating in the democratic process.
If one considers weaponization of the government by partisans a threat to the democracy - as one should - we are not in "could happen" right now, it is already happening around us right now. We're not "getting close", we're in the thick of it. "Where the ruling party stays in power by weaponizing the legal system against its opponents" is exactly what is happening in the United States, right now, before our own eyes. Removal of political opponents from ballots and prosecuting people for acts that threaten powers that be - such as demanding more secure and transparent electoral procedures - is happening right now, and not only to Trump either.
And, astonishingly, Trump - who, with his multiple faults both as politician and as a person, is clearly and undeniably a victim here - is responsible for that? It's like saying "Navalny is responsible for destroying the democracy in Russia by forcing Putin to murder him". Unless it's some kind of ironic take I failed to recognize - which, I admit, happens often on the Internet - I am totally dumbfounded how a claim like that could make any sense.
Let us keep the prime responsibility, if that happens, on the Democrats. They choose how they respond to their fear of Trump. Their repeated use of lawfare, behind the scenes censorship, attempts to abolish the filibuster, stealth rule through unelected bureaucrats, making law when a court has ruled it illegal, and pushes to pack the Supreme Court (or even abolish it!) makes them the main threat. Trump is awful but they are currently much bigger threats to democracy.
I have never been convinced by the claim that the 2020 election was decided honestly.
In the first place, if I propose to audit my business's books, and the accounting staff freely cooperate, that won't make me suspicious. But if they fight tooth and nail against the suggestion, that will make it seem likely that they have something to cover up. The Democrats were bitterly opposed to any call for a review of various vote counts, and that looks as if they had, and have, something to hide.
In the second place, virtually none of the courts actually reviewed the evidence and showed that the counts were fair. Rather, they came up with various excuses not to address the actual charges, along such lines as denying standing or saying that it wasn't the right time to bring such actions. So I don't think they cared about the integrity of the election; I think they were trying to avoid catching political hot potatoes.
And the treatment of Trump since 2020 has only reinforced those impressions.
There is a piece on lawfaremedia that goes through some of Trump's charges about the election, arguing that they were claims he could not have believed, since there was no evidence for them and he had been told they were not true by his people. It doesn't show that the election wasn't stolen but it makes that less plausible:
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/why-i-doubt-trump-s-sincere-belief-defense-will-fly-before-a-jury
From that article.
> At the indictment’s foundation are what I’ll refer to as eight anchor lies—specific, provably false claims about the election. These are the whoppers about thousands of dead people voting or noncitizens voting
And after that kind of BS, I see no reason to take anything else in that article seriously.
Oh, Jesus. Bill Barr doesn’t even buy this. He told Trump plainly, “You lost.” What will it take to accept reality? When Trump won in 2016 I didn’t like it but I knew he was our president fair and square.
I'm not inclined to be persuaded by appeals to authority, which is what this seems to be. I've stated my reasons for finding the outcome doubtful; I don't see you presenting grounds for setting them aside.
Trump lost scores of law suits claiming fraud. He did not win one of them. Those cases were all fixed?
Most were lost by technicalities. Whether that's a conspiracy or not, does not matter. Losing by technicalities is not losing on the merits. 2000 is a good example; part of the reason for stopping Florida's recount was worry about it taking so long that it would delay past when the Electoral College was required to meet. IOW, a technicality.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but courts love to dismiss cases on technicalities when having to decide the merits would be unpopular regardless of who wins.
Actually, most of his law suits did NOT allege fraud, and his lawyers said so explicitly. The fraud allegations were only addressed to the public, not to the courts. The law suits mostly accused state legislatures and/or state election officials of not following proper procedures in modifying election procedures to handle the pandemic.
As I understand it, most of the "technicalities" were either (a) Trump's team knew about this procedure modification before the election, and had plenty of opportunity to object to it then, but they didn't, so it's too late now, or (b) the "witnesses" have no first-hand knowledge of anything improper happening, so there's no evidence that can be presented in court.
