If one of the candidates is a convicted felon, then there is no lessor of two evils. It’s good vs evil. Still, a substantial portion of the electorate is unfazed by evil thanks to the wonder of bothsidesism. What will save Biden and the nation is abortion. The tide of public sentiment has reversed and now Dobbs is a millstone around the neck of Republicans. It may not amount to a blue tide, but definitely a blue wave in 2024.
Re: convicted felon—that’s ridiculous. You could be running for president but have had a DUI when you were 19, decades previously. You could be (as I understand Trump is) not currently a convicted felon, but likely to be the greater of two evils in any given set of two.
A felony conviction is certainly a strong negative, but insufficient as a touchstone for lesser-evil-determination.
PS: nitpick: the lessor of two evils is whichever of those evils who has signed a lease, magnitude of evil notwithstanding.
Eight percent of Americans are convicted felons. It does not make them evil.
Some felonies are worse than others, as Dr. Drake beat me to saying. Pressuring election officials to report false election results would be, to me, an extremely serious crime. What Trump has been indicted for so far is less serious.
He’s been indicted for having a complete disregard for the national security of our country. I guess the importance of that depends on the individual doing the judging.
The key words are “so far”. There will be more indictments regarding election interference and sedititious conspiracy on 1/6. Not to mention the GA charges to come this month or next.
I think the documents case is very serious indeed. There are a lot of people putting their lives on the line to gather this information and to cavalierly bandy this about to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that comes to Mara Lardo poses a significant risk not only to national security but to American agents abroad. It may not move the “duhhhh…Hunter had a laptop and duhhhh…emails” crowd but there is no way that significant numbers of people vote for him in 2024 that didn’t in 2020.
Yes, I put in those two words on purpose.
I also think that the New York indictment, concerning campaign-law-violating bribery to prevent voters learning relevant candidate information before an election, is morally more serious than waving around secret documents, or even the associated obstruction of justice.
As a child of the sixties, I’m guess I’m just not as impressed by the phrase national security. And I’m reluctant to pull the trigger on the word evil.
Maybe it’s trivial question of style. But what if Biden went into his garage, when a possibly alcoholic secret service guard had fallen asleep, and pulled out the most seriously secret of his retained documents, too embarrassed for it to be found that he’d been careless with that one? Impossible? Maybe in the exact details I just gave – but not, I think, in principle. Perhaps I’m thinking the way many Trump supporters think right there – while showing a bit how he can still be viable – but I’ve never believed they could be wrong about everything.
So would I then vote Green or Libertarian or Kennedy Jr.? Nope. I’d be disappointed in Biden, but he’s disappointed me before.
Unless you killed somebody while driving drunk, or had several prior convictions, a DUI isn’t a felony.
There’s a vast chasm between a misdemeanor criminal conviction and a felony conviction.
And in this case, it’s not just any felony.
I remember when republicans pretended to care about whether classified information was kept secure.
There are many white Americans who want the system to collapse utterly so that they can replace it with something else.
Obviously the extreme MAGA types, Christian nationalists, etc. want that. But they’re bolstered by the extreme left (actual socialists, DSA types), who also want liberalism to fail, so that a new order can be ushered in (some folks call this the red-brown alliance, or the horseshoe effect, where the ends of the spectrum bend to meet in opposition to the so-called “center”).
There are just way too many Americans who think they would come out on top if there’s a political collapse, and they’re willing to play with the lives and livelihoods of millions of people to achieve their extreme goals.
I saw a clip yesterday of Trump talking about Hillary Clinton in 2016. Saying how serious mishandling classified documents is, how she would inevitably “disparage the FBI” and that an indictment should disqualify her for office 
I’m not seeing this as a “both sides” thing.
Yes, if you search around on social media you can find people on all sides that believe anything. But tearing down the institutions and rule of law is something absolutely at the core of the MAGA GOP. Something that politicians overtly endorse and campaign for office over.
It doesn’t really matter how you see it. Revolutionary defeatism has been an active thread of leftism for over 100 years, and if anything, has only been ticking up in the Trump years.
