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Trump announces Ken Paxton as possible AG pick: https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/20/donald-trump-ken-paxton-attorney-general/
This is interesting because 1) Paxton is an aggressive partisan willing to engage in skullduggery, exactly the sort of person project 2025 would want and 2) he’s one of the few people trump has shown loyalty to. Also unlike Greg Abbott, who turned down the VP job, he seems to want the job. Also, last time he was out of office Abbott appointed his own chief of staff as attorney general, so it’s not like that would strip mine the Texas state government of conservative talent.
It’s worth noting that a lot of trump’s policy success from the last admin came through bill Barr, and an aggressive consiglieri in the AG seat is probably what trump needs to be effective.
God.
Paxton represents everything I dislike about this state. Setting aside his little scandal, he’s a shameless partisan who grandstands whenever he gets the chance. Every AG statement just drips with condescension and/or righteous anger at the opposition. I suppose, given our political climate, that makes him a savvy political operator.
While we have various stupid and offensive laws, I can’t really blame him for enforcing them. But I do not look forward to seeing how he operates with a more deadlocked legislature. Especially if Trump is looking for opportunities to get even.
Tangentially related...
How much should Trump get even, if he is elected? Either choice he makes seems pretty fraught.
Option 1) Play the bigger man. Pardon himself, obviously, and a few limited other people. Beyond that do nothing. This will prevent a wider conflagration in the culture war. Downside: without a tit-for-tat, the left will be emboldened for much greater tats in the future.
Option 2) Do unto him as he hath done unto me. Pursue corruption investigations against his pursuers (many of whom quite deserve them). Go after voter fraud and ballot harvesting. Turn the executive branch against the left in the same ways it has been turned against the right thus far. Upside: When both sides are armed, the chance for peace is higher than when only one side is armed. Downside: The system will probably resist him, and it could provoke a bigger backlash.
If I were Trump, I'd go with option 1. In reality, I expect him to just do whatever he wakes up feeling like he should do that day with little follow through.
Speaking for myself, with a caveat: Option two, massive. Not quite Treblinka, but I want skulls, family fortunes confiscated/destroyed, any resistance killed or imprisoned along with anyone they care about. Imagine Putin, but a lot more oligarchs falling out of windows.
The caveat is that this has to be done competently, and I don't think Trump or his hires have it in them.
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Playing cooperate against defectbot is how the Republicans have been losing for decades.
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I literally cannot conceive of Trump going for option one. If he did, it'd completely rock my worldview and my trust of all of the political voices around me. Is there any time you can point to where he's behaved with such magnanimity?
Despite the "lock her up" rhetoric, Trump didn't actually try to lock Hilary up. That's just off the top of my head. In fact, I don't remember any anti-Democrat lawfare from his administration, although I'm sure we can dig something up.
Why does your worldview rely so strongly on Trump being vindictive?
He's awful in many ways, but vindictiveness doesn't seem to be one of them. His nature is impulsive, not cold-blooded.
That's not magnanimity. At best it's baseline, expected behaviour. If you find that to be impressive coming from Trump, that seems like a meaner thing to say about him than even most of his leftie foes tend to use, at least the ones that are at all grounded in reality. (And I say that as one of those foes, though increasingly I'm only "leftie" by the standards of this place.)
Sorry, but this is annoying.
I said Trump is not vindictive. Then someone replied with "give an example of magnanimity". Of course, magnanimity is not the same as not vindictive. Ignoring this contradiction, I replied with an example of how he is not vindictive.
Now you are trying to force me to defend a claim I never made, that Trump is magnanimous? I never said that.
Are you saying you didn't write this?
Also, the piece I replied to was your direct response to the question, referring directly to what I've quoted above, "Is there any time you can point to where he's behaved with such magnanimity?". Like, it's literally what you gave as an example of that, or so anyone would think from reading that part of the thread. I think the "misunderstanding", if it is that and not just revisionist history, is pretty damn understandable.
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It mostly didn't work, but settling with Defense Distributed (and giving a not-trivial amount of cash in the settlement offer) is the sort of lawfare I'd expect from a coldblooded conservative, if small-scale by the standards of that sort of cy pres-like lawfare. And then there's the obvious guesswho stuff that didn't work entirely.
I agree that a Count of Monte Cristo-style planned revenge isn't really Trump's strong point, though.
EDIT: that said, I do think it's the sort of thing Paxton would a) have the temperament and skills for, and b) absolutely do it for both political ends and to make an impulsive boss happy.
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He didn’t even try to Lock Her Up, for one.
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To be clear, this is not a corrupt policy choice and shouldn't be lumped in as some malicious attack motivated by revenge-getting. It is just actually bad that elections are insecure and political operatives collect ballots.
The problem there is that going after voter fraud in a non-grandstanding way means he actually needs to name names and have evidence. You can't just say there was MASSIVE FRAUD in Detroit or wherever; you have to actually say here is a corrupt election official and here's exactly what he did and here's the evidence to prove it. Most of the voter fraud stuff in 2020 was more along the lines of "I don't like the looks of this", which doesn't exactly help you out too much when it comes to a prosecution.
