rolling “Trump is gonna win” containment thread

did robert mueller investigate trump's connection to epstein? it seems that might have been another channel for "kompromat," although not connected to russia

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/epstein-documents-trump.html

i think the answer is no. he was scrupulous in not going beyond his mandate iirc. but it's very bizarre. the "katie johnson" allegation (i think that is a pseudonym) was from 2016, so while trump was running for prez (suspicious maybe) but before epstein was a household name.

Now our only hope is Biden dies.

think positive, they could both die

at least there is one positive to gerontocratic degeneracy!

think positive, they could both die

Been predicting this for a year! Or at least that they would both be incapacitated before November. It would be surreal to have Harris v. Vance or whoever in just a few months.

The only fun now is waiting to see how they blame the left for Trump's win.

Gerontophobe Berniecrats (wait...) just refused to turn out for Joe etc..

think positive, they could both die

Surely this can be arranged?

Idk, I wonder how many signatures you could get on an open letter saying “will no one rid me of these turbulent candidates?”

Surely there's no glory or real sense of victory in beating an old ailing man, though, is there, Donald?

"Hi - we know you did the Tylenol Murders several decades ago. No, no, put your hands down. You're not under arrest. If you're willing to earn back some of your freedom, there's a McNugget supply we need your help with"

Well....

just a week off the anniversary of the July Plot to kill Hitler!

Lotta MAGA Smugness over on FB rn...

!

LOL this thread

Trump can't even win the wet t-shirt contest.

The regular politics thread was like Oprah yesterday morning, better post this here. John King had his big map out last night. He had Biden with one or two very narrow paths to 270 or 271; Trump had multiple paths to 270-plus. He pointed out a bunch of states that were Biden's last time and close right now, and that if they all broke for Trump he could get as high as 330. I'm pretty sure everything was still based on pre-shooting polls.

Lots of time left, but I'm feeling pretty fucking void of hope at the moment. Every single thing seems to break his way and the Democrats are a flaming pile of garbage that did absolutely nothing to prevent this very obvious and inevitable position they've been aimed in for 4 years.

I should balance that with something their other poll guy, Harry Enten, said: that he puts Biden at 25%, which sounds bad but just means flipping two heads in a row--happens all the time. That's about where Nate Silver had Trump in 2016 (when most polling gave him no chance).

To be fair, I'm putting almost zero faith in polls at this point, no matter what they say. I'm just disgusted that this is even close on any level.

I'm settling back into my acceptance of a likely Trump win that I had reached prior to the debate and the brief sense that there might be some other possibility on the ballot. Acceptance is nice, I don't get freaked out about polls because I already figure Trump's going to win. I'm not saying I won't entertain hopes along the way if circumstances warrant, and of course I'll still have fingers crossed on Election Day, but I refuse to be shocked and shook by another Trump win.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0S_MebzyzQ

We (as in America) have only given one other president a second, non-consecutive term, and no one really showers Grover Cleveland in glory these days. I remain, if not serene or confident, fairly certain that — as I've said many, many times — Trump is not winning over new voters. Him getting shot registered not as a national trauma but as a disappointment — fuck, we were almost rid of this asshole. Vance will certainly not help him; Vance seems fixated on driving people away. He lives by Pat Buchanan's Nixon-era idea that "if we tear the country in half, our half will be bigger," and his personality is DeSantis/Cruz-level wretched.

FiveThirtyEight still shows a 50/50 chance, with Biden slightly ahead - though the polls themselves favor Trump: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/

The only advantage Trump gets with Vance is that he hasn't been in politics long enough to rack up negatives with normies. Also too Machiavellian to go off script or fuck up.

I dunno, I think Vance can turn people off at lightning speed.

If there's any political calculus to Vance at all (beyond "He will definitely violate the Constitution if I need him to"), I assume it's a Midwestern play for Michigan, Wisconsin, Pa. Go to the hard-luck towns, tell his own inspirational hard-luck story. If he weren't so creepy maybe that would seem like a good move.

