They may have also been exerting illegal influence on others, trying to compel the other’s votes as well. “Hey, Bob, the rest of us are voting for Trump, you don’t want to be the only hold out…>mob voice,< do you?”
I was reading a synopsis of yesterday’s hearing just now. This quote jumped out at me.
“You could have a situation here, within 24 hours, you have hundreds of people resigning from the Justice Department,” Donoghue has said he told Trump. “Is that good for anyone? Is it good for the department? Is it good for the country? Is it good for you? It’s not."
Bolding mine.
Leaves little doubt as to what motivated the actions of DJT. But we already knew that.
I took it as a reward for their actions. I’m sure that some of them have done some illegal activities, and a blanket pardon wouldn’t be to pardon them for the vote, but for their other crimes.
yes, all other things go by the way side with trump. you tell him he will look foolish, stupid, or weak and you have him going your way.
It’s also a really good way to cover for the ones who really need the pardons.
I don’t think they do. The way they phrase the listing makes it seem that way, but if you tune in it’s just three hours of commentary on the hearings. Unless they changed it.
I couldn’t catch the second hearing, so I tuned into MSNBC, thinking they’d rerun it and ….they didn’t. I was very disappointed.
I’m on vacation this week and I’m a houseguest. Yesterday my hosts let me take over the living room TV to watch the hearings, but no one was interested in watching with me. It was sort of weird. Most of my IRL friends don’t follow politics, that’s why I hang out here.
ETA - my hosts don’t have broadcast TV, I found the hearings live on YouTube channel.
I was thinking of it more like
“Hey, Bob, the rest of us are voting for Trump, you don’t want to be the only hold out…>12-year-old schoolyard voice,< or are you chicken?”
Yeah, I was disappointed about that, too. MSNBC has regularly rerun the hearings in total, so their choice not to yesterday was an unfortunate departure.
I can hardly bear to hear about how apathetic so many people are about the politics that affect all our lives in deeply meaningful ways. I realize not everyone has the time or inclination to follow it all as closely as we do, but FFS, these hearings are historic and important.
The Indifferent will take us all down with them, I fear.
Well done.
They are making it into the local news, people are talking about them, even if they aren’t watching them directly. I’m no pollster, but from where I stand in the middle of Trumplandia, I do think that they are having an effect.
I think that one of the more powerful stories was him going after those poll workers. Most of the rest is politicking and tribalism to the average Republican voter, but that was the President calling out an ordinary citizen for abuse.
If Garland had indicted Trump before the hearings, there would have been riots from his supporters. Not saying that indicting him after this all comes out means that there won’t be riots, but they will be much less supported by rank and file Republicans.
This won’t have an effect on the MAGA heads whose chief goal in life is to harm their fellow citizens at all costs, but not all Republicans are as drunk on the Kool-Aid.
I saw where you wrote about this yesterday somewhere on the forum, and it gave me more hope than I’ve had for awhile. Thanks for sharing your observations from your perch in Trumplandia.
I do believe this is exactly the intended effect of these hearings, to soften the blow when indictments come. It’s heartening to hear it’s working at least to some extent.
Yeah, this. It feels like a lot of the rank and file Republicans are using the “No harm, no foul!” rule for the Big Lie. But there is real harm happening. People leaving jobs they’ve held for years, because of the harassment. Hell, these people stormed a grandmother’s house looking to do a “Citizens arrest” on one of the people Trump singled out. That should not sit well with anyone.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to start calling it just regular Republican dominated area soon.
But I do interact with a few dozen people a day, and we have an interesting parasocial relationship, where many of them feel that they can talk to me about all kinds of various stuff. For years, I’ve endured rants about the ebil libruls and how they are out to get Trump because they hate him and just can’t stand to see him succeed.
Now, that commentary is muted to a large extent, and I even had someone say, “I do still think that Trump was a great president, but after he lost the election, he went too far.” This coming from a guy who would regularly pull his phone out to read the latest Fox News headlines to me. I mean, I obviously disagree with the first half of the statement, but you can take what you can get.
Much more important to me than the party or people in power is that we have a peaceful transition of power to the winner of democratic elections. I am happy to report that it seems as though a good number of Republicans feel the same way, and now that they are being exposed to incontrovertible evidence that Trump was preventing that peaceful transition, they are becoming less supportive.
Now, the demographic I deal with is mostly in the more affluent class, so I don’t know as much as to how things are going with more economically stressed Trump supporters, so they may not be coming around as well, but the more affluent are also generally the ones with more power anyway.
I don’t know, I may even just be seeing what I want to see, but it’s enough to give me some ray of hope, a smidge of optimism that we may manage to push civil war off for another generation or so.
Ha! My immediate reaction to this sentence was “Even friends of people without a TV will be sure to tell you they don’t have a TV!” Like the old joke about how do you know someone’s a vegan: They’ll tell you. Same with going to Harvard or not having a TV. Only now it’s gotten worse; even their friends will tell you!
No offense intended or implied, you are one of my favorite posters. It just tickled my funny bone.
(I realize you’re saying that they do actually have a screen, just no cable, only streaming.)
It has to translate, though – into … into … something.
They’re overwhelmingly not going to vote for the Democratic candidate. How many of them will stay home (, even) ?
Without straying too far OT … they’ve been beaten bloody into believing The Worst Imaginable Accusations against everybody who isn’t them.
How much flexibility does that leave these people with ?
Ditto. My mom loves Trump, but I still feel she could be reached…only she has to look after my grandmother with dementia, and her cat just died, and she had a minor operation, and my cousin’s kid has cancer, etc. I’d feel like an asshole if I tried to get her to pay attention right now. However, when election time rolls around, she’ll take the time to vote, and she’ll bring Grandma with her. Grandma only wants to be assured that the Republican is a Christian, and he’s got her vote.
My brother’s not interested in politics, but he’s a racist and feels those brown people are taking over the country and our jobs! With any luck, he just won’t get around to voting, because there’s no talking to him. I have no doubt he feels the hearings are a witch hunt, if he even knows about them.
Maybe they support libertarian candidates.
I honestly don’t know.
On Monday, I may have agreed with you.
But today ? Today – on the heels of both a ‘more guns’ SC decision and the upending of Roe v Wade ? Idunno. You probably know these people better than I do, but ISTM that, in their heads, they can call it a push:
- tried extremely hard to overthrow the government and dismantle almost every crucial component of our democracy, but
- gave us more gun rights and overturned Roe
That’s an all too plausible scenario, in my mind – today.
What will tomorrow bring ? Could the J6C restart hearings, and present such a compelling case that the prevailing winds shift yet again ?
Man, I hope so. But the possibility that Trump is sanctified for having put enough Justices on the SC to make these two bedrock-to-the-base decisions possible, and that this sanctification brings some of the lost sheep back into the flock … can’t be ignored.
I’m not thinking that they abandon the Republican party, only that they abandon Trump. Any Republican would have sat exactly the same justices as Trump did, so they don’t need to thank him for that.
I don’t know that this prevents them voting for him in the general in 2024, but I do think that it keeps them from voting for him in the primary. It means that when/if Trump is indicted, they don’t throw a shit fit, and instead actually cooperate in removing this blemish upon their otherwise upstanding and noble party.
Like I said, it’s a mere glimmer of hope, but it’s the most hope I’ve had since November 8th, 2016.
FWIW, it sort of threw me because I do have cable TV at home, and I had to figure it out. I edited the post to mention it because of the discussion about alternate ways to watch/ rewatch the hearings.