Trump Leaving Office Poll

[Thad]

The GOP will be a lot less likely to support a guy who doesn't have any re-election prospects, so if he does win (aiieeee), it'll be interesting to see how fast the rats leave the White House.

Like right now, the GOP supports him, because, hey keep the Presidency to own the libs.

Yeah, I suspect if he gets a second term it'll look a lot like Bush's: Democrats will sweep the midterms, and conservatives will spend the last two years of his presidency pretending they never really liked him in the first place and this new nominee they've got is completely different.

Though that softpedals the sheer horror people are going to experience in the meantime. A second Trump term is still a nightmare, even if the last two years do end with his support crumbling and his own party starting to back away from him.

I don't think Trump will want to actually serve a second term; I don't believe he intended to win last time. If he serves a second term, he can't grift for money to run again in 2024.

My original thought was that he wants to run a huge campaign about getting donations that he can pocket and lose, but unless I'm missing it, he's not really doing as much fund raising right now as that would entail.

He hasn't been out there having rallies, but he's furious about that and that's part of why he's been agitating to reopen the country.

That said, while he may not be out there personally raising money, his campaign has raised a lot of it on his behalf.

[Mongrel]

I don't think Trump will want to actually serve a second term; I don't believe he intended to win last time. If he serves a second term, he can't grift for money to run again in 2024.

My original thought was that he wants to run a huge campaign about getting donations that he can pocket and lose, but unless I'm missing it, he's not really doing as much fund raising right now as that would entail.

I think that was more the plan in 2016. Today it's a whole different ballgame. At the very least, I'm pretty sure that Trump's family have quietly made way more cash behind the scenes (or, tried to anyway) than they ever would have by embezzling campaign funds and getting TV deals.

They have a taste of what it's like to be a loyal family member of the person holding the most powerful position of any human on the planet. Just because they know it - probably - has to end someday doesn't mean they're not looking for ways to stretch that out for as long as possible.

The one blessing here is that to a man the Trumps are fucking idiots. As Brent said, Trump himself possess a very sharp low cunning, but even if his lizard brain managed to luck him into this, that's not enough to let him keep it.

At the very least, having literally any credible - even VISIBLE - opponent from the Dems and his position would look a lot worse than it does now.

That said, while he may not be out there personally raising money, his campaign has raised a lot of it on his behalf.

Absolutely. Like I said, there's now thousands suckling the Trump teat. Plus the GOP would 100% run Literal Hitler if he were already a first-term Republican president, and I do not feel that is any any way hyperbolic.

[Brantly B.]

Absolutely. Like I said, there's now thousands suckling the Trump teat. Plus the GOP would 100% run Literal Hitler if he were already a first-term Republican president, and I do not feel that is any any way hyperbolic.

Literal Hitler was an accomplished writer, spoke at an adult level, was conventionally well-groomed, had years of military service and an Iron Cross to his name, and could generally respond to criticism on the spot with self-control and a subtle sense of humor. He's way too qualified to run for President in 2020.

[Mongrel]

Absolutely. Like I said, there's now thousands suckling the Trump teat. Plus the GOP would 100% run Literal Hitler if he were already a first-term Republican president, and I do not feel that is any any way hyperbolic.

Literal Hitler was an accomplished writer, spoke at an adult level, was conventionally well-groomed, had years of military service and an Iron Cross to his name, and could generally respond to criticism on the spot with self-control and a subtle sense of humor. He's way too qualified to run for President in 2020.

I'm just running around the apartment howling "Oh lord it's true! It's true".

[Thad]

At the very least, having literally any credible - even VISIBLE - opponent from the Dems and his position would look a lot worse than it does now.

I don't fault Biden for not appearing much in public over the past few months -- "don't appear much in public" is exactly the right example to be setting right now -- but I do fault him for not posting more videos in that time. You're the presumptive nominee; show some goddamn leadership.

I do think he's started saying the right things this past week; it looks like he's got some good advisors and some good speechwriters pointing him in the right direction.

There's a long way to go until the election. That's not to excuse Biden's absence these past couple of months, merely to observe that in the scheme of things it probably won't affect his numbers in November.

Biden's not going to inspire anybody. But he might be able to convince people he's the grownup in the room. Sooner or later he's bound to say something stupid and the media's going to give it wildly disproportionate coverage compared to what they give the stupid and dangerous shit Trump says all the time. But if Biden can manage to stick to the script most of the time, that might be enough to make that 53,500-vote difference and win him the election.

[Brantly B.]

We haven't talked about the "shoot them in the leg" thing here, have we? I mean... that was a god damned perfect storm of stupidity. Underinformed, underconsidered, violent, still pretty institutionally racist, contains at least one oxymoron within itself, badly timed and in the worst context possible. I think if anything that got underblown, just because of how much more relevant shit is going on than "Jeff Bidet rams his foot so far into his mouth that he manages to give himself a prostate footjob".

