Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Trump endorses Scarface, Hannibal Lecter, and hot dogs — and disses Bruce Springsteen in New Jersey. #ACloserLook pic.twitter.com/XtLP7TH7hv

— Late Night with Seth Meyers (@LateNightSeth) May 14, 2024

James Fallows has a fascinating analysis of that weird rally last Saturday:

Among Donald Trump’s virtues is that he does not drink. That is useful to remember in considering his current speaking style. On Saturday night Deb and I sat through the nearly two-hour entirety of his rally performance at Wildwood, on the Jersey shore, as televised by Fox. The whole thing is archived here, courtesy of Right Side Broadcasting.

To me this version of Trump sounded genuinely different from the crowd-pleasing showman who rode televised rallies to success (and big audiences for the cable outlets) in 2015 and 2016. Maybe it’s just that his material is now so familiar and tired. Maybe it’s that Trump has nearly exhausted the “what will he say next??” Evel Knievel-style suspense and excitement of his live shows. Maybe it’s that he goes on at such length. Whatever: the result is less “outrageous” than … boring.

It could also be that there is something more visibly wrong with him. In his interview last month with Eric Cortellessa of Time, Trump came across as extreme and under-informed, but more or less coherent sentence-by-sentence. In New Jersey two nights ago, he came across as the kind of person you’d move away from in an airport or at a bar. The kind of person you’d assume to be drunk if you didn’t know he teetotaled, or you’d think was in other ways disturbed.

I have not made a single political prediction since dismissing Trump’s chances in 2015. But I find it hard to picture the voter who—if not already a member of the MAGA minority—will get a fresh look at today’s Trump and think: Yeah, I’d like the next few years of news to be all about this! Jerry Brown told me years ago that shrewd politicians know that the public doesn’t always want to hear from them. Less is more. This is not Trump’s approach.

No kidding…

I have been saying that people actually need to see more of this lunacy and Fallows agrees. You have to see it to believe it.

He goes on:

Here are just a few samples of what Trump said this weekend. As far as I can see, they went unmentioned in mainstream stories about the event. (“That’s just Trump.”)

-Trump claimed at the start of the speech that “over 100,000 people” were there. “You can’t even see the end of the crowd.” Fox had earlier placed the attendance at “thousands” and, briefly, at “tens of thousands.” A huge crowd for a beach event would have been around 30,000.

-More than an hour into his talk, Trump said: “You guys! Not a single person has left.” Photos from that time showed that most of the crowd had long since bailed. (The screenshot below is from a Xitter video by Zac Anderson, showing the thinning crowd.)

-He riffed at length about hot dogs. Some parts of the speech included “policy points” and details; these Trump was obviously reading, reluctant-schoolboy style, from a prompter. But whenever a point struck him as interesting he would light up and freewheel into an aside like this one.

The hotdog section was a fair sample of his improvisations. This is my best effort at a cleaned-up transcription. What’s below was all part of the same continuous passage, with nothing cut out:

Hotdogs, let’s talk about hotdogs. I just had one actually. I just had one. It was very good. I hope it was. You know it was very good.

Frank Sinatra told me a long time ago, never eat before you perform. I said I’m not performing. I’m a politician. If you can believe it, I hate to be called a politician. I like ‘I’m a businessman’ much better. But I guess I’m a politician.

Because we did great in 2016. We did much better in 2020 A lot better. We had millions more of votes. So I guess, and this time, and I will say this, this spirit that we have this time blows both of them away. You know why?

Because you still like me. But you saw what the alternative is. The alternative. It’s just, the alternative is not a good thing.

But I just had the best hot dog, so I said, Frank, I’m sorry.

Now Pavarotti was a good friend. [Out of the blue,] He didn’t have that same. He ate all the time. He didn’t care.

But I just had a hot dog and it was very good. So the price of hot dogs is up 22%, chicken’s up 32%. Hamburgers are up 37%. That’s why I had the hot dog. It went up the least.

