That’s why I said a good president could have accomplished so much to unify the country had he or she led the country with an effective response to the pandemic.
I do see a repudiation going on though. Not necessarily in the voting, but in what is happening after the vote.
Trumpists are turning on Fox News because they dared to suggest that Biden was projected to win Arizona. They’re protesting on the streets in Arizona with signs calling out the network.
Many top Republicans are not on the same page as Trump. They are asking for people to be calm, to let the counting continue, and to let the rule of law stand. Trump and his supporters are attacking the party, calling out RINOs and such.
All the major networks cut off Trump’s feed in a press conference because he was spouting out so much misinformation that they didn’t want to be a part of it. I can’t think of a time when the press did anything like that. That sort of thing is news and it gets ratings whether you support it or not. I suspect this is unprecedented.
Yes, a disturbing number of people still support Trump despite all that has happened, but the right is basically eating their own as Trump has a massive public meltdown, even before he has officially lost. I suspect that after all of this, only the most fervent Trumphards are going to be openly supporting him.
Regardless of the votes, this is going very badly for Trump. If Biden won in a landslide and Trump conceded in a rare show of professionalism it wouldn’t have tarnished him as badly as this one man circus.
As others have said, many Trump fans will simply assume that such indictments are illegitimate and part of the general Persecution of the Messiah.
But IF indictments and trials go forward, it would certainly distract Trump from his probable forward path of gaining control of OAN or starting his own network, and making a comfortable living selling worthless stuff to viewers. (Which, of course, would cut into the Murdochs’ business, so the venture would not be without drama.)
If Trump manages to stay out of prison–and there will be many who will try to facilitate that outcome, through fair means or foul–he could become known primarily as a huckster in the vein of Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. And that would tend to erode his “messiah” status.
Which could only be good for the nation and the world.
I hope that he is too busy fighting off lawsuits and subpoenas to prey on the masses. But I’m a realist and I know that people like him are in their own special class.
@Mijin said it nicely.
MILLIONS of people voted for the fascist imbecile. He got the second highest vote total in US history! (Yes, I know, population growth. But still.)
That is HUGE vindication. Horrific, astounding, awful vindication.
Just because those votes were distributed in a slightly different way vis-a-vis a few arbitrary state boundaries means NOTHING for the purpose of this thread.
I think we are starting to se the Trump-repudiation right now. Trump is being ignored, Governor Cuomo just botch slapped him publicly. This election was not about red vs blue, but removing a man incompatible with the US political system and a call to come together and move forward as one nation. And yes as I predicted above it did involve not a blue wave, but being close enough to push Trump over the edge to expose who he really is and always was to even his most ardent supporter.
The New York Times had an article yesterday (paywall warning) saying that on Thursday, The New York Post ran an article critical of Trump, saying that Trump made an “unfounded claim that political foes were trying to steal the election.” The NYT article said, “In short, the president appears to be going down — and The Post is not about to go with him.”
Last month, the New York Post called Trump “an invincible hero, who not only survived every dirty trick the Democrats threw at him, but the Chinese virus as well.” And of course they ran that bullshit article on the laptop and its contents.
So yes, it appears that the right is turning on him.
That’s an inspiring idealistic statement, but unfortunately the last four years have shown us all too plainly that
a) The Trump administration and Trumpism in general are in fact highly compatible with the US political system as Republicans/conservatives want it to be, and
b) Only Democrats/liberals are actually expected to do any work, reach out to opponents, and make any compromises when it comes to “com[ing] together and mov[ing] forward as one nation”.
The widespread denial of these realities needs to stop now. Even if Biden is successfully inaugurated in January and manages to restore some approximation of normally functioning governance to the executive branch, Democrats/liberals mustn’t regard that as yet another excuse for sinking back into complacency and comfortably optimistic illusions about the nature of our current system.
Yes, Democrats/liberals need to go on working for the rights, freedom and prosperity of all Americans, even the incorrigible fools and bigots among them, because that’s what we as liberals are morally obligated to do. But it’s time to stop maintaining the polite fiction that Republicans/conservatives are good-faith partners in the work of responsible governance.
This election has definitively confirmed that the US conservative movement and the Republican Party, and their cheerleaders/enablers in other countries, are overwhelmingly dominated by crooks, liars, ignoramuses, malicious anti-democracy governance-sabotaging authoritarians, and willing supporters of crooks, liars, ignoramuses and malicious anti-democracy governance-sabotaging authoritarians. It is absolutely on them to fix themselves before asking liberals to take them seriously as responsible and law-abiding political opposition.