I do think it would be hilarious if Trump realized how much of a charisma suck Vance is in about a month and "fired" him.

unlike Trump's last vice presidential nominee Vance would stab Trump with a toothbrush handle through the eyeball if he thought it'd make him president. He's a little schemer.

He also had a big Hollywood movie about him, which a friend of mine pointed out was likely the decisive factor in Trump's eyes

*Trump's eyes FOR NOW xp ;)

it was funny missing the memo that Nate Silver left 538 because I kept wondering why he was shitting on his own model and criticizing his own methodology before I realized

That 538 link above, with Biden winning 53% of their simulations, is encouraging. I don't understand--is Silver still part of that or not? I looked on his Twitter page and he seems to be, but you're saying he's not.

He probably works for the publication Nate the Wonder Boy's Substack Page now.

he divested. he has his own model now. G. Elliott Morris runs 538 now and Silver hates him

in fact lol he said that G. Elliott Morris is one of the only people he has blocked on Twitter.

nerdbeef i swear

what's keeping me going: the possibility that the election might be "2016, but backwards this time." the stories about the gop's confidence at their convention gave me acid flashbacks.

I felt a sense of impending doom when Katy Perry blasted at the DNC>

(xposts) Thanks. I figured it out and found his Substack (less colourful name than above). I liked his book a lot, found him very reliable in 2008 and 2012, and even in 2016 compared to everyone else. (Lost track of him in 2020--Wikipedia says he had Biden at 89%.)

Silver's own model (not gonna bother to look up the differences) has Biden right now projected to win 238 electoral votes — his lowest number in the forecast to date.

xpost maybe Perry can come back this year with Dr. Luke.

"Libs of TikTok" have spent the last few days ruthlessly doxxing teachers and just people in any other job who have posted anywhere online that they wish Trump had been killed, tagging in employers, sending their 3.2 million followers after them. Genuinely terrifying to see, I know all reasonable people blocked them ages ago but this means people don't seem to realise quite how much they've ramped it up.

feeling like we can merge this thread with the regular politics threads at this point lol

this might seem like hair-splitting but it's significant to me - i don't see trump _winning_ so much as biden _losing_

to me, this whole biden thing - to me this is confirmation of what i've believed about the democrats for a while

who _wants_ biden as president? what does he have to offer? there's only one thing i've ever heard people say in biden's favor, over and over again: he's not trump

i need more than that. yes, i know trump and the republicans would quite literally kill me if they could. i need more from a political candidate than "well i'm not going to kill you."

because the fucker _is_ supporting genocide and that _does_ matter to me even though it's not about _me personally_, i have fucking _values_ and maybe i'm a little too stubborn sometimes but i don't think refusing to vote for a... genocidaire? i like that word... is me being too stubborn.

like i can be a little blackpilled, but you know what i believe about the democrats? you know what i've believed about the democrats since 2016? they're not interested in winning. they're interested in getting paid. to them, politics is a career, is a profession, and you know what personally? personally i think it probably _should_ be. politics requires a certain set of skills, a certain set of core competencies, and trump, for instance, he completely lacks those core competencies. he can get elected, but i haven't seen any evidence yet that he can either govern or _rule_.

if we're doing historical analogies - and they're all flawed, trump is trump - but if we're doing historical analogies the one i come back to so often is charles vi of france. "charles le fou", the mad. this man was a _bad king_. he did a _bad job_ of ruling france. one of the reasons the hundred years' war lasted a hundred years is france got stuck with charles on the throne.

and i guess i should... i mean i guess keeping someone like him ought to be a priority. i just feel like... in or out of the white house, on the federal level, republicans rule. and it's not a matter of their _competency_, but the unwillingness or inability of the democratic party on a national level to challenge them or to offer a coherent alternative.

what do the democrats offer? fundraising appeals. a lot of them. everything in their platform seems completely calculated to appeal to big-money donors. i mean i understand the calculus. you need money to run a campaign. it's just that... they don't seem to be interested in literally _anything_ else. getting paid and trying to shame people into voting for them. a lot of us don't vote for republicans. a lot of us _don't vote_. again, they don't seem to care. it's not that they don't care about people who don't vote for them - the impression i get is that they don't care about anybody but big-ticket donors.