Eggs are up 50%, gasoline’s up 50%. Bacon is up 79% Bacon! That’s why I don’t have bacon anymore. So expensive. Not one thing is cheaper.

There’s not one thing anywhere, there’s not one item that’s cheaper. Energy is way up. That’s what caused the problem.

-The whole speech was like this. And I’m not even getting into the parts about Hannibal Lecter. Again, think if you encountered a person like this on the street. Also, remember the front-page coverage Joe Biden got for saying “President of Mexico” rather than “President of Egypt.”

-OK, here is one other part. It’s about how Joe Biden is no longer up to the job. I’m presenting it as one long paragraph, verbatim, because that is how it came across:

“He [Biden] doesn’t know what the hell he is saying. Don’t forget, he can’t put two sentences together. He can’t find the stairs off the stage. Let’s see this stage when I’m finished. I got stairs there. I got stairs there. I got a nice ramp there. I got stairs. If it got really dangerous, I could jump off the front. You ever seen him when he’s finished? He finishes the speech which usually lasts about a minute and a half. And he always goes like this [looking around] and then he doesn’t know where he goes. But you know we have great people. Secret Service, they always run up on the stage and they lead him off the stage. But he wants to let our tax cuts expire. And I don’t do that anyway. You know I don’t imitate him anymore. Because I called my wife, our great First Lady, and I said: First Lady [he actually said this], we had a big speech. By the way, not as many people as this! This is like big record stuff on television. Even from the haters. They said this may be the biggest rally they’ve ever seen, a political rally.”

As Fallows notes, we’ve all heard nonsense like this from dementia patients or the drunk guy at the end of the bar. But why in the hell do so many people want that rambling loon to be president of the United States again?

The Bulwark is featuring a fascinating piece today about Trump and fascism, a very urgent topic:

IN THE INITIAL, HEADY DAYS after Joe Biden’s 2020 victory over Donald Trump, many public commentators played down Trump’s threats of not leaving the White House quietly, with some outright dismissing concerns about his electoral lies.

Others, though, saw Trump for exactly who he was—and his actions for exactly what they were, even from the outset. One of those discerning voices was Federico Finchelstein, a professor at the New School who studies the history and dissemination of fascism. Just a few days into Trump’s refusal to concede, Finchelstein authored an op-ed in the Washington Post linking Trump directly to a series of previous authoritarians who clung to power, helping introduce Americans to the term auto-golpe (self-coup). It was one of the most prescient pieces of analysis of America’s post-election troubles—vindicated especially on January 6th, when Trump helped sic insurrectionists set on violently overturning the election results.

Now, Finchelstein has a new book out on the topic, focusing on what makes Trump, and the other budding autocrats rising alongside him, so dangerous. In so doing, Finchelstein hopes to cut through some of the definitional clutter of what Trump was, and still is. Trump is not, as his supporters would have him, simply a populist. But given his failures on January 6th and afterward to cling to power, he’s also not a classic fascist, at least as popularly understood. He is, rather, something else—something can be found in the title of Finchelstein’s book: The Wannabe Fascists.

[…]

Fascism, for Finchelstein, is “a global ideology with separate national movements and regimes,” an ideology whose “primary aim” is “to destroy democracy from within in order to create a modern dictatorship from above.” Implementing a “divine, messianic, and charismatic form of leadership that conceived of the leader as organically linked to the people and the nation,” fascism broadly “aimed to create a new and epochal world order through . . . extreme political violence and war.” With four primary characteristics—political violence, propaganda, xenophobia, and ultimate dictatorship—fascism took root around the world throughout the twentieth century, beyond just places like Mussolini’s Rome or Hitler’s Berlin.

Read the whole thing if you can. It’s fascinating. He says that MAGA and Trump fit the criteria in three ways, and I think you can see what they are: political violence, propaganda and xenophobia. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. Obviously, the fourth is dictatorship and Trump is just a few votes in a couple of swing states away from achieving that.

There’s much more to this analysis, however, and it’s terrifying.

“Why Hannibal Lecter?”

And has a thing for “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” a “wonderful man.” What a catch!

