Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. The presidential candidate who infamously claimed he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters is putting his belief in his immunity to the test by openly trying to convince the Georgia secretary of state to change the election results to make him the winner. Just like that. It’s an attempted coup, right in front of our eyes, in a recorded phone call, and the response of a select subset of Republicans (like Cruz and Rubio and Rand) is to refuse to recognize the criminality, and instead conspire to overthrow the certification of the results in the Senate.
The Post reports: “President Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that election experts said raised legal questions.” In the call, Trump asked Raffensperger to change the certified vote that was subject to multiple recounts: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
In fact he threatened him. The Post reports, “During their conversation, Trump issued a vague threat to both Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the secretary of state’s general counsel, suggesting that if they don’t find that thousands of ballots in Fulton County have been illegally destroyed to block investigators — an allegation for which there is no evidence — they would be subject to criminal liability.” Trump, sounding like a mobster as he often does, said, “That’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.” Nice career, there Brad. Shame if anything happened to it.
You can listen to, or read the transcript of, Trump’s hour-long phone call.
It’s an embarrassing spectacle. Trump is whiny and desperate, a rat frantically scratching at the walls of his cage, accusing the FBI and everyone else involved in verifying the results dishonest and incompetent, bringing up every ridiculous conspiracy theory he found on Twitter, just lashing out absurdly. This was Trump’s Captain Queeg moment, and he’s caught in this recording rolling his ball bearings around and looking like a demented fool.
Trump and Meadows dominated the phone call, talking non-stop and mostly incoherently. When he could get a few words in edgewise, Raffensperger quietly shot down all of Trump’s accusations. Here’s a few words from the Georgia secretary of state.
Well, I listened to what the president has just said. President Trump, we’ve had several lawsuits, and we’ve had to respond in court to the lawsuits and the contentions. We don’t agree that you have won. And we don’t — I didn’t agree about the 200,000 number that you’d mentioned. I’ll go through that point by point.
What we have done is we gave our state Senate about one and a half hours of our time going through the election issue by issue and then on the state House, the government affairs committee, we gave them about two and a half hours of our time, going back point by point on all the issues of contention. And then just a few days ago, we met with our U.S. congressmen, Republican congressmen, and we gave them about two hours of our time talking about this past election. Going back, primarily what you’ve talked about here focused in on primarily, I believe, is the absentee ballot process. I don’t believe that you’re really questioning the Dominion machines. Because we did a hand re-tally, a 100 percent re-tally of all the ballots, and compared them to what the machines said and came up with virtually the same result. Then we did the recount, and we got virtually the same result. So I guess we can probably take that off the table.
I don’t think there’s an issue about that.
Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong. We talked to the congressmen, and they were surprised.
But they — I guess there was a person named Mr. Braynard who came to these meetings and presented data, and he said that there was dead people, I believe it was upward of 5,000. The actual number were two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted. So that’s wrong.
Mr. President, they did not put that. We did an audit of that, and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times.
It’s a remarkable criminal performance by the president. It’s going to be our eternal shame if he is not prosecuted for his blatant abuse of power.
Par for the course then?
You know, Trump probably could shoot somebody in public and not lose many voters. Especially if he chose his victim carefully.
Isn’t it funny how when Hilary calls them deplorables everyone gets offended, but when Trump calls his voters total scum who don’t care about human life or the law they agree and cheer.
One thing you can’t deny him is how unwavering his confidence is that he is above the law. And the nation just keeps proving him right.
This is terribly unfair to Queeg who, for all his deep and terrible flaws, was never a con artist, or a traitor, or a rapist, or a nepotist, or a racist, or a releaser of war criminals.
I am expecting a speech by Biden shortly after inauguration where he will discuss the need to “look forward” and there will be no federal investigation into any Trump related crimes. This will make governing easier in the short term and guarantee a successful coup in the future…
This call really surprised me only in that I had been operating on the assumption that this attempt to overturn the election was purely a fundraising grift. I suppose that this could still be a part of it, but Trump genuinely sounds desperate in the call.
Still worth impeaching Trump.
Impeach, convict, “bar from any Federal position”, goodbye 2024 candidacy.
Going into the record books as “twice impeached LOSER” also, too.
Well, at least impeachment taught him a lesson.
The lesson being, extortion is legal.
If push comes to shove I don’t think Biden should pardon trump. One of the things that Americans are proud of it that we’ve had peaceful transitions of power for over 250 years. trump is undermining that and is calling for armed rebellion
It is going to get much uglier before it gets better. If it gets better.
As bad as this is, I would argue that his presidential pardons to those who refused to testify against him are even more worthy of a charge of treason than this. The phone call to Georgia’s Sec of State is evidence of conspiracy to commit sedition, and possibly is a step towards additional treasonous behavior by Trump.
In either event, as an earlier commenter noted, this kind of explicit and outright corruption and criminality is par for the course for Trump, and his Republican lapdogs.
Pelosi declared in ’07 that Congress could not possibly prepare and carry out an impeachment and trial in only two years.
And the chickenshits of the Democratic Party grovelled and agreed.
How could she possibly not recycle that excuse for a two-week interval this time?
Trump “looking like a demented fool.”
Well he looks like a demented fool and he sounds like a demented fool. But don’t let that fool you – he really is a demented fool. (h/t Groucho Marx)
In all fairness to President Trump … wait, WTF am I saying?
I fully expect to see the “It’s just grifting”, “You don’t take this seriously, do you?” etc. crew to appear here, as they have in relation to all the previous (and admittedly ludicrous) Trumpist attempts to steal the election. The parallel I keep thinking of is the “Beer Hall Putsch” of 1923, Hitler’s farcical attempt to seize power ten years before he became Chancellor. If the German courts had taken an appropriately serious view of the attempt and given Hitler a 20-year sentence, rather than the brief enforced vacation during which he received numerous visitors in his comfortable quarters, and wrote Mein Kampf, the world might have been saved a great deal of trouble.