I seem to remember there were also objections filed *before* the election, which were rejected because there had not yet been any wrongdoing, or something.
Wait a minute. Are you now saying Gore should have prevailed in 2000?
I thought the Supreme Court's decision in 2000 was pretty dubious.
Felix has stated what I find critical as well: Trump's cases were lost by technicalities, and not on the merits. When a court turns a case away without examining the evidence, or ordering it to be examined, that doesn't convince me that the claim has been falsified.
"Now"? When did I say anything either way? I personally would rather have a rule that if no one wins by, say, 55-45, the election should be settled by a coin toss just to avoid all the fraud claims. I'd rather have everybody screaming about fake coins than fake votes. You can always find something less susceptible to fraud than coins.
Actually, I'd rather such a puny government that no one thought fraud was worthwhile.
Fraud is fraud. If you think everyone else is a partisan hack, what does that say about you?
They could be all fixed, if the persons deciding them all had common interest of deciding them a certain way (let us see if we think hard enough - could we think of any interest like this?) Or some of them could be fixed, and some could be badly prepared or lost on technicality, such as the law not having a remedy for this particular problem in this particular circumstance.
I think there is a strong case while they might not have been fixed, they were definitely strongly biased and Trump's team didn't receive due process. I don't think he won (Trump) as regardless nobody is accusing the electoral college nor certification to be improper but doesn't change the fact he might have lost a couple states he actually won, or lost them by less a margin.
This is a ridiculous position. Why would the Democrats, at great risk and the cost of their reputation rig elections they were already winning?
I literally wrote I didn't think it was rigged as that requires collusion. I think individual anti-Trump officials each individually denied him due process in the courts and possibly the pre-EC vote hence in the aggregate may have cost him the election.
I don't think any individual actor was sure of a Democrat victory hence they each felt the need to do their own part to make sure it happened; no collusion, no rigging, no fixing as a group necessary hence why never a leak to prove it.
One might ask the same question about why they would use lawfare against Trump to try to prevent him from running instead of just winning the election.
Although I don't think there was outright fraud in 2020, it seems undeniable that Democrats changed voting rules (citing covid, though the changes were often technically illegal) in ways that made it both easier to retain mail in ballots and easier/possible to submit fraudulent votes. I don't think the DNC would have ordered an operation to create fraudulent votes or engaged in that, but I have less confidence that individual representatives in local areas wouldn't do the same. Again, I don't think that happened, but due to the ways voting laws were changed, it is also very hard to persuasively argue that it couldn't or didn't happen.
It's very true that having more mail in ballots benefitted the Democrats over the Republicans, and that many of those changes in election procedure were illegally implemented.
Maybe you personally knew, but a real lot of Democrats didn't, a lot of them called him illegitimate, and a lot of them said he only won because of Russian influence and was working for Russia in concert with Putin. BTW, so far I don't think I heard any single apology for any of that. So, while you make credit to your party by avoiding any of that misbehavior, this is in no way a common pattern among other members of the party.
I'm not sure though how Bill Barr's opinion is supposed to be a definitive evidence here. Is Bill Barr some kind of oracle that if he says something about election security, that immediately makes it true? How did he acquire such powers?
That Bill Barr who knew, in 2019, about the H. Biden laptop, with lots of selfie evidence of crimes including bribery, yet remained silent in October when 51 other lying Intel Community bozos were falsely claiming the true evidence was Russian disinformation?
The B. Barr unwilling to tell the truth because it would hurt Biden, since he wanted Biden to win?
Yea, his DoJ was supporting illegal censorship of the truth, so he could say to Trump "You lost" (you're fired!). Most of the GOPe prefer the elite luxury beliefs of most college professors, and strongly dislike the vulgarity of some rich guy who brags about having a gold plated toilet.