Cohen will be back to testify before this goes live, so I’m bailing. Enjoy.

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Who do we wish to be?

In conversation at The Ink, Eddie Glaude, Jr., Princeton professor of African American studies, ponders, in essence, “Who do we take ourselves to be?” in the wake of 50 years of Reaganism, Thatcherism, neoliberalism. That framework is collapsing. What kind of society have we created?

Madison and others insisted on the importance of character, that we had to be certain kinds of persons in order for democracy to work. And this 50-year run has exacerbated some of the distortions in what makes us who we are. We’ve always dealt with the dangerous and disfiguring effects of white supremacy, of patriarchy, of class ideology. But over the last 50 years, they’ve congealed in a particular sort of way.

For democracy to work, we have to admit that we have to become better people. If we are the leaders that we’ve been looking for, then we have to become better people. And if we’re going to be better people, we have to build a more just world, because the world as it’s currently organized actually distorts our sense of self, our relationship with each other.

Glaude considers the intractability of prejudice in a social system with roots in slavery.

Reaganism rode the backlash to greater equality for marginalized Americans that accelerated in the second half of the 20th century. It might be trite by now to cite, “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression,” but it’s clear some of those formerly more privileged Americans are now aggrieved Americans. And less American for it. The progressive era sense of American purpose, of governing for the common good, has been rejected for the zero-sum view Heather McGhee described in “The Sum of Us,” intended to preserve historical stratification Elizabeth Wilkerson outlined in “Caste.”

Thus, it’s not just Reaganism breaking down, but the ties that once bound the country together, however imperfectly and inequitably. It’s one thing to wistfully imagine a more perfect union. It’s another to grapple with sharing it with people unlike yourself in a society that looks very different from the one in which you grew up.

And you knew who you were then
girls were girls and men were men

Those are real challenges. Practical challenges. There is a budding fascist movement springing from those anxieties that we cannot wish away among people who would rather break the country than share it. The kinds of people Madison thought necessary for a stable democracy have been depleted like the icecaps.

Rolling coal on America

Michele Goldberg has noticed:

John McEntee — who started out carrying Donald Trump’s bags and rose to become, in the chaotic final days of Trump’s presidency, his most important enforcer — has a TikTok account. In a video he published last week, he explains how he likes to keep “fake Hollywood money” in his car to give to homeless people. “Then when they go to use it, they get arrested, so I’m actually like helping clean up the community,” he said.

With his boyish face and slicked-back hair, McEntee, the former director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel and a man likely to be central to staffing a future Trump administration, comes off a lot like Patrick Bateman, the homicidal investment banker played by Christian Bale in the 2000 film “American Psycho.” The clip’s smug villainy, I think, offers a clue to why South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, thirsty for a bigger role in MAGA world, might have thought she could ingratiate herself by bragging about killing a puppy.

Right wingers often rain contempt on what they call virtue signaling, a performative kind of sanctimony epitomized by the “In This House” yard signs that once dotted progressive neighborhoods. Partly in response, they’ve developed what’s sometimes called vice signaling, the defiant embrace of cruelty and disdain for social norms. Think of “rolling coal,” the practice of modifying diesel engines to make them belch dark exhaust in an effort to trigger environmentalists, or the way George Santos’s promiscuous falsehoods endeared him to hard-core MAGA acolytes.

They wave American flags with a kind of Pythonesque “French taunters” flair. Thuggish displays of dominance stand in for statesmanship even among what Republicans now consider leaders and Madison might have considered barbarians.

In a show of force, Donald Trump summoned a gaggle of them to his Manhattan trial on Monday, the day former Trump thug Michael Cohen arrived to tesify against him. With Trump facing jail for further violations of his gag order, Sens. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) and Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) arrived to attack Cohen outside the courtroom.

I was a professional engineer, a PE. I’ve worked with PEs who were useless and PhDs who were clueless. Credentials do not impress me. Nor does it impress me that people with degrees from Princeton, Harvard and Yale — Vance, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and others — threaten the republic from titled positions in Congress and on the U.S. Supreme Court. Nominally, they support the constitution they swore an oath to defend. In reality, they mean to renounce any application of the law to themselves or their sovereign now on trial.