As reprehensible, illegal, and unconstitutional as the phone call was, the silence from the Senate right is simply deafening. Other than their target being a democrat, what actions are needed from them to stop cowering, put on their big boys pants or big girl skirts and call this for what it is: an in-you-face affront to the Constitution and our stability as a nation.
My contempt for them and the GOP shows no sign of slowing down.
@KG
I have to admit to being one of those people simply because of how terrible an attempt it has been. 60-odd lawsuits filed so shoddily that the only rational explanation was that they wanted to keep up a public veneer of campaigning whilst really just taking their supporters’ cash, The fundraising call openly said that most of the money raised would be going to pay down debts, and Trump himself mostly keeping out of it except to rallies and Twitter. All of that pointed to a non-serious campaign designed purely to grift.
This call has changed my mind.
Wait until he tries to get the military to support his attempt to overthrow the government and leave him in office.
We all know the US military is very large, the largest on the planet by a long ways.
Yeah, that’s how mobsters work, by saying what they say without saying it. Legally slippery unless he were to come out openly and said something like, “I don’t care how you find the votes, make something up if you have to. Do it or I’ll get some bikers to bust your knuckles with a hammer.”
It’s possible that if Raffensperger caught him at the right moment, he could have asked Trump if he wanted him to cook the books, and got Trump to say outright, “Yes.” Unlikely though.
Trump is a piece of shit. He’s always been a piece of shit. It’s plain as day. But after all these years, there he sits in the WH. There’s no reason at this point to expect that significant numbers of people will admit to themselves or anyone else that they could be so embarrassingly wrong and stupid. This isn’t a society that values that kind of integrity.
@#2, llyris
Gee, it’s almost like Democrats and Republicans are groups with largely oppositional values and aims, and expect different things from elected officials. Good thing this hasn’t been totally obvious for decades, because then the strategy followed by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 of seeking Republican voters instead of trying to energize the base might have ended up in losing an election to Trump, or winning by a narrow margin of percentage points but still losing a lot of Congressional seats. This despite the way Obama’s electoral strategy of working the base and making promises to them (which he did not intend to keep) gave him both the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress. Why, if the difference between the parties was obvious, then the nominations and campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden would be signs of either unbelievable, fractal incompetence or deliberate malignant self-sabotage, and it would mean that everybody who supported the Democratic Party was either an utter fool or a deliberate saboteur of the very things they claim to support. Yup. Sure is a good thing.
@20 Big Tents, Vicars, Big Tents. Unity, harmony, Both Sides, let’s all get along like Barney told us to, let’s give everyone a flag and a history month, yadda yadda yadda…
I wouldn’t gloat too much if I were you. If there were a throwdown over the heart and soul of the left, the Rad Lefties and the Bernie Bros would be the first to go, because the one mistake you keep making is thinking that the US is further to the left than it really is.
So I sometimes listen to a podcast by a lawyer (Opening Arguments) and one thing I’ve learned is that the word “treason” has a very clear meaning, to a lawyer: it has to do with levying war against your country… so nothing Schmuck a’la Orange does here will be treason, by the legal definition. Also, there is this idea that he will pardon himself. I did learn that if that works (I guess it’s still an open question) it would only be for federal crimes – state crimes do not fall under this. So what we need to hope for (weird that I’d have to say this) is that he’s broken Georgia state laws, because those will be tougher for him to escape with magical hand waves.
Also from what I understand he did not just try and pressure people in Georgia. He went to several other states as well. The guy is a complete and utter criminal, so I do hope that SOMETHING sticks. This is ridiculous, and what I see Republicans doing by following along with this is completely poisoning their party. Not that it wasn’t already very toxic.
llyris@2
Uh, he already did. Trump personally ordered the assassination of Qasem Soleimani about a year ago and carried it out in full view of witnesses. Or doesn’t a drone strike count as “shot”? There’s a projectile involved, though its operation is more complex than a bullet , arrow, or crossbow bolt to be sure.
I know, I know. Presidents are “allowed” to shoot people in public that way. Shame on me for being such a peace prig. However, it was a little even compared to ordinary military acts or even Obama’s drone strikes, since we were not in a state of war against Iran. Among other things, Trump appears to have carried it out in a fit of pique rather than any other reason.
Fortunately, on domestic issues, he’s less likely to express his tantrums with deadly force, but he has praised extrajudicial killing in the abstract, and would certainly carry it out eventually given enough time in office.
I hope that there are many lawyers patiently waiting for January 21st, who are keeping track of all the crimes and any elected officials who are violating their oath of office by supporting clearly criminal acts.
I suggest court martialing them, as was done to Chelsea Manning.
chrislawson@4 True. As Greenwald says
It sure as fuck wasn’t Donald Trump. He faked his way out of serving in the Vietnam War (I don’t blame him or anyone for that) and spent the next few decades swindling people, not paying contractors, exploiting bankruptcy law to clear himself of debt, and never did anything beyond what a moderately competent businessperson could do with the vast sum of money he inherited.
So yeah, Tump is no Queeg. He had serious insecurity issues and took them out on his crew, but Wouk makes the point clear that Queeg is a patriot. Trump is a leech.
@25 In the film, it’s made clear that Queeg was what TV Tropes would call an “Asshole Victim”.
Does a Gish Gallop carry any weight in law ?
He’ll fire, it would take a lifetime to meticulously unscramble all that shit !
voidhawk@6 I think you are making the common mistake of looking for rational motives. I have no doubt that Trump “believes” he won the election, for suitable definitions of “believe.” As he said, he had big rallies. Plus, there were those boat parades, right? Suburban “housewives” should have loved him if they just knew how much he had done for them.
And he has a clear distinction in his head between which votes are legitimate and which are “invalid” or “corrupt.” You really can’t separate this from his racism. He does not necessarily hate Black people, as long as they accept his authority and praise his benevolence. He does, however, hate the idea that anyone other than white men like him should have authority over government. Votes coming from a city that is not white-run are by definition less worthy. He believes he won the votes that count and truly does think Biden “stole” the election.
