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Since my post last week for which I was explicitly not warned at that time, I thought I would address the particulars of the criticism, mainly that,
First, there is nothing stopping anyone from disagreeing, but I figure I should present and defend my thesis.
Donald Trump is guilty of winning the 2016 election, and for this crime he will be hounded by Democrats until the end of his days. The crime of winning in 2016 was the rationale for the Russia collusion hoax, it prompted the Mueller investigation (which produced nothing actionable), it was the reason for his first impeachment (not the appropriate anti-corruption measures he was taking against his likely 2020 opposition), and it is the reason he was indicted last week.
Plenty of people commit plenty of crimes, and I'm sure Trump is technically guilty of many things, but the same can be said of Obama, Bush, and Clinton, as well as she-Clinton and VP Biden, though not themselves Presidents. The same can be said of many, many people at all levels of the legislative and executive branches. Presidents are not prosecuted, and for good reason, until now, so the difference cannot be the scale of the crime, but must be some other factor. The obvious and clear factor, judging on the last seven years of evidence, is that Trump is unduly and irrationally hated by the powers that be, and that he is specifically marked for destruction in a way most others are shielded.
From Victor Davis Hansen:
VDH goes on to list six problems with this prosecution, before 20 examples of crimes that have gone unprosecuted, from the people I've mentioned as well as various spooks and spies.
If we look at the indictment itself, and the person responsible for it, Alvin Bragg, you see more evidence of my thesis.
Here's the kind of thing he chooses to prosecute:
This is the kind of anarcho-tyranny that one would expect when you view the world through a comprehensive lens that allows for understand my claim. That Alvin Bragg doesn't give a shit about the law, he's just there to settle scores and punish those he can find. The law is powerless to help, but boy can they punish when they get around to it. Alvin Bragg, for what's it worth, is another Soros-funded prosecutor. Soros at least gets his money's worth, as every single DA I've ever seen associated with him and his money is using their discretion is release violent criminals and prosecute normal citizens. The man has a type.
Everything about this perfectly fits the model that I've developed over the last seven years for understand what happens to people when confronted with Donald Trump. Trump engenders hatred and revulsion unmatched by anyone in my lifetime, the source of that hatred is his 2016 election win, and that people like Bragg can't help themselves but act on it.
Maybe one day events will not fit this model, but today is not that day.
For those of you who don't share this model, or don't share this view, how can you explain the lack of prosecutions of other executive branch employees in the past? How can you explain the two impeachments and long-lingering investigation? How can you explain the one-sided coverage by once-respectable media outlets? How can you explain anything that's happened since 2016? I didn't use to rely on this explanation, but after a certain amount of time, it becomes the simplest explanation, and I have stopped fighting it.
What's missing from your argument is an explanation of why Trump engenders unprecedented "hatred and revulsion." The explanation cannot be merely that he won the 2016 election, since many of the other people you mention (Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden) also won presidential elections.
The standard pro-Trump explanation for why he's hated is something like "he's the only one who isn't corrupt and won't do what the deep state wants." The standard anti-Trump explanation is something like "Trump has shown a unique willingness to violate democratic norms, such as by calling on Russia to release hacked emails or stating that both the 2016 and 2020 election results were rigged."
It seems like the whole argument pivots around this "why is he hated" question. If Trump is in fact uniquely willing to violate democratic norms, it seems reasonable for his opponents to take issue with that and to argue he has forfeited the right to avail himself of those norms for protection. You and VDH raise good arguments for why the norm of "don't prosecute former presidents" exists, but many similar arguments could be made for why the norm of "presidents gracefully concede elections and don't challenge the results" exists. In game theory terms, if Trump consistently choses the "defect" option, it may be the optimal strategic choice for his opponents to do the same.
The question is not whether Trump is personally corrupt - to be honest, nobody cares much if he took or given a bribe or two. The reason he was elected is not because he's a saint personally, it is to try and break the whole corrupt system - where the problem is not personal corruption, which can be dealt with by replacing the corrupt individual, but systemic perversion of the whole power structure. So, for those who elected him, Trump defecting is exactly why they elected him - because cooperating hasn't been working for them for decades now, and they feel like the other side is already been defecting for a long while, and it's time to respond in kind.
These are good examples, because neither of them actually violates any democratic norms. It does violate the norms of behavior that the elite political class has set up - mostly not for themselves but for others - but that's, again, why Trump is there in the first place. Whining about elections being rigged is the staple of American politics - but when the Left has been doing it about Bush, that was par for the course. Asking KGB's Andropov to help with fighting Reagan was par for the course. Arranging with Medvedev to be "more flexible after the elections" is par for the course. Getting millions from Russian banks and oligarchs for "charity purposes" is par for the course. It's when the Right is suspected of doing a tiny bit of something similar by themselves - then it's a norm violation, they're not supposed to do it to us, we're supposed to do it to them! That's exactly the norms that the deplorables wanted to be violated.
But does it really? Maybe the Democrat President did not have to personally challenge the results - he had hundreds of lieutenants to do it for him. The deplorables do not have the army of lieutenants that the systemic president, chosen by the system, has. So they can not rely on a network of proxies to do the job, if anything can lead this on the deplorable side, it's Trump. But the norm of "elections are never questioned" does not exist - it's all pretend. Bush results were questioned all the time, Stacy Abrams still claims her election was stolen and she is not seen as norm violator - I know her title as The President of Earth may not qualify, but she is still quite prominent to illustrate that this supposed "norm" is fake - it works only towards one side and not the other. Such are almost all "norms" that Trump has "violated".
Sure, but if this is the case you don't have standing to complain when his opponents adopt the same strategy. Arguing that indicting Trump is norm-breaking rings hollow if Trump himself was elected to break norms.