Glaude considers what we must do in response:

I use this phrase in the book over and over again, “close to the ground,” and this is really coming out of my reading of Ms. Ella Baker. We have to understand the problems that are right in front of us. The local becomes the space where we do this work, right in our communities, where we are. So we can have this fight over education in our communities. We can have this fight, understanding that elections are important, but elections are really just one moment in the hard work that democracy requires of us. Part of what Ms. Baker taught is that those problems are right in front of our noses, and all we need to do is stop looking to D.C. and look where we are.

We have to be better people, better than the kind simply invested in securing power for power’s sake. Freedom? Liberty? They are mere shibboleths on the right, things to be individually hoarded not used to secure a more perfect union or for the common pursuit of happiness.

To overcome where we are we must recommit to who we want to be as Americans. What’s scary is who some of us are and like it.

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By a 24 pt margin, voters under the age of 30 say they trust Trump more to deal with Israel/Gaza, a wider margin than any other group.

What exactly do they think Trump will do there? https://t.co/Yv5P2gkTZI

— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) May 13, 2024

Here’s one thing he has in mind:

Not voting for Biden is a vote for Trump https://t.co/82Eqec1wXj

— Mueller, She Wrote (@MuellerSheWrote) May 12, 2024

Mother Jones reports:

The comments come amid Republican-led efforts to brand all anti-war protesters as supporters of terrorism and a continued push to criminalize protest. 

Last week, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) re-upped an effort he first made last fall to deport protesters who have “endorsed or espoused the terrorist activities of Hamas” or other anti-Israel terrorist organizations. Rubio wrote a letter to the secretaries of the State and Homeland Security departments to initiate “expedited deportation proceedings” for participants in “antisemitism and pro-Hamas protests.” Earlier this month, Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R-Tx.) introduced what her office calls the “Hamas Supporters Have No Home Here Act,” which would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to allow for the deportation of people “charged with any crime related to their participation in pro-terrorism or antisemitism rallies or demonstrations.”  […]

Some of those on the right condemning all anti-war protesters have gone beyond calling for enforcement. Last month, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said people “who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic” should “take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way.” (He later claimed he wasn’t endorsing violence.) And earlier this month, Cotton introduced a bill called the “No Bailouts for Campus Criminals Act” that would make anyone convicted of a crime in connection with a campus protest ineligible for student loan relief.

These young people aren’t “woke” enough if they actually believe that racist piece of work Donald Trump and his henchmen will be better for Palestinians or anyone else. It’s insane.

The new NY Times’Sienna poll (gift link) has the entire political world besides themselves with excitement because it shows Trump winning in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. (The other swing states are essentially tied.)

Maybe it’s right and Biden is fucked in the sunbelt and the south. Other polls aren’t showing this but as we all know the only poll that seems to matter to the cognoscenti is this one and it therefore influences the narrative that Biden is toast. In reality, almost all the polls are showing the race tightening with Biden gaining ground.

Simon Rosenberg also keeps pointing out that their poll and some of the others continue to poll registered voters rather than likely voters (people who have voted in the past) which are showing, in these current snapshots, Biden winning narrowly. Maybe all these new voters are champing at the bit to come out and vote but I have to say I’d find that surprising. 2020 had a gigantic turnout, mostly because everyone was still in the throes of the pandemic and paying attention to politics. I’m not sure that’s true today.

Anyway, I stand by my standard disclaimer about early polling and the fact that whatever they say, it’s going to be trench warfare in the swing states. Granted, that freaks me out because it means that Trump could win which is a horrifying prospect. But it doesn’t mean he will win.

