“Donald Trump may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. When he claims that ‘nobody’ showed up at a 10,000 person Harris-Walz rally in Michigan that was live-streamed and widely covered by the media, that it was all AI, and that Democrats cheat all of the time, there is a method to his madness,” Sanders said in a statement.
“Clearly, and dangerously, what Trump is doing is laying the groundwork for rejecting the election results if he loses,” he added. “If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be hard to convince them that the election returns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere are ‘fake’ and ‘fraudulent.’”
[…]
“This is what destroying faith in institutions is about. This is what undermining democracy is about. This is what fascism is about,” he said of Trump’s campaign falsehoods. “This is why we must do everything we can to see that Trump is defeated.”
Bernie continues to espouse truth.
Except for the “Trump is not stupid” part.
Stupid is a stupid does, and smart is just the ability to efficiently accomplish your objectives with the resources available to you.
I would argue that Trump is smart in that he has managed to, with limited intellectual, strategic, or character resources pull off one of the largest con jobs in American history.
He doesn’t want to do good for America, he wants to do good for himself and has achieved heretofore not possible levels of graft and extortion and all of this without facing any real consequences himself.
He’s not a good man, He’s not an intelligent man, but he is a smart monster. He not an imbecile, he’s not witless, but he is a stupid business man.
Trump proves that you can be stupid and smart at the same time because they can apply to different qualities of a person.
He is undeniably a bad American.
True. I’d qualify him as more manipulative than intelligent though, but I guess you can be smart at being manipulative. I’m not sure he’s even that because he’s just been afforded every opportunity in his life to take the most advantage of being manipulative so if he was not a millionaire by birth, I don’t think he would be anywhere near as good at it.
He’s good at subconsciously transmitting divisive/extremist messages with such “genuine innocence/ignorance” (not sure about this word, but he seems to be genuinely unaware of when he is lying) that other susceptible people absorb subconsciously too. It does not go through the rational part of the brain, so this is not about being stupid, being stupid probably helps him be genuine when he makes the most blatant lies, unlike JD.
He was born rich, all the stuff he does is because he got started on third base and even then lost it all.
His saving grace was him being entertaining, not intelligent.
You don’t give him enough credit.
He didn’t just lose it all, until the presidential graft, he had lost a couple orders of magnitude more money than the substantial fortune he inherited.
Read about his past, he lost it all and then made the apprentice which he only could do because he was famous.
…and he only got that job because of how hard up for cash he was after somehow managing to lose money on a casino.
In the world of business Donald Trump is boldly pioneering the frontier of incompetence.
Lots of people are saying it. Everyday someone comes to me to say Donald Trump is an amazing loser of money. Big strong men come to me in tears saying No one can lose money quite as confidently as Trump, (with the possible exceptions of Cathie Woods and Elon Musk).
There is a difference between intelligence and low cunning.
Trump has the latter, not the former.
I will always cherish my time volunteering for him.
He offers very little in the way of remedy.
What do you do in a country with a two party system when one party is openly caught trying to cheat the election results? What do you do when that party loses and then accuses the other party of doing the same? What do you do with the millions of Americans who don’t trust the winning party to lead?
The Dems’ answer seems to be capitulation. Give Republicans what they want to demonstrate bipartisanship. Put Republicans in your cabinet. Cherry pick “the good Republicans” and pretend they represent the secret heart of the rival party. Then compromise away every piece of legislation that becomes the subject of right wing hysterics.
How do you govern like this? How do you govern in a country where one party can break the law with impunity absent any consequences? How do you govern when breaking the law gets your opposition rewarded whether or not you win on election day?
This is why turnout matters. If enough people vote against Trump the mandate will restore faith in the election results. Harris/Waltz need to win with a clear mandate. If not we will still be dealing with MAGA going forward.
If enough people vote against Trump
“We need to score 3 points for every 1 they make in order to win” is a rickety formula for success. It assumes you can run up the score every season and doesn’t question what happens when you lose.
We are ~11 weeks from Election Day. What do you propose we do?
This is what we have in front of us. We can’t get upset about what could be or would’ve been. It’s mid-august 2024, time’s up.
I don’t actually know. But what I do know is that the GOP is recruiting 100,000 election “observers” (read: saboteurs) and we’re gonna need way more tactics beyond just turnout to counter that!
I completely agree but also remember that they have no power and have to keep a certain distance. They do anything funny don’t even engage them. Report them immediately. Especially if they are wearing any Trump merch. Easy to accuse them of campaigning too close to a polling location.
They did the same shit in 2020 and 2022. Gotta be vigilant.
This is what we have in front of us. We can’t get upse
We can and we should
While also remembering to stop the bleeding any way possible(vote), even though we’re upset that we haven’t built the hospital yet, or trained the doctors.