It's a continuation of the norm-breaking that led to electing Trump. Or, in other words, the supposed "norms" have been norms only to one side, but not the other - and the indictment is added to the long list of these one-sided norms, where Democrats are routinely doing things they claim shouldn't be done because of the "norms". It's not the new complaint, it's the same complaint over and over and over and over.
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I think it's important to compare Trump to the two previous Republican presidential candidates, McCain and Romney. In that context, what made him different was not only that he won the election, but also that he actually, you know, made a serious, undeterred attempt to win the election, no matter what crap the hostile media outlets threw at him. He actually competed, and tried to win, unlike those other two losers who tried to live up to their opposition's supposed standards. That explains most of the animosity.
Except it wasn't the opposition's standards - at least not on election denialism. The difference between that and "being racist" by wanting to deport people is vast.
The idea of accepting election results was uncontroversial on both sides until Trump talked. The benefits of polarization.
Hell, the Dominion lawsuit revealed that, even within Fox, people who didn't excoriate him in public were dubious but worried about their audience.
But I guess they were also playing by Democrat standards?
This seems like a strange claim to me. Would you classify the two-year investigation of "Russian interference" by a Special Prosecutor as "accepting election results"? "Not My President"? Hillary - the actual losing candidate - calling Trump an illegitimate President? Sadly, the civilized norms had already been well eroded by 2020.
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I remember watching a documentary about how Bush stole the election with Diebold voting machines. Do you mean uncontroversial among politicians? I guess not since you mentioned Fox reporters.
Accusations of unfair elections have always been around, but the politicians themselves are supposed to accept defeat. Consider the 2000 presidential election: Al Gore disputed 1 legitimately very close state with sketch election practices, and when he lost the court challenges, that was it. There weren't dozens of lawsuits filed against every state and election official where he lost, alleging far-flung conspiracies. There wasn't a riot at the Capitol. There was definitely a lot of double-think and crappy opinionating from the peanut gallery (e.g. is it a question for Florida state courts or SCOTUS; depends on who everyone thinks they'll side with) but I think overall I think he had a much better case than Trump for losing unfairly and managed to handle it more gracefully.
I could quibble about some details, but I don't really have anything against what you said. It might be a tone thing, but I can understand where someone saying "there was a riot at the capitol, and the way Trump was acting was the most likely cause of it. That's pretty damn bad compared to recent presidential candidates" is coming from, but when someone unironically calls it an insurrection, I check out.
I specifically used the word riot because of how charged "insurrection" is!
The extent to which said riot was even Trump's fault is... eh. I'm personally inclined to blame individuals for their own actions. The 1/6 riot was the fault of the rioters, not Trump. BLM riots were the fault of BLM rioters, not some academic writing a sociology paper on how riots are the voice of the unheard. Mass shootings are the fault of mass shooters, not the NRA. It's not so much that he's mostly to blame as that I think we should have a very high standard when it comes to "are politicians following rules and norms for a peaceful transfer of power." Trump's behavior was a contributing cause, but even if it's only 5% of the cause, it should 0.001% (numbers fabricated).
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Politicians especially are expected to concede publicly but, yes, I cited Fox to say that even they would were dubious about the path they were on. If it was normal why would they be?
But I just looked up that documentary and apparently it was Emmy nominated which is...shocking. Good counterexample.
There were stats going around at one point about how the majority of Fox News employees donate to the Democrats, this old reddit post with a dead link is all that I could find about it now, but it could go some way to explaining the crew's selective memory about election legitimacy claims. Also the Republican establishment itself isn't all that hot on Trump either, so there's a potential reason for them to be biased even if they're Republicans.
I managed to find the blogpost, which the reddit post linked.
If the images don't work, they are: one and two.
@Tanista
Thanks
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And this explanation is simply wrong. Trump has not shown a willingness to violate democratic norms. The norm violations were and are against him, starting from before he was elected with the FBI surveillance of his campaign. There's no norm that says "don't call on Russia to release hacked emails". There certainly no norm against complaining that elections are rigged, that's like claiming there's a norm against taking a dive in soccer. He talked big about an actual violation ("lock her up") but he never actually tried to do it.
There is no law. Just as there is no law that you have to release your tax returns.
I think it's more of a stretch to claim there's no norm against calling for a foreign entity to help you win the election.
There isn't now though, that's for sure.
Yet losing candidates are expected to congratulate their opponents and concede (it was noteworthy that Clinton didn't have a concession speech).
Again, less of an expectation with Abrams' thing + Biden pre-complaining about the midterms.
That was a joke. That was always an obvious joke. Vox even had an article saying it was only a joke in poor taste, and not a serious request, which was memory-holed two or three years later when the first impeachment began.
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The problem with most of these proposed "norms" is they either seem to have been made up entirely after the fact, or they end up being suspiciously gerrymandered to only cover Trump's behavior and not the very similar behavior of other politicians.
Just out of curiosity, which of those two buckets do you feel "don't ask enemies for political help" and "avoid calling elections rigged" each fall into?
Both of those are "made up entirely after the fact". The "don't ask enemies for political help" has the added issue of being obvious rhetorical flourish, not a serious request.
Given that the Russians did in fact hack and leak John Podesta's e-mails on behalf of the Trump campaign, why should I believe people who say he was joking when he asked them to do the same to Hillary Clinton? I think Henry II was probably joking when he said "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" but he doesn't get the benefit of the doubt after Thomas a Becket is murdered.
That's like saying Al-Qaeda did 9/11 on behalf of Bush.
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The first can be disregarded, as it was an obvious joke. If he had actually intended to ask a foreign enemy for political help, he would have done it secretly, they way Ted Kennedy did with the Soviet Union in 1984. As for the second, I dispute that "avoid calling elections rigged" has ever been a norm