because any time anybody proposes anything that might upset their big-ticket donors - something that would benefit the majority of the voters to the detriment of their donors - they rush to stamp it out, to make sure everybody knows they don't stand for it and will have nothing to do with it.

i mean, i am politically engaged to an extent. i've listened to a lot of things the democrats have said, on a national level, i've seen a lot of the things the democrats have _done_, on a national level, and i've reached my conclusion.

my hope has _never_ been in the democrats. my hope is in... it's not just the incompetence of the republicans. no. my hope, my faith, is that the people around me... in them, i see the beliefs and values that i _don't_ see in the democratic party. it's like alfred said - a lot of the people around him _believe in america_. i believe in _them_, in those people. not in the democratic party leadership. not in joe biden - for god's sake, does anybody _believe_ in joe biden? at this point?

and it's not blind faith. trump was president before. why did he fail? well, yes, he was incompetent, but more than that people _lived their values_. there are people who will follow trump anywhere and the people who don't... they're not standing down and saying "well, ok", even though the democratic party, in a lot of ways, _has_.

i don't know what the future looks like. but it doesn't look like donald trump. and it doesn't look like joe biden.

very well said and extremely otm

Thanks as ever for the post, Kate. To address this point --

or god's sake, does anybody _believe_ in joe biden? at this point?

Yes. It surprises me. People like us who live online and post on message boards like this and who read American history are exceptions. Most people I meet, whether they're MAGA or Dems -- even our queer community!-- genuinely believe in presidents. They want their presidents to be good people. They believe their choice is the best. They call Biden "Joe," which I find creepy as fuck. I'll daresay they believe in Joseph Robinette Biden and Donald J. Trump even they know they might be being fucked over.

I don't get it because I never followed sports or have this kind of relationship with abstractions and too much about our perfidious history but here we are.

*and know too much about our perfidious history

I'm the oddest fit as a local Dem volunteer. Even at the most local of meetings when the candidate for tax collector or sheriff or whatever's being introduced I feel so gross yelling YEAH or GO DEBBIE! I have no problem belting "Show Me Love" to a roomful of drunk assholes at karaoke but can't muster the enthusiasm to go with crowds.

Yes. It surprises me. People like us who live online and post on message boards like this and who read American history are exceptions. Most people I meet, whether they're MAGA or Dems -- even our queer community!-- genuinely believe in presidents. They want their presidents to be good people. They believe their choice is the best. They call Biden "Joe," which I find creepy as fuck. I'll daresay they believe in Joseph Robinette Biden and Donald J. Trump even they know they might be being fucked over.

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

i think that's cool! i think it's cool that people believe in joe biden even after he's given them, you know... so little to believe in. so little. it's the idea. the idea of a leader who cares about them, who wants what's best for them. i don't think it's wrong to believe in that idea. because to me, it's an idea, and i don't know, maybe it's similar in some way to believing in the chicago cubs, but america... i mean, america matters a lot more to me than the cubs do. to be clear, i fucking love the cubs, the _idea_ of the cubs. they just don't personally affect me the way america does.

sometimes i see people who are really politically informed look down on people who aren't, and i don't think that's warranted. it's certainly not warranted to treat people who aren't politically informed as _stupid_. politically, i relate to them more than i do when people talk about polls or what this pundit said or that pundit said. to me, that's the horserace, those are the smart marks, the sabermetrics people. my ex-girlfriend says sabermetrics ruined baseball. takes all the fun out of it. i don't know whether i agree or disagree, but i can see where she's coming from.

i mean nearly everything donald trump says is a lie but he does offer people something to believe in. i mean i gotta believe in _something_. and that's not gonna be donald trump, for me, but _something_, even if it's probably not true, even if i'm deluding myself.

of course i see the downsides, of course i see how dangerous that can be, but going off and saying people shouldn't be _like_ that... i don't have a problem with people, i don't have a problem with human nature.

i relate to them more than i do when people talk about polls or what this pundit said or that pundit said.

otm