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this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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This is an interesting article - thanks for sharing! I found this snippet noteworthy:
That is a good point about the criminal cases not going away if he loses, right? It's interesting how it's openly stated by the former aide.
I'm unable to muster any sympathy for the felon's perpetual state of stewing.
He must think that "his" SC will protect him regardless, so he has an out if he loses. Or, he knows about the plan to ratfuck the election regardless of the outcome.
A. Win it. (Looking increasingly unlikely)
B. Steal it. Most of the fake electors are still in place, they've had four years to hire a new sleepers
C. Coup 2.0 historically the Democrats haven't been very smart about things and it'll totally blindside when you pull it again only this time with more people. All those people that got locked up in serious consequences we'll just tell them that we'll pardon them again
D. Civil War 2.0. if he doesn't win it, and can't steal it, and if there's actually military protection around the Capital for 2.0. he'll just openly call for the south to rise again. Only this time it's not the south, it's the rural areas, hell plan a Vietnam style offensive where the rural armed people lay siege everywhere.
My real actual best guess is he's tired. He's old, he's out of shape, he's stressed to the nines and he's just trying to blow off the stress, he probably does have a plan b in a plan c. His actual plan d is probably two take a flight to Russia.
Even the recent movie "Civil War" didn't touch on how and why such a thing started, because it just doesn't make sense. There may be regional conflicts and riots, I don't doubt that, but there's no single organization to pull off a new Confederacy or whatever it would be. People watching the film even laughed at the union of Texas and California...what? Maybe that was a subtle message by the writers to not take the overall thing seriously, the movie wasn't about the background events but about the characters in a hypothetical situation.
It was a real dogshit film. Just gratuitous violence. No real point. No story.
The movie is a counter point to the romanticism of political conflict. It intentionally doesn't go into the specifics of politics that lead to the war as that would be saying "this political side is bad" which wasn't the point. The far right romanticizes a civil war, the far left romanticizes a revolution. What you see in the movie is what it would look like if there was a wide spread political conflict. It shows the gory details to ask people on both extremes "is this what you really want?"
For a lot of people the best case scenario is to end up in that refugee camp in the football field. Worst case is to end up in a mass grave because some psychopath decided you're from the "wrong America". Does the politics matter to people that wind up in those outcomes? Does it even matter to the soldiers storming the Whitehouse? Just seemed like they had a mission to accomplish, the politics aren't all that relevant anymore at that point.
People sometimes feel like using violence may achieve a better political outcome. But the reality is everyone is just worse off because of it. That was the point.
IMO, “war bad” is just so fucking pedestrian as to be a complete waste of the capital that goes into a film.
Methinks you have a romanticized notion of a civil war (or revolution) and don't like having that bubble burst.
C and D might be slipping away from him, and possibly even B. They require a base that's fired up to support him. He's starting to lose that. They'll still vote for him, and his best chance is to take a straight electoral college victory without the popular vote, but nothing extraordinary to subvert the system. If he doesn't make that, though, he's probably done.
He wouldn't be able to succeed at C without military backing. In fact I don't think he has much of a chance of any of it succeeding. But go ahead and put it on your bingo card for trying. I suspect he's going to take a good shot at each one of those before it's over.
I don’t think he ever wanted to be president, but now he has no choice.
Russia is probably plan B or C.
Look at the age of the AVERAGE US farmer.
I am not worried about a civil war lead by the gravy seals.
I'm not too worried either. But The average age of the rural Texan is not 60. The guys that own the farms might be 60.
Yeah this is more just an indicator of the boomer monopolies that heavily exist.
They don't pass on their wealth or business they hold onto it until they die and look at how big some of those parcels of land are.
What about the average age of a meth head ?
I think the civil war one is actually the best case scenario.
Imagine a tired con man, not ready to fight, barely any energy. Calls for his die hard supporters to show up en masses and then a very tiny group show up and get arrested by the army (assuming the army doesn’t side with them).
For D the winning strategy for the United States needs to be to treat them as harshly as we treat eco terrorists. The viet cong had experienced Japanese and French occupation and so were more willing to engage in prolonged conflict. The confederacy had a lot of build up to prepare the common rabble for war. Martyrless crackdowns with a propaganda campaign can remove the will to fight.
Also a good point that a critical measure for the leader of the free world in the mind of a Trump staffer is how strong the nickname game is.
trump, trump, bo-brump, Bonana-fanna fo-frump Fee fi mo-mrump trump
If he loses, I'm very curious to see if people in power still support him. I don't think he will be very viable again in 4 years, physically or mentally.
