12-08-2020, 06:24 AM
(12-06-2020, 06:16 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 06-Dec-2020 World View: What is Trump trying to achieve?
richard5za Wrote:> I don't live in USA and I am very curious: Has anyone any idea of
> what Trump and legal team is trying to achieve?
Navigator Wrote:> The actual selection of the president in the USA has not yet
> happened. The USA is a democratic REPUBLIC. This means that
> people vote for others who will actually select the president.
> Those that select the president are called Electors. They are
> members of what is called the Electoral College.
> Each state has to certify that the election was valid. In doing
> so, the state selects the Electors for the candidate they certify
> has won the presidential election in their state. Most states
> have laws that require the Electors to vote for the certified
> winning candidate. But some do not.
> The Electoral College then gathers, I think on December 14, and
> vote on who will actually become president. If more than 50% of
> Electors do not vote for a candidate, the selection of the
> president is instead made by the House of Representatives, with
> each state delegation receiving 1 vote. The winner is then the
> candidate who gets 26 state delegations to vote for him.
> What Trump's legal team is trying to do is: First and foremost, to
> stop states from certifying elections that result in the selection
> of Electors for Biden. But enough have now certified Biden
> Electors that he will have more than 50%. So now they are trying
> to "un-certify" elections, or they are trying to convince
> Republican controlled state legislatures to ignore the election
> results and instead pick the Electors themselves (which they can
> do).
> Second, they will try to convince Biden Electors to not vote for
> Biden but for Trump or even someone else. This is what Hillary's
> people tried to do in 2016. There are often a couple of Electors
> (from states that don't have laws forcing their vote) that will
> vote for some alternate choice, but usually only when the
> candidate of their party has lost anyway.
> The idea here is to, either by method 1 or 2 above, have the
> election sent to the House of Representatives, which has a
> majority of Republican state delegations, and they would then
> select Trump.
> These very unusual situations happened twice, in 1824 and 1876.
> But now, with the selection of more than 270 Electors for Biden,
> the whole thing is basically over for Trump.
> NOW, and very dangerous, some people are saying that Trump should
> declare martial law and re-do the election. The military would
> NEVER do this, and Trump would end up being tried for treason
> (which carries the death penalty) if he did this. The US military
> swears allegiance to the Constitution, not the President. And
> this would be an attack on the Constitution.
Thank you for this detailed explanation. There is more to be said,
however. The amount of evidence of cheating and fraud is growing
every day, though it may or may not be enough to affect the results.
Trump is not planning anything as ridiculous as declaring martial law,
but he is starting a new political movement, based on the enormous
anger and fury held by most of the 74 million people who voted for
Trump, and who believe that the Democrats cheated and stole the
election.
A vote counts the same as another (with an allowance for the distortions of the Electoral College in the Presidential election), whether it is cast by a fanatical supporter or someone mildly supportive. A vote cast by someone who tosses a coin to make a decision (yuck!) means as much as one cast in due deliberation.
Anger and fury are questionable values, to put it tamely, in democratic politics. 81 million people voted for Joe Biden. The 2020 Presidential election was at least as clean with respect to the process of election as the 2016 election. Electoral fraud is becoming increasingly difficult because of rigid rules of custody of voting devices and ballot materials in accordance with procedures modeled after those involving the accounting for cash and high-value items (jewels, computer chips, rare coins and stamps, expensive wine vintages, and certain clothing items). The number of votes cast must match (or be very close to) the number of voters. Ballots have watermarks on their paper as do legal documents and personal checks. Dead people might vote, but the vote of someone who casts an absentee ballot and then dies before the election will be disqualified. (In my community, the Township clerk reads the obituaries to match names and birth-dates with deaths to prevent such mischief as someone casting a vote on behalf of a deceased person). Classic cheats such as machine tampering and stuffing the ballot box (or removing ballots cast) are practically impossible.
If Donald Trump seeks to set up a new political movement, then such is his right. He has his fanatical supporters, his personality cult so to speak. Someone will inherit it if and when he croaks.
If I can accept that Donald Trump, a thoroughly vile and disreputable person could get elected as he was in 2016, then if he lost by the same rules four years later... then many of us will suggest that "$#!+ happens in years four apart.
Quote:This morning I watched George Stephanolopous's news program. The
thing that stuck out in my mind was the several occasions when
Stephanolopous angrily yelled that the election was settled. I
consider those angry outbursts to be admissions of guilt.