I've written on this at some length in the past, but the evidence is much stronger than "I don't like the looks of this". I'll accept that the elections are free and fair when there aren't thousands of people mentally adjudicated incompetent voting in my state. If the clerk's office admits it's not capable of running a cross-check that prevents that subset, specifically covered as ineligible to vote, I have no idea why anyone would believe it's capable of preventing the myriad of other ineligible voting that occurs.
I hate to do this but you did the math wrong in the earlier post. You said:
The article says that there are about 22,000 voters on the incompetent list in Wisconsin. A random sample of 1,000 taken showed that 95 people had cast ballots at some point since 2008. Without numbers specific to 2020 there's no way to estimate how many improper votes were cast. That being said, if they want to implement a system to catch this I'm all for it. If they want to prosecute the people who voted illegally, I'm all for it, though going after incompetent people probably isn't a good look.
The same is true for the indefinitely confined. If you want to go after these people that's fine, but you'd better be prepared to investigate all 250,000+ instances and prosecute each one that doesn't meet whatever strict reading you want to give the law. You can't just go into Milwaukee and find a few black people or bleeding heart liberal activists who violated the law and use them as an example of "Democrat voter fraud"; you have to be willing to go into rural areas and ask MAGA hat guys detailed questions about whether Grandma is really indefinitely confined when she still has an active driver's license and was seen at the grocery store walking around the day before submitting her application. That isn't going to sit well with anybody, which is why nobody is ever going to suggest such a thing.
The context of the "indefinitely confined" issue is a disagreement about whether people who were staying home because of COVID-19 were eligible to vote by post on medical grounds. Eventually the Wisconsin Supreme Court said that they were not, but not in time to purge the voter rolls. So this isn't a case of fraudulent voting - it is a case of irregular voting due to blue-county election officials making an incorrect interpretation of State law in an unusual situation which the Supreme Court didn't correct in time, and voters acting on advice from their counties. Prosecuting individual voters over this would be an abuse of process. Part of the Project 2025 playbook is that an incoming Trump II administration should launch federal prosecutions of the county officials, which would be (and is intended to be) catastrophic for the resilience of the American electoral process, but would not be legally outrageous.
I don't know enough about Wisconsin law to know how likely it was that these votes could have been tossed if the Trump campaign had raised the issue in post-election litigation, but "large numbers of facially valid Dem postal votes should be tossed on technicalities" was an argument the Trump campaign mostly chose not to run with - both in its litigation strategy and in its public messaging.
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I actually very much appreciate it. I've referenced this a few times and haven't had anyone point out the error, which was going to result in me continuing to reference it. That this goes back to 2008 rather than being a single year count probably makes the per election frequency roughly an order of magnitude lower. So, duly noted, and thanks for that.
With regard to the second paragraph - yeah, I know, and I've tried to be pretty consistent about stating that none of these numeric estimates are intended to prove that 2020 was "stolen" since they don't even provide evidence on the direction of fraud and error. The point here isn't that each instance is a vote that should have gone the other way or that I think all of these people are criminals (in fact, I'd bet almost none of them intended to do anything illegal), but that the system is so shoddy that it allows a whole bunch of illegal voting that everyone shrugs at. I don't think we need to go track down a bunch of illegal votes from 2012 or something, we can just implement a system going forward that makes a reasonable attempt to have clean databases and require identification. Personally, I would prefer elimination of absentee balloting, but I know this isn't politically tenable. My offer to opponents would be replacing it with excellent early in-person balloting and making election day itself a holiday; I still know that's not getting done, but I do believe that it's a good-faith position to hold for someone that cares about security but isn't actually trying to engage in nefarious voter suppression.
Finally, while these numbers don't give any definitive data on fraud, I strongly believe they bring the lie to the ridiculous claims that there is basically no illegal voting. When we literally can't stop mentally incompetent people that are explicitly ineligible to vote from doing so, it seems pretty obvious that there are going to be at least a few other categories of illegal voting. The core of my position is that we should make a good effort to stop illegal voting and that we're obviously not doing that right now.
"a whole bunch of illegal voting" I would think that having an order of magnitude error in your thinking pointed out to you would maybe reign in unsubstantiated claims of large amounts of fraudulent votes. There simply is not wide spread voter fraud going on in the United States, when it does happen, even in stupid instances of a college kid voting at school and at home, it is eventually found and prosecuted for the most part.
https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud
Lol at the downvotes...amazing stuff. Don't worry, you're about to chase me off. Then you can have your echo chamber.
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At my job it's enough to point to the potential for things to go wrong to be able to guard against them.
There is a motte and bailey between real past and possible future vote fraud. A common reading of "Go after voter fraud" would be that such fraud actually is happening in sufficient quantity to merit pursuit.