A love story? That’s doubtful

In court today, Michael Cohen testified:

COHEN BOMBSHELL TESTIMONY: Trump said to delay payment to Stormy Daniels until after the election because the story wasn’t relevant if he won and if he lost: “I really don’t care.” He didn’t care about Melania, noting that he wouldn’t be on the market long. pic.twitter.com/kpd5mZj4Tj

— Kristy Greenberg (@KGreenberg_) May 13, 2024

He also said that it was Melania who came up with the “it was locker room talk” talking point after the Access Hollywood tape.

Yeah, it’s a real love story.

Get a load of this bs from the NY Times:

Donald Trump sat silent, stone-faced and staring straight ahead as he listened to the intimate details in Stormy Daniels’s testimony on Tuesday, closing his eyes at times in an apparent attempt to maintain his composure.

But there was one moment when he lost it — when Ms. Daniels recounted asking Mr. Trump about his wife, Melania Trump, and recalled that he told her they didn’t “even sleep in the same room.” From the defense table Mr. Trump shook his head in disgust and muttered “bullshit” loud enough that he drew a rebuke from the judge, who called his actions “contemptuous.”

Mr. Trump has a great deal of experience sending a specific message to his intended audience — whether on television, at rallies, through social media or in the Oval Office. His intended audience, on Tuesday and throughout the trial, is the jury. And whether his emotion in that moment was authentic or strategic, the message to the jury seemed pretty clear: How dare she talk about my family?

Uhm, no. He was upset because it implied that he wasn’t getting any from Melania. It was much more like that time Marco Rubio ribbed him ab out his hand size and he blurted out in a debate that his dick is big. That’s what he cares about.

As with every other relationship in his life, his marriage is purely transactional. And she’s fine with it.

Nothing can shake them

Here was Trump’s economy in 2020. Massive unemployment, food lines, tens of thousands of deaths with no end in sight.

Four years ago today, as millions of Americans were jobless

Q: Do you agree that economic stimulus should move forward?

Trump: I don’t know. It depends. They want to be able to make sure that Republicans can’t win an election pic.twitter.com/3ay6mRLZ68

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) May 13, 2024

He only cares about himself. And they love him for it. They love him so, so much

Michael Tomasky took a look at this issue today and it’s mind-boggling:

Politico and Morning Consult asked respondents a series of questions about all the major economic legislation Biden has signed. Majorities know little or nothing at all about the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS act, the American Rescue Plan, and the Inflation Reduction Act. And get this: While 40 percent said Biden has done more than Trump on infrastructure, 37 percent said Trump had done more. In January, NBC found that Trump has a 22-point advantage over Biden on the question of whom voters trust more with the economy—up 15 points from the same poll in 2020.  

How can this possibly be? Fine, we know that most people pay scant attention to politics. But even scant attention should produce some knowledge. I pay scant attention to pop culture events aimed at people younger than I am, but even I know that Drake and Kendrick Lamar are fighting and that Kendrick appears to have public opinion on his side. Stuff seeps through.

It’s not just Fox, unfortunately:

As for the mainstream, “liberal” media, they’ll report on these things, but they’ll usually do so in a way that gives plenty of space to views from Republicans like Rubio. Read, for example, this Associated Press report on Biden’s Wisconsin visit. Its first half is largely positive toward Biden. But then it quotes RNC Chair Michael Whatley and the Wisconsin House Republican in whose district the event occurred and describes what Trump was up to that day. 

Yes, the AP, and all mainstream journalism, is supposed to be balanced. But it’s also supposed to be accurate. Whatley was quoted as saying, in part, that “manufacturing has stalled, and family farms are shuttering,” as if these things are Biden’s fault. Actually, manufacturing jobs are higher under Biden than Trump, which it took me about four seconds to ascertain. And while the family farm is in decline, it has been for many years: There are a lot of reasons for this, several of them centered around the lobbying power of corporate agribusiness.

Trump voters know all this they just won’t admit it because they adore Trump. It’s really that simple. So it’s all about that small slice of the electorate that’s persuadable and they are mostly the people who aren’t paying close attention and are simply floating on the zeitgeist created by the media that says Trump is this vital man articulating the outrages of our time while Biden is an old, tired, cipher plodding along with a bunch of boring policies. It’s possible that Biden can reach some of them by relentlessly pushing the economic argument and hoping that local media will make up for the lack of national attention. But there’s little guarantee that any traditional approach will work in this environment.