The desperation may also come from some recognition of what happens when he stops being POTUS and goes back to being a schlub saddled with debt and criminal investigations. While it still might not be enough to penetrate his thinking at a conscious level, it’s certainly cause for distress.
@#21, Susan Montgomery
Funny about that: where left-leaning policies were on the ballot, they were far more popular than the centrist trash idiot Biden that people like you think represents the “real” America. People like you are dolts.
The truth is that America is really mostly divided into two camps. There are the people who are — using the terminology of the moment — on Trump’s side, and there are the people who are basically opposed to him. The people on Trump’s side know they’re on Trump’s side. They campaign on it, rally for it, are knee-jerk voters for it. And then there’s the opposition, which has trained itself to think there’s a middle ground which they will alienate if they actually try to push for the policies they want — largely by a bunch of boot-licking a*sholes like the Clintons and Biden, who have made careers and fortunes (high 9 digits for the Clintons, in case you’ve forgotten, according to their own figures) stabbing the rest of us in the back for the benefit of the Trump supporters.
There is no middle ground. What little there was disappeared decades ago, and people like you are still afraid to try to do anything in case there are still people who will be scared off by the word “socialism” in the mouths of people like Trump.
I admit I was wrongt@14. The Vicar turns up, and instead of minimising Trump’s attempt to overturn the election result by threatening state officials as I predicted, completely ignores it, and attacks all the 81-million-plus people who voted for Biden.
Vicar@29
And yet you know that
Your “really mostly” deflates the reply I am tempted to make, that if politics are such a dichotomy, then how is it that you (American I think) are both against Trump and yet recognize the lack of middle ground?
But even if we go with “mostly” I am baffled about how you intend to win elections with your coalition of the very few Americans who get stuff right. You do know that these things work by counting votes. Thus elections will be decided by one or these two camps, nearly of which is to your liking. You’ve stated the problem well enough. You have not proposed a solution.
The Vicar@29,
Where were all these radical socialists when Sanders was campaigning for the nomination? Why didn’t they come out in their scores of millions to support him? I’ve asked you this question repeatedly, and you’ve never even attempted an answer.
It’s true the $15 minimum wage passed in Florida. And some more states decriminalised weed (not necessarily from any progressive motivation – it’s been said that a Libertarian is a Republican who likes weed). But in California, Uber and other exploiter scum succeeded in exempting themselves from even the inadequate controls that apply to employers in their relationship with their employees. Can you point to a systematic survey of how progressive/socialist propositions and Democratic candidates did in comparison to “moderate” ones? I’d really like to believe your claim that there is this huge pent-up desire for socialism in the USA, because without radical change in the world’s richest and most powerful state the world has little chance of avoiding catastrophe – but I don’t see the evidence for it.
Apparently, Lindsey Graham’s latest criticism of those in Congress trying to overturn the election is that they’re not “effective enough”. Sounds like a “you guys need to cheat harder” argument.
Trump’s phone call may not be treason, but it may be an election crime. Reps Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Kathleen Rice (D-NY) have asked the FBI directory to open an investigation. I wouldn’t expect much from this for a while, but it’s a start.
And that’s the kind of thing they can do to him and his family: death by a thousand cuts. New York DAs are already digging into a number of things about his finances, diverting campaign funds to pay off prostitutes, etc. Then there’s the suit by E. Jean Carroll which will forward now, and that sort of thing could expand as his victims come out of the woods. There will be more investigations…like where does all that money go that he’s receiving from his fans to fight his loss.
And I’m sure that the DOJ under Biden and the new Congress will be looking into aspects of it. Perhaps not Trump directly or to explicitly pursue criminal charges, but to fine tune the system in an effort to prevent future abuses. For example, updating the Hatch Act and other laws to prevent presidents and other admin employees from profiting from the position or promoting products from the supporters. There’s also been talk about tweaking the 25th Amendment because it’s not clear how to invoke the removal clause in case of mental illness.
a rigged election in the US in the current era has only been done by the republicans and mostly centered on racial minorities and the urban working class with gerrymandering and voter suppression and “leagle means” to rig an election using law. It as has been demonstrated can be defeated by turnout. the fix was in but failed this time and almost failed last time.
“HE” knows what he has done he was there through all of it after all. He has cheated all his life so he keeps on trying to cheat it is all he knows cheating and lying. He knows and so does the state of New York what he has done and they are playing hard ball
He is on fire and crashing finally and there is nothing he can do to stop it but he is stupid and will just keep trying anyway. It is just taking so f’n long. He will be remembered for as long as the United States is a country, he is the guy that only had an image and no substance and people just lapped it up.
uncle frogy
Vicar @ #29
Take a moment to wipe your chin and spittle flecked lips.
Kestrel@22
The Georgia law is extremely favorable towards a prosecution of Mr. Trump. Georgia Code section 21-2-604(a)(1):
Note that there is no knowledge requirement in the criminal solicitation to commit electoral fraud statute. Whether Mr. Trump knew that he was soliciting electoral fraud is irrelevant; all that matters is that Trump intended the Georgia Secretary of State to commit acts that constitute electoral fraud, and that’s a slam dunk case based on the recorded call.
whheydt@33 I find Raffensperger’s take the most telling, though sadly unsurprising. It’s clear he would have preferred Trump to win, and he saw it as his job to place legal obstacles in the way of Democratic voters, often using the same playbook the South has always used to make it hard for Black people to vote.
So his view seems to be along the lines of “Sorry, I failed, but I’m not going to fake it. I take pride in my work and I’ll do a better job suppressing the vote by all legal means the next time around.”
As Woody Guthrie put it, “some will rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen.” Some, having failed at the latter, consider it beneath their dignity to stoop to the former. And I’m sure this describes a large slice of Republicans who aren’t quite with Trump on his coup.
@ PaulBC, # 31: The Vicar NEVER proposes a solution. He shows up, rants, and tells everyone else how stupid they are. He seems like a very bitter and thwarted person.