Stephanolopous and the others claimed that Trump was endangering
American democracy, and was making America look foolish in the eyes of
the world.
...and I say calmly that the election is settled. To claim that this election is a sham is to say that almost every other American election is a sham. I can even use the generational theory to explain the difference between 2016 and 2020: voters over 55 are now about 5% more Republican than Democratic, and voters under 40 are about 20% more Democratic than Republican. Based on the assumption that people are in the electorate for about sixty years on average, that means that roughly 1.6% of the electorate, almost entirely people over age 55, die off each year. New voters are almost entirely under 40. Over four years that is a shift of 1.6% of the electorate from R to D, and that is enough to explain how Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin went from Trump to Biden. (Doing so crudely would have suggested that Biden would win Florida, but Trump ended up losing Arizona, Georgia, and the Second District of Nebraska instead).
One of the oldest realities of politics, and it seems to apply in all countries, is that renters and debtors tend to be on the Left side of the political divide because they have less stake in the prosperity of ownership than do lessors and creditors. Most people have more respect for some capitalists, typically those who create and innovate, than for those who simply charge the client whatever they can. If you are a software engineer in Silicon Valley, then most likely you are paying more than half your income to a landlord who does not innovate, and typically has his tenants in a bidding war against each other. Don't like this rent? Then go to the Hell that is St. Louis, Misery, you unappreciative ingrate! Landlords like I own your opportunity to work in this town, and we have the right to everything we can bleed you for! That is not a good way to be loved as a capitalist, but landlords are not leasing overpriced apartments to people to get love from tenants. A second factor is debt. Whether one is in debt to an employer (a commonplace for agricultural laborers through the ages) or to a bank so that one could get a college degree that allows one to hold a non-menial job, one has every cause to want one's debt to be trivialized through inflation. If one holds the debt one wants that debt to hurt -- to be the figurative pound of flesh. The capitalist who innovates and makes the world better is more widely admired than the one who simply enforces and exploits a bidding war in a race to the bottom for all but himself.
The Millennial Generation faces the highest rents in American history and is most heavily in debt of any generation. It has little stake in American plutocracy in contrast to older generations more likely to be creditors and landlords.
Except for the Presidency, 2020 was overall a status quo election with an allowance for the generational change in the electorate.
Quote:Stephanolopous and other Democrats, led by shithead Adam Schiff and
Nancy Pelosi, have been relentless assholes (RAs) for four years. The
RAs never acknowledged Trump's legitimacy, they brought one ridiculous
charge after another, knowing that they were false charges to try to
get him out of office. The RAs were completely humiliated by the
farcical impeachment trial, but that didn't stop them. They say and
believe that Trump supporters are ignoramuses and evil bigots. And in
the last four years, these relentless assholes never once worried
about endangering American democracy, or making America look foolish in
the eyes of the world. So now when the RAs accuse the Republicans of
"endangering democracy," the response to the Democrats is likely to be
"Fuck you, asshole."
Donald Trump is a racist and a religious bigot, and his protest that he is the least bigoted person in the world is like the claim of some inmate at an insane asylum that he is the only sane person there (including the staff, although I would expect the staff to go nuts over time). Donald Trump is a thoroughly vile person who has said inflammatory things, which is par for a shock jock like Rush Limbaugh (to whom I refer to as "Rash Libel", which is one of the cleaner, but fitting derogatory monikers that one could place on him) If you want a generational angle to Donald Trump, then he exemplifies the worst traits that Howe and Strauss associate with Idealist generations of the past (ruthlessness, arrogance, and selfishness) without two of the usual virtues of Idealist leaders (erudition and principle). He is decisive, but he is decisively wrong due to his vices and his lack of respect for the usual decencies of life.
This man is a serial adulterer, a liar, a cheat, and a consort with organized crime. He has had to pay hush money to a porn star. His purported competence as a businessman is suspect. Really good businessmen do not try their hands at other things marginally related to what they do. James Cash Penney didn't get involved in the grocery business. Henry Ford never invested in an airline. Ray Kroc did not put gasoline pumps in front of his fast-food places. Sam Walton never bought a bank or insurance company -- and neither does Jeff Bezos. Ross Perot didn't go into the entertainment business. Warren Buffet stayed clear of high technology because he does not understand it. Dave Thomas did not try to enter the 'upscale' dining business. Trump's TV program is pure schlock, reality television that exposes the sadism of this horrible man. (OK, it is impossible to be a sadist and a good person!) It never took me long to "fire" The Apprentice with my remote control. He has been rich only because he was born to riches; he has been rescued from failure; he has been involved with gangster.
