Is it appropriate now he’s declaring the democratic election invalid?
That’s what fascism is, you realise?
This really cuts to the heart of it; what does it take to get someone to change their views, when the facts don’t work?
Even if you disagree with a democratic agenda, how can you in good conscience continue to support someone who is blatantly acting like a fascist dictator right now?
I personally find it easy to distinguish Trump, who I consider an waste of air, and the GOP, who has an agenda I can appreciate.
If he believes it is invalid, I'm not sure what else I'd expect him to say.
The fact that the left has been absolutely out of their minds with hatred for the man for the last four years makes it very, very difficult for people to easily trust that they are not engaging in impropriety during the election. Their motto for removing him is essentially "At any cost" at this point.
I'm not sure why you're framing his actions or words along the lines of "fascist dictator". This is simply a continuation of the vitriolic rhetoric I've been trying to combat for years now. It's crazed, and I do not understand why you - someone who can write clearly enough that you must be intelligent - cannot see it. It's rhetoric like that that is driving so many people to distrust you.
Trump will challenge the election results in court and succeed or fail. It's as simple as that. Personally, I hope it's a failure because I don't want there to have been any impropriety. If that's the case, Trump is done. There is no fascism. There is no dictator. Please stop catastrophizing.
He did everything in his power to make sure this election would be a catastrophe (but failed, to the credit of Republican and Democratic state governments).
Now, he’s refusing to accept the results of the election.
He has appointed self-proclaimed facists and neo-Nazis to his inner circle.
His apparently illegal secret police force illegally detained protestors over the objections of the state governments that had legal jurisdiction over the protests.
He said he rushed the appointment of an additional judge to the supreme court so he would have enough votes to overturn the election results.
People claim he wants to be a “fascist dictator” because these are just recent examples of his four year concerted effort to dismantle our democracy.
He did all of these things in the open. There’s no “catastophizing” here. These are all, well-documented, uncontested facts. Most are documented by multiple videos of him, and members of his administration speaking about them. There are dozens of other examples of this behavior, also all well-documented.
Fortunately, it looks like he failed, and will soon be a former president.
This is the problem - Trump is a moron and everything he believe is suspect.
He believes he had the largest inaugural crowds ever, even after PHOTOGRAPHIC evidence proves otherwise. He believes his administration accomplished more in the first 100 days than any other one in US History. He believes COVID is a conspiracy, fading away, we've rounded the corner, doctors and hospitals are faking numbers to make money, the fake media only talks about it to hurt him and it will stop after the election. Etc.
>I'm not sure why you're framing his actions or words along the lines of "fascist dictator".
He has called for jailing or imprisonment of his political enemies, suggested the election system is rife with fraud, order troops to suppress free speech, had federal agents snatch people off the streets, tried to get other countries to smear his opponents before they got aid from the US, etc. The GOP ran a political convention when HALF of the the speakers were his relatives and advanced no agenda. If he were the President of some banana republic, we would say that is expected in a failing state led by a fascist dictator. I mean the convention alone is bordering on the type of stuff North Korea would stage.
> Trump will challenge the election results in court and succeed or fail. It's as simple as that. Personally, I hope it's a failure because I don't want there to have been any impropriety. If that's the case, Trump is done. There is no fascism. There is no dictator.
It's not “as simple as that.”
He's made baseless claims about the security of mail-based voting, suggested that shifts in tallies are the results of illegal votes — instead of a predictable effect of preventing counties from tallying ballots until election day, and clearly and unequivocally claimed that he has won the election and that any other outcome must be a result of fraud.
Working to create the appearance of fraud and then pointing to the situation as evidence is problematic, even if it is not ultimately successful.
It's not just that he's going to challenge the result in court. Please, go listen to his words- they're on YouTube. Read his tweets.
He's saying things like that he would win if it weren't for all of the illegal votes being counted. That "bad things" are happening in Pennsylvania as his lead was closing. He said, months ago, that he didn't think votes should be counted after election day, which is absolutely absurd.
He's literally trying to sow doubt about the election process and trying to make people think that Biden closing and overcoming a vote gap is suspicious, when it was totally expected.
I don't throw the term around lightly, but I don't know what else to call a blatant undermining of democracy like that other than fascism. Maybe we can discuss whether or not fascism is all that bad, but I find no way you can argue in good faith that what he's saying about the election is "ho-hum. Nothing to see here."
He has also casually suggested being president for more than 2 terms. I find that to be a statement in poor taste, at best. While the constitution is a living document by virtue of amendments, it stinks of aspirations for being dictator-for-life (when being spoken by a sitting president).
...but, I don’t think you can reasonably claim that now, even if, perhaps, you could previously.
I’m not trying to convince anyone; I’m just saying, for me, looking at what is happening right now, I cannot argue that the behaviour Trump is displaying is a) inappropriate for the potus, and b) scarily like what you would expect from a “fascist dictator”.
I can’t disagree with you more strongly than this: regardless of what has happened in the past, what is happening right now is NOT a continuation of the last four years of leftist media agenda.