As you’ve noted, Vics, progressive policies tend to be popular in isolation if you just ask about the policies. When you ask under a label that explicitly associates them with people like you, most Americans reject them.
Funny, that.
[reposting from a comment I left on Mano Singham’s blog]
Trump: “blah blah 5,000 dead voters blah”
Raffensperger: The actual number were two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted.
I was curious about this, and looked it up, and Raffensperger seems to have misremembered,
There were (originally) four questionable cases, but actually only one single case of a person, who was actually dead, and actually registered to vote, who had a vote logged in his name.
Note that the actual vote that was cast is not revealed.
So either Skwiot’s identity thief was a Biden voter whose vote made no difference for the county, or else was in fact a Trump voter adding an unnecessary additional vote for Trump.
Friendly reminder that the Vicar supported Trump during 2020 because at the end of the day hes a fake ass leftist. A lot of them are.
And yet somehow the democrats are to rally and cater to them when they cannot even support their own guy during the primary (Sanders).
Nobody likes socialists. They like socialist ideas but not the self proclaimed socialists because a lot of them preach commie shit and preach and look down on a lot of people high on theirnown sense of antiestablishmentarian special snowflakery. making it hard for the other socialists who sre really trying to make things better.
Florida passed 15 dollars minimum wage but trust me as a Florida native they fucking hate people like you Vicar.
Yes but is Susan Collins concerned?
logicalcat @42: I’d be interested to see your definition of “commie shit”.
@29. While I’m pondering an in-depth answer, I have one further question for you: After over 50 years, where is your revolution? You have plenty of excuses, sure, but no results.
@42
Going through this list, I’d say it’s a mixed bag https://www.biographyonline.net/people/famous/socialists.html I “like” a lot of these people, in the sense of considering them well-intentioned and sound thinkers (not to say I’d get along personally). Who doesn’t like Bertrand Russell? Of course, some are demagogues and thugs. Alberto Korda’s photo of Che Guevara is cool, but then I consider that he’d probably kill me without thinking hard if I got in his way. Actually, the “self-proclaimed” socialists who just talk up a storm aren’t even that interesting.
I’m not a socialist. I believe in mixed economies that aim at finding the most effective balance between the private and public sector. What would you call Paul Krugman? I’m whatever he is. To an American conservative in 2020, that is socialist or communist. To someone on the left, I’m a feckless neolib. By European standards, it probably puts me squarely with Social Democrats or equivalent, though I imagine I am American enough culturally, that my preferences would sound pretty conservative in Europe.
I am curious how it is possible for the Clintons to have enriched themselves by “stabbing the rest of us in the back to support trump supporters” long before there was such a thing as the maga crowd.
I think anyone with such apparent time traveling abilities would use them to do something like alter past events to change an outcome.
Read that good ol’ Lindsey Graham may be responsible for this. Last time, when he called and urged Raffensperger to discard legal votes, and Raffensperger reported it, Graham denied that he’d said it. So, Raffensperger and his lawyer were ready with a recorder this time. The guy is going to catch even more hell after the GA run-offs: oh well, as was said above, he’s mighty fine with vote suppression as long as it’s “legal”. And, at least no one will call him again!
I got a real feeling of dismay and evil listening to that call: I’ve never had to listen to Trump for that long before. Don’t know how all his flunkies stand it.
If Moscow Mitch has a brain, or ever watched Game of Thrones, he’d see that this is his chance to save the 2024 election for his party: if Trump is impeached and McConnell lets it through, Trump won’t be eligible to run for president again. Otherwise, he’ll claim he’s running for the next three years and prevent any other Republican candidate from even thinking of entering the race.
OTOH, McConnell has to whip those anti-democracy senators into line, to get a two-thirds vote to impeach. But, since so many of them want the nomination in 2024, they might see which side of their bread is buttered.
Also, Mitch and Trump are already battling for control of the party, and this is Mitch’s chance to win. He has nothing to lose by offending the MAGAs, they already hate him. Trump is trying to lose the senate for the Republicans, to show Mitch and maintain control: he might not have meant this call to be part of that plan, but it certainly seems like it’ll help.
“Nobody likes Socialists” in America because they are told that they don’t by Fox and Sinclair and indeed most of the “liberal media”. In turn the billionaire owners, and their billionaire friends don’t like “socialism” because any improvement in minimum wage, or working conditions, or health care, or public education, or environmental protection, represents money that they believe should continue to go straight into their pockets.
Heather Cox Richardson’s take on Trump’s phone call. Some interesting info in it about the twists and turns Trump was trying, and tried after the recording was released. Basically he’s toast, his lawyers who were the call could also get in trouble, and Mark Meadows. He’s also undermining his support in Congress.
Sometimes, Republican ineptitude is stunning: David Shafer, Georgia Republican Party chair, claims that the call was a “confidential settlement discussion”. Biden’s lawyer handling election lawsuits, Marc Elias, notes that if that was their purpose, then he wasn’t on the call to represent his client and he should have been.
garnetstar@48
Which is funny when you consider that Trump’s greatest “accomplishments” (corporate tax cuts, rightwing judicial appointments up the wazoo) would have been impossible without him. But no, I don’t expect that level of reasoning from them, nor that most Trumpies care about these core Republican issues. They want to their hats, boat parades, and defaced US flags. It’s amazing how easy it is to scam one group of people to do the bidding of another group with entirely different interests.
Mitch paved the way for Trump by hectoring Obama through two terms as a president and making sure he could accomplish very little. Maybe that makes Mitch John the Baptist to Trump’s Jesus.
voidhawk@17,
Kudos for acknowledging your error! But grifting and attempting to steal the election were never incompatible, since both called for the same set of activities: telling lies the right-wing media would repeat, bribing or intimidating state officials and legislators, launching lawsuits – however fatuous – in the hope that at least a few would land in front of judges willing to rule in Trump’s favour. And if the attempt to steal the election fails, well, Trump’s still collected a lot of cash, persuaded a lot of people Biden’s Presidency will be illegitimate, and reinforced his hold over the party by forcing prominent individuals to come out for or against his lies. But if it had been only one state Trump needed to steal rather than at least three, as it might easily have been, it’s difficult to be confident he would not have succeeded, as G.W. Bush did in 2000.
