I meant fuck shit up for Harris and the Democrats. Sorry, I edited the post. Hopefully that makes it clear I think something of this sort would HELP Trump get reelected.
No problem.
I think it would be a roll of the dice, and I’d rather not roll the dice (plus, I don’t want people to get hurt).
But I think it could go either way. If Biden and Harris show good leadership and deal with the situation effectively, then it could redound to Harris’s benefit. Timing would also be important. If it happened right now and were resolved effectively before the election, then good. If it happened the week before the election, probably bad no matter how it was handled.
He didn’t say 30% of the voting public, but people. The people who want fascism are much more likely to vote than the people who don’t care or generally weakly oppose fascism, so they are over-represented in political power. Fascism doesn’t require 51% of the public or 51% of the vote to take over - it actually takes a very small number and an ineffective opposition. The US has far more than the minimum required fascists for a fascist coup.
And when it comes to fascism, it is much more important that fascism win out than that the fight is fair.
When bad things happen presidents get the blame whether warranted or not. When good things happen presidents get the credit whether it’s warranted or not. A bad thing handled well is still a bad thing that will be blamed on the administration.
This for certain. The most likely route for DJT to win at this point could will be cheating.
Or Democrats getting over confident and cocky.
This election has been and will end up being about turnout. If GOTV is the strong effort it should be then this will be an amazing election.
Okay - I’d still disagree that the Ds would have enough gumption/initiative to do that, but I’ll set that aside for now.
Even if the D’s wanted to do this counter-insurrection, how? The U.S. reins of power are very decentralized. There’s no one single target, like a palace/throne, that you go after to seize power. Even if the Rs have cheated and sent the election to the House, and SCOTUS says this is fine by a 6-3 vote, what do the Ds to prevent the House from sealing the win for Trump by state delegations? Or, if the House has already voted, what do the Ds do then? Have Biden announce himself as some interim dictator for a few months, and declare martial law, until Kamala can step in?
Given the complexity of the situation, do you think the Rs could successfully pull off a cheat? They have heretofore demonstrated a stunning lack of ability with anything more complicated than chewing on a toothpick. They could try to cheat, but the outcome could very well bite them in the soft parts.
The Dems wouldn’t need to seize power; they are in power, and Biden will be POTUS even after the election.
At this point, the Dems would probably not be participating in Congress at all, or perhaps they would convene at a different location as the “real Congress.” What would happen is unpredictable. We could see something similar with the Supreme Court, with the three Liberal justices declaring the corrupt majority to be illegitimate.
Biden would retain control of the executive branch, and he could declare the relevant Supreme Court decision and ensuing House vote to be illegitimate, which they certainly would be, and announce that he would be transferring power to Harris on January 20 per the normal procedure. No dictatorship required. Who would be able to stop that? Only the military could do it immediately. However, we’d probably have a civil war starting up at this point.
Indeed. And Trump is not POTUS now, has no SC-gifted immunity for his current “acts,” and could be jailed immediately for any insurrection-related behavior.
Presidents get props for handling situations well that they did not cause. So if an earthquake happens, the president earns acclaim or blame for how s/he handles it. S/he doesn’t get blamed for the earthquake itself.
As has been said by others here since my post, it doesn’t have to be ‘real’, and if it’s spread widely and quickly very close to the election, it could be a factor in some close races. The “I was going to vote for Harris until I heard that - now I won’t bother!” thinking.
I think we probably both feel the risk overall isn’t that high, but still too high to be fully confident.
In theory. It’s not as though you can say any old thing and have it work. The Hunter Biden laptop thing was a bust, for example.
Also, is it plausible that the Trump campaign has some sort of October surprise ready already, having planned for the contingency of Harris replacing Biden, and that the campaign has the discipline not to inform Trump of this plan, lest he give it away with his dumb mouth, yet, at the same time, it has nothing in the works with which to begin the battle against Harris and, instead, concedes to her all of the momentum and good vibes that she currently enjoys?
Not plausible IMO. I think the Trump campaign has been caught completely flat-footed, and I don’t know if they are disciplined enough to cook up a believable October surprise in time.
With the widespread easy access to “deep fakery”, all they have to have is something really clever that looks convincing. A clip of her in front of some official building making a truly vile statement. The Democrats could try something similiar with Individual-ONE, but it is hard to imagine anything that could make him look worse than he already does. She, on the other hand, would be vulnerable, being apparently not unpleasant in character.
I think such an attempt would be crowd-sourced to death, literally within minutes. When was the statement made? OK, is there any footage of that building timestamped at that time. Yes? Does it contain Harris making the statement? No? Whoops, fail. Also, is there any footage of Harris elsewhere timestamped with that time. Yes? Whoops, fail. And so on.
No, I don’t think so.
Could they dig something up in the next couple of months? I guess we’ll see.
Yeah, I don’t think it would have a great effect outside of the people who still think Q was/is real. It’s not hard for such things to be quickly debunked and people would have to already want to believe it’s true for it to really work. And those people weren’t going to vote for her anyway.
Deepfakes really only work until they get too much attention. If you tried to derail an entire campaign with one it couldn’t withstand the scrutiny. I have zero concern about them in this campaign.
If past performance is an indicator of future results…
Trump and his campaign never came up with an October surprise in either 2016 or 2020.
In 2016, Trump started out with “her emails” and finished with that. Idiot Comey provided a sort of October surprise with his announcement, but that wasn’t Trump’s doing. Plus, keep in mind, the email issue was real, not cooked up.
In 2020, there was the Hunter Biden laptop, which went nowhere. Here again, Hunter Biden’s shitty past behavior was already known at the start of the election, and the laptop would have meant nothing without this context.
So no, I don’t see Trump as being poised to come up with something brilliant.
I don’t think that’s in any way relevant. There probably wasn’t anything they could have used in those campaigns. We hope there isn’t anything now either, but it’s possible.
If you go panning for gold and find nothing, it’s not necessarily that you’re incapable of it. There just wasn’t anything to find. Maybe there will be in the next river.