Trump got some 61 million votes in 2016, then over 74 million in 2020. He believes, and I believe, the election was stolen. But most evidence was destroyed - the 65 million mail in ballots with poorly verified signatures.
Most normal Americans don't want to believe the Dem Deep State would rig an election, and I sure don't like it. But that's what I believe happened.
I don't think Trump scared his enemies into acting the way they did so much as they scared themselves into doing it. In an attempt to mobilize their base they genuinely promulgated dozens of lies about how dangerous trump was until there are tons of people who seem to genuinely believe he is a wannabe hitler
He isn't a wannabe Hitler, if only because he doesn't have the skills required for the job. But he could be the source of a major political shift which resulted in the people now in power, broadly enough defined to include the NYT, the Harvard faculty and the teachers' unions, being out of power for a long time. If you identify with the conventional political orthodoxy, that's scary.
Think of it as the revenge of flyover country.
Does it seem ironic that "the revenge of flyover country" is carried out by a guy born and raised in New York City who's never spent a day of his life as less than a multi-millionaire? Who _started_ his career with a hundred times more money than most Americans will earn in their lifetimes?
Not really. If you need to overthrow the king, because he mistreats the peasants and neglects his kingly duties, your best bet is one of the other nobles, and not some random peasant who has a rusted plow and a starved horse. You need somebody with resources, knowledge of the system and ability to navigate the system and build the movement to overthrow it (something btw Trump manages to be both very good and very bad at, paradoxically). It's not that it's not possible for a random poor person from Iowa to pull it off - it's just much easier for somebody who already has billions, name recognition and experience to do it. So, it looks like a highly probably event that the person who actually takes the flag of the flyover country is not one of them - just as it was highly probable that the US President who led to black slaves being freed, for example, wasn't himself a black slave - if only because effecting such change while being a President is much easier than effecting it while being a slave. There's no contradiction in this at all.
Class isn't about money.
Instead of listing people who will be "out of power" say the specific things Trump wants... I put these in no particular order...
1. Put in camps and deport ~10 million people, most of whom have been in the U.S. for multiple years.
2. Trade the Ukraine for support from Putin and Russian oligarchs, including cash, intelligence, and direct intervention as helpful in U.S. politics. See, e.g., which company is funding Trump's $80 million bond.
3. Trade concessions with corporate interests, such as demolishing the post office (good for e.g. Amazon and UPS), providing drilling/mining leases on federal land at nominal or no cost, directing the military to intervene where American corporate interests face nationalization or other putative seizure by foreign countries acting on assets in their jurisdictions.
4. Criminalize most abortion.
5. Use the pardon power as a purchase-able commodity, available to high bidders, as Rod Blogevich attempted with the Chicago Senate Seat.
6. Sell American military assets and classified secrets for private profit.
7. Trade any accountability or restraint we could impose on Israel w/r/t/ civilians in Gaza for personal enrichment, impunity in American political/legal process.
8. Trade the personal security against assassination of U.S. Congressmen for Trump's personal impunity. (See Jan 6th!)
9. Criminalize political opposition.
10. Elevate political allies to be above the law. (See the misuse of the pardon power, which will also chill prosecutions and provide impunity to commit crimes at will to people who anticipate that support.)
I don't like some things about the direction the left is going. E.g. I think the ACLU has lost its way, is now a leftist purity club where it was previously a place of principled defense of *liberalism*. Union overreach in the public sector is a thing to worry about, sure. But the job of the Presidency is not to be a stick to punish domestic factions I disagree with. The President is primarily the agent for conducting U.S. foreign policy and protecting and defending the U.S. Constitution at home. Trump is fully unfit for that job; discussion of his candidacy should start there.
> Sell American military assets and classified secrets for private profit.
I think you're confusing Trump with Hillary.
> Criminalize political opposition.
Are you just projecting now?
Let me put it another way.
The center left is cowardly, and when confronted with total insanity from their own side they shrug and go "but Trump." No enemies to the left.
