rolling “Trump is gonna win” containment thread

sorry for revive, i didnt mean to cause tsuris
― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Friday, July 24, 2020 12:09 PM (eight minutes ago)

2020, man. The hits just keep coming!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQZqJ_-WAO8

to frighten people even more

That Politico piece basically summed up a number of other articles from the past few months and synthesized them, so that's fine.

I'm with kate here. What's happening right now is what people like me have been warning about since 9/11, and even now, we're called loony-tunes by people who just want to ignore the fascist violence that's being deployed on our city streets.

sorry for revive, i didnt mean to cause tsuris

― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius)

you ain't causing tsuris here morbz, you're good

Well, I learned a new word today (tsuris).

same!

here's the problem that I have with the "Trump isn't going to step aside" narrative. Not talking about those in this thread necessarily, but when I hear this from people I know, it's never a "this COULD happen", it's a "you watch, this is GOING TO HAPPEN". But you would think if someone firmly believed that we were about to have our democracy dissolved, even if they didn't have outright solutions, they'd be brainstorming and loudly barking about things we needed to start doing. but they never do - it's an exercise in faux-nihilism, either for someone who gets their rocks off on these doomsday scenarios, or someone that wants an excuse not to fight the Trump machine.

Those that do want us to react to the 'impending threat', well...what can you do in advance to prevent this from happening? Ask Trump if he'll step down if he loses? Even if he says he will, he's not held to that. Ask other politicians if they'll embolden him to do it? Nobody will admit it - and other Republican politicians have already said it's absurd to think he'll try to stay in office. Even if they're lying, you can't get them on the record admitting that.

It's important to note people used to say the same thing about Obama - hell, I even had a conservative call JOHN KERRY "dictator material" to me once. The only difference between Obama and Trump is that while Obama obviously continued the expansion of the Executive branch's powers and did many things that were unpopular with Congress and our constituents (Affordable Care Act, drones, etc), he did not attack the rule of law or politicize independent departments. he was very concerned with "fairness" for better or worse.

There is no doubt that Trump has indeed done many things that come from the autocrat playbook, and he's attempted to erode the rule of law, slowly. But - as bad as he's been, and as stressed out as he makes us, how many times has he fallen flat on his face and caved because of leftist-driven blowback? Very often. He backed out of holding the convention at his own property which was largely Democrat-led noise, and the whole familial separation thing was largely Democratic-lead noise to where he was forced to change his own policy - even if they continued to separate families after at times, he publicly walked it back.

Hell, he even got beaten back on invoking the Insurrection Act just a month ago by his own cabinet. And then there's all of the times he's proclaimed he would do something, only to forget and not do it, or to put it in people's minds so they forget and think he did it even though he didn't.

He's definitely stretched the rule of law, but while he has definitely broken laws and legitimized it by claiming "different legal interpretation", that's hardly a new thing for a President (look at the average Presidential signing statement). Most of the time, Trump and his crew are doing things legally, but doing them in ways they weren't intended. Which doesn't make them any less fascist/autocratic because of his intent, but still "technically" legal.

Refusing to step down would be an illegal action that isn't on par with anything he's done to date thus far, AND, would require a Machiavellian level of scheming that we're going to entrust this dementia fuck to pull off?

Plus, much like in 2016, Trump voters came home only when his numbers improved mid-October and they saw maybe the election wasn't a lost cause, because Clinton had to face her own October surprise. GOP Senators are seeing the Cook Political Report from yesterday that suggests the Dems are now poised to take back the Senate. People who were previously safe now have their jobs in jeopardy. As the GOP operates on purely "what will keep me employed?", do we really think GOP Congress is going to aid him in a coup, or that the military will join him in some Gilead-ian uprising?

nah. I think what's more likely is that he claims he was "robbed" and that the election was "rigged". maybe even files a legal challenge to a few states' results, which don't go anywhere. and then quietly steps down, with teh narrative that he "didn't lose", but that the election is stolen from him. he can finally quit doing the job he hates and not be seen as a quitter.

