Trump Could Maybe Refuse To Accept A Loss in 2020

When asked if he would acquiesce to a peaceful transition of power, he replied that "We'll have to wait and see", which translates to "no". He further commented that if we got rid of all the ballots, there wouldn't be a transition of power. Which means he hopes to get all mail ballots invalidated, and he thinks that will be enough for him to win.

Notice characteristic 14.
Lawrence W. Britt: 14 Characteristics of Fascism

Five states (Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington) have exclusively mail-in voting, have for years.

Fraud has been non-existent.

One hopes our votes will be counted.  The FBI has warned that Russia is sowing misinformation about mail-in ballots, which Comrade Trump is dutifully repeating verbatim.

The mainstream news has picked up the story that Trump is telegraphing that he will not allow a peaceful transition of power.

Now I wish they would connect the next dot: this is all Russian counter-intelligence's idea.

NoCoPilot wrote:

... Trump campaign is laying the groundwork, by claiming that mail-in votes are wrought with fraud, ...

Project Veritas has released an "expose" on ballots in MN. Yeah, it's probably bullshit but my guess is stuff like this is all his supporters are gonna need.

New theory (not entirely mine):

Andrew Weissmann and Mary Trump both say Trump ran for president as a lark, basically, as a way to raise his public profile and add some value to his "name brand," which was suffering crushing debts and loss of luster at the time.

He was as surprised as everyone else when he won.  He hadn't counted on -- didn't even WANT -- the Russian interference that put him in office.

So he has an "oh shit" moment - what does he do now? 

Answer: As a lifelong Democrat, he does everything in his power to PREVENT getting re-elected.  He creates constant chaos, he reverses himself, he promotes wild conspiracy theories, he plays kissy-face with dictators, he sends federal troops to clear out peaceful protestors.  In short, he "plays on TV" the worst president imaginable.

Only problem is, the Russians LIKE this style of American self-destruction.  They'll probably do everything in THEIR power to get him re-elected.

Apparently the Democrats are taking steps to remove the Orange Ass Clown after the election.  I certainly hope this is true.  It might be bluster, like everything else in politics the last thirty years.

Trump is musing out loud about needing to leave the country after he loses the election.

Preferably to a country without an extradition treaty.

This is astonishing for a POTUS.

He was joking, although (given the situation) it wasn't actually funny.

MSNBC wrote:

It's likely this was a clumsy attempt at humor, though it's a curious thing for the president to joke about.

I was running this scenario in my head this morning:

1. The Orange Ass Clown is ahead on votes on November 3
   
2. OAC declares victory
   
3. Democrats poll state election supervisors, and determine that Biden won nearly every state
   
4. Democrats cry foul, claim there's rigged vote counting, file a lawsuit
   
5. Like 2000, the election ends up in SCOTUS
   
6. Barrett casts the deciding vote to certify the election without investigating election irregularities
   
7. Nation erupts in "Not My President" protests
   

Nightmare scenario #2:
* Trump wins re-election
* Democrats win a majority in the Senate

Trump would get impeached again. Bill Barr would get impeached. Mike Pence would get impeached.

Who would become president?

Nightmare scenario #3:

* Biden wins the election
* Between November 3rd and January 20 Trump is a lame-duck president, with all of the powers of the presidency but none of the checks-and-balances.

What does he do?

Nightmare Scenario #4:
* Trump wins 98.4% of the vote
* Trumps gets more votes than there are people in the United States
* Trump gets "the most votes in history"

Pick two from the following list:

• Trump disputes the results of the election in key battleground states due to unfounded allegations of voter fraud, allowing the Republican legislatures in those states to pick their Electoral College electors themselves, which gives the Electoral College win to Trump instead of Biden
  
  
• Trump declares war on some poor Gulf State before the inauguration (I'm thinking Iran), allowing him to claim changing presidents "during a war" would be unwise

I'm kind of hopeful. The first option is obviously dangerous, but so far, Governors have expressed unwillingness to go along with such a plan. The second idea seems like Trump could actually do it, but as people have pointed out, just having a war is not sufficient excuse to keep him. His term ends January 20th, whether there's a war going on or not.