He may become more useful if they let him get eaten by the legal machine. Then they're able to invoke his image like they do with Reagan all the time, but with some martyrdom thrown in about how those mean libs kicked a former president when he was down, nevermind he got away with the crimes he'd be charged with for about a decade by then.
He might not ever serve time, but having everyone ignore him as useless as he sunsets might be an almost fitting punishment. We know the right struggles with empathy, so he could be facing some very frosty cold shoulders.
The best thing that could have happened for Republicans was trump got assassinated and Biden refused to step down.
Now they're stuck with trump and Dems cut all their baggage by dropping their elderly infirm candidate.
trumps only real shot is stepping down to. Letting someone else run, and counting on them to pardon everything possible and the SC to take care of the rest.
That has a chance at least, but he can't beat Kamala.
I'm glad he put in as much effort into this as he did to stopping Covid. I think I'd have preferred Biden to Kamala, but Joe just stopped bringing it, so I was getting nervous. Without years of Sleepy Joe and Brandon memes, Trump just can't figure it out lately, and barely seems to be trying.
I'm in Pennsylvania, so I'm going to be voting the hell out of this election, and hopefully we'll reach Jan 7 without drama. Then we can start getting on Kamala for her less than great positions, but until then, we got bigger things to deal with and I'm not going to crap much on the better of the 2 options. Post election is another story.
Fuck man....
Are neoliberals doing that thing again where they insist their candidate is perfect and if anyone tries to point out that there are valid flaws with neoliberal politicians it's because they fell for Republican misinformation?
Anyone that was or is going to vote D doesn't care what Republicans say.
Dem voters didn't want Biden to run against trump, Republicans did
That should tell you all you need to know about how good of a candidate Biden was.
I don't believe any of it swayed any votes, but I do believe it got a significant amount of people that either wouldn't vote or wouldn't promote a candidate to do so. From a hype and marketing viewpoint, I don't think one could argue MAGA has not been a tremendous success for Republicans. I don't recall a candidate of either party owning the media or having so much merch-aganda as Trump, and it's going to hurt them when he's gone. No one's going to be sporting I'm going HAM for Lindsey Graham stuff.
I said in my original comment I'm all for getting in any candidate not doing the best thing. There were things I didn't like about Biden, and there are a number of things about Kamala I'm not excited about, but that is hopefully next January's problem.
The concept of Biden as a candidate was viable, but the man himself no longer was. The Republican average Joe that was the real mass behind the MAGA movement no longer knows what to do though now that the Lock Her Up, Sleepy Joe's Got To Go, etc is gone. It's not just Trump with the wind knocked out of his sails, but a lot of supporters as well. Trump spoke their language, but now he's at a loss for words, and I'm happy to see it.
EDIT: Not me that downvoted you. I don't downvote for disagreeing, just for misinformation or bigoted crap and you haven't done anything like that.
No, Biden flaws made people not want to vote for him or promote him
Harris doesn't have that baggage, so as soon as she took over people were willing to do those things for the Dem candidate.
They say the same shit about Kamala as Joe.
It's just when they said stuff about Joe, some of it was true and what anyone could tell from his incredibly limited public appearances.
He did the lowest amount of press conferences as any president since Reagan...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/us/politics/biden-public-appearances-media.html
Do you really need me to tell you what common trait president Reagan and President Biden share?
The Rs fired up for Trump and the Ds bummed at Biden are 2 separate groups. Whoever minimizes the damages from their own respective group is going to come out on top. I don't see undecideds as a factor with as divergent as both parties are. They both had sagging bases, but the Kamala swap got one group fired up, but the other side just seems caught unprepared, and that's why polling is flipping.
Whoever doesn't think Kamala has baggage isn't paying attention. There's reasons she was hardly anyone's choice last time around, and anyone reading any articles other than the kiss up ones now is already getting a reminder of those reasons. Lemmy was full of articles about dropping the anti-death penalty stance from the platform this week, for example. But there isn't any good to come out of beating up on her about that unless she's elected first.
Don't think of them as undecided.
Think of them as people unwilling to hold their nose for Biden or trump.
Change out Biden, and suddenly more people are willing to vote.
Because Biden was and is a bad candidate. He spent like 50 years trying to be president and only succeeded in a rigged primary against the literal worst president we've ever had when he was the incumbent.
I don't think trump and Biden are the complete bottom of the barrel numbers for an incumbent at the end of their first term, but I'd be surprised if they weren't bottom 5, there might be a handful of ancient (for America) history that were less popular but not in modern history
Turnout seems to be slightly improving, but it's still around 60%. I get not being thrilled about either candidate, but you're not picking a best friend, you're pretty much picking a CEO for the country.