[Mongrel]

I mean, Biden's effectively a pylon - nobody's paying much attention to the content of his speeches because everyone knows he's just reading a prepared statement from someone who's at least semi-functional. The question is "Can a pylon with a DEM sticker on it beat Trump?"

Maybe?

[Thad]

I mean, Biden's effectively a pylon - nobody's paying much attention to the content of his speeches because everyone knows he's just reading a prepared statement from someone who's at least semi-functional.

Except when he says something like "shoot them in the leg." That's Biden talking.

[Mongrel]

For sure. That was 100% Biden on his porch mumbling about the newspaper he's reading upside down before his handlers arrive.

[Lottel]

I mentioned in #ff and will say it here: I'm still not convinced he will lose the next election.

I want to say by extreme fraud and interference but I understand it's possible it'll be just the regular amount of fraud and interference and people will just want to vote for him.

[Friday]

Oh, yeah. I'm not even remotely confident he'll lose.

What the left will do if he loses (and by "the left" I mean the people, not the establishment) is a whole other can of worms. "Sit back and take it for another four years as Trump just starts gassing Mexicans" is possible, but in my opinion unlikely. I personally think the most likely path to blood isn't a narrow Trump loss, but a narrow Trump victory with a supermassive popular vote loss.

And yeah yeah, I know a lot of people think human beings will never ever fight for whats right and everyone is fucked forever etc etc. We get it, you're tempering your emotions to avoid feeling like you did in 2016 again. But if the current protests and riots are evidence of anything, it's that the (ground level) left has a limit. We can only be pushed so far.

The democratic establishment, on the other hand, has pretty much repeatedly demonstrated that they have no limit in their capitulation.

[Thad]

I personally think the most likely path to blood isn't a narrow Trump loss, but a narrow Trump victory with a supermassive popular vote loss.

I'm not skeptical of the possibility of a Trump victory, but I am skeptical that there's any plausible scenario where he can win the EC while losing the popular vote by substantially more than he did in 2016.

A 3 million-vote popular vote loss correlated to winning the EC by 107,000 votes.

State outcomes are correlated. A Democrat overperforming in California means he probably also overperforms in other states.

So what's "supermassive"? Let's say Biden wins the popular vote by 4 million votes, not the 3 million Clinton won by. It's pretty hard to envision a scenario where Biden manages to score an additional 1 million people but, of that number, he doesn't scrape together the 54,000 he needs to flip in the 3 closest 2016 Trump states.

[Büge]

Intercept: What if Trump Won't Leave?

[Thad]

Intercept: What if Trump Won't Leave?

It's a good piece but it isn't what the headline says. The headline suggests that it's asking the old "What if Trump loses but refuses to leave?" question, but what it's actually asking is "What are the tactics Trump could use to make sure he doesn't lose?" I think there's a very important distinction between those two questions.

I think a lot of people are picturing a climactic scene from a movie, tanks in the streets, that kind of thing. Stealing an election is usually a lot more mundane than that -- it's a break-in at a hotel, or a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling stopping a recount in Florida, or refusing to fund the Post Office.

The threat we should be watching isn't that Trump is going to suspend elections and declare himself emperor, or that after a clear and unambiguous loss he's going to orchestrate a military coup to keep himself in power anyway. It's that he and his cronies are going to do everything they can to ensure that there isn't a clear and unambiguous loss. They're going to do everything they can to make sure that people who don't support Trump don't get to vote, or that if they do their votes don't get counted. It's all about muddying the waters enough to eke out an electoral college win -- with a 2000-style assist from the Supreme Court if necessary.

Dictators don't generally suspend elections; they rig them. Russia has elections. North Korea has elections.

"Is there going to be an election?" is the wrong question. "Will Trump abide by the results of the election?" is getting warmer, but I think it still misunderstands the nature of the threat. The threat is that Trump and the rest of the GOP will interfere with elections to change the results of the election.

[Thad]

Put another way: I think merely framing the question with the qualifier "if he loses" presupposes a scenario where he's already tried every dirty trick and called in every favor and they've all failed. If the election is officially called and he's lost, that means he doesn't have the state legislatures on his side and he doesn't have the Supreme Court on his side. I think at that point he's about out of allies in high places.

I'm not saying nothing bad happens after that. There could be riots. There could be mass shootings. Conspiracy-minded Trump fans believing that sinister forces have stolen the election from him could still mean some very, very bad things happen on his behalf. But I'm not seeing how any of that translates to him still getting to be president. He's mocked, berated, and belittled the Secret Service and the military brass often enough for me to be skeptical of any theories that they'll have his back if things are already so far gone that Republican legislatures and the Supreme Court have washed their hands of him.

So I don't think what Trump does in January is the thing we should be worrying about. I think what he's doing right the hell now is. He's actively trying to steal the election, and will continue to do so. We need to do what we can to make it as difficult as possible for him to succeed, not worry about what he's going to do if he fails.

[Mongrel]

On that subject: Cohen says Trump won't leave office peacefully

[Thad]

Yeah, well, I'm still not gonna buy his book.

[Mongrel]

xD

That reply was worth a good 30 seconds of laughter. A+