Because ffs, if he really believed millions of ineligible people voted, even though he won in 2016, why would he have allowed his Election Commission fold so easily? Because he only cares about the narrative.

I don't think getting a hernia worrying about this shit helps much because we're reacting to something that isn't happening and just adding to our own already over-the-top stress levels and that weakens us come November. I'm not going to waste time worrying about it.

What he's doing now in Portland is sick, but...from what I've read from most legal experts, it's testing the limits of the law, but is generally within the law to have federal officers protect federal buildings. Some of the extralegal stuff they're doing with the illegal detainments, etc, they will immediately pass off to individual irresponsibility and throw those agents under teh bus after they get fired/arrested.

that's about the level of illegality/fascism Trump does. If he was going to send tanks into the streets to run over Democratic vehicles and houses, he'd have long done it by now. He's a coward.

so I'm not going to worry about whether he will step down or not. I am, however, going to worry about what's happening in Portland spreading to other cities and throwing gasoline on an already raging inferno. I hope Philly DA makes good on his promise to arrest federal agents.

For the record I didn’t call anybody loony-tunes

The only difference between Obama and Trump

obv "only" shouldn't be in there, yikes

I hope Philly DA makes good on his promise to arrest federal agents.

just saw this, much respect to Krasner for that

it's honestly the tone that eneds to be taken. this "we're asking you to leave" rhetoric is weak and Chad Wolf will just preen on television every time you say something like that to him. hit him in the mouth

I don't think getting a hernia worrying about this shit helps much because we're reacting to something that isn't happening and just adding to our own already over-the-top stress levels and that weakens us come November. I'm not going to waste time worrying about it.

What he's doing now in Portland is sick, but...from what I've read from most legal experts, it's testing the limits of the law, but is generally within the law to have federal officers protect federal buildings. Some of the extralegal stuff they're doing with the illegal detainments, etc, they will immediately pass off to individual irresponsibility and throw those agents under teh bus after they get fired/arrested.

My thoughts exactly.

I'm convinced he'll start a 24-hour Trump News Network if he loses, and several comments he's made suggest he's at least considered the possibility he just might.

he even got beaten back on invoking the Insurrection Act just a month ago by his own cabinet

That's one of several examples of GOP pushback cited in this article

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/24/trump-rages-open-defiance-him-is-mounting-here-are-7-examples/?hpid=hp_opinions-float-right-4-0_opinion-card-d-right%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans

In bureaucratic trivia world, I do wonder how the situation with FPS might be different if CISA hadn’t been created in 2018 and the hodgepodge that was NPPD (which held FPS) still existed, with its own Senate-confirmed Under Secretary

I was too young or naive to know or notice at the time, but the military, national guard and others of that ilk were also sent to LA during the Rodney King riots.

That time, they were requested by the state though

Trump’s also held back funds for testing explicitly so that the numbers look better. Right? Unless I’ve missed something? That, and the troops in the streets, are the kinds of thing you’d read about Kruschev doing, or Stalin, and you’d think, “Well that’s just crazy. It’s so obviously evil. Who would stand for it? Didn’t those leaders realize how deligitimizing that was?”

Yet here we are.

We have to remember that he’s still on something like 87% approval with Republicans. They won’t stop when he’s out of office. None - or very little - of the “pushback” in the article is an overt rejection of Trump by name. They’ll keep apologizing for polluters and rapists and elect somebody even worse next time. Their entire mindset needs to be turned into ash and the ground salted for 500 years.

Maybe Trump will die and refuse to accept the results

We have to remember that he’s still on something like 87% approval with Republicans.

% of ppl who identify as republicans has crashed over the last few years

(honestly i've heard that a few places and when i google that fact lots of articles come up but when i look at a gallup numbers they actually seem pretty stable over long periods of time so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

The margin of a Biden win is going to largely determine whether Trump will try to pull any post election shenanigans.

I want all 50, baby

don't forget about those territories and commonwealths

joe biden 2020: it's like the 1972 dolphins, and yes that's a reference a 77 year old man would understand.com

I hear this kind of thing a lot a lot and am genuinely puzzled by it. Is the idea that every period of tumult poses the same existential threat?