There are also a few persuadable Republicans who care about abortion rights, democracy and are upset that Trump is a criminal but many of them are women and they are under pressure from people around them to vote the straight GOP ticket. There is no doubt the campaign is going to be focusing on them like a laser. They are key and the economic argument could have an effect in combination with the rest of the agenda.

It’s depressing to read that comment from the Wisconsin voter in the screenshot at the top. The guy knows Biden did it. He just loves Trump so much that nothing Biden could do for him personally will shake him. This is not about politics or government. It’s a cult and they worship Donald Trump. I don’t think they can be deprogrammed.

Tommy Tuberville attacks the jurors, suggesting they aren’t American citizens, and says they’re putting Trump through “mental anguish” pic.twitter.com/Bil7KTs9st

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) May 13, 2024

Tuberville: We have a courtroom that is the most depressing thing I've ever been in. Mental anguish is trying to be pushed on the Republican candidate for the president of the united States pic.twitter.com/F7X3rjCvdD

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 13, 2024

Tuberville: I'm disappointed in the courtroom. I'm hearing Mr. Trump, Mr. Trump. He is former President Trump. Give him some respect. pic.twitter.com/unQyPayPJx

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 13, 2024

This obviously coordinated “mental anguish” and “torture” line seems like a double edged sword to me. Plenty of Americans have been involved with the legal system and those who haven’t have seen trials, both real and fictional, portrayed on television for years. They’ve even been exposed to the Manhattan courts in the “Law and Order” series for decades. They know what this process looks like. Saying Trump, the alleged alpha male, is being tortured by having to endure it isn’t exactly a compliment. If it’s true then someone needs to tell Trump to man up. His surrogates are making him sound like a wimp.

But if the shoe fits…

Watching Trump fall asleep is something else. He’s almost got a routine down to make us think he’s not asleep. He’ll nod off, then lift his head, shift side to side as though he’s paying attention, then he’ll doze off again. It’s kind of funny that he seems so confident that he’s…

— Mueller, She Wrote (@MuellerSheWrote) May 13, 2024

Oh, and by the way, Tuberville going after the jury is really something. That guy is brain damaged — and evil.

It’s not going to be pretty

The mainstream press has finally turned its focus to what a second Donald Trump administration will look like should he win the White House in 2024. Salon has been covering this since Trump first flew off to Mar-a-Lago in 2021 and it was obvious that unless something happened to his health, Trump would be the 2024 nominee and the rest of the GOP would be developing a multi-faceted program to grant themselves unlimited power. None of this was anything but predictable once we saw what they were capable of during the post election period of 2020 and the events of January 6th.

The mainstream media has caught up and over the past few months has produced in-depth features and front page articles on the new MAGAfied Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Schedule F, Agenda 47 and the details within all of those and other plans which reveal an authoritarian, anti-democratic crackdown on Americans’ rights and a full rollback of safety regulations and vital programs. The proposals for foreign policy and national security are even more horrifying. Trump is as narcissistic as ever and his motives remain purely personal but he’s got a full crew of authoritarian lackeys ready to take the wheel who are prepared to serve him well as they transform the United States into a full-blown autocracy for their own purposes.

So kudos to the media for doing what they need to do. Informing the public of Trumps plans should he win is job one. But we should probably also prepare ourselves for what they will do if he loses. I think we all know that he will not gracefully concede and quietly retire to play golf and cash in his political chits. In fact, he recently told TIME magazine, “If we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election” and elaborated in a later interview, “If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results…If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.” Does anyone doubt that he believes there is no such thing as a fair election that he loses?

It’s important to remember that he won’t be the incumbent president as he was in 2020 and will not have the same tools at his disposal. He cannot try to deploy the Justice Department to illegally interfere in process on his behalf and while his henchmen could theoretically plan another fake elector scheme, as long as Vice President Harris performs the constitutional duty of counting the electoral college votes they wouldn’t get anywhere with it. He also won’t be able to draw up plans to seize voting machines or declare martial law and his bully pulpit will be limited to sore loser press conferences carried live on Fox and Newsmax.

