All you do with that sort of response is reinforce how unserious you are.
This is stuff that happened, that the Trump administration openly says and does. Never mind where there's smoke there's fire, the actual flames of the fire are visible.
US 2024 Presidential Election
- Thread starter gorfias
- Start date
Recommended Videos
This is stuff that happened, that the Trump administration openly says and does. Never mind where there's smoke there's fire, the actual flames of the fire are visible.
This is because you continue to class those who haven't taken a certain action-- for reasons unknown to you, but potentially very trivial-- as a fundamentally, politically distinct category. It is an unsubstantiated assumption.
I’m not really sure what you mean. It can’t be said Trump handled his electoral defeat particularly gracefully, or that his stance on journalists and media who annoy him aren’t needlessly aggressive and discord sowing.
It’s not some unfortunate coincidence that Trump’s devotion to democracy and its pillars are considered shakey at best. Even if we assume Trump is just supremely bad at expressing himself then his words and deeds remain a bad look
It's the premise of the argument that those who don't vote are a category with distinct political opinions. If you reject that premise, you have no argument at all.
Yes, but what you've expressed here is measured and reasonable. Trump did not handle defeat gracefully, and expresses his distaste for journalists quite explicitly. Those are not what Agema listed.
If you want to say Trump is responsible for his supporters getting violent on January 6th, that's reasonable, that's not the same as accusing him of setting a mob on Congress.
Every politician who has ever wanted a recount is hoping that enough additional votes for them are found to flip the result. You could say Trump approached that ungracefully, you could say it's a bad look to call Georgia to express that hope, but Agema did not say those criticisms and instead suggests it was a threat against officials to try to make them commit fraud.
Everything there is taken to an senseless extreme, and if he really believes all those caricatures are real, I pity him.
Careful now, you're approaching in good faith a person who only argues in bad faith themselves.
First, probably don't presume what Hades is thinking, you may not be quite getting the right read here.
But second, I love the implication that out of the hundreds of posts directed at me regularly, that's the first one to make you think someone was arguing in good faith.
They're distinct simply in that they didn't take a certain action at one time.
If you're adopting presumptuous premises beyond that, about their conviction or their reasons or their propensity to switch political affiliation, then certainly I reject that. You have no basis for it.
Last edited:
Your argument is based on them either having firm convictions or no propensity to switch affiliation.
Speaking of Trump's devotion to democracy. Here he is trying to muzzle the media as if he's Orban or Putin
Trump has new plan to ‘rebalance’ media to force them to air more patriotic programming, according to FCC chair | The Independent
Trump has new plan to ‘rebalance’ media to force them to air more patriotic programming, according to FCC chair | The Independent
Indeed. My point is mostly that what I said was the absolute most favorable reading on Trump's actions that objective reality allows. And even that still reflects horribly on him.
But if to condone Trump requires the most favorable reading in all instances then how reasonable and measured is that? Is it reasonable to expect the rest of the world always reads Trump's many, many assaults on democratic principles in the most favorable light? How likely is it that there's a harmless explanation behind everything and that Trump only had the best of intentions?
Is Trump really just hopelessly inept at expressing himself about journalists while having the best of intentions otherwise? Maybe. But if he routinely attacks journalists and judges, while also shouting about not accepting any election he doesn't wins, and also admires Putin and holding real democracies in open disdains, and the mob he invited also stormed the capitol after he kept lying to them in order to arouse their anger then the problem likely goes deeper than that
Maybe, just maybe Trump calling an election oficial to go ''find'' votes for him was Trump expressing himself very akwardly. Maybe. But if he keeps the same attitude to every single aspect of the election then Trump didn't just express himself poorly, but really did pull out all the stops to stay in power illigitimately.
Any of those instances being due to Trump just being ''clumsy'' is already a hard sell. But all of them? At some point we must concede its not just a bunch of isolated ''oepsies'' from a goofy politicians, but a malicious pattern. Isn't that more reasonable than to request us to believe that by some gigantic stroke of luck it being all just a misunderstanding brought about by Trump expressing himself poorly?
And to stress, even the most favorable reading still reflects badly on Trump. Theoretically its possible Trump didn't outright desire the mob to storm the capitol to keep him in power. But its a fact they did storm the capitol after he invited them, and they did so because an anger brought about by Trump lying to them for months out of anti democratic anger about losing power. No one with any interest in preserving democracy would have let it come to this.
