CITATION NEEDED If Donald Trump had said, in January, "My fellow Americans we face the public health crisis of our time and we all need to band together to beat this foreign virus" he would be at 95% in the polls and would have shunted trillions to his cronies. The man gets graft; however, he doesn't get subtle graft and the pandemic offered him the opportunity to brazenly embrace fascism in ways not seen since Mussolini. It was such a gimme problem. Instead he was so busy with nickels that he missed the gold bricks. He can't beat Joe Biden because he does not have a "fine political mind" he has the attention span of an adderal-addicted reform school brat. The 12Steppers will tell you that your emotional development stops at the point where you take on an addiction. Emotionally? Trump never made it to high school. "Fine political mind." And he got a hundred ICE stormtroopers in rented minivans. American President "drink the sand" speech goes here He expects to lose because he's never made a single move to win. We're talking about a demagogue who literally can't win anybody over. Yeah - the Chuds will love him if he fucks a goat on the west wing lawn but does anyone really think that the slightest bit of leadership from the man wouldn't be hailed as the second coming of Abraham Fucking Lincoln by the press? THERE IS NO PLAN. That's it. That's the joke. That's the whole fuckin' past four years, fuckers, we've all been subject to the whim and vanity of a narcissist with no capacity for long-term planning. Fuckin' hell let's say you're Trump and you owe Deutsche Bank $400m and Putin a pee-pee tape or whatever but goddamn it you just won the mutherfucking presidency of the United States and you've got four ENTIRE YEARS to get out from under it. You telling me you couldn't grift half a billion dollars out of all the craven fuckin' opportunists out there? Goddamn DeJoy gave $700m for the mutherfucking convention, FFS. Try telling me that the Democrats wouldn't stay out of the goddamn way if Trump largely restrained himself to gross personal enrichment. Dude could have nominated Merrick Garland in exchange for a trillion dollar bailout of the hospitality industry and we'd be done. Pelosi&Co ain't gonna say shit about it and you know it. kk look. That's Trump, literally calling for the violent overthrow of one of our 50 states. Fast forward six months and the FBI arrests six guys planning to do just that. Six guys. Six. Sure - there's more chuds with guns and bad intentions out there and we'll be playing Nazi whack-a-mole for generations now so that's nice but the fact of the matter is, there's a shit-ton of distance between "what Trump wants" and "what Trump gets" because about one in a million Trump supporters is willing to take steps towards the violent overthrow of America. Naaah dawg they're totally here to own the libs. That's the whole point. Their lives are already shit, they're making their situations better by dragging the rest of us down to their level. Every single one of those fuckers has Red Dawn memorized; every single one of those fuckers has seen every Rambo movie, every single one of those fuckers knows more about "stand your ground" laws than they do about the three branches of government. This is their Carolco action-adventure movie staring themselves as Charles Bronson and if it doesn't get shooty splodey it's a mutherfuckin' letdown the only thing saving us is (A) they're splendiferously incompetent (B) total fucking cowards. Yeah, Trump wants all this shit. Fer sure. Nobody else does. This was always the calculus: shit gets better when all the lickspittle opportunists firmly wedged in Trump's every orifice determine that the corpse is bloating and it's time to find a new host. We're there.Trump has a fine political mind,
For months now, he has been signaling that he cannot beat Joe Biden in an election.
When he tried to summon the armed forces to aid him in June, it was the gesture of a man who needed unusual forms of help.
When he tweeted in July that elections should be delayed, he revealed that he did not think he could win them. Undermining the United States Postal Service, asking his supporters to vote twice, and saying that he will not accept the results: all of these are ways of saying that he expects to lose.
The plan is not to win the popular (or even the electoral) vote, but rather to stay in power in some other way.
By telling Americans in advance that he intends to stay in power regardless of the vote count, Trump is implicating his supporters in the action as it unfolds
In that dark scenario, the joke is on the Trump voter, since a vote for Trump is a vote for spiritual self-annihilation.
Lots of hand wringing here. No matter what Trump tries, we'll will always be one bullet away from reestablishing democratic norms. We might even get a chance to eliminate a dozen of the most fascists figures in the right wing media for treason and reap a few score militia wacko's. I'm pretty sure it's not going to come to that. We might edge our way right up to the brink but I don't think it will even be a significant issue.
The NY mag article that kleinbl00 posted yesterday had some speculations from some people who know the president that he knows he's gonna lose, so all the bat shit stuff he's doing and saying are just him setting himself up with an excuse. I thought that made a lot more sense than anything else I've read.