06-26-2020, 08:14 AM
(06-26-2020, 12:18 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I did a for laughs version of this a while ago. I don’t put it past Trump to try. Right now, though, the election would have to be vaguely close for him to be taken seriously at all, and the polls are not looking that way. The people are with reforming the violent racist police. They have until this point been favoring the scientific governors over the happy talk governors significantly, which I read as an approval to date of stringent precautions. The infection rate in many parts of the country are going way up, and should be rather decisive by the time the election comes around. The reopening the country to look good economically is not looking good if done before limiting the number of people infected first and having many test kits available.
The problem with Trump is that he is unaccustomed to anyone saying NO to him and getting away with it -- unless getting away from his influence. He has appealed to the worst in many Americans, and I expect him to keep doing so.
Like many entrepreneurs he believes that people are nothing more than Homo oeconomicus, an entity driven solely by desires and needs and best controlled by ensuring that he can meet his barest needs only at the greatest of efforts under the harshest of circumstances. This view of human nature started to lose its luster in the Enlightenment but regained some support in the Gilded Age, when in return for horrible working conditions that we would never excuse now people got unprecedented levels of technological progress and consumer choice. But workers got wise to the ugliness of the system, one that demanded an unending stream of child laborers as sacrifices to Lord Mammon as their prole parents were spent by age 35 and were seeking health through elixirs best described as cocktails of liquor and laudanum.
Quote:Basically, Trump took the wrong side of the crisis issues. The progressive values traditionally wipe out the old conservative values come a crisis. Just ask the royalists, slaveholders or isolationists. It is looking no different this time.
... and don't forget the ultimate losers of the last Crisis war: the Axis fascists
defeated, disgraced, and at times executed.
Quote:And I don’t see Trump as one to admit a mistake, to radically change course. He is apt to ride his presidency into the ground. The problem is that he is apt to run the country into the ground too for good measure.
He got away with much until he quit getting away with it.
Quote:I cannot see the military taking orders to blatantly use force against the American People. Trump may think he has loaded the Supreme Court, but Roberts has always been willing to vote with the liberals and Trump’s appointee went against him recently. I could see Biden setting up shop in Camp David, giving Trump enough rope to hang himself if he wants to.
So it was in the Philippines in 1986, when it had to choose between someone who obviously cheated to win a rigged election, and someone who apparently won except for blatant electoral fraud. It was even more so in Romania in 1989, when Ceausescu ordered the Romanian Army to fire upon peaceful demonstrators. The Romanian Army changed sides then and there.
Quote:But mostly, the fact checkers are still with the traditional media while Trump lies. An attempt to seize power would be a big risk to take when there are a lot of criminal offenses outstanding for Individual #1.
The fact checkers usually watch the journalists. Now they watch the President.
Quote:I suspect trying to see if a self pardon works is the more likely threat. It would not surprise me if after the election, he throws pardons around freely for any people that manage to stick around.
Self-pardon? Mike Pence is spineless enough to pardon Trump on his own.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.