I contrast to PaulBC, I am a socialist (more specifically, a democratic ecosocialist), but I consider it more useful to that cause to try to look at the world as it is, rather than as I’d like it to be – and that includes appreciating that I’m therefore one of a very small minority. I probably still tend to over-optimism – realistically, our chances of avoiding catastrophic climate disruption are very slight, and nuclear holocaust is still a likely prospect as the world trundles toward the cliff-edge – but I at least shun the kind of fantasies The Vicar indulges himself in.
@Tethys:
The most generous parsing that I can make of the original is: “stabbing the rest of us in the back for the benefit of the people who would become Trump supporters.”
While Trumpism is a recent phenomenon, the pettiness, entitlement, racism, homophobia, misogyny, (and other bigotries), cruelty, smugness, contemptuousness, conspiracist mindset (and so on) that led to and fed into Trumpism have been in America for a very very long time.
Owlmirror
That is a very generous parsing.
It seems that the Vicar conveniently ignored the Bush and Reagan eras of defunding education, gutting American manufacturing, stealing elections and crashing the economy as factors.
I absolutely agree that there is nothing new about human nature, or the propaganda and rhetoric of hateful tyrants. George Orwell wrote about the Two Minutes Hate in 1949.
Remember how the Vicar has spent most of the last four years ranting about Hillary?
@42 What you need to remember is that all too many of these Lefties are upper-middle class, privileged people. Like Jane Fonda’s evolution from Hanoi Jane to Millionaire’s Celebrity Trophy Wife and fitness guru for middle-class housewives, or John Cleese, who was a product of the UK private school system and well-off enough to attend Cambridge University, the loudest lefties are usually more disgruntled with the chores of preserving and propagating the privileges that they’re born with than genuinely seeking change. Sooner or later, they come around to the realization that if there were a socialist revolution then all the things they’ve been accustomed too will be gone for good.
And then they either toss aside the mask completely, or they cloak their change of heart with impossible and constantly changing goals and all-or-nothing demands.
@22: The thing is that the “levying war” component can be much broader than it seems, as https://www.pangyrus.com/politics/perspective-trumps-acts-may-face-america-with-an-unwelcome-dilemma/ discusses. Same with “giving aid” to enemies. Trump’s actions can be viewed as an open attack on American institutions. It’s like lighting a fire at an embassy or firing at a Senator and missing or something of the sort: the fact that what he did is superficially non-violent doesn’t make this any less of a potential act of war. In any instance, it definitely would be sedition.
@32: They don’t vote. I know lots of people even in a red county who are deeply anti-corporate, who are very sympathetic to socialist causes, and they either don’t get registered in the first place to vote, can’t make it because it’s not a national holiday, or don’t think voting has any effect. It’s why increasing registration always improves things for Dems. Yes, it is a lot more complicated than folks like the Vicar suggest, in that a majority of Americans also believe some ugly stuff (at various points most Americans supported torture against terror suspects, for example), but I think Chomsky’s analysis that there is a deep potential for organization is fundamentally correct.
@57 Seriously? This is your knowledge of socialism?
FBC@58–
Much as I would like to see Trump charged with treason, the legal definition makes that highly unlikely. Even the “aiding the enemy” clause is about supporting an enemy the country is at war with. There is a reason fewer than 30 people have ever been charge with treason in US history. Even Aaron Burr, who was charged for conspiring to create an independent state on Texan and Mexican soil (a pretty clear case of treason by the common parlance definition), had the charges dismissed not because of lack of evidence but because his actions were ruled to not meet the constitutional threshold for treason.
The states can prosecute for treason in their own right, but the Georgia version of the treason laws is very similar to the federal.
Even sedition probably won’t fly because it requires the threat of force.
But I’m sure there are dozens of other charges that could be made to stick…and I’m sure the prosecutors are happy to wait until Trump is out of office…
@57
John Cleese a Lefty? He is at best, a centrist. He’s been a long-time supporter of the Liberal Democrats, supported their coalition with the Conservatives, considered joining UKIP, and has increasingly said fairly regressive things about trans people, , multiculturalism, etc. He’s definitely a complicated character, politically, but far, far from being a Lefty.
KG@52
Yeah, I think you’re right. Until the phone call, I had assumed it was the other way around – the main goal was to raise money and if he happened to become president along the way, then that would be a nice bonus.
I’m afraid all that shows is your ignorance of the UK. At the time Cleese went to Cambridge, there were no tuition fees at UK public universities (which means almost all of them – may even have been all of them at the time – and includes Cambridge), and there were grants for living expenses for those from poorer families. Cambridge itself provided additional scholarships for those who did best in its entrance exams. Sure, there were still considerable advantages to having well-off parents and attending a private school, but many bright kids from poor families went from state schools to Cambridge.
Frederic Bourgault-Christie@58,
To a certain extent I can accept that there is a reservoir of inchoate economic leftism among non-voters (often combined with social conservatism aka racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc.), and I’d certainly favour a massive campaign of political education and voter registration to bring about the situation The Vicar claims already exists but:
a) That’s not what The Vicar is saying. He’s claiming – without providing evidence – that if only the Democrats had switched to left policies and candidates, they would have done vastly better than they did. My request for a systematic survey of how well progressive candidates and propositions actually did is entirely serious – do you know of one? I’m assuming The Vicar doesn’t, because I’ve asked him to provide evidence for his claims repeatedly, and unsuccessfully. Frankly, I think his rants are powered simply by a sense of his own superiority to practically everyone else who comments here.
b) Sanders ran a widely-reported and serious left campaign in 2016, and remained a public figure, with the evident intention of running again, throughout the period between then and the campaign for 2020. That’s plenty of time for people to realise that: “Hey, there’s going to be someone I could vote for in the Democratic primaries, better get registered!”. And IIRC, many of the primaries allowed for early andor mail-in voting.
