I think we can safely assume that 45’s legal team (not including Guliani) can keep him out of jail until he dies, and that he would certainly die if it started to look like he might actually be held accountable for anything.
1 Like
You are repeatedly yelling into the void. This scenario is ridiculous and, even if it were to happen, would result in nothing. Your entire foundation of concern is less cogent than Eichenwald’s.
Let’s take your extreme point as granted: Millions refuse to turn out for the vote due to a tweet. Okay. Trump-aligned chud bikers then organize and flood to polling places. What do they do? Check every vote? Prevent people from entering the polling places? If so, they are arrested immediately by actual dudes with actual power that fuck up their lives, and it’s all directly and publicly tied to Trump. A maelstrom of anti-Trump sentiment sweeps the nation as this egregious, blatant, and ultimately futile action is ridiculed by literally every notable media outlet. This makes it bad for him twofold: it is laughably obvious desperation on the part of a weak executive in the eyes of everyone remotely paying attention, and it is crystallizing Trump as such in the career-preservation-focused eyes of the delegates who would give him electoral votes. Giving him electoral votes would be self-immolation. Rs are already dividing and looking for reasons to inch away from backing him, and tweeting ‘illegitimacy!’ like you propose would not work in any possible favorable way for him. The vote happens whether he likes it or not. How many scary chuds per polling precinct would actually organize and show up to do anything? If they did, how many of them would there be relative to a whooooole lot of pissed off citizens, arresting officers, and news cameras in their faces at every middle school and community center that serves as a polling place?
Your scenario sucks, is stupid, and will not happen. Even if it did, it would have the opposite effect of what you’re clanging on about. Please stop bringing it up.
3 Likes
Trump has made anything possible.
3 Likes
I’ve heard this every election season since at least the tail end of the Clinton administration. Ain’t gonna happen.
1 Like
I haven’t posted in a week or so because I said something the community deemed inappropriate (O.K…), but I break my silence to say “yes. this.”
He’s been a crook all his adult life. He reminds me of every single New Yorker cartoon.
2 Likes
i’m fairly certain that many (if not most) of the states would still have elections…i’m not sure what the end result might be, but it’s not like people won’t be voting. i mean, we will be voting for other offices next November.
also, it might be wise to take a peek at Article II section 1 of the constitution:
“The Congress may determine the time of choosing the electors, and the day on which they shall give their votes; which day shall be the same throughout the United States.”
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleii
and then Amendment 12 https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxii
dude can try, i guess.
2 Likes
I would like to remind everyone that the laws we have to govern our society, our elections, and the conduct of our elected officials are social constructs. As such, they function on a couple of things: one, our common acceptance of the rule of law and the reality that we all live in (which at this point, we as a nation do not agree on). Second, enforcement via monopoly on violence. I will also note that this current president has acted over and again as if the laws do not apply to him and that he can act as he will and the rule of law will protect him from following the rule of law. I don’t think any of this is up for debate, too (how the law actually functions and the nature of this current presidency). Keep in mind that it’s not historically unprecedented for a dictator to emerge out of a democratic system (in fact, the MOST notorious of dictators, the man who stands in for unprecedented evil in our modern parlance came to power via entirely legal means!).
My point? The system is ONLY as good as we are at preserving it. The whole thing is based on power. Saying that something is unconstitutional is meaningless if there are people who can claim that it’s entirely constitutional with a straight face, and get those who can interpret and enforce the law to back them up. You might not agree with every single detail of what Eichenwald is suggesting, but if we don’t entertain the thought, we might be screwed. The reality is that we historians are more or less in the business of analyzing what has already gone down. And when you’re in the thick of things, it’s very hard to see the possibilities, good and bad. More importantly, it’s hard to take seriously the worst case scenarios of the past, projected into the future. But someone has to entertain the worst case scenario, because that scenario needs to be cut short, for all our sakes…
Nothing is foreordained in the future. We make it by our collective choices. But we can use history as a means of understanding what CAN go wrong by us making collectively bad choices. Fiction and fields such as political science can also help us to understand the possible consequences.
