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Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses? Trump himself has a big personal incentive to say the election is "rigged" if he loses no matter what. It redirects the conversation from analyzing the defeat ("how could we do better"), which will inevitably shine a light on Trump's shortfalls, to one where the basic facts of reality are debated instead. The obvious example is the 2020 election. Lesser known was that Trump did the same thing in 2016 when he lost the Iowa primary to Ted Cruz. Now it seems he's preparing to do the same in 2024.
Many Republicans are more than willing to go along with this, mostly due to either negative partisanship or living in a bubble ("everyone I knew was voting for Trump, then the other guy won? Something doesn't smell right!"). If the pain of defeat stings, why not just be a sore loser instead? I've debated many people who thought the 2020 election was rigged, and inevitably it goes down one of three rabbitholes:
Vibes-based arguments that are short on substance, but long on vague nihilism that "something was off". Nearly 70% of Republicans think 2020 was stolen in some way, yet most are normies who don't spend a lot of time trying to form a set of coherent opinions, so the fallback of "something was off" serves as a way to affirm their tribal loyalty without expending much effort.
Motte-and-bailey to Trump's claims by ignoring everything Trump himself says, and instead going after some vague institutional flaw without providing any evidence to how it actually impacted 2020. For instance, while mail-in ballots are a nice convenience for many, there are valid concerns to a lack of oversight in how people fill out their ballots. People can be subjected to peer pressure, either from their family or even from their landlord or another authority figure to fill out their ballot a certain way. However, no election is going to 100% perfect, and just because someone can point out a flaw doesn't mean the entire thing should be thrown out. In a similar vein, Democrats have (rightly) pointed out that gerrymandering can cause skewed results in House elections, yet I doubt many Republicans would say that means results would need to be nullified especially if Democrats had just lost. These things are something to discuss and reform for future elections.
People who do buy at least some of the object-level claims that Trump or Giuliani has advanced about 2020 being stolen. There's certainly a gish-gallop to choose from. The clearest meta-evidence that these are nonsense is that nearly everyone I've debated with has chosen a different set of claims to really dig deep into. For most political issues, parties tend to organically rally around a few specific examples that have the best evidence or emotional valence. The fact that this hasn't happened for Trump's claims is indicative that none of them are really that good, and they rely more on the reader being unfamiliar with them to try to spin a biased story. One example occurred a few weeks ago on this site, one user claimed the clearest examples were Forex markets (which were subsequently ignored), Ruby Freeman, and the Cyber Ninja's Audit. I was only vaguely aware of these, so I did a quick Google search and found a barrage of stories eviscerating the Ruby Freeman and Cyber Ninja narratives. I then asked for the response, preferably with whatever relatively neutral sources he could find, since I was sure he'd claim the sources I had Googled were all hopelessly biased. But this proved too high a bar to clear for him, and so the conversation went nowhere. Maybe there's a chance that some really compelling evidence exists out there that would easily prove at least some of the major allegations correct, but at this point I doubt it.
At this point it seems like the idea that elections are rigged is functionally unfalsifiable. The big question on the Republican side now would be whether to claim the elections were rigged even if Trump DOES win. The stock explanation would be that the Dems are rigging it so they have +20% more votes than they normally would, so a relatively close election means Trump actually won by a huge margin. On the other hand, saying the election was rigged at all could diminish Trump's win no matter what, and it's not hard to imagine Trump claiming "this was the most legitimate election in the history of our country" if he manages to come out on top.
It's unfalsifiable because the evidence that would prove or disprove election fraud was illegally destroyed. Ballot chains of custody were destroyed across several swing states. You can recount the ballots as many times as you want but you can't prove where any of those ballots came from. This is after several swing states simultaneously stopped counting on Election Day only to return massive pro-Biden dumps at 6am a few hours later.
This will sound unbearably demented to most posters here, and I'm aware of that, and fine with this, because I mean it earnestly: all talk of Trump's "shortfalls" is nonsense. Trump is obviously one of the greatest Americans to ever live. He spurred the renaissance of New York, mastered reality TV, turned his fathers modest real estate portfolio into a multi-billion dollar company synonymous with wealth as one of the most famous people to ever exist, then ran for president as a private citizen despite major opposition from both parties and won. He casually reinvents the language every time he speaks. He tried to do a denuclearization deal with Russia and China, we were literally on the cusp of world peace, and we couldn't get there because of the Russia hoax. Fundamentally we aren't good enough for Donald Trump. We were all sitting around debating the doom of Western Civilization and pro-woke and anti-woke and he's the only guy to stand up and say, we have all these factories lying around, we should turn them on, we should make Detroit wealthy again, we should make San Francisco a paradise again, we should Make America Great Again, and going further than that we should Make America Greater Than Ever Before. He just did it casually, because he wanted to help his country, when he was full of success and worldly things. (Multibillionaire, supermodel wife, luxury real estate empire, grandchildren and kids.) And we sit around debating things like his tone and his shortfalls because, I guess, people have told so many lies about him that we cynically believe some of them have to be true.
Trump is unfathomably based for not dropping the 2020 election. Anyone else would have let themselves be bullied out of it. Anyone else would have quietly dropped the issue and made a nice conciliatory speech and walked away beat. But Washington DC is governed by a fundamentally sick culture where the wealth of the greatest country in the world is spent making the world a worser place. There is immense pressure within the system, all the time, to pillage everything for the wealth of the people running it, bomb some more countries for the defense contracts, ruin the world for the price it cost to ruin, then pay the experts to sell their misconceptions as the smartest ideas on earth. It takes immense pressure to not cave and do something good. Most presidents only do it a few times. Trump did it over and over and over again, more than anybody, even up to the point of this most important thing. They stole the election from him and he refused to concede it, even as they accused him of destroying democracy.
That's why he's going to win too, and why he won in 2016 (and 2020 alike). It's the quality from that first Republican debate in 2016, when Trump stood on stage and was the only candidate to say he wouldn't pledge to endorse the Republican nom.
Trump is the only candidate. He's the only one actually willing to stand up and fight. We all forgot what it even looked like to fight, we were all living in a world of sitting around waiting for Caesar and collapse and depression and loss, waiting and watching and coping. He makes it look easy! "Moderating" wouldn't help. All his "shortfalls" are his best qualities and why he is in fact The Best and will win at all. While we were sitting around passively debating the death of America he was imagining making America Greater Than Ever Before. You just come down the escalator, and you fight, and you win, and it's easy. And then you win some more.
Come on! He's clearly one of the greatest of the WORLD if not the greatest.
Soon we will all be talking trumps english
Right, but Americans are already the greatest in the world, it goes without saying.
Your logic is sound
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