When vote counts suddenly stop and then overnight the opponent starts surging, people tend to assume foul play is at hand. This is how it happens everywhere where an actual authoritarian cheats to stay in power, for instance: https://twitter.com/ajplus/status/1186630753523818502. For you to not understand something like this is grounds for people to question the validity of elections all over the world means that you don't understand much about the world, let alone what's happening in your own country. And I speak about this as a non-American who's simply watching it. You're being brainwashed by your media into believing things that aren't true.
The vote count turn is unsurprising since the in-person ballots could be quickly tallied while the mail-in ballots had to be hand-counted.
The reason the two types of balloting had such a difference in party-support is that the President in the Republican party had been telling his supporters not to use mail-in balloting because it would be rife with fraud. People took him at his word on that side of the political divide, so there's a resulting bias in the likely candidate supported by the mail-in ballots.
The PA, WI, MI GOP state legislatures refused to process mail in ballots before hand which is why it took so long. Look at Florida who voted R and counted their mail in ballots before Election Day and were able to report results that night. It was manufactured by GOP state legislatures to sow doubt.
Also worth pointing out that in the case of Florida the exact opposite happened and the original count was Biden winning handily but as the panhandle started being added the election swung the other way to Trump. It's not like the big shift in results was unexpected, as soon as the results for Miami-Dade came in even though Biden had a large lead the NY Times election needle immediately swung hard to Trump because they knew the lead would be wiped out by in person voting.
Funny how Trump isn't complaining about the exact same thing happening when it winds up helping him.
There's a reason why countries like France and many others have banned mail-in ballots. When those ballots keep being found day after day and the vote counting keeps going and going without end, until the right candidate wins, people will say its fraudulent. There's nothing you can say or do about it because that's just how it will go. You should want to prevent the voting process from looking fraudulent at all. There should be no doubts about it. The only thing you can do to achieve that is preventing that kind of voting from taking place to great degrees in the first place, which I believe Trump wanted to do but his opponents didn't.
> When those ballots keep being found day after day and the vote counting keeps going and going without end, until the right candidate wins, people will say its fraudulent.
This is not what is happening, and if anything, in Pennsylvania in particular, the Republican legislature is responsible for this situation. PA is one of only a few states that does not allow processing mailed ballots until election day (i.e. they can't even open the envelopes). The Democratic governor asked to change the law to allow counting of ballots before election day, precisely so you wouldn't get into this situation, and the Republican legislature refused.
When I say "the right candidate" I don't mean Biden specifically. If Trump now suddenly starts overtaking in multiple states with the ballots that are still being counted, people opposed to him will also find it suspicious and be unhappy with those results. The overall point is that this kind of voting shouldn't be allowed to this degree in the first place because it only generates doubt no matter who wins. As for the PA situation, yes, that's true, but the process I described is happening or happened in multiple states, not just there.
This. I'm more alarmed and afraid that investigation into all of the allegations his campaign is bringing up will be handled lightly or handwaved as a waste of time, where nothing less than a full blown addressing and running down of every accusation should be done. I don't care who wins in the end. I care that the processes integrity is maintained at all cost. Doubt with regards to the voting process is not something any Republic can afford.
Trump made allegations about the last election as well, then followed up with his own investigation which found no evidence. Then he spent the last few months ginning up distrust of mail in ballots and instead of offering help to states to scale up their voting infrastructure he instead appointed DeJoy to head USPS who destroys sorting machines and slows down the mail.
Now he throws as many lawsuits as he can about the voting process with zero evidence. His suits are being thrown out because they are frivolous and lack credibility.
Doubt with regards to the voting process is being sown by a single person and we shouldn't doubt our institutions just because someone is screaming loudly with no evidence.
I'd still be championing the need to investigate if Trump won, and it was Biden's team calling out the discrepancies.
Admittedly, I'm still trying to track down some more info on the rumored last minute software update in Georgia I believe it was and some more info on some rather interesting age demographics.
I don't doubt that if there was an election to pique voter mobilization, it'd be this one. I just know I'd sleep more soundly knowing some of the numerical strangeness rumored to be going on was looked into wholeheartedly.
Because of the hyper-distributed nature of American elections, those with doubts can often walk down the street (or catch a bus) to the elections office, start talking to people, and find out how the process works.
Also because of the hyper-distributed nature of American elections, that's a much better way to understand how they work in one's town than to look at national news about what's happening in Miami-Dade County. If you're not a citizen of Florida (much less a resident of Miami-Dade), you might as well ask how elections are run in Germany; it'll apply about as much to how they run in your town.
That’s what fascism is, you realise?
This really cuts to the heart of it; what does it take to get someone to change their views, when the facts don’t work?
Even if you disagree with a democratic agenda, how can you in good conscience continue to support someone who is blatantly acting like a fascist dictator right now?
I personally find it easy to distinguish Trump, who I consider an waste of air, and the GOP, who has an agenda I can appreciate.
Why is that so difficult to do?