Trump’s a lazy moron. He couldn’t steal a seat on a town council. He certainly can’t steal the Presidency. He would need other people to steal the election for him and hand him the Presidency.
Trump is losing pretty badly. In order for him to be declared the winner, there will have to be an unprecedented amount of electoral fraud. People will have to commit some serious felonies - and do it on behalf of Donald Trump. And then count on him to keep his mouth shut afterwards.
The conservative movement is in it for the long run. They’re not planning on disappearing regardless of who wins in November. A Biden victory might be the end of the world for Trump and his followers but it’s just another off year for the Republican party. They’ll just start making plans for the 2022 election.
Trump hasn’t been doing the Republican party or the conservative movement any favors. Sure, his antics have given them some cover for quieter corruption. But he’s also damaging the brand they’ve spend decades working on. And there are plenty of high ranking Republicans who are thinking about their own presidential ambitions and would like to clear a spot for themselves.
So the Trump victory scenario requires the Republicans to be willing to make great sacrifices and assume high risks for a minimal reward. If the Republican party had principles it might be willing to do this. But if they had principles, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
Nobody said he would steal it alone; he would absolutely need assistance, and he would likely get it. Okay, so Trump couldn’t steal an election, but Bill Barr could help him. Chad Wolf could help him. The acting director of national intelligence could help him. State governors, legislatures, election boards, and secretaries of state could help him.
This is simply not true. He only needs to create (or knowingly allow) a situation in which there is a legitimate legal question about the electoral process. Then the stampede of lawsuits begins. Then states refuse to certify elections. That’s pretty much all it would take. Democracy isn’t natural. In fact, over the past 50 years only 25 to 45 percent of the world’s countries (and a clear minority of the world’s total population) live in a state of democracy, which is on the decline globally. Democracy doesn’t come naturally; it is hard work, and it requires that people value, respect, and agree to play by democratic rules. What if they just, don’t?
What is the conservative movement? Can you define it? Does it exist in substantial numbers outside the Republican party? Understand this: 87 percent - eight seven percent - of the Republican party approves of the job he is doing. This is months into his horrific mismanagement of the pandemic. Months into the deepest unemployment crisis since 1932. Dude…WAKE . UP.
Again, there is no Republican alternative. This is who they are: a party of oligarchy that subscribes to patriarchal ethno-nationalism grounded in fundamentalist Christianity. Nothing will change until their base of idiot voters wakes up and realize that they’re getting scammed and screwed by their party, and that hasn’t happened yet because tens of millions of voters are anxious about changing demography and its impact on their culture and their place in society.
You guys act like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were never elected. That the Republicans have such a dominant control of the political system that they can simply do whatever they want to. Are you saying that Donald Trump will be succeed where men like George H.W. Bush, Robert Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney failed? I certainly won’t dispute that Trump has lower morals than any of those men but he’s also far less competent.
When a clearly bigoted woman at one of McCain’s rallies stood up and started ranting about how scared she was of Obama, John McCain took the mic out of her hands and insisted that his opponent was a decent man. We are a long, long way from that now. That is ancient history.
I don’t recall any of these three candidates declaring in advance that the election would be the most rigged in history. As I recall, not a single one of the republicans you mentioned seriously challenged the legitimacy of the elections that they lost before the election or afterward. They campaigned in earnest, pledged to live with the results, conceded on election night. Meanwhile this president is not only claiming that the election will be rigged, but he is also encouraging people to violate election laws (North Carolina) so that he can point to evidence of malfeasance. He’s deliberately interfering with mail-in voting for that same purpose.
You could argue that Trump is just trying to create a situation in which he’s saving face, but what’s harder to dismiss is that so many people in his party are refusing to call him out and challenge him in the face of obvious facts. He has so many accomplices, from Barr to Dejoy to Kevin McCarthy to Gov. DeSantis of Florida to Gov. Kemp of Georgia. You have to stop thinking in terms of normal and in terms of tradition. Trump and today’s Republican party has made it abundantly clear: the norms of democracy can go to hell.
Crimes don’t just happen. Criminals have to actively commit them. And in order to benefit from their crimes, criminals have to succeed in their attempt and then avoid getting caught.
I’ve said before that Trump couldn’t successfully hold up a convenience store if you dropped him off in the parking lot, put the loaded gun in his hand, and pointed to where the entrance was.
The thing is we’re not talking about just Trump, but the entire Republican apparatus, including much smarter and just as ruthless guys like William Barr and Mitch McConnell. This isn’t like Watergate, where it was just Richard Nixon and a few hired goons breaking into a hotel room. This is the whole Republican Party leadership, the Attorney General, Secretary of State, the Senate majority leader with the vast majority of R senators, and multiple state legislatures where the vast majority of R members are also willing to follow along.
I feel I said all that in my previous post. Trump isn’t capable of stealing the election. What we have to worry about is the Republicans stealing the election for him.
I won’t say it’s impossible. But I still feel it’s unlikely for the reasons I gave earlier.
But we’re in agreement on that point: the thread title is misleading. No individual can run a country by himself - Putin doesn’t just run Russia by himself. So that was not what we were discussing at all in this thread. We were, in fact, discussing whether Trump and his allies could work together to destroy democracy, with Trump’s toxic demagoguery and the Republicans legal and administrative warfare.
I’ll remind you: about 9 in 10 Republicans - this is the voters we’re talking about - support Trump and approve of his performance. You talk about Republicans building a future, but when Republicans go back to their voting districts and stump, when they ask for campaign contributions, who do you think they’re asking support from? It’s those 9 in 10 who support him no matter what. Maybe it’s not because they support Trump; they support his rhetoric and his lies, and his baseless attacks on institutions and media.
This is Watergate, the Robert Conroy version. This is what happens if Richard Nixon goes full-on authoritarian, jails investigative reporters, and Howard Baker and Barry Goldwater claim the investigations by House Democrats are rigged and refuse to cooperate.
I didn’t really give a reason why I don’t think Trump will attempt to stay in office if he loses, and this pretty much sums up my thinking too. Especially 1., well, because Trump IS a lazy moron, 'nuff said, and also 3. I’ve thought for a few years now that a lot of Republicans have essentially been pay lip service to supporting Trump, but are smart enough to realize that the best thing that could happen for their party, especially as the election get closer and Trump becomes more and more unhinged, is for it to lose in November. Just take one on the chin, regroup, and get ready to start bashing Biden for four years.