Trump is a mid-90s Democrat with some personal failings (like....Bill Clinton).
Small nitpick, but I think it's revealing:
You say he isn't a wannabe Hitler, because he lacks the skills.
Lacking skills (but being otherwise similar) is the definition of a wannabe, not evidence that a person isn't one. You cited something that centrally identifies him as a wannabe, not something that centrally identifies him as "not hitler-like in ambition".
fair point.
So lets be more honest.
Does anyone think Donald Trump wants to start a World War to establish lebensraum and kill tens of millions of people?
I don't think he wants to do that, regardless of whatever his skills might be.
In a lot of these discussions, it seems that people have a congenital inability to conjure up any less-than-democratic figure OTHER than Hitler when making unflattering comparisons.
For every Hitler -- a revolutionary who had vast and detailed ambitions of restructuring society and the entire global order and who then repeatedly risked everything to make his vision possible -- there have been approximately 10,000 corrupt men who just want somewhat more power and security than they currently have and are prepared to bend the rules to some degree to get it, but who also don't want to push so far as to get in serious trouble for it, and who don't really have any grand vision other than "The status quo, but with me having somewhat more political power."
But everyone picks Hitler for their comparisons, not the 10,000. It's all so tiresome.
I once saw someone compare Putin to Napoleon III, instead of Hitler. Great comparison. Really made my day. In the history of the Internet, such a thing has only been done a handful of times.
Well, nearly every politician and political party could be described as "The status quo, but with me having somewhat more political power."
You can't bend all the rules to fight that, only Hitler. Otherwise things like using lawfare and keeping people off the ballot sounds insane.
Perhaps my wording describes most politicians, but let's at least acknowledge that Trump's "stop the steal" represents an escalation of bending the rules, or at least flagrantly violating norms, by US politicians in order to maintain power. But it's not nearly so far outside the normal range of bad political behavior by corrupt old men that we have to look for genocidal megalomaniacal revolutionary dictators to find the closest comparison.
Nor -- I would agree -- does it offer a clear basis for excluding him from the democratic process, except by the legal process of Congress doing so.
I also don't think bending the rules against political power grabs was necessary even to stop Hitler. Just give the man a proper punishment for the Beer Hall Putsch -- he a noncitizen at the time, who personally threatened Bavaria's leaders at gunpoint! Though I suppose bending the rules would have been necessary if Hitler had been overthrown later; the 20 July Plot is still to be lauded even if we have to consider it "illegal".
I would have thought that lack of skills would be a help rather than a hindrance to being a wannabe 🧐
I just think they have a lot of nerve accusing Trump of doing the very things they've been trying to do for eight years. Our democracy has already been damaged by the censoring, the various health mandates, the orders from on high that certain "non-essential" businesses must shut down, and the sick and dying must do so alone and among strangers, because some idiot in a government position decided that family ties can be broken for the "public good." To call January 6 an insurrection, but not the months of rioting in Portland, Seattle, and Kenosha is hypocritical at the very least. Why is it not a threat to our democracy that our president can receive a disappointing decision by the Supreme Court, but then turn around and announce that he's going to ignore it and do what he wants anyway? And nobody is stopping him. And to be so furious that Trump supporters believed that there were problems with the 2020 elections after the Democrats screamed for four years that somehow the Russians rigged the 2016 election. Either it's possible to rig the elections or it's not. They can't claim on the one hand that our elections are clean and honest, and then on the other, that a few ads on Facebook somehow gave Trump an unfair edge.
I remain convinced that what sets Trump apart from almost every other politician is being an outsider who didn't need political shenanigans to get rich, and felt free to insult and denigrate the political class just for fun. It also helped that he (mostly) stuck to his guns, as in trying a zillion schemes to build that border wall, as contrasted with Obama who gave up on shutting down Gitmo after one half-hearted try was shut down by Congress.
