And let’s not forget his recorded phone call to officials in Georgia, where this occurred:
“All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump says, according to audio of the call. “There’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated.”
The state conducted three separate ballot counts, resulting in two official certifications of Biden’s victory. Final results show Biden won 11,779 more votes than Trump out of nearly 5 million cast.
Trump and subtle don’t really go together, but you’ll notice that the other Republicans didn’t go for something this blatantly obvious. They’re at least smart enough to know there’s got to be at least a fig leaf of legitimacy to their frauds.
“It’s not clear that the Republican Party is willing to accept defeat anymore,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die.” “The party itself has become an anti-democratic force.”
American democracy has been flawed and manipulated by both parties since its inception. Millions of Americans — Black people, women, Native Americans and others — have been excluded from the process. Both Republicans and Democrats have written laws rigging the rules in their favor.
This time, experts argue, is different: Never in the country’s modern history has a a major party sought to turn the administration of elections into an explicitly partisan act.
You guys are aware that Trump isn’t President, right? You’re acting like he’s all powerful when he’s actually the weakest President we’ve had in forty years. He needed the full and active support of the Republican party to be declared the winner in 2016. If the Republicans decide they don’t want him back all they have to do is nothing.
No Republican will need to make a speech to defeat Trump. All they need to do is rig the primaries - and Republicans are really good at rigging elections. They hold the South Carolina primary and announce Trump came in fourth place. Trump will denounce the results. But he denounced the results in 2020 and it didn’t make a difference.
Trump’s a toddler. He can scream and whine and hold his breath. But he can’t drive himself to Chuck E. Cheese. The Republicans control the car and Trump isn’t going anywhere they don’t want to take him.
So Trump’s only chance to get re-elected in 2024 is to get the Republican party to support him. He’ll probably do that with threats; he’ll tell them he’ll oppose any other Republican and if the party doesn’t nominate him, the result will be Biden’s re-election.
But the Republicans are going to look at the reality that Biden has already beaten Trump once. Why should they think Trump will win in a rematch?
So the Republicans are stuck trying to figure out how to avoid losing with Trump and avoid losing without Trump.
I suspect that there’s somebody in a back room asking this very question. And reflecting how all of the Republican party’s problems would disappear if Trump isn’t around in 2024.
Except we’ve been hoping that exact thing for about six years now. Someone would kill his nomination, someone would be the adult in the room during his presidency, someone would vote for his impeachment, someone would tell him he lost the 2020 election, someone would vote for his second impeachment, someone would rat him out for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, someone, someone, someone.
No one. No one has done any of those things. At least no one with the power to actually do anything about any of it. The best we have is Liz Cheney, and all the other Republicans have repudiated her, and are going to primary her the next chance they get.
Plus, there is no “back room” any more. Trump has a statutory right to put his name on the ballot for Republican primaries, provided he complies with the statutory ground rules in each state, and the party has no power to stop that. The voters in each state have the right to vote for him, and the party can’t stop that. If he wins the primary, he has the delegates that the constitution of the state Republican party says he gets.
There’s been some speculation that the national convention could refuse to seat delegates that Trump has won, but that’s a fantasy. If the voters have given Trump their delegates, how can the national convention repudiate their own voters?
You’re handwaving into existence a massive, illegal and unprecedented case of electoral fraud on the basis that Republicans are “good at it.” To take your South Carolina primary fraud as an example, who exactly is going to be orchestrating this? The South Carolina Republican Party that is stacked to the gills with MAGA-hat leadership and volunteers? The RNC, co-chaired by the head of Trump’s super PAC? How is Trump going to place fourth when no other Republicans will dare to challenge him?
The Republican Party is not controlled by an Illuminati-esque cabal that can simply pull some strings to bring about whatever outcome they want. Trump showed that the “Republican Leadership” was a paper tiger when they failed to stop him from taking the nomination in 2016. Any further resistance has been fully and effectively purged. The Republican Party today is controlled by the grass roots, and those people overwhelmingly support Trump.
Oh come now. In 2016 all of Hillary’s potential rivals didn’t bother running, except Sanders. She then proceeded to win handily in the primaries, no help from the DNC.
In 2020, the mainstream candidates themselves realized that unless they all dropped out and supported Biden, that Sanders would win the nomination and almost certainly lose in November. Out of patriotism, they all did.
They have a shot at winning with Trump. Without him they have no shot short of a drastic change in their platform.
In other words, my guess is that even Hillary, a comparatively weak candidate, would likely have beat Jeb Bush, Chris Christy, Bobby Jindal, etc. back in 2016. The only reason the Republicans won is because Trump tapped into a new base that was previously not mobilized. Without Trump on the ballot those voters will go back to staying home on election day.
Plus, if Trump loses the Republican primary, he’s likely to run as an independent and completely ruin the Republicans’ chances. And they damn well know it. Even if they could rig him to lose, they still can’t.
Most states have “sore loser” laws (if you run in the primary and lose, you can’t get your name on the general election ballot). I suppose he could run a write-in campaign, which is more work.
It won’t happen either way, but I’m pretty sure either party could just cancel their primaries, at least as far as the law is concerned. It would just be the parties rules for themselves.
But as you say the issue would be backlash from GOP voters if this happened. In addition to the fact that primaries choose more electable candidates than smoke-filled backrooms.
Of course we’re aware. And in losing, he got more votes than any other Presidential candidate in American history except for one (and luckily for us, that one was Joe Biden). He increased his vote totals in every state. He added 1.5 million votes in California, despite not campaigning there at all. He did better not just among old dying white people, but among growing demographics such as Hispanics and urban voters. Trump has an enormous, enthusiastic constituency in this country and there’s no reason to believe that 2020 was the apogee of how high he can go.
Yes, Biden beat him. He successfully brought long-time Republican strongholds like Arizona and Georgia into his column, and brought back traditionally Democratic states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But this year’s Virginia elections demonstrate that states don’t consistently move in one direction, even after they’ve been declared safely “blue”.
I certainly don’t think it’s a given that Trump would win in 2024. But I’m genuinely baffled by comments you’ve offered in this and other threads that Trump has no chance at all. What if the economy’s in the toilet? What if Biden declines to run and the Democrats engage in their own internecine bloodbath? And what about new voting laws that will put a thumb on the scale in his favor in state that had razor-thin Biden margins like Arizona and Georgia?
Right, the lack of control comes from using the state voting system. But it would be quite a reach for a state party to suddenly stop using the state primary system, especially since Trump has so many supporters within the state parties.
If Trump had won these three states in 2020 (and all other state outcomes remaining the same), he would have ended up in an Electoral College tie with Biden. In 2024, in the same scenario, Trump would win due to Congressional reapportionment moving electoral college votes to Trump states.
I’m not saying that. Trump might get re-elected in 2024.
My point has been that it won’t be Trump who will make that decision. Trump’s an incompetent moron who couldn’t get himself elected to a school board. The only way Trump will get re-elected will be the same way he got elected in 2016; if the Republican party decides to throw its full weight behind him.
And it will have to be the full weight of the party and that might not be enough. The Republican party will have a harder time get Trump elected in 2024 than it will have getting any other likely candidate. Trump is the weakest candidate the Republicans have.
Because we are in the second decade of conservatives reacting to a loss not with capitulation but with resolve. They will not yield; they will re-double their efforts.