I missed this before I posted mine, but this is it. There’s no need to go through the - is it legal or not analysis. I’m happy to, but of course, there is no shred of legal basis. It’s 100%.
The problem for Trump is the scale. and honestly, gerrymandering makes this matter less - that already guarantees results to a large extent in lots of elections. There’s only so many contested elections / big counties that make a difference in a statewide race. Go park your lawyers there and have the federal judges direct line.
Or futbol (soccer)/hockey: a relatively small percentage of shots on goal get through, but those that do are consequential, and – to your point (and less true with my analogy, I think), defensive players can be weakened, harmed, or decimated wholesale in the process.
I met a guy decades ago who – whenever he visited his storage space – said he ‘jiggled’ the padlocks (that were normally in use at the time) of other storage spaces as he walked down the halls. There weren’t (always) security cameras back then, and he said I’d “be shocked” at how many people didn’t correctly lock their padlock on their way out.
Locks keep honest people honest. Same with rules, laws, and the Constitution. Though I’m buoyed by the recent tariff decision from our goalies-in-chief, SCOTUS, they haven’t made me an optimist.
ISTM that the Supreme Court has made it clear in two big rulings in the last few months that yelling “I DECLARE EMERGENCY” does not give Trump the power to rewrite the law by fiat, and the scope of what this hypothetical order would do just isn’t practical.
You’re gonna ban mail-in voting? How’s that gonna work for my state, which hasn’t had an in-person election since 2004? Are we supposed to implement an entire new system in a few months? It’s just not practical.
It could be more simple and still on-brand for Trump. Throw it out, let the courts and states challenge it, and then when the elections come out against him (please, Please, PLEASE) use the now-in-place excuse it was all China’s doing and that those elections are invalid. And throw every single election back to the courts, and refusing to allow the newly elected individuals into the Capitol (where he can use federal troops) with sufficient MAGA Republicans going along with it from “an abundance of caution”. Which will probably take us to 2028 if not longer to unfuck.
To be clear, I’m not saying any of that would be legal or constitutional, all evidence indicates that no one in his government cares about either of those “issues”.
Technically, it’s very likely that TikTok, at least, interfered in the election. Per Trump, they showed him a chart demonstrating that they’d given him billions and billions of views.
What that means, more specifically, I couldn’t say - probably pushing an anti-Israel/pro-Palestine viewpoint against Biden, based on my personal observation of the social movements at the time.
But certainly, anything that you can measure you can adjust.
If TikTok could show him a chart of pro-Trump or anti-Biden/Harris views, then they had the ability to adjust those view counts.
Yes, I agree at that point that there’s a very strong chance of it going to a Civil War. My thoughts though (and I was trying to minimize my book-long posts!)
Trump also hates to loose.
Trump tends to believe those who tell him what he wants to hear. If one of those says “It’ll work” he may go along until all of us are too deep to back, out.
Trump may be scared of a Civil War, but many of those supporting/goading him seem to think it as a very easy way to create a “pure” America (generally fascist, mono-racial, mono-cultural and a particularly virulent rancid flavor of Christianity).
The group in # 1nd and # 2 may actually be right. Given the serious lack of pushback from Dems and the griping about “you’re hurting the people as well!” ( see the complaints about Democrats in the various Shutdown threads) I think it no better than 50/50 that we’d see anything more than “the courts will sort it out again” or a further knuckling under. Not just the political caste, but if people can still go to work, get to the grocery store and watch Netflix/Youtube/etc they may just figure it’s not worth it.
I’m being cynical, but Trump 2.0 has really pushed farther down the dark path to the future even faster than I thought. A reminder that we’re barely over a year into this term! We’re roughly at the point I figured we might hit around year three…
Congress is not the Capitol building. Congress is its elected members and there’s no law that says they can only conduct business from one specific address. If they have to rent out the conference hall at the Sheraton in downtown Richmond, they can convene and pass legislation from there.
Moreover, as noted, if Trump doesn’t have the power to dictate how states conduct elections, he CERTAINLY doesn’t have the power to declare elections invalid or sic the military on Congress. This is a “Chancellor Palpatine declaring himsellf Emperor” scenario and Trump is no Palpatine.