As for his "dictator for one day" comment, you don't have to hear much of him to take it as a joke tweaking his opponents' noses. Every time his border wall schemes were shut down by the courts or Congress, he tried something else, which is hardly characteristic of real dictators.
As for his accomplishments, he did slow down regulations, but he's an economic ignoramus, he should have vetoed spending bills and forced Congress Critters to stand up on their hind legs and put their names to veto overrides, and he should have fired Fauci and Brix. About all he really accomplished was scaring the political class. I was half hoping Colorado and other liberal states (which he would never have won) would have kept him off their ballots and he had won enough votes elsewhere to win as President, just for the fun of it.
I agree wholeheartedly. It’s purely speculative and ridiculous to think Trump will take down the American system. Now, if Congress would get off its dead ass and start fixing the laws instead of wasting time spending all our money, I’d be a happy camper…
Congress had a bipartisan immigration bill hammered out and a phone call from Trump nixed it. He wanted the issue for November.
Was that the bill with 5000 or 8000 allowable illegals per day? I forget…
It was the one Senator James Lankford (R-OK) worked hard for, the one that Mitch McConnell said “We will never get a better deal than this even with Trump as president.”
5000, then…
What does any of that have to do with the 2020 election? Why blame only one actor in such a god-awful mess of a bill? Is everyone else an angel and only Trump a devil?
Frank was carping about Congress not doing anything was why I brought it up.
I encourage everyone to read “The Revolt of the Public” by Martin Gurri. It explains the response of the elites to Trump, Brexit, Arab spring, etc. Now it’s a war between the elites and the masses in many parts of the world. Trump is the leader of the masses here in the USA. He may not be the best but he’s awful good at revealing the corruption and bias in our elite institutions.
I found an interview with the author, from which it sounded as though he didn't believe there was such a thing as truth, as though we had more truth in the past because it was defined as what everyone believed and when there were few sources of information, all controlled by the elite, almost everyone believed the same thing. It didn't seem to occur to him that the reason the elites lost trust was that people discovered they didn't deserve to be trusted, were often lying.
Is that true of the book or just the impression I got from the interview?
Strange. Do you have a link to the interview? That wasn’t what I got from the book at all. I cannot recommend it highly enough. If I remember correctly, Bari Weiss thinks it’s one the most important books of the decade. He also has some good essays at Discourse magazine. Please consider reading the book and posting your review here.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22301496/martin-gurri-the-revolt-of-the-public-global-democracy
Part of what I'm reacting to:
"As for truth, that’s a tricky subject, because a lot of elites believe, and a lot of people believe, that truth is some kind of Platonic form. We can’t see it, but we know it’s there. And often we know it because the science says so.
But that’s not really how truth works. Truth is essentially an act of trust, an act of faith in some authority that is telling you something that you could not possibly come to realize yourself.
I would perhaps add a little bit more: for 200 years Latin Americans have always agreed in democracy as the source of political legitimacy, but they were always unable to agree about the results of individual elections. That is the fire the United States is now toying with.
That outcome would be fitting and ironic. Just as the 911 bombers succeeded in damaging the US primarily via the US's insane reactions, Trump may indirectly destroy American democracy via driving those with TDS to corrupt the US beyond repair.
On the other hand, a wise man once said "there's a lot of ruin in a country".
Oh well, we had a better run for nearly 250 years than we had any right to expect. And we've all learned something in the process.
Eh, as bad as things look now and as bad as they might get, we've survived worse.
The Civil War is obviously way worse than anything we might deal with here, and the *severe* consequences of that lasted at least 30 years (taking a few years before the war through most of the rest of the century).
Then there's the less catastrophic but still significant issues around WWI and WWII (censorship, rationing, unconstitutional laws), mass terror bombing campaigns on US soil in the 70s, etc.