26 Likes
I mostly agree, but when Trump wanted to host the G7 at Doral, somebody yanked his leash and the proposal got overturned. Who was that somebody? Will they act again? I suggest it depends on what is in it for them at the time.
3 Likes
And the very first line of the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 is
If, by reason of death, resignation, removal from office, inability, or failure to qualify, there is neither a President nor Vice President to discharge the powers and duties of the office of President, then the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall, upon his resignation as Speaker and as Representative in Congress, act as President.
Pelosi would be acting president until there was a new election.
1 Like
If you’re referring to Hitler, that’s not true; murdering the Brownshirts en masse once he was done with them certainly wasn’t legal, for example, and he’d committed quite a few other crimes along the way by then-current German law. Afterwards, he MADE it legal, pretty much, but I’m guessing that’s not what you meant.
If not, them I’m at a loss.
Otherwise, however, you make a very good point. In fact, it only makes the parallels stronger.
2 Likes
How is it not true? Your example doesn’t make your point at all.
He was already democratically elected before the Brownshirt murder. He came to power via legal process, he murdered people to stay in power.
Of course dictators do illegal stuff after, but they often start by gaining power in a democracy. That was the point, and Hitler’s not a wrong example of it.
3 Likes
Absolutely true. But the issue here is that Eichenwald is one of the people claiming it’s entirely constitutional (albeit as a warning).
Propaganda is important. The difference between the number of colonels who believe the scenario described is constitutional and those who don’t (and who are willing to keep their oaths) could make or break a Trumpian putsch.
1 Like
More likely scenario: he tweets that he’s going to cancel it, 5 min later tweets that he would NEVER cancel it, tweets that Hillary is going to cancel it, tweets 9 times in a row about how many people were at his inauguration and forgets entirely about the concept of election-cancelling from then on
4 Likes
You are mostly right but I see one mistake I often see in Americans, you have an awfully unrealistic and weird idea about who these “founding fathers” were.
They were landed English gentry or low nobility, far better educated than the population, from well-established families in England. They had even far more voting power in England than most realise, their families in England often owned land and through the rotten borough system they had far more influence in power than most English living in England.
The whole “no taxation without representation” was a smoke screen. The average labourer in let’s say Manchester had as much voting influence as any small farmer in the Americas. (ie. none.)
See how Trump would perfectly fit in this crowd? And how really those people would not mind if one of them took over power? Wasn’t that their whole point?
They were not hot on human rights, or good government, or taxation, or anything but what benefitted them. They sold their ideas well to the crowd who died fighting in a revolution that in no way improved their own lives but did benefit those that led them.
8 Likes
I have to wonder if it wasn’t a few of the more liberal G7 leaders quietly telling the State Dept. they’d find excuses not to attend if it were held there.
Il Douche has never been dissuaded before when someone questioned his profiting off the use of one of his properties for domestic purposes, but it’s harder for an American to say “no” to the President*.
3 Likes
Tl;dr: Only a fool would put this past Crooked Donnie. Democracy rolls on what Donnie has completely lacked his entire life: Good faith.
Where Eichenwald ever so slightly errs is having Trump pull this crap far enough in advance that the courts can get involved and block him.
A hallmark of the Roberts SCOTUS is maintaining the illusion of a democracy while chipping away at it. Approving blocking, delaying, whatever an election because of an emergency declared on a basis proven to be a complete lie would be too much for a majority of the Court.
Allowing the envisioned emergency would be saying that the US democracy is a complete sham. It’s only close to that point, not there yet.
But, you know, Donnie only does things in the worst, most inept way, so why not this?
But god knows Eichenwald is more than correct to fear the Lawbreaker-in-Chief — enabled by his party’s fear of him and by the establishment media’s decades of support for the GOP.
3 Likes
Obviously … ?
No, he hasn’t.
Uh, there is no serious evidence he did any of those things, and half of them are not even illegal anyway. So yeah, comparing those to him canceling the election and refusing to leave office is stupid.
@Avery_Thorn said impeachable, not illegal.
9 Likes