I’m with whywhywhy @5. The Orange One, and his enablers in the HoR and senate, need to be charged with sedition (at a minimum), It may cause short term pain and maybe even violence, but not doing so will, in the longer term, pave the way for a smarter version of you-know-who to really trash democracy in the USA.
The Vicar @29 said “…where left-leaning policies were on the ballot, they were far more popular…”
A questionnaire, published by a newspaper here in Australia, asked respondents to pick, from multiple choices, which policies they most agreed with. The three choices given were between those espoused by the Coalition (right wing), the Australian Labor Party (left wing), and The Greens (environmentalist, ultra-left wing in many people’s opinion). A very large number of respondents (even right wingers) were surprised to find that they favoured The Greens policies more than those of the party they were most likely to vote for. The election result (May, 2019) proved that most of them nevertheless voted for their party of preference rather than the policies they favoured.
@59 That’s my perception of it, yes. And many, many others can say the same. Care to ponder how this perception came about?
@62 Cambridge was still Cambridge. And still is. I’ll readily confess ignorance but I still can’t imagine they’d let just anybody but the “right” people in.
@61 Then why was PZ “disappointed” in Cleese a few entries ago? What was he expecting?
@59 You can either take a good, long look at how Rad Lefties and socialists have presented themselves over the years, how they’ve behaved towards the people the claim to want to help and what values they’ve demonstrated towards them or you can blame the media and Russian hackers. It’s your choice.
Susan Montgomery @64:
Oh, that’s easy. You, and many many others, have fallen for the right-wing cartoon version of leftism promoted in the US for decades.
@66. How many lefties today have done the exact same thing? Is it all that unreasonable that a cartoon caricature has become a self-fulfilling prophecy?
KG@62
This is not too far off from what happened in California, though I don’t know if there was any effect on registering for primaries.
In 2016, California had settled in for a fairly normal election. There was at least not the same level of discontent with Hillary Clinton that was making the news everywhere else. Sanders did better than I remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_California_Democratic_presidential_primary but it’s interesting to see that Clinton won the big metropolitan areas (SF, LA, Sacramento). Santa Cruz county has a reputation as leftwing and did go for Sanders, but I think what distinguishes it from the adjacent Bay Area is that it has fewer very wealthy people, less tech money, and fewer wealthy immigrants.
By 2020, Sanders looked like a serious candidate, and he won California convincingly in a primary that squeaked in just before the pandemic took over the news. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Democratic_presidential_primary In fact, I’m not even sure how to characterize the places that went to Biden (how is Marin different from SF, Sonoma, or Napa?).
I was never that thrilled with Sanders, but I liked him better than Biden and thought he could win. I preferred Warren, but voted for Sanders anyway because Warren did not look like she had a chance.
I voted for Clinton in 2016, again just stupidly thinking we could have a normal election and hold down the White House to preserve some shreds of Obama’s policies, since obviously we weren’t going to have Congress that time around. (I was dumbfounded by the failure of many voters to see it that way, but now I get it. Many voters don’t really go for “least bad” no matter what they claim. However, I think this is not a bad description of a lot of voting in the SF Bay Area in 2016.)
If Sanders were even 10 years younger and could get at third try, who knows. His Latino outreach was much better, making him less of a white “boutique” candidate. It seems like his big idea is “Let’s be more like Western Europe.” And sure, let’s. I find it annoying that his fan base has to wrap it up in the term “democratic socialism.” I don’t see how that helps, and while people may split hairs, it sounds like you might as well call it social democracy.
Susan Montgomery@64,
Yes, doubling down on ignorance is exactly what I’d expect of you.
PaulBC@68,
That’s interesting – I wonder why the same did not happen in most states.
Susan Montgomery@64
I think disappointment in Cleese is just a matter of those who’ve enjoyed his humor and consider him intelligent finding themselves appalled at some of his positions, and maybe just that he has turned into the stodgy, pompous old man we thought he was making fun of all this time.
I’m not sure it’s that connected to politics. I knew lots of people in college in the 80s who enjoyed Monty Python and voted for Ronald Reagan. People just tend to want to believe that if they like someone for one reason, they will agree on other things.
Ray Bradbury’s another great example of someone who’s a hero to some on the left, but if you actually examined his politics, you’d see he was a nutty libertarian his whole life. That’s not inconsistent with Fahrenheit 451, and it doesn’t mean that as a leftist you have to hate yourself for agreeing with the parts you agree with.
@69. Okay, so Cambridge has the same admissions standards as Manchester Fish and Chips Polytechnic. Got it.
KG@69 At the risk of being accused of “identity politics” it may just be that Sanders nailed down Latino outreach in 2020 (in contrast to 2016) but failed at outreach to Black voters.
Susan Montgomery@71,
Yes, misrepresentation of someone who pointed out your ignorance is also exactly what I’d expect of you.
PaulBC@72,
Could be – and certainly Biden’s comeback in the primaries started in South Carolina, where he more-or-less swept the black vote. But if The Vicar was right, Sanders would still have won with an overwhelming working class vote – the people The Vicar thinks are just aching for some good red socialism. In fact, even in the early primaries, although he was leading before South Carolina, he did less well than in 2016. Admittedly, there were more significant candidates, but it suggests his vote in 2016 was partly anti-Clinton rather than pro-Sanders.
@70. True. But when it comes to understanding where the politics of our culture really are, taking a good long look at the stories we tell and who was telling them becomes important.
This isn’t necessarily to punish or blame anyone. This needn’t be about what message was intended but what was nevertheless received. And it’s about seeing past what we want to see.
I’m pressed for time so I apologize if this isn’t quite clear.
@70 nailed my answer before I’d even written it.
“But when it comes to understanding where the politics of our culture really are, taking a good long look at the stories we tell and who was telling them becomes important.”
So important that you thought that Cleese was a Lefty?
IIRC, Cleese was a supporter of the centrist breakaway from Labour in the 1980s, the Social Democratic* Party. So hardly a lefty even then, but has clearly done a very silly walk to the right since.