Quote:It's important to remember that this actually has nothing to do with
Trump, as I've been writing for over ten years. During the Obama
administration, when they still loved Trump because he was a TV star,
the Democrats had a vitriolic hatred of the "Tea Partiers," whom they
described in highly abusive terms, highlighted by the word
"teabaggers," which is as bad an insult as the n-word. Hillary
referred to them later as "basket of deplorables -- racist, sexist,
homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it." For the past
four years, the RA Democrats have constantly described all Trump
supporters as "white supremacists." But this is not because of Trump.
This is because of the innate hatred in the minds of the Democrats.
The TEA (literally Taxed Enough Already?) Party had the sponsorship of the Koch Brothers and other plutocrats who want a government deferential to his economic interests -- low taxes, low wages, harsh labor discipline, and no regulation. It found its suckers -- people who see the well-educated as exploiters trying to destroy the low-brow culture of ill-educated white people.
Quote:There's something in Democrat world view that always leads to this
kind of hatred. Remember that it was the Republicans who freed the
slaves, and it was the Democrats who bitterly opposed it. After the
Democrats lost the Civil War, they formed the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), and
the Democrats spent the next century lynching, beating, torturing and
raping any black person they could. If you had been a Democrat a
century ago, you probably would have been a member of the KKK, and you
would have cheered every time a black was lynched or beaten. Today,
Democrats have exactly the same mindset and hatred, but it's directed
at the 74 million Tea Partiers and Trump supporters.
In the Gilded Age the Republican Party represented the urban, industry-owning and banking bourgeoisie on the make in the North and the Freedmen. The Democratic Party was an odd coalition of Southern agrarian lords and the Northern white (largely Irish then) industrial proletariat who got along with each other so long as they did not meet... So what could industrial workers have in common with Southerners who had recently been divested of the most exploited workers possible? A shared distrust of Big Business -- exploiters on the job or distant monopolists who demanded tariffs to make the plantation owners overpay for industrial goods. The white urban proletariat saw any blacks as competitors to drive down wages...
As for the Second (1915) Klan it was bipartisan in its way. It was Democratic, of course, in the South; it was Republican in the North and West.
Quote:As I've developed Generational Dynamics, I've seen plenty of
historical analogies to this kind of hatred. It's identical to the
Nazi hatred of the Jews, or the Hutu hatred of the Tutsis, or the Serb
hatred of the Bosnians. This past summer, when the antifa-blm gangs
were rioting and looting and burning down small businesses, this was
the same as the Nazi's Kristallnacht. As it says in Ecclesiastes,
there's nothing new under the sun.
Black Lives Matters and Antifa are nice guys in contrast to the Alt Right, the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Boys, and the Wolverine Watchmen. .
Quote:So if you ask what Trump is trying to do -- yes, he'll try overturn
the election if he can. But there's a lot more. By continuing to
gather evidence of massive fraud by the Democrats, he'll galvanize his
new movement, based on the 74 million Trump supporters. He'll
probably say that he's running for president in 2024, and on that
basis he'll continue to hold rallies, from which he will continue to
attack the Biden administration.
Donald Trump is the definitive egoist, a person who measures all things by how they serve his interests. Most people grow out of that while kids. If they don't by then, then there is usually some ego-smashing experience such as having to work at a job that calls attention to a subordination to bosses, shareholders, and customers. The opposite of egoism that Trump exudes to the extreme is humility, something that nobody does for the fun of it. Except that people admire him for getting away with what they wish they could do... heck, marauders like Dillinger and the Barrow-Parker gang had their perverse admirers... I can't understand the appeal. There are other rich people far more admirable than Donald Trump.
81 million votes for Biden and 74 million for Trump translate into the 306 electoral votes that count and the 232 that are irrelevant in deciding who will be President as of Inauguration Day.
Quote:How will all this end? I've also been writing about this for over 15
years. It will end in an existential threat to the United States that
will unify the country behind whoever is president. That existential
threat is most likely going to be war with China.
COVID-19 is killing at the scale of a bungled war. Our Coward-in-Chief appeases a relentless enemy.
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.