Note here that I’m not using the traditional sense of “both sides” to deflect attention or responsibility from anyone. But given the apparent mystery of why Trump is still viable, it’s important to remember that the right wing aren’t the only people who hate liberals enough to favor a Trump candidacy, for whatever strategic reason.
Trump is still a viable candidate for the same reason Biden is. People vote for party and whatever person the Democrats and Republicans throw at the public. Even if the candidates are elderly, corrupt, racist rapists, people will support their party’s candidate.
We should demand better people to run and to represent the country as President and in congress.
Trump is an elderly, corrupt, racist rapist. Biden is elderly.
I know who I’d vote for if I was a racist, misogynist man who wished he could cheat more on his taxes than he already does. Or a woman who thinks that’s what being a real man entails.
From my real life experiences, these are not rare species by any means.
Really? What do you have to support that?
As I say, it’s trivial for me to cite examples of right-wing politicians, candidates for president and right-wing pundits with millions of followers espousing authoritarian and fascist views. That’s their main platform right now.
It’s not so easy to find prominent people on the left saying such things.
Let me be clear: I am not saying that authoritarianism, say, is inherently right-wing. I am aware of the history and the classic “horse shoe” description of extremism. But the current reality in the United States is that authoritarianism, fascism and “burn it all down” are central to one political wing, and fringe to the other.
Must-read article here (gift link):
Money quotes include:
“The MAGA base [37% of Republican primary voters] doesn’t support Mr. Trump in spite of his flaws. It supports him because it doesn’t seem to believe he has flaws.”
“Zero percent — not a single one of the 319 respondents in this MAGA category — said he had committed serious federal crimes. A mere 2 percent said he “did something wrong” in his handling of classified documents.”
The rest are divided on the issues, so are unlikely to coalesce around a particular candidate.
Some of The NY Times readers comments are about whether it’s better to have an almost-(?)-unelectable Trump be the Republican candidate, or not. In any case, it’s looking likely he will be the candidate. Not definitively (yet), but likely.
Here’s a related (gift) link about that new NY Times/Siena poll.
The headline is: “Trump Crushing DeSantis and G.O.P. Rivals, Times/Siena Poll Finds”
The main thrust of the poll findings is this:
Former President Donald J. Trump is dominating his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, leading his nearest challenger, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, by a landslide 37 percentage points nationally among the likely Republican primary electorate, according to the first New York Times/Siena College poll of the 2024 campaign.
Mr. Trump held decisive advantages across almost every demographic group and region and in every ideological wing of the party, the survey found, as Republican voters waved away concerns about his escalating legal jeopardy. He led by wide margins among men and women, younger and older voters, moderates and conservatives, those who went to college and those who didn’t, and in cities, suburbs and rural areas.
But what really had me (somewhat ironically) crying was this quote from a NH Trump supporter:
“He might say mean things and make all the men cry because all the men are wearing your wife’s underpants and you can’t be a man anymore,” David Green, 69, a retail manager in Somersworth, N.H., said of Mr. Trump. “You got to be a little sissy and cry about everything. But at the end of the day, you want results. Donald Trump’s my guy. He’s proved it on a national level.”
I just… I… [curls up in fetal position]
Also, they want to be just like him. A liar and cheat that falls backasswords into money. A man that cheats on his model wife with a porn star.
A ‘man’ that asks for money and gets millions. A bully, racist and a misogynist. It’s what they aspire to be. The MAGAs respect these ‘qualities’. It’s disgusting.
A man that also fell backasswords into power, and can break laws with seeming impunity.
That last one might be changing though…
The MAGA sheep truly believe that he is their messiah. In their eyes, he is incapable of error and incapable of wrongdoing. If he does something, it is by definition not only good but it is treasonous to suggest he did wrong. Most of all, he gives them permission to release their inner demons of hate and they love that he hates the same people that they do. They truly believe that the feds want to indict them but first they have to get him out of the way. In other words, they’re paranoid and delusional.
I did not know, or need to know for that matter, that David Green, 69, a retail manager in Somersworth, N.H. wears his wife’s underpants.
Right? That’s the only thing I learned from that comment.