To pretend that Trump did not try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power by illegal means (just for starters) is as delusional as anything found in any hard leftist publication. The writer and commenters aren't the fenceposts wearing orange hats, who can claim the low IQ excuse. You are the large class of educated people who helped Hitler into power in Germany just about a century ago. You peddle multiple and obvious falsehoods on behalf of a psychopath, yet think you can sit in judgment of the cultural Maoists of the Left. The mirror image of that woke madness is right here, not where the quoted Republican apologist fancies it to be.
> You are the large class of educated people who helped Hitler into power in Germany just about a century ago.
Wow, that's really weird accusation, especially weird since apparently "we" - whoever we are - managed to do it before our own birth.
> You peddle multiple and obvious falsehoods on behalf of a psychopath
While it is possible that there are some people working for CNN, MSNBC, Reuters, AP, NYT, WaPo and other similar outlets, I am not sure what makes you think everybody you address works in the corporate press?
> yet think you can sit in judgment of the cultural Maoists of the Left
Anybody human can sit in judgements of movements that collectively murdered hundreds of millions of human beings and caused decades of misery, unfathomable suffering and destruction of wealth unparalleled by anything in human history. It's not hard. It's like throwing a ball and hitting Earth - you practically don't have any alternative.
> The mirror image of that woke madness is right here,
It if were true, we'd witness Biden removed from ballots in 2020 in Republican states, yet we didn't. We'd witness multiple prosecutions initiated against Democrats by Republican DAs, which we didn't. We'd witness academic institutions where non-Republicans are physically attacked if they want to speak - which we didn't. We'd witness Republicans in FBI, CIA, NSA, DOJ and other government structures abuse their positions to suppress the opposition and subvert the elections - which we didn't. We'd witness constant calls to change the congressional rules, abolish the Supreme Court and destroy any other institution and convention that does not directly serve Republican ideology - which we didn't. And so on, and so forth.
Uwe appears to be a Maoist apologist.
Mighty wide brush you paint with. Kind of hard to discern any detail like that.
As opposed to the illegal means the Biden campaign used to rig the election.
Without Trump as a challenger, the Democratic Party would not be more benign. Well, they might be to a leftist.
They might not be more benign in what they wanted but they would be more moderate in what they were willing to do to get it.
Overall this appears to be a good stress test on American institutions. A lot of institutions have worked well within some margin of error. They have failed to actually put Trump into jail or disqualify him from any race though this matter reached to SC.
It is going to be very entertaining.
They will eventually though. It's extremely hard to actually win most felonies as a defendant given how broad they are written. They will just keep throwing cases at him until one sticks. They haven't even gotten down to the low hanging fruit yet that nobody in government can incidentally avoid like falsifying government records, fraud/waste/abuse, etc.
He did not concede. Either the election was stolen and Biden is a usurper, or the election was not stolen and he was an aspiring usurper. Having knowledge of Sharia, probably you will appreciate the following argument more than others:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ekM9jQqXq8D8qa2fP/united-states-2024-presidential-election-so-help-you-god
I think it is considerably overstated. I'm not sure Trump actually believed the election was stolen but it isn't impossible that he believed it and was wrong.
Oh, so we can feel reassured because the US President, having the federal government sources of information at his disposal still falsely believes the election was stolen. That is the “overstatement” part.
It is not a national emergency, because the first presidential non concession (ever? since the Civil War?) perhaps was only an unfortunate confusion.
You underestimate the bubble any president lives in when the 5th estate (bureaucracy) is actively working against you in a uniformed manner. I worked in a Federal office that refused to even put Trump's picture, or anyone else he appointed, up as you do with every other current president. They just left Obama there, and intentionally so, immediately putting up Biden's VP portrait in the presidential spot the day he won the primary.
Well I can leave with that: in the argument of the Takfir candidate there is a leak: perhaps Trump was an accidental Tekfir…. He was in a “bubble” and he did not concede by mistake.
Nothing of this is necessary: perhaps the election was really stolen and he is simply right. Perhaps you shall vote for him if the election was stolen and for Biden if was not, as in the main argument!