I’m not looking for apologies or confessions or loyalty oaths. I’m not even spending any time jeering at the disappointment of conservative voters in real life or online. But from now on, if a Republican/conservative wants me to pay any attention to their partisan opinions or interests as something worth caring about in a democratic society, they need to show some evidence that they:
(i) respect the rule of law and support enforcing protocols for fair governance;
(ii) recognize the importance of facts and science as opposed to made-up bullshit, willful ignorance, and anti-media paranoia when it comes to policymaking; and
(iii) support a positive and productive program of effective governance for the benefit of all Americans, rather than mere lumpen anti-government hostility or spiteful commitment to Pissing Off the Liberals.
I really don’t think that that is so fucking much to ask of a citizen in a modern democracy. Notice that I’m not even including any conditions about such fundamental basic-decency criteria as not espousing racism, sexism, fascism, what-have-you. I said above that we need to stand up for the rights of all Americans, even the fools and bigots, and I meant it.
But you can’t have a meaningful conversation about how to build a country up with somebody who just wants to tear it down. And Republicans/conservatives as a group have completely forfeited their claim to the trust of their fellow Americans when it comes to being seen as responsible participants in a democracy. If they want that trust back again, they need to actively earn it.
Kimstu, have you ever run for office? You’ve got my vote right now.
No, but thank you for those kind words, and I live in hope for the day when I can go back to taking it for granted that at least a sizeable proportion of Republicans/conservatives have sufficient information, integrity and principles to make bipartisanship a realistic option.
Agreed. Sadly that won’t be any time soon.
Biden’s speech called for “unity”. This is the response headline from Fox, the agenda-setter and taste-arbiter of all things RW:
Jason Chaffetz: President-elect Biden calls for ‘unity’ – but where was ‘unity’ from Dems when Trump won?
[Fox News]
Quoted for truth. Well put.
Where was Trump ever even attempting to call for unity, or promising to be the president of all Americans? Even after he was inaugurated he was still fuming about the opponent that he lost the popular vote to.
Yes, it is going to be a long hard slog re-training (at least some) conservatives to behave as though facts matter and can’t be just dismissed in favor of their preferred made-up version of reality. But at least, if all goes well, after next January they won’t have a sitting President constantly modeling that willfully delusional behavior for them.
I watched This Week with George Stephanopoulos this morning (transcript here), and one of the guests was Republican Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri. Among other things he said, “One of the great things about the Senate and the Senate rules which I think if we maintain the majority will continue to be the same is you have to reach across the aisle. You have to find in almost every Senate somebody on the other side to get things done. That’s a good thing. Senators are inclined to do that.” Which is such bullshit. When has Mitch McConnell reached across the aisle? When he was pushing through all of those Supreme Court and other judicial nominees? Or when the Republicans refused to even consider any nominee proposed by Obama? (And Blunt refused to acknowledge that Biden won, leaving open the possibility that Trump might be the one sworn in.)
But now that the White House is in Democratic hands, and it’s possible for them to get control of the Senate, the Republicans are talking up cooperation and unity.
We just have to keep calling out that hypocritical bullshit when it happens, and calling out the spokespeople who don’t call it out (did Stephanopoulos address that with Blunt?). Like I said: long, hard slog.
ETA: Read the transcript, sounds like Coons and Blunt were on the same page about it, which, if it worked for them, I’m happy for them. But that doesn’t mean that conservatives in general get to pretend that Republican obstructionism never existed.
He’s not entirely wrong, if you care about anything except for confirming judges. But that’s been the entire Republican Senate agenda for four years.
Republicans only controlled the Senate, not the House. They could confirm judges without needing to “reach across the aisle”. But if they wanted to actually pass legislation, they needed to do so to get House approval.
Not sure why you think Democrats have been working with Republicans. Trump’s three nominations for SCOTUS got a total of three votes from Democrats. Sotomayor and Kahan each got more GOP votes.
The house fought pretty much everything Trump tried to do. Not working with Republicans just means nothing gets done unless you control the president and Congress. Biden is hoping to change that.
This is of course entirely because the Republicans refused to even consider the nomination of Merrick Garland by Obama.
Perry Bacon sums up how the electoral picture has actually been quite stable, before during and after Trump: “The list of states that Biden won but Barack Obama lost in 2012 (maybe Arizona and maybe Georgia) is short, as is the list of states that Obama won in 2012 but Biden lost (Florida, Iowa, Ohio).”