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There were lots of specific allegations in 2020, and most of the cases weren't heard for lack of standing. To the extent that there have been follow-up investigations, much of the relevant evidence no longer exists. Chain-of-custody is gone.
I guess I'm trying to say, without opening up the whole 2020 debate all over again, that everyone in the world agreed that 2020 was stolen, it would be extremely difficult to name specific actors. We could prove that 3k ballots from Fulton County were fraudulent, but who created them? Unless somebody came forward there would have to be an investigation first.
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Why? What successes have come from previous iterations of this option? Why do you believe it would deliver superior results versus prosecuting the culture war to the greatest extent possible?
When you are weak it is best to avoid antagonizing your enemy.
The worst case scenario is that the bureacracy would just say "no" to Trump's orders, precipitating a constitutional crisis. More likely they'll just slow play his demands until the clock is run out. Then the lawfare against him can begin anew.
The only way he doesn't die in jail is if a Republican is elected in 2028. For that reason, he needs to remain popular with the people which means not triggering a crisis.
A constitutional crisis ends with a red state governor playing Sulla. There are no men with guns willing to actually fight for progressive values and Our Democracy(tm).
As the response to Trump's suggestion of using the military to stop BLM riots, there are; we call them the US military. The officers are blue now, the rank-and-file are not all that red, and many are minorities A red state governor trying anything likely ends up being crushed.
Federal forces obeyed their orders to suppress BLM riots, there just weren’t very many such orders.
As I recall, Trump had to use Customs and Border Patrol to do it.
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Yesterday it was true that there were no man with guns willing to fight for progressive values.
Tomorrow it is possible. The AI guys and people like Sergei Brin perhaps. And of course I am referring to drone tech.
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Granting for the sake of discussion that Reds are "weak", it seems to me that all Red Tribe victories in living memory have come from actions generally characterized as antagonistic, and no valuable victories have ever been delivered through actions generally characterized as cooperative or conciliatory. Further, given the state of the culture war, it's hard to imagine how this could possibly be otherwise. Many, many Blue Tribe actions, especially in the last decade, seem to me to be strongly antagonistic to the point where a response is fundamentally necessary to retain even a modicum of legitimacy for the existing system.
What's driving your definition of "worst case", here? Worst case relative to what?
I believe the current system has been engineered by Blues to be incapable of providing redress for Red grievances. It doesn't matter what elections we win, what laws we pass, what norms we follow, what processes we engage with, the output is always failure for our goals and values and victory for those of Blues. If that is the situation, then how would precipitating a constitutional crisis make things "worse"? We've already seen the normalization of organized political violence nationwide, universal violations of fundamental human rights, the partisan weaponization of the security services, and the complete collapse of rule of law. What would a constitutional crisis add to those problems?
I am perfectly willing to see Trump die in jail. Trump is by no means irreplicable, and his value as a martyr could easily exceed his value as a President. It seems obviously worse to me to see the numerous catastrophic abuses committed by Blue Tribe be cemented into durable norms, as was done with their abuses in previous generations. Playing nice for fear of the consequences of conflict is exactly how we arrived in our current predicament. It is past time to fight fire with fire.
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I'm for "Trump smash". Breaking the current environment that any tactic is OK for the left but none (including ordinary political rallies, which as you may recall the left liked to disrupt in 2016) for the right is necessary for the right.
But I suspect that a Trump in Sing Sing for putting an expense in the wrong ledger category(with the correct one determined retroactively, natch) will have trouble doing any of those. The boomercons will desert him as a criminal and he'll lose, and the left will be emboldened.
Of course if they put Trump in Sing Sing and he wins, he'll almost certainly at least TRY "Trump smash".
The respectable class of Boomercons have already migrated to the left.
Trump's bombastic style actually appeals quite a bit to young blacks and Hispanics, and the Democrats are having a hard time keeping them onsides. Biden is being forced to defend the black vote, and it's going badly.
Witness Biden's commencement speech at Morehouse yesterday in which students turned their back on him.
What style is going to appeal to young voters? This or... this? Whatever the issues, one of these people has rizz. And the other doesn't.
I have Trump at 60% odds right now, but much higher if he is jailed. Personally, I plan to vote RFK this time around, but would probably go for Trump as a protest vote if he his jailed, despite his obvious awfulness.
Yeah but that's Israel rather than any style issue. He can't go full Hamas without losing a rather important segment of Democratic elites (and anyway I'm pretty sure it's not personally his desire to do so), but that hurts him with blacks.
It’s the Economy, Stupid.
Many negros are antisemitic, but not in the sense of giving two shits about Israel or Palestinians. On the other hand, like most working class voters they’re very exposed to price increases and inflation is one of the few things that can lead to substantial black defections from the DNC machine.
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NR is pretty boomercon. They hate Trump but support him in the trials.
Most boomercons were never as anti-Trump as is now sometimes claimed. They didn’t like it, but many still voted for him.
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