*Political terminology is unstable – Lenin described himself as a social democrat.
KG @ # 76: *Political terminology is unstable – Lenin described himself as a social democrat.
And Father Coughlin used “social justice” as his slogan.
as for understanding what socialism is and isn’t how is that discussion bettered by emphasis on labels in stead of policies?
the right wing has labelled all of the left with Stalin-ism and Maoism for decades ?
uncle frogy
@75. I had no idea, based on his crude and sadistic comedy, that he wasn’t. The younger self that was I loved Monty Python. My older, thinking and discerning self now sees it for what it was.
And that discernment was brought about the dreary procession of people in the media turning against liberal values when the business hit the fan. When it happens again, who is going to be coming to our defense and who is going to turn around and join the attack – or just cop-out with squishy bothsidesism?
@64 I don’t doubt how your “perception came about” – a combination of right wing media and ignorance, but I repeat myself.
The mockery of leftist protests in MP & the Holy Grail – “Come see the injustice inherent in the system!” and in Life of Brian – “What else has Rome ever done for us?” – while uncomfortably on target, signaled the presence of at least one right-wing perspective amongst the Pythons from the get-go.
Still sad to see Cleese turn into a grouchy self-caricature.
I think he was always Basil Fawlty, and that’s why he played him so well.
@82
absolutely
@82 You could think of Fawlty Towers as a documentary not a comedy…
nomdeplume@84 Maybe they could do a reality show called “No Riff Raff” and put John Cleese in charge of an actual B&B.
Before we praise Raffensperger, don’t forget:
He was a witness to and recorded evidence of multiple crimes involving election fraud for which he has admitted that he wasn’t going to do anything about so long as Trump kept his yap shut.
He was going to cover up election fraud until he got caught up in Trump’s attempt to throw him under the bus.
@81 The best that can be hoped for is that Cleese and the rest of the Pythons were nihilists who just felt that “conservative” targets were juicier than lefties at the time. In about 6 months time, when the NHS is facing major shortfalls and BoJo blames trans care for it, we’ll see where Cleese is, if he chooses to chime in. Will he be “Crikey, that’s wrong!”, “I identify as an attack helicopter” or “Both sides are wrong?”
rrhain@86
Praise Raffensperger? Are you kidding. He’s just annoyed that he couldn’t get Trump elected with the usual bag of tricks.
You can think of your own analogy, but I imagine a pair of antique dealers who show up at an old lady’s house to try to get her to part with a priceless heirloom for a song. They fail and one of them says, “Why don’t we just go back and steal it tonight?” The other says “What? Are you calling me a common crook? I take pride in my work!”
@44
In this case it means amywhere between those accerlarationists who fantasize about a leftists uprising after the country gets destroyed by fascism to antiestablishmentarian hipsters who dont actually care about communism, socialism or its ideals and just want to look cool and post edgy commie memes. Out of those two theres some overlap. At the end of the day they are a preachy lot who consdescend and think very highly of their own intellect.
For the record im very bias against communism because like most latinos ive seen the horrors and never seen a valid defense of the system. Of course I can actually have a conversation with some communists. Some communists are good people and not at all like Ive described above. Cant do that with a fascist. So they are better company for sure. The kind of communist i was refering too are authoritarian as Trumpers. If Sanders were doing what Trump is doing in trying to steal the election they would no doubt be for it.
@49
I agree but the problem here is that some socialists are under the illusion that they are popular. Their ideas are popular. They are not.
Oh and before someone tries the whole “fell for right wing propaganda” i am a) using examples from my real life as a social democrat and hanging out with other left leaning people, b)leftist social media and the bullshit that i see, and c) the ridiculous leftists that sometimes appears on this board.
A lot of leftists live in a bubble.
rrhain@86:
Hm.
Not quite the same as “If one can’t praise Raffensperger for everything, one can’t praise Raffensperger for anything”, but near enough.
Oh and another thing @Susan Montgomery is fucking right and coincides with my observation even if one of her examples is incorrect.
Socialists are privleged dipshits. Sorry for taking up multiple comments. Ive noticed this on university as well. They were always usualy the well off. Not well of enoigh like republicans are but middle to upper class.
logicalcat@93
I have a concordant but slightly different take, and I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about “socialists” as such. I think third party voting in the US is almost always an indicator of privilege. Basically, if you know your life won’t change all that much no matter who wins, you can use your vote to look cool to your friends, or win some personal purity points for that warm fuzzy feeling. That could mean voting Green or it could mean voting Libertarian. Though it nearly always means being white.
If you look particularly at the way Black voters align consistently with Democrats, it’s not because they all agree, and it’s not because they really think Democrats are that great. It’s definitely not an alignment with social liberals. That varies, but many Black voters are religious and socially conservative.
It is just a no-brainer that Republicans are worse for their interests, and it’s not a game when your life is tangibly affected by government policy. I have a lot of respect for Black Democratic voters, because they’re the only segment of my party that gets the concept of party discipline. You have to win elections or you don’t get to do anything. Republicans get it. Holy fuck, it’s not rocket science. Why are the people I agree with such idiots about politics?
I will add that I think Bernie Sanders is totally fine. He’s a good senator and clearly figured out how to win consistently in Vermont. (And he’s not really a socialist, more of a New Dealer or European-style social democrat). In 2020, I also took him seriously as a primary candidate and I voted for him in California. But in 2016, I really got sick of people saying “Feel the Bern” or posting cutesy stuff like a bird alighting on his podium. I don’t vote purely on electability, but I don’t vote against electability either. Politics is not for fun. It’s actually rather dreary. And if you vote just to make some kind of personal point, you are wasting everybody’s time.
“A lot of leftists live in a bubble.”
but not you, of course. never you…
lol
goes for Paul as well.
but hey, here’s some good news…
Georgia just went 100% blue.
The days of Mitch McConnel as villainous foil to any progress in the US are done.