However, Trump also has some advantages he didn’t have the last time, the first being that virtually the entire Republican establishment has bought into the lie that the 2020 election was stolen and are clearly ready to back Trump’s claims that it will have been stolen in 2024:

Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance told CNN that he’ll accept the results if they’re “fair and free” and previously said that if he were VP he’d tell states to send in alternate electors, apparently so that he could personally pick and choose which ones to accept as legitimate.

South Carolina Senator and top VP contender Tim Scott famously evaded the question on Meet the Press earlier, saying that he wouldn’t answer hypothetical questions.

Asking whether you will accept the 2024 election results is not a “hypothetical” question. It is the foundation of our constitutional democracy and if you can’t do it, it should disqualify you from office. https://t.co/IGvKxO0VVC

— Richard Stengel (@stengel) May 12, 2024

The Republican National Committee, now run by Trump’s family and personal henchmen, will not hire anyone who doesn’t avow that Trump actually won the 2020 election. I think it’s indisputable that if Trump loses, they will all rise up to declare once again that it was stolen. You can’t have a democracy if one party is unwilling to accept that they lost.

The Washington Post reports that the Trump campaign is planning a “leaner” and “more efficient” operation this time out because Trump has “told them to not worry about getting out the vote since he could do it himself. He told them to ‘focus on the cheating.'”

To that end, it appears that Trump and the party are preparing to turn the election itself into a chaotic mess. Starting last December, Trump began employing a phrase used by his disgraced former National Security Adviser and QAnon adherent Michael Flynn: “guard the vote” telling his supporters to “go into” cities including Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta to “watch those votes when they come in.” This tactic was tried in the 2022 election when armed citizens staked out lock boxes, intimidating voters as they attempted to drop off their ballots. We can expect more of that driven by outside groups and Trump’s exhortations at his rallies.

The new RNC chair Lara Trump announced that the party is building a massive “election integrity” unit with a program to send 100,000 poll watchers all over the country who will be able to “protect the vote and ensure a big win.” She said, “We now have the ability at the RNC not just to have poll watchers, people standing in polling locations, but people who can physically handle the ballots.” (Actually, they cannot.)

In other words, the party is doubling and tripling down on voter suppression in order to win. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to have the effect that it used to have back in the old days when the GOP had to be put under a consent decree after it was successfully sued for intimidating racial minorities at the polls. Today we have early voting and vote by mail (and Trump has trained his flock to mistrust those methods.) That’s why they have also concentrated on intimidating election workers and plan to do more of it during the counting process.

If all that doesn’t work to ensure him a win, he will obviously challenge the vote count. They plan to have lawyers stationed in every swing state to prepare the charges of voter fraud in the event he does come up short. He won’t be relying on the likes of Rudy Giuliani or Sidney Powell this time. Now that the whole GOP establishment has been completely absorbed into the MAGA universe, they’ll have higher quality legal minds working on overturning the results. It’s a good career move.

And then if all else fails, they will have their violent mob ready to explode and that possibility will be hovering over every other tactic they deploy. Trump said recently,  “if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country” and “If this election isn’t won, I’m not sure that you’ll ever have another election in this country.” This are very thinly veiled threats in a climate where his followers are being brainwashed by his lies into believing that he has a massive, unbeatable lead in the polls which is entirely untrue. And according to WIRED, the militia movement is on the rise again. One recent Facebook post shows where their thoughts are leading:

“When the government tries to steal the election again and they think we’ll just sit and take it … It won’t be like the last time … Just remember, they started it … We just wanted to be left alone … We prefer ballots over bullets … But …”

The sad reality is that the worst of all possible worlds is that Trump wins the election in November. But Trump won’t go quietly into this good night if he loses and neither will his followers. Either way, the election itself is just the beginning.

Salon