Is calling a duck a duck delusional? Or just pattern recognition? Even if the most favorable explanation would somehow be the accurate one then its still intensely reasonable to reach the conclusion he did try to overturn the election. Trump gave everyone all the reason in the world to reach that conclusion
Last edited:
What? No, its not, its based on us having no information on any of that, and that in the absense of such information, someone is likelier to vote for the party they explicitly state they affiliate with, than for the party they do not.
Let me ask you this: when pollsters ask the population (the pop at large-- mostly voters) about their party affiliation before an election, do you expect the result to have no bearing on how those people will vote? Do you expect a voter to state, "i affiliate with the Republicans" to a pollster, then be exactly as likely to march into the polling booth to vote Democrat?
Or do you make an additional assumption about the propensity to entirely switch allegiance, of those who didn't vote, even though their reason is totally unknown to you, and may be trivial?
Last edited:
Absolutely rich, coming from a guy who regularly ascribes intent to anyone arguing with him.
It isn't remotely the most favorable reading on Trump's actions. Until you start mentioning the behavior of Democrats leading to those events, you haven't even hit the more favorable half of all possibilities.
Hades and I have interacted before. I am aware of Hades' previously stated stances. I assessed that Hades was playing devil's advocate based on that experience. Hades confirmed that I was correct about an hour before you made this comment.
I don't just ascribe intent however it suits me, I pay attention to what you all say.
No, but that is because I'm making the assumption that their opinions haven't changed, just like you are. But it's a much more reasonable assumption in the situation where nothing else has changed, and in the case of someone who was previously considered a non-voter but is now voting, we know that something has changed. Something has motivated them to vote, and because their previous party preference had not motivated them to vote, there's no reason to imagine that preference is involved. The most plausible assumption to me, and the one the voting data supports, is that the the newly motivated voter matches the people who were already voting.
Winning an election and having the audacity not to humor the great leader' desperate lies? That Democrat behavior?
Right, so like I said, its an additional assumption you're applying to those who did not take a certain action in the past. You have extrapolated a shift in affiliation from a change in behaviour. This is speculative to begin with: the latter does not necessarily imply the former, and you still have no meaningful data.
Then we have your willingness to entertain the possibility of shift away from their party, but not towards it. The party affiliation didn't compel them to vote before. Maybe they see more from the next candidate they like. Or maybe their preference has shifted further in line with the party. Or maybe their circumstances changed. This is all at least as feasible as the notion they entirely swapped.
Credulity, then.
There's no conspiratorial thinking required. From November 2020 to January 2021, Trump et al had been actively and openly campaigning to get the results of the 2020 election declared invalid and reversed practically nonstop since the instant they were declared. Hell, he still insists that the results were fraudulent apropos of nothing more than him wanting to believe it.
For goodness sake, in the months leading up to the election, Trump had declared - repeatedly, explicitly, and emphatically - that he would only accept the results as valid if he won and would reject them as invalid if he lost. And mind you, at that point his attitude of "Heads I win, tails declared invalid and called for heads instead" was already very well demonstrated as his go-to position for competitions, as seen in everything from the Emmys to the Republican caucuses in the primaries.
If that were the whole of it, it would have been dismissable as a spoiled brat's temper tantrum: unbecoming of someone his age and station, but well within his rights. But that's not where it ended, so instead that becomes evidence of mindset and intent behind the events that followed, such as the brazen chicanery afterwards to unlawfully alter the results of the election, such as seen in the Jeffery Clark Letter, and the Fake Electors plot as following the gameplan laid out in the Chesebro Memos. In the words of Powell when she was representing Trump's claims, "The entire election, frankly, in all the swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for Trump".
And the march on the Capital was pitched both in the planning for the event and the speech preceding it as the culmination of all that: the last chance to embolden Congressional Republicans to "do the right thing" and "take back our country" from the Democrats by rejecting the tabulated results and unilaterally declaring Trump the 'true' victor so that he could remain in office.
Hell, that same morning, Trump sent out that "States want to correct their votes, which they now know were based on irregularities and fraud, plus corrupt process never received legislative approval. All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN. Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!" Which is to say...the "Pence Card", the premise that Pence could unilaterally reject the votes for Biden from swing states by falsely declaring them to be invalid.
Pence's unwillingness to play ball in that scheme in turn became the impetus of the chants of "Hang Mike Pence", because - as far as Trump and his base were concerned - that constituted treason. See Watkins, for instance, tweeting that Pence was "orchestrating a coup against Trump" and linking to a blog calling for "the immediate arrest of [Pence], for treason."
During the speech just before the march, Trump made a point of griping that congressional republicans had not done enough to back up his claims of voter fraud, as if their failure to sycophantically champion the claim - despite the lack of evidence - was a betrayal. And even during the attack itself, Trump tweeted to egg on the mob that - and I quote - "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!" (referencing again, Pence's unwillingness to play along with the "Pence Card" part of the scheme and falsely reject the results as fraudulent, and telling Trump et al that what they were demanding he do would be would be unlawful). For goodness sake, event itself was called the "Stop the Steal Rally" followed by the "Save America March".
There was zero ambiguity that the point and purpose was to get Congress to - in Trump's words - "do the right thing" by unilaterally declaring Biden's win invalid, flipping the vote, and declaring Trump the victor. That was clear even before accounting for things like the Eastman Memos which spelled out the sleight of hand meant to provide the pretense under which to launder Team Trump's intended fraud.
But you want us to disregard all of those details about the storming of the Capital - the context, the build up, even its own stated purpose - and instead treat it as existing in a vacuum, with neither preamble nor purpose. And why? To insist that the criticism of it as attempting to overturn the result and keep Trump in power is necessarily "conspiratorial thinking" and that internal consistency would mandate that we derive similar conclusions from "any [other] demonstration that turned to a riot"? And that it was, in actuality, not substantively different than simple calls for recounts?
Come off it now. That doesn't even remotely resemble a good faith argument. It's a straight up dismissal of all relevant context and details in order to facilitate a false equivalence, claiming that two very different phenomenon are practically identical on the grounds that they have a commonality in an vague and abstract sense of being "dissatisfied with the election results" while pointedly ignoring context, scale, intent (in this case the retention of power through unlawful means that would then be treated as a fait accompli after it was accomplished), method, and consequences, despite those being essential differences. Hell, it openly equivocates between verifying the results - as in the case of a recount - and dictating that the results be declared invalid apropos of nothing and flipped outright - as in the case of Trump's demands.
You might as well be insisting that a grand larcenist shouldn't be accused of stealing because a discount hunter wouldn't be, claiming them to be functionally and legally equivalent by ignoring everything substantive about the actions and instead focusing exclusively on painting them as common abstractions of "they both didn't want to pay the full price for a product."
Last edited:
Trump is panicking and losing it even more. Impeach the monsters and arrest him.
I don't feel sorry for any of you. You all chose this.
I don't feel sorry for any of you. You all chose this.
Last edited:
No, in actuality, all of those details hammers down the point. You have evidence for all of those things that were done to try to maintain Trump's presidency, including the explicit understanding that the demonstration was encouraged to call on elected representatives to use their legally designated powers. We both know that they don't actually have those powers in Congress, but that was the premise, have a group of people at the Capitol calling for the electors not to be confirmed. Where in any of what you've presented is there even an inkling of a suggestion that Trump or his people the morning of January 6th were planning for people to break into the Capitol to try to install Trump as president by force.
That's Hades version of events, that Trump had "the capitol stormed to force himself into an office". That's the conspiratorial thinking. You've got all those notes and methods listed they they tried to challenge the election through the legal levers of governance, which is what you're supposed to do if you want to enact change specifically because those systems don't allow him to just install himself in office. People characterizing the riot as an attempt at a violent coup aren't leaving open the ambiguity to mean "well, he inspired violence with his rhetoric against the election", they're saying that he planned the storming of the Capitol as an attempted violent otherthrow of the US government. Which would be incredibly stupid, but even if you think he's really that stupid as to try that, where's the evidence? You've got all those things in writing for the ways they attempted to legally challenge and overturn the outcome, so where's the memo that told people to attack Congress? Did not a single person in that crowd have a piece of evidence to show they were being ordered to do that? That's where it becomes "conspiratorial thinking".
That is not accurate. I have said repeatedly, the people who start voting have a tendency to match the other people who were already voting. If a great Democratic candidate comes along and inspires a landslide, those previous nonvoters may very well vote more strongly Democratic than previous polling suggested. Their votes still would not be logically connected to the opinions of nonvoters.
Multiple totally inappropriate impeachment attempts, spying on his campaign, laundering opposition research into an FBI investigation, encouraging their supporters to mob up outside the White House where people committed arson and the Democrats mocked Trump for allegedly being in a bunker while things were being set on fire just outside the fence. Using unfair election rules to tip the scales against him and create the circumstances where people question the elections legitimacy. His actions were immature and ineffectual, but his ire was justified.
And every single tactic Trump used in 2020-2021 to try to overturn the election, he learned from watching Democrats in the 20 years prior. Every single one.