And Trump knows this. He’s clearly terrified of a Congress, or at least House, controlled by Democrats and will do everything he can to prevent it. If it’s illegal that’s completely irrelevant to him – not even a minor detail. Despite all his bluster he can read polls as well as anyone.
Yes, all of it would be blatantly illegal and unconstitutional, but it doesn’t mean he wouldn’t do it or a sufficient number of politicians and judges wouldn’t go along with “letting the process play out” until things go too far. Which is why @Atamasama pointed out that by that point we’d be in a Civil War.
And I later pointed out, that plenty of people in Trump’s circle likely are looking forward to that.
And he will give as much attention to that court finding as he does to any other court finding against him.
Apparently he is able to learn something. He’s doing it now because he is–or perhaps is handlers are–aware that it will take time. And his response to the court finding against him on the tariffs is to announce he’s going to do it anyway.
Why? They haven’t responded to his rejection of their finding on tariffs yet, AFAIK. The only positive from them recently was the majority of them boycotted the SOTU.
That’s still puzzling me. If the 2020 election was so invalid, why didn’t he rile up his supporters to have them attack Congress before January 6, 2021? (No, it’s not puzzling; I know the real reason, as does everyone else with more than zero working brain cells.)
He doesn’t. But his buddy Pete would love to (see others) die for it.
Oh, I’m sure Stephen Miller has practicallly euphoric fantasies about the glorious armies of the Fatherland purifying the Volk in the name of Trump’s thousand-year reich, and that Hegseth would love nothing more than to yell “Deus vult” and start burning heretics at the stake.
Trump, though? Trump may be a bully, but he’s also a coward. Hos crippling fear of being thought of as a loser makes him too chickenshit to commit to anything where he isn’t assured of total flawless victory. Every military action has to be a “perfect attack” where the US achieves all its goals in one fell swoop and there are zero American casualties. His childlike obsession with violence, and in particular his aversion to the sight of blood, would never allow him to do what Putin has been doing in Ukraine, for instance.
Trump was too chickenshit to even participate in his own coup attempt last time - he riled up the crowd without actually telling them to do anything, then went home and watched on TV so that if it didn’t work he could claim it wasn’t his fault. He talks a big game but he backs down easily. It’s more likely that he’ll just write off a Democratic victory in November as “Trump wasn’t on the ballot” or “the RINOs didn’t want to make America great again” than to launch Civil War 2.
Trump hasn’t rejected the Supreme Court’s finding on tariffs - he merely is asserting the ability to levy tariffs via a different part of the law, one which has more restrictions than the section he was using - indeed, the part he was using said nothing at all about tariffs, which was part of the reason for the ruling.
Trump is not the one who is coming up with any of these plans. All he wants is to stay in power but he doesn’t care about the details. The Project 2025 guys are the ones telling him what to do and say. The shitshow we see is just distraction from what they are doing in the background. They have spent several years now going through the Constitution and 250 years of legal documents to find every loophole, backdoor and work-around they can to make sure the Republicans hold on to power. Every time there is a legally questionable action, they have a cite to defend it. “A hundred and fifty years ago, this thing was done that wasn’t objected to, therefore now our thing which is similar is perfectly legal.” It’s not true but it sounds good to their supporters. Taking it to court draws the problem out until the damage is done and it’s too late to fix it. It’s working exactly they way they intended.
Project 2025 also spent those years training people they could place in positions of authority in the elections process countrywide. They are going to use the same playbook of misleading precedents, dubious cites and outright lies to muddy up the entire thing. These people are evil. Never underestimate them. I hope we have people who are keeping an eye on them and can somehow ameliorate the damage. But know that they have not done all these illegal things to chance losing and being held accountable, and there is nothing they will not do to try to prevent that.
Me too - you wrote exactly what I was trying to spit out.
And Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh are going to go along with it. Will Barrett? All we can hope is that he’s now pissed off Roberts and Gorsuch and Barrett enough that they’ll do the right thing. And hope that no unfortunate accidents happen to Kagan, Sotomayor, or Jackson. And that might not be enough once you get down to the state and local level with the Project 2025 plants.