We all live in bubbles. Who says otherwise? In fact, I like my bubble a lot.
One thing people miss about Cambridge that’s very different from most US universities is that it’s really a collection of 31 semi-autonomous colleges and they’re all different. When you apply as an undergraduate, you don’t apply to Cambridge University — the university is this weird stub organization that only manages the faculty+departments and sets examinations;– you apply to one or more colleges. They all run their own admissions processes and can have completely different standards/goals (e.g., Churchill College specifically allocates 80% of its slots for science and engineering students) and, I suspect, widely varying percentages of how many they take from public (i.e., private) vs. comprehensive (i.e., public) schools. The colleges also vary widely in resources (iirc, Trinity College is the 3rd largest landowner in the UK, behind the Crown and the Church of England)
Cleese went to Downing, which is middle of the list asset-wise, but is one of the older ones, with an emphasis in law and medicine. So it’s possible they have a bit more than their fair share of upper-class and right-wing folks.
Paul BC @68,
I think the main thing is that it’s much whiter. Just as it was nationwide, racial makeup was a very strong predictor of the Sanders-Clinton vote margin in California counties. The correlation between vote margin (as a percentage) and the white percentage of a county’s population was about 0.58, which is a pretty huge effect size for the social sciences.
Marin residents are older and much wealthier than any of those other counties, and also much whiter than folks in SF. Lots of health-conscious retirees; Marin County has the highest life expectancy in California, and the highest female life expectancy in the US.
Solano and Contra Costa don’t fit that demographic profile at all, but they are the most suburban of Bay Area counties, with the highest proportion of long-distance commuters. I believe they also have by far the largest minority suburban populations, concentrated in the cities around Suisun Bay like Antioch and Fairfield.
So, for differing reasons, I suspect these are all New Democrat strongholds. Their voters prioritize immediate electability, an effective pandemic response, and getting the federal government back to its “normal” level of semi-functionality. Defunding the police and economic revolution, not so much. Thus, Biden.
I won’t try to explain what’s happening in the rural eastern counties that chose him over Sanders. They’re sparsely populated and majority-Republican, so I have no idea who actually voted in the Democratic primary, let alone why.
logicalcat @93,
That’s not the case nationwide. According to Pew, Americans with a very positive impression of socialism are disproportionately poor, and disproportionately black or brown. They do tend to be more highly educated, but it’s not a huge difference. (And that’s people who approve of the word “socialism,” not just the policies by another name.)
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/25/stark-partisan-divisions-in-americans-views-of-socialism-capitalism/
“Who says otherwise?”
I do Paul… I do.
I’ve seen outside the bubble.
someday, you might too. but not soon I think.
@97 The point is that Cleese is a product of privilege and no one should be surprised that, when the choice came between protecting those privileges (regardless of how ruthlessly one may have mocked them in their younger years) or challenging them, Cleese came to their defense. The same can be said for the even more iconoclastic and sadistic Ben Elton all the Ivy League-educated “counterculture” icons in the US who now, in their elder years, embrace their status as Alt-Right icons.
Ichthyic@100
Well, good for you then. What’s with the drive-by sniping? Do you have a point?
And yeah, the Georgia election is great news. It took a massive GOTV effort. You can thank Stacey Abrams, a partisan Democrat who gets a predictable tut-tut from Jacobin: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/stacey-abrams-democratic-party
I don’t see how that contradicts anything logicalcat or I said.
Anton Mates@98 Interesting point about Marin. I know Santa Clara well and Santa Cruz to a lesser extent (I lived there for a couple of years). I tend to lump Napa, Sonoma, and Marin together in my head as “You know, that Northern California, wine and hot tubs and all.”
@Anton Mates
Yes they approve of socialism, but not socialists. Thats what im getting at. We (poor people of either white or color) like socialist policies. We just dont like self proclaimed socialists. Because they are often preachy, annoying condescending privleged people who think they can speak for us but never stepped inside our shoes or even interact with us. They also are very judgy. Especially the purity ones who are the worst. And dont even get me started with the commie apologists. Seeing someone with a Che shirt is irritating. We dont call him “The butcher of La Cabana” for nothing.
Most of the working class are only socialist in that they support policies associated with it but as far as political leaning go its very varried. Some identify as left, liberal, hell even conservative and right wing. Most dont identify with any of this shit and dont even have a label. They are just as likely to vot for Trump, Obama, or Sanders. Even more likely to not vote at all because theyve been conditioned to think voting doesnt matter.
@95
Nope. Dont live in a bubble. I ensure of that. Not never tho but i bust out of a bubble when i find myself in one. Just because you cant accomplish this doesnt mean others cant.
logicalcat @104:
So, a poor person who calls themself a socialist is a contradiction in terms? Americans are fucking weird.
I live in a bubble, but I research outside my bubble. There’s a limit to what I can handle. I can read crap from National Review or even The Federalist. I don’t want to listen to any of their voices. I don’t want to “reach out” to people who aren’t really any different from conservatives I already knew pretty well in college 35 years ago, except if they’ve transitioned from Reagan to Trump then I’ll just keep a safe distance. I will read Jacobin articles too, or whatever else my leftwing friends are into.
Nobody said we all have to agree. I acknowledge the existence of many people who see things very differently from the way I do. In fact, that’s the story of my life. It’s nice, though, to have found a place where I am usually around like-minded people. Hooray for bubbles!
“Sir, this is a Wendy’s.” Socialism wasn’t even on the menu in Georgia.
I think we got two thoughtful, decent individuals to replace the two corrupt insider-trading crony capitalists who were occupying Senate seats. That is cause for celebration, and I expect celebration to ensue.
Seriously, I don’t even get Loeffler and Perdue the way I can get the appeal of a complete asshole like Ted Cruz. Those senators had literally nothing going for them except being very rich and not being Democrats. I guess that used to be enough in Georgia.
@102
All he gots is attitude. No real point or substance.
@106
Considering that Obama was called a socialist by right wing media…yea we are weird. That term doesnt really mean anything anymore and imo gets in the way.