It's kinda weird to get thrilled by any candidate. I like a lot of things taxes pay for, but I didn't get excited for the act of paying taxes. Voting is just another civic duty we should all be doing.
Republicans get candidate they're excited for. Dems get candidates we can hold our noses for (hopefully)
It's a bigger reason why we still have republican presidents than the electoral college.
https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_elections
I'm not sure where your picture came from. Or why it's combining 2 elections a line or why it's numbers are wrong.
But 60% for presidential years is pretty normal.
08 got a bump from Obama running, and 2020 got a bump because trump was the incumbent. 2024 will likly be above 2020 still. But that's because compared to trump or Biden, Kamala is an amazing candidate. If we had known it would be Kamala, I think she wouldn't get the numbers she's about to
The Republicans couldn't even elect a House Speaker, you think they'll be able to agree on a new Presidential candidate this late in the game? Trump is the only thing holding the GOP together. Without him they've got nothing.
Seriously?
The one defining feature of Republican voters is their willingness to fall in line and vote for anyone with an R by their name.
There's some diehard Trumpers who are voting specifically for trump, but Republican turnout is fairly steady (obviously population changes in four years). What decides elections is how good a candidate Dems put forward.
We're the party that needs a good candidate to vote for and has to keep it's voters happy
The best thing that could happen for Republicans and Trump is that they manage to fuck with the election enough that it doesn't matter who wins the vote, either the Senate or the Supreme Court awards the election to Trump.
I mean, if Mike Pence wouldn't do it, I don't know if Chuck Schumer will....
It's really not that easy for them. It worked on Gore because party leadership was telling Gore to concede, if he won he'd have put progressives in charge of the DNC.
But even if the SC tries to hand it to trump, it doesn't mean much. They can say it till they're blue in the face, it only matters if the Dem candidate goes along with it and concedes. The DNC won't push Kamala to "do the right thing to unite the country" because Kamala ain't going to significantly change the course of the DNC or the personal at it's helm.
That's the big difference, and why I don't think we have to worry about the SC this time installing a republican.
We would likely see some civil unrest and strife if they tried, but hopefully that would at least convince Kamala to actually do something about the SC instead of just fucking ignore it like Biden did.
I don't have this much faith. What lost gore the election is the fact that it was a terribly close election that the supreme court could swing one way or another (and they swung it for bush). If this is a close election for trump and there's 1 or 2 cases that would make him win, I definitely see the supreme court swinging in his favor. This is quite obvious if you look at the recent case that granted him full immunity. The SC is more than willing to bend of over backwards if it furthers rightwing ideals.
As for what the house/senate can do to swing the case, that loophole was mostly closed after the 2020 election. There's not the same room that trump was trying to exploit to steal an election from congress. I worry a lot more about election laws in swing states stealing the election for Trump. There were more than a few laws passed in republican controlled swing states that gave republicans more discretion in figuring out "legitimate" votes.
If he loses, there will be another Jan 6 with both sides being more ready for it, maybe even the supreme court tries to forcefully install him, then the cognitive decline will be so severe he no longer needed for the GOP, then global fascism goes from moderate decline to steep decline, with currently far-right parties pulling the "let's pretend we're moderates" game like Fidesz and many others will actually have to become moderate.
I just don't feel the same energy. I see much less Trump signs and so on, though it's picked up a little, it's nowhere near what it used to be. The MAGA relatives aren't going on about it at get-togethers, and when they do, it's much less passionate than prior years.
I think any gathering in DC is not going to be met with the same light hands as before. There's no one there to whip them into a frenzy, and with a Dem president and potential future president in charge, win or lose, I don't feel they would go out sitting idle. Last time was the guy in the oval office trying to stay. Now he's got to try to get in, and that seems to be a much steeper hill to climb.
Don't get me wrong, even if Dems were to sweep everything, the fascists aren't going to go quietly. Plenty of Americans have always been monarchists, and plenty supported the literal Nazis up until bombs fell. Then they just didn't like those Nazis.
A large portion of this country still seems pissed the North won the Civil War, and until that gets resolved, the need to guard our country isn't over.
Yeah maga round here aren’t pro trump anymore they’re “Kamala is four more years of this economy”. It’s definitely a different energy than in the past
Between criminal charges, a reinvented and reinvigorated Dem campaign and havi g been grazed by a bullet... I think he he's cratered.
To say nothing of his noticeable cognitive decline.