― singular wolf erotica producer (Hadrian VIII)

like i wanna be fair to everybody pushing back against the stuff i'm saying, this is fucking horrifying stuff, this violates pretty much everything i've been taught about right and wrong and i gotta imagine other people are not immune to these concerns. and one of the ways i deal with stuff i'm not willing to accept is, you know, by pushing back, in any way i can, and if that means pushing back against the credibility of the person saying it because i can't meaningfully engage with what they're saying, i'll do it. i don't think it's right or fair for me to do that, i try not to, but you know, we are not any of us in exactly a great position right now.

it takes time to come to terms with, and, you know, it's a rapidly evolving situation, we don't have a lot of time right now to process all this shit, and so i'm pushing pretty hard. but i am, unreliable or no, i'm just a goddamn messenger, and pushing me away or rationalizing it or trying to contextualize it, you know, it's trying to turn the intolerable into the tolerable, because if you can't change the situation, you change yourself to adapt, right? you change yourself because you need to survive.

i don't know how to make this tolerable. this is bad and it is worse every day. my only hope is that the situation will change, and saying "wait till november" is not something i can, at this point, take any comfort in.

― Kate (rushomancy), Friday, July 24, 2020 1:18 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Kate can you expand on this w/r/t the kind of pushback that essentially says "Oh, we've been through this strife before, look at history, you're overreacting"? I follow your post but not as it relates to my question.

Maybe Trump will die and refuse to accept the results

― Lady Antibody (Neanderthal)

don't even joke about that, we're still dealing with the fallout from that one time two thousand years ago

a complete blowout is important for several reasons, from political things like winning downballot races and flipping statehouses, to looming fascism things like overcoming blatant voter suppression and making sure the margin of defeat isn't small enough for Trump's inevitable claims of election fraud to be taken seriously by enough of his idiotic followers to make a real difference. i also succumb to the mystic-cosmological instinct to triumph over the pure source of evil, like it's important to me for this magnificent piece of shit to be pushed hard into the mud

xp

Kate can you expand on this w/r/t the kind of pushback that essentially says "Oh, we've been through this strife before, look at history, you're overreacting"? I follow your post but not as it relates to my question.

― singular wolf erotica producer (Hadrian VIII)

sure, i wasn't specifically addressing your question, it was more of a tangent

i am very interested in history myself, and that interest is only amateur but i've encountered enough professional historians to have some vague inkling of how history looks from that perspective

one of the big historian jokes is the story of a historian who, after fifty years studying it, concludes that history is "just one damn thing after another" - which is funny because we want to read meaning, purpose, _prophecy_ in history, and it's not there.

i mean, the argument of "this never happened before" has a fairly obvious flaw, doesn't it? lots of things happen that have never happened before. the present is not dictated by the past. ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny.

i can't count the number of historical facts i've taught myself in order to convince myself that the things that have happened weren't, in fact, going to happen, starting with the election of donald trump to the presidency of the united states.

we are in unprecedented times. there is no consolation for me in the past.

But you would think if someone firmly believed that we were about to have our democracy dissolved, even if they didn't have outright solutions, they'd be brainstorming and loudly barking about things we needed to start doing.

― Lady Antibody (Neanderthal)

you know there are laws against saying those sorts of things, right? and that they are enforced?

xp yeah, the whole "we've been through this kind of thing before" line never consoles me much. it's like yeah, we have - and those times fucking sucked, and the people that died or had their lives ruined aren't here to post about how bad it sucked and how we should look out for fascists

look everybody, we've been through pandemics before, it's fine

"we" as in "people i read about"

yes everyone agrees many things are bad

*coughs up a lung*
*last dying words: "you shudda seen...1918...this is nothing...aghhghh"*

Idk my paternal grandparents fled Hitler’s Germany, my grandfather in particular had to make his way to America via Italian prisons, Vatican interventions, and sea voyages, then went back in the US Army, i do draw some strength from knowing that if he lived through that that I can, minimally, get through another year or so of staying inside and not being able to visit my parents.