Peter is not basing his position on anything resembling evidence.
He's working backwards from not wanting to deal with the mess dealing with a "Tekfir" would cause.
Not at all, I wasn't even addressing that. My comment was purely in respect to "having the federal government sources of information at his disposal still falsely believes the election" in that Arturo ascribes some magical weight the President has access to that, or even he does, it's even accurate.
Hillary may have conceded on election night (I do not remember) but she has been claiming up to the present that Trump stole the election.
Let’s see the declarations (any link). I am quite interested, because I saw her conceding. I did not know even about the electoral fraud accusations for 2016.
"Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election in a CBS News interview to be aired Sunday."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trump-is-an-illegitimate-president/2019/09/26/29195d5a-e099-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html
There's a bunch of stories about it, she wasn't shy in claiming he stole the election. Google "Hillary Clinton claims Trump stole the 2016 election."
Don’t vote for her either!
Trump does lots of dog whistling, but he aims them not at his supporters, but at reporters. "General Lee was a great general." has a literal meaning to his supporters, but to reporters it means "the confederacy was good" and they go bananas. For Trump, a hyperbolic anti-trump article in the NYT is worth 10 Trump apologias in RW news. MAGA obviously loves triggering those folks and it creates anti-anti-Trump people who mostly dislike trump, but dislike unhinged resistance -types even more.
'Trump is a competent demagogue but an incompetent administrator'- I disagree with our host on both counts. Trump's knack for snappy patter amuses and reassures his base but inflames his opponents. A competent demagogue arouses his base while soothing his opponents. Obama's knack for speeches that rouse his supporters and leave his opponents somnolent is the ideal rhetorical skill for a politician. And an incompetent administrator in the snake pit of New York real estate would have bankrupted himself long ago. Trump is incompetent to administer your rent money, but if you have a flashy gamble that can hold his interest, he might pull it off. Trump Tower is built. Operation Warp Speed succeeded. When he loses he's fine with it. He's proud of being a high roller comfortable with big losses and people who hate him.
The Democrats have called every R politician since 1932 a fascist threat to democracy, but let's steelman the case that Trump is a danger to America. Nate Silver is smart:
'I am not prone to hyperbole about Trump, but he very much is not in that [respectable conservative] tradition, obviously. January 6 was a dangerous, radical insurrection that undermined the rule of law and the democratic process. A second Trump term would at the very least almost certainly entail a *massive expansion of executive powers* and — although I’m more optimistic about the checks-and-balances of the American system and particularly the role of the courts than some commentators — potentially even push the Republic to the brink.'
Okay, the stuff about outgroup riots being dangerous, radical insurrection while ingroup riots are fiery but peaceful is flag-waving. But the 'massive expansion of executive powers'?
Nate Silver gives a link:
'New presidents typically get to replace more than 4,000 so-called “political” appointees to oversee the running of their administrations. But below this rotating layer of political appointees sits a mass of government workers who enjoy strong employment protections — and typically continue their service from one administration to the next, regardless of the president’s party affiliation.'
Trump's last-minute Schedule F would have attacked civil service immunity, and the Democrats think he might actually carry it out if elected. Why would R-Trump attack civil service immunity? Because D-FDR, D-JFK, and D-LBJ made civil service a D party monopoly.
Nine decades of D party, one-party, rule over the federal civil service is long enough. Silver knows it, he knows D patronage is unpopular, and he knows he has to lie about it or face D party youth wings backed by D party courts.
Would the Democrats accept election results that threaten their monopoly over federal patronage? Some of them, youth wings like antifa or BLM, will not. The rest of the Democrats may well back them, from a mixture of loyalty and justified fear. This is indeed a threat to democracy.
Basically when the left talks about "democracy" they mean technocratic oligarchy, when they speak of "fascism" they mean rule according to popular will.
That almost sounds like they fear that Trump might stop the election fraud that keeps many Democrats in power.