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. These people believe that if Trump wins, then by the 2026 midterms, if not by the 2025 gubernatorial elections, Trump and his acolytes will have figured out a way to rig the elections, or disenfranchise large number of Democrats, or hack the voting machines, or some other nefarious plot that will end self-government. The irony is that these people are the mirror image of the Trump fans who insist that the 2020 election was stolen, and that Democrats (or the Deep State, or whomever) rigged the elections, hacked the voting machines, etc. (Jim Geraghty in
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.
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
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
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 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 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.
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.
Without Trump as a challenger, the Democratic Party would not be more benign. Well, they might be to a leftist.
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.
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
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.
That almost sounds like they fear that Trump might stop the election fraud that keeps many Democrats in power.