Wow. In one poll 82% of Republicans do not think Biden legitimately won the election. That's very disturbing.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-were-primed-to-believe-the-current-onslaught-of-disinformation/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Does not bode well for 2021, no matter how conciliatory Joe is.

Georgia Republicans beg Trump to release them from his prison of lies

Opinion by
Greg Sargent
Columnist
Dec. 1, 2020 at 10:12 a.m. EST

By now, it’s been widely established that President Trump’s nonstop lies about the election being stolen from him have created a potential problem for Republicans. If GOP voters believe the system is rigged, why would they turn out to vote in the two runoffs in Georgia that will decide control of the Senate?

In a new turn in this ugly saga, Georgia Republicans are now actively pleading with Trump to put an end to this problem for them. But what’s even more darkly absurd is how they’re going about doing this: They apparently do not believe that they themselves can explain to voters that the voting was actually legitimate in their own state — until Trump gives them permission to do so.

Two new pieces — one from the New York Times and the other from The Post — neatly capture all this depravity. The Times reports that Republicans are “quietly rattled” that Trump’s lies will “depress turnout,” and it’s gotten so bad that an adviser to one of the GOP senators running for reelection is speaking out:

Quote :

“You can’t say the system is rigged but elect these two senators,” said Eric Johnson, a campaign adviser to Kelly Loeffler, one of the G.O.P. Senate candidates, and a former Republican leader of the Georgia Senate. “At some point he either drops it or he says I want everybody to vote and get their friends to vote so that the margins are so large that they can’t steal it.”

Tellingly, this Republican is suggesting that Trump should either quietly let the matter drop, or keep saying his loss was fraudulent but voters should turn out anyway, to drive up margins beyond the ability of Democrats to steal the Senate elections.

What cannot be suggested, of course, is that Trump should simply tell the truth to voters: The voting in Georgia and his loss in the state were entirely legitimate, and Republican voters can rest assured that the votes were, and will be, counted accurately. Instead, Trump is being offered a way to keep up his lies about the election being fraudulent, but one that won’t depress GOP turnout.

This is also notable because Kelly Loeffler herself — a United States senator, last we checked — continues to parrot the same lies. Loeffler and fellow GOP Sen. David Perdue have called for the Republican secretary of state in Georgia to resign for the crime of doing his official duty and certifying Trump’s loss as legitimate.

Loeffler defended this stance on Fox News as follows:

Quote :

“The buck stops with the secretary of state. He is supposed to run a trusted, free, fair, transparent election. David Perdue and I have called for him to step down because Georgians have lost faith in our elections.”

To recap: Loeffler’s own adviser is calling on Trump to stop telling Republican voters that they can’t have faith in Georgia’s electoral system — even as Loeffler herself is telling them the same thing. Loeffler apparently can’t stop telling this lie until Trump stops telling it — even though Republicans fear it will hurt their chances.

Separately, The Post reports on still another tangle of pathologies here. Neither Loeffler nor Perdue has conceded that Trump lost the election. But this is creating a problem for them, because they want to sell their candidacies to Republican voters as a check on a Joe Biden presidency.

The rub is that they can’t really do this. Why? Because they’re not allowed to so much as hint that Biden might have won the election, because that angers Trump voters:

Quote :

David Perdue’s conundrum in 10 seconds: He’s pitching himself and fellow Ga. Sen. Kelly Loeffler as the last line of defense against Democratic control. A guy in the crowd (the one in the hat) interrupts, screaming ‘What are you doing to stand up for President Trump.’ pic.twitter.com/QuLuYFKGrV

— Cleve R. Wootson Jr. (@CleveWootson) November 23, 2020

Again, the ugly dynamic exposed here is that telling the plain truth to Republican voters — that the voting in Georgia and Trump’s loss there were legitimate — is simply not permitted.

GOP strategist Liam Donovan recently got to the core of the problem: Untold numbers of Trump voters trust him more than they trust Republicans. When Trump tells them the election was stolen, they not only believe it; they also think GOP leaders will betray them on this point as well. Trump has told them for years that all our institutions are corrupt; that only he is the arbiter of reality, and only he should be the focal point of their political aspirations.