Are we having a serious discussion or not?
Its what we got. Win here and then throw out FPTP immediately. We can’t change how voting works right this instance, Varuca.
Win here and then throw out FPTP immediately.
Uh huh
The Right intends to play fuck around with the election.
“How could the Democrats do this?”
Go home Russian propaganda.
It’s not enough conseqences, but it’s not none: https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-capitol-rioters-jailed-sentences-january-6-1826075
That is a list of disgusting America hating criminals and all patriots should revile their names as long as they live.
And long in to history. Absolutely.
He offers very little in the way of remedy.
Uhh huh
You seem to be ignoring the obvious here, this is intentional. The Democratic party leadership actually wants the same as the old Republicans. It’s just that the Overton Window has shifted so far to the right that we no longer see actual Left views to compare against anymore.
And both parties are fine with using social issues to mask everything else because those are always in your face and easy to take a side one way or the other, and the two-party system excels at that.
It’s always possible to go further left, but I think being pro-union, anti-trust, pro-regulation, pro-equality, pro-school meals is far enough left to qualify as left in the historical US political spectrum, no?
The Democratic party leadership actually wants the same as the old Republicans.
Careful, you’ll get called a Putinista Wumao Trump Bot Account for saying things like this.
And both parties are fine with using social issues to mask everything else
Social issues tend to be the symptom of underlaying economic issues. They’re just easier to talk about, because we can frame the discussion as “opportunity” and “freedom” rather than “economic restructuring” and “wealth redistribution”.
No warning necessary. This is guaranteed.
Trump will of course deny it.
He didn’t even accept the vote totals when he won in 2016. I don’t think there’s any result where he doesn’t attack faith in democracy.
Calling out bullshit before the bullshitter performs the bullshit might help people see the patterns of Trumps behaviour.
It’s worse than just laying the groundwork to make a claim. Much worse. Republicans have been installing MAGA zealots in key positions getting ready to tie up the election until SCOTUS steps in and hands Trump the win as they did with Bush in 2000.
Rolling Stone identified at least 70 election officials around the country that are 2020 election deniers. In addition, 3 of the 5 member Georgia Board of Elections are election denying Trump supporters that are already changing rules to allow and support challenges this November. Trump called out all three by name at a rally there and one was even in the front row and briefly spoke at the rally.
Not only that, but pretty much every countermeasure you could take to stop them would be twisted by them as “evidence” that they were right in the first place.
It’s like the 100,000 election “observers” (read: saboteurs) they’re recruiting: the role of an election observer is to raise objections in case of problems. But if they’re going to fraudulently raise objections to nonexistent problems, there’s no counter to that. You can’t just get another 100,000 election observers from the other party to try to stop them, because their role is also to raise objections. There’s no such thing as an observer actively not-raising a not-objection. It’s an asymmetric tactic in the MAGA fascists’ favor.
Yes. It’s going to get ugly. I’m hoping it’s a huge blowout for Harris but even then, Trump’s cult will deny reality and react violently.
The scariest part for me is SCOTUS helping Trump get away with it. I worry that there are too many Americans who are too comfortable/stupid/in denial to fully appreciate the long-term implications of what’s happening, and that the thin veneer of legitimacy a corrupt SCOTUS could give a Trump coup would stop them from doing what would need to be done.
Of course he fucking is, he’s still denying the last one.
Why is it that blatantly lying about your political opponent and actively spreading clear disinformation that is easily reputable isn’t penalized?
And I don’t want like “cuz capitalism” zero effort responses, I’m wanting to know from an actual legal complexity standpoint what would go wrong if this was made illegal.
The fact it’s so clearly provably as a false claim by countless directions, it should be an open and shut “you spread obvious disinformation” and at least a notable slap on the wrist should occur each time.
Why can a candidate just go and openly lie and say whatever without penalty, legally? Shouldn’t this be under something like Libel, defamation, etc?
Shouldn’t Kamala’s crew be able to take Trump to court right now for defamation?
Their mob also does not believe trial by jury either now. they discredited the executive branch with trump, the legislative branch with the stunts in congress, the judicial branch with the supreme court, Cannon and his NY trial so now there is no taboo left to break to question an election without a massive potential for convolution. What Bernie is saying is not what people say is obvious.
What he is saying is prepare, trump-proof, harden and diversify your election integrity verification methods, because this time maga knows what it’s doing.
What could go wrong when you have a law on the books like that is the people in power will enforce it based on their concept of truth, not yours. The libel laws are the way they are currently because lawmakers and courts have, so far, chosen to err on the side of encouraging speech. Letting anyone say anything they want about politicians is probably better than limiting political speech, because, in the wrong hands, limits on political speech can be very dangerous.
