Let’s not fall into the trap of thinking this is “just” a distraction. Or that Trump intended it to be a distraction. He means it. Sure, he doesn’t have the power to do this, and even if it happened, it’s a completely separate issue that he’d stop being president in January. But not having the authority to do something hasn’t stopped him from finding work-arounds before. He’s shown he’s absolutely going to try to find a way to prevent a vote in November, using whatever tools are at his disposal, and do whatever he can to undermine their perceived legitimacy.
Yeah, we should have learned by now that when Trump does something outrageous it’s not done purely as a calculated distraction from (whatever else is going on). He means it. It also acts as a distraction from other things he’s doing, but everything he does is outrageous enough to distract from something else that’s going on.
Someone pointed out that not only has Trump had more conversations with Putin lately than with any allies, but more than any president would communicate with any foreign leader, unless it was a close ally during a time of crisis. Which is exactly the situation here: Trump’s communicating with his own personal ally at a time of crisis - his impending electoral loss.
Right - it’s (early) 1933 Germany bad, not 1940 Germany bad.
The problem is: when the Supreme Court ruled against the administration on DACA, making it clear they were acting illegally, the administration’s response has been, “Don’t wanna, you can’t make me” and continued doing the thing that’s illegal. So clearly, court rulings don’t matter if there’s no actual mechanism to enforce them.
He didn’t want to be. I’m entirely convinced that was his plan for the 2016 election - lose and start a grievance-based right-wing media outlet. (The Trumps had already put things into place to make that happen.) But now he’s stuck. He’s committed crimes in the process of getting elected and being in power, and past crimes have come to light due to the extra scrutiny. He’s got a bunch of loans coming due in the next couple of years. His best chance of making all that go away is staying in power another four years. His ego won’t let him lose, either. So now he’s got a lot more motivation to win than he did the first time.
There aren’t enough federal goons, er “law enforcement” to do this. (There’s about 130K total, including lots of people who wouldn’t/couldn’t go along with it or are actually needed where they are, so the actual number of deployable agents is a fraction of that.) But Trump is also clearly angling to convince citizens to go out, armed, to “defend” the polling places from undesirables. That’s the bigger threat. (Though the federal forces can be used to create chaos to inspire local “militias” to become active, as has been happening already.)
Yeah, he’s certainly made that clear lately, hasn’t he? Send in federal goons, spark riots, use those riots as justification for… whatever, and then declare victory as well (even as things get even more violent and chaotic due to his actions).
I’ve been saying - sending in the feds is his Reichstag fire. Because of the fact that we can see him holding the match, it hasn’t worked out that well for him, but I have no doubt he’ll keep trying variations of it.