Fascist gestapo in my city tho I am not sure what to do about

xps yes got it. I think history is instructive when it comes to human behavior, to instincts. But yeah whether or not comparable events have or have not happened in the past seems largely irrelevant for all kinds of obvious reasons (shifting mores, technological changes, etc.) to how the present plays out.

*extremely utilitarian voice* yes the covid-19 pandemic is unprecedented in recent times but there’s also more people now alive so even if 2% of the global population dies of it there will still be more total lives worth living on the planet than there were during the Black Death!

the people that died or had their lives ruined aren't here to post about how bad it sucked and how we should look out for fascists

this is the part that always gets me—yeah, worked out for *who* exactly?

The human population in general of course

we're still a species! See?

Gonna go have a repugnant conclusion all over the back porch

The usefulness of pointing to history IMO comes from looking for divergences. What Trump's doing looks sort of unprecedented but not really - American authorities have killed and jailed and done horrible things to citizens for the entirety of our history. Now it's more out in the open but that makes more people aware or opposed - telling a white American in 1971 about COINTELPRO or assassinating Fred Hampton or etc. and they'd either look at you like we look at QAnon people or in much larger numbers than Blue Live Matters gets, defend it.

That tells me we're not on the precipice of falling into a situation where Trump can stay in office illegally, America's mostly just trucking on as it always has.

(Which shouldn't ease anyone's anxiety or depression because America's just trucking on it as always has.)

Doesn't this risk underselling the importance of something being "more out in the open"? Impunity, egregiousness, shamelessness—surely these things don't *only* serve to heighten awareness and inspire resistance. They also serve to vindicate certain bad behaviors and inspire it in others.

That tells me we're not on the precipice of falling into a situation where Trump can stay in office illegally, America's mostly just trucking on as it always has.

― Donald Trump Also Sucks, Of Course (milo z)

see, this is the sort of thing that makes me extremely, extremely uneasy. yes, america has a history of deep, systemic injustice. i believe it's important to acknowledge that history. if you want to understand american history, i think it's important to understand the Corrupt Bargain and the Slave Power Conspiracy and Rutherfraud B. Hayes.

i think it's also important to not use these historical facts to exculpate, to remove the urgency, to remove the immediacy, from the atrocities, past and present, of the trump administration. yes, the trump administration is, in some sense, a culmination of 250 years of racist government. it is however, _necessary_, in order to do anything about it, to recognize the deep aberration it also presents.

this is different from america's past atrocities, this is different from all of the people america and its racism and its anti-queer prejudice has killed in the past. you know, one day, hopefully not for a while yet, i'll be dead, and anybody who cares can look back at my posts and shrug and talk about how fucked up american capitalism has always been, but i'm not yet, the people out there protesting on the streets of portland are not yet. you want to turn a blind eye, you want to tell yourself there's nothing you can do, you want to tell yourself you're powerless and helpless.... well, as long as i have a voice to speak with i will use it to disagree.

you want to turn a blind eye, you want to tell yourself there's nothing you can do, you want to tell yourself you're powerless and helpless.... well, as long as i have a voice to speak with i will use it to disagree.

But recognizing that America has always been an exploitative capitalist hellscape, and politically much farther to the right than most Americans will ever admit, is not at all the same thing as shrugging one's shoulders and admitting defeat. Sure, protest if you feel you must. Run for local office if that seems like a better route to societal change. Form/join a mutual aid society. Do whatever you think is necessary to create the world you want to live in. But be clear-eyed about the world you're currently in, and that means both recognizing the true depth of the darkness and not getting apocalyptic when it's not actually warranted.

N.B. I say this as someone whose long term plan remains not to improve America, but rather to simply get the hell out of America as soon as possible. So maybe I'm the worst traitor-to-the-cause of all.

when are we gonna make this interesting and start throwing some money down?

https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/us-politics/us-presidential-election-2020/winner

hang in there Bernie!