Now Republicans believe this is backfiring on them and are pleading with Trump to release them from this toxic dynamic. But he isn’t in any mood to do that:

Quote :

Do something @BrianKempGA. You allowed your state to be scammed. We must check signatures and count signed envelopes against ballots. Then call off election. It won’t be needed. We will all WIN! https://t.co/UiJrlyBGiK

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 1, 2020

Indeed, as CNN’s Ronald Brownstein aptly notes, all this is comparable to the 1950s. Just as Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s lies about communist subversion grew more wildly implausible, Trump is now implicating the “deep state” and more and more GOP governors in his invented conspiracy to steal the election from him. Now, as then, GOP leaders are largely silent:

As Trump’s charges have grown more and more untethered and vitriolic, Senate Majority Leader McConnell, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other top GOP legislators in both chambers — not to mention the vast majority of Republican governors — have raised not a peep of dissent.
However, in this case Republicans themselves have spent years plying GOP voters with lies about fraud, to justify all manner of voter suppression directed at the other side, as I recount in my book.

It’s not clear whether this will end up costing Republicans one or both Senate races. It probably won’t: The lie that the election was stolen from Trump might actually juice GOP turnout, which would validate the wholesale delegitimization of our electoral system as a mobilization tactic, with unsettling future implications.

But it’s a temporary form of poetic justice that Republicans themselves fear that Trump’s much more grotesque version of the voter-suppression lie they’ve told for years is threatening to discourage their own voters. It would be amusing if it all weren’t so toxic and destructive to democracy.

Gen Michael Flynn just came out and said Trump should declare martial law, and declare the election "invalid."

I'm sure he found two receptive ears for THAT suggestion.

But, that would essentially be a coup, and Flynn can (and should) be charged with treason.  Will he be shot against the Rose Garden wall?

Oh, I NEEDED a good laugh-out-loud this morning!
https://www.newsweek.com/roger-stone-says-north-korean-boats-delivered-ballots-through-maine-harbor-trump-boosts-fraud-1551937

Supreme Court just issued a one-sentence denial of the Trump Administration's effort to overturn the election in SCOTUS.

Good for them.

Alito wrote the sentence(!)

I turned over to Fox News, as I occasionally do, out of curiosity to see how they were covering Trump's final loss in the Supreme Court.

Their only story -- lead, secondary, tertiary and sidebars -- was that Hunter Biden apparently profited off his father's position as VP in 2014.  Imagine that, the CHILDREN of an elected official PROFITING off their father's position!!!!

Oh the irony.....

Widely reported yesterday and today that Trump's flailing attempts to overturn the election have finally definitively failed spectacularly.

Time now to start measuring for the orange jump suit.  The ass clown is going down!

They say ("they" being MSM) that Republicans are standing by Trump because he has hinted at another run in 2024, which means they have to suck his dick until then or be cast out of the Republican party.  I tend to discount this theory however, as I don't believe it is possible -- maybe it is, but I doubt it -- to run for federal office while serving time in prison.  How long after his incarceration, how many weeks after he reports to the facility (along with his children and business partners) before the Republicans pull their heads out of their asses and notice the sun is shining again?

I think that the Republicans plan to do their utmost to destroy the Biden presidency and damage the economic recovery of the country. The current faffing around is starting their cover story about why this would be "their solemn duty".

Yes, this will kill thousands (maybe millions) of American citizens. They don't care.

Yes, this will leave millions of the survivors in poverty (perhaps for generations to come). They don't care.

They have no souls.

I don't understand.

I don't understand why there are no consequences for filing frivolous lawsuits.  These lawyers should, at the very LEAST, be permanently disbarred.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/10/politics/trump-texas-supreme-court-election/index.html

I would argue the attempts to overturn a duly-certified election amounts to sedition, which is a federal capital crime.  In addition to disbarment, I think federal executions are in order.

Paxton's main motive is rather transparent. He's currently under indictment.

‘He’s going for a pardon’: Experts trash indicted Trump-supporting Texas AG’s SCOTUS election lawsuit

I agree that this is a coup attempt, and sedition charges are in order.