Then there’s the classic “you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater if there is no fire” example. Maybe that could apply to knowing purveyors of disinformation, but you’d have to prove that they know what they are saying is false, and they intend harm. That’s a very high burden of proof, but if you can prove both of those then there’s a case for fraud.
you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater if there is no fire
This SCOTUS case has been largely overturned. It’s from Schenck v. United States, a case involving people distributing fliers to draft age men during WW1 encouraging them to resist the draft. The ruling was narrowed in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) to only allow free speech restrictions based on imminent harm, not just making the government a little uncomfortable.
The specific example of causing a stampede in a crowded theater could be criminalized as imminent harm. Speaking of that specific scenario, apparently it had come up because there had been multiple deadly stampedes in crowded theaters from false alarms. I wonder if now we would not have that. People have been trained from childhood to evacuate a building in an orderly fashion.
it has nothing to do with capitalism, the issue is freedom of speech is one of our most heavily protected rights in the constitution. winning a law suit over speech is extremely difficult. Even if it is a blatant lie you have to prove concrete damages to the victim.
What could go wrong if it was made illegal is what if the opposite was true and there was no one there? With how easily “evidence” can be fabricated It could easily devolve into “believe my truth or be punished”
“The only shared reality that society is allowed to have is Trump’s subjective interpretation of reality.”
The crazy part is, that MAGAts want Trump to be the sole source of truth probably more than even Trump does.
One fair thing to do would be to let them to live with each other and eat each others’ faces until they want to come back to a “realer” world.
He did last time too.
And people still deny it to this day.
He also denied the results in 2016 when he won because he didn’t win by whatever margin he thought he deserved.
He likes to deny that he lost the popular vote.
gearing up? They never stopped rigging even while getting smacked down after the last election.
If Harris wins, there will be another, more successful contest, another coup attempt, they’ll be calling for civil war.
It is his only choice now. He will lose the election, and all of the swing states will not certify it.
Is this not just taken for granted? It’s as certain as the sun rising tomorrow.
Nobody is surprised by it, and we can only hope the infrastructure is in place to properly defend against it when the time comes.
We know. Same monkeys, same circus.
Sorry to pick you, but for all the people saying this is nothing new, what are you expecting will happen if he loses? Same as in 2020 and he’ll be gone?
With Democrats in control of the Senate and White House during the transition, and such a narrow margin of Republican control in the House, I can’t really see how denying the election results without court-admissible evidence ends with Trump in power. That said, it could still result in violence.
It will result in violence, that’s going to cause problems. Also, weakening faith in our institutions, and voting processes is very problematic for the long term.
Violence kicks the issue to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court – now packed with not only a fascist majority, but with no less than three of them having worked on Bush’s side of Bush v. Gore! – coronates Trump.
Nothing in that article suggests that the violence was what kicked it to the Supreme Court, and I don’t think that’s a sound assumption to make. If their plan is to replicate 2000, they’re putting in a lot of work that will hinge on a very unlikely situation.
They’re trying to do the Brooks Brothers Riot, Jan 6, and brand-new tactics all at once.
I think one idea this time is to have enough states not certify the results to force a vote for president where each state gets a single vote. Since there are more Republican states they vote in Trump. Not sure what safeguards there are against states that decide not to certify even if they don’t have proof, or what role courts play in that scenario.
The thing is, that was the plan in 2020, and the reason it didn’t happen was because Pence was supposed to refuse to count the electoral college due to the “confusion” caused by the fake electors. He’d then call for the “1 vote per state” sham. Now, Kamala Harris is in charge of that process.
I thought states needed to certify before it got to Congress? This would be not sending any results period so the VP isn’t involved yet. Least that’s my understanding.
Well there’s nothing in the constitution or law that says “if the electoral college is too gunked up to work, we go to a single vote per state.” The Electoral Count Act of 1887 lays out rules for how it’s supposed to be done. The plan in 2020 was for Mike Pence to claim the ECA was unconstitutional and throw it to a 1 vote per state assembly, since the extra (fake) electors from some states were muddying the waters. He didn’t do it because his lawyers and advisors convinced him that he didn’t have that power under the law.
I’m no expert, but it seems like best they can do by refusing to certify at the state level is probably just to slow things down. There’s really no viable way that gumming up the works will end with Trump in the White House without having actually won.
According to Wikipedia a candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win, if no one gets 270 votes then it goes to the other vote. All I’m saying is one avenue I’ve read about is they are trying to have enough people in place to ensure the Democratic candidate can’t get the electoral votes to win to force the house to vote by not certifying their states’s results.
I’m not saying it’s likely or possible, that’s beyond my knowledge of the process so I really have no clue, but that’s slightly different than the VP not certifying the votes though it’s the same end result.
Duh
Oh we know, Bernie. He’s been framing (and gradually amplifying) that narrative for months now.
