He knows in his gut.
I hadn’t thought about it this way, but it makes a lot of sense. In his world, objective reality does not exist.
I think would be pretty irrational to consider the OP quote devoid of the years of necessary context.
Even if the only other thing you knew about DJT was the transcript of the phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian President, you couldn’t reasonably give him the benefit of the doubt about the goal of the Raffensperger call.
The problem is, “ignoring the context” is standard operating procedure for those who are always looking for an excuse to not see the problem. “Okay, so if you ignore his entire history, what was so bad about what he said this one time?”
So we need to keep reminding people about the context, to make it harder for them to fall for this.
Even if the phone call was bad, it’s the exception that proves the rule Trump is honest, because nothing he’s ever done counts.
The driving force is mostly a combination of his gut, the fact that he had much bigger rallies than Biden, the notion that it’s inconceivable that more people would have voted for a loser like Biden over one of the greatest presidents and human beings ever like himself, and similiar nonsense.
In terms of the actual details, there were - as there always are - rumors of various shenanigans, non-compliance with the voting laws, and assorted hanky panky. Most people scoff at these reports/rumors, but to Trump they seem highly credible since they support the bigger narrative that he “knows” to be true, i.e. that he really won, and thus provide a rationale for the ostensible results not reflecting his “victory”.
So from his perspective, if you look closely enough, you’ll undoubtedly find all the rumored undervotes for him or overvotes for Biden, and it’s only a matter of having the will to carry it out.
So if they had just carried it out, it would have been a triumph of the will?
I see what you did there.
That’s good. Otherwise, you might be a “Not-See.”
And for what it’s worth, I think it’s pretty clear that the Cheeto was telling Raffensperger to make the votes happen.
I believe that one of the reasons why Trump is so convinced that he won is because he was leading initially. I think that’s what he (and many of his followers) are referring to when they believe that fake votes were added overnight, and all that.
Many more absentee votes were cast by Democrats than Republicans, since leading up to the election the Republicans were declaring very loudly that mail-in votes were untrustworthy. (They still are, look at a lot of the legislation from them.) Clearly people are going to avoid a voting method if those they trust tell them it’s unsafe.
It was inevitable that whatever initial lead the Republicans had on a national level would erode after later votes were counted. On election night it was repeated over and over whenever I watched coverage of the election. Sure enough, that’s what happened, and it was enough that Trump went from looking like he won to looking like he would lose.
People on the right have objected to the counting of the later votes and called it cheating. It’s like objecting to gravity and calling it a trick done with magnets. And Trump thinking he was cheated is like a runner in a race who had a lead midway saying that the race should have been stopped at the halfway point before their opponent got a second wind.
Trump can’t get over the fact that his early celebration was too early. Having assured himself that he won re-election, he just can’t accept that he didn’t. Surely it can’t be allowed that his initial lead could have been lost. It’s unfair and anyone who profits in an unfair system is a cheater. He will prove that he was cheated and everyone will know he’s the real President.
The funny thing about all this, including the audits, etc., is that even if they could somehow prove at this point something went wrong and he really did get more votes, it wouldn’t matter. There is no mechanism to change presidents after the votes are counted. There is no new election. The guy who “should have won” can’t be installed in the office. To paraphrase what they say about the Supreme Court, the election is not final because they got it right, they got it “right” because it’s final. That’s why they tried so hard to stop the counting on January 6th. After that point, no amount of re-counting, auditing, or complaining is going to change anything.
I’m sorry but was number was Trump talking about cutting in half three times that would give him “…more votes than we need”?
BTW and IMHO, if Trump wants to take credit, its “I”. If he thinks there might be some negative consequence to what he is saying, its “we”.
Not to sidetrack too awfully much but this was huge. What I said at the time (because of Trump’s appointment of DeJoy (Postmaster General), and DeJoy’s all-but-certain marching orders to make sure the mail didn’t go through) was:
One of the many problems with this situation was “why not wait and let the voters decide in November.” The sanctity of the vote was at the very heart of the issue. It’s like saying, “Wait for me in that black church over there,” when that’s where the white supremacist group is alleged to have planted the bomb.
They told all of their people not to vote by mail because they had DeJoy in their pocket and the mail rotting in sort facilities. Or so they thought. Dem’s got their ballots in the mail very early.
It’s also reminiscent of virtually every single action movie where the bad guy kills the good guy and – miraculously – the good guy shows up later.
“I know you’re dead. I killed you myself.”
But Bond exists. Cogito ergo Bang.
Exactly. He was treating an elected official the same way he would an accountant he wanted to cook the books.
At this point, I suspect that most (if not all) of them (at least the ones who are actually in government) know this. It’s now become all about three levers for future elections:
- Encouraging Republican-led states to enact new voting laws in the name of “eliminating fraud,” which actually serve to suppress the vote among those who are less likely to vote Republican
- Creating distrust in the voting process overall, thus building acceptance for the above, as well as for any future actions in which election results could be ignored or overturned
- Energizing the Trumpist base
Also, the Republicans were declaring that the COVID pandemic was just another bad flu season if not dismissing it as an outright hoax, which made their voters more willing to show up in person on Election Day.
“All of the pickup trucks I saw at the polls had MAGA stickers, the libruls had to’ve cheated!!!”
The number of floors in a skyscraper, for example.
And there is even more to the story than the excellent points you have already made.
In most states, maybe all of them, the election officials asked the legislatures to change the system so they could count all the mail in ballots first before election day itself just so they could be completed on election day itself. But the Republican lead legislatures would not agree to this plan because of the optics – the Dems would have a very visual lead because they knew damn well very few R’s were voting by mail.
So they refused to allow any mail in or absentee ballots to be counted until every vote cast on election day was counted. Even though they knew other states had been doing that and that course of action would have made the most sense they refused because they knew R’s would appear to have a HUGE lead using the system already in place (and probably had a plan to stop counting the absentee/mail in allots at midnight-- some were saying things along those lines).
If those battleground states had been allowed to count mail in ballots before election day- this whole flimsy “election was stolen” lie would not exist. The best narrative (from their view) would have been: Just not enough votes to overcome the enormous margin the Democratic Candidates had from all those legitimate mail in ballots.
Another excellent point.
There’s more specifics on how each state ended up in this regard … here:
Any fair reading of this issue would lead one to conclude that – like drawing district maps – this doesn’t really inure to the benefit of US citizens, but rather secures and perpetuates another way the pols can game the system to their advantage.
None of this stuff is ever really done by stupid people. They’re evil, well funded, and – in this generation – have ample access to terabytes and terabytes of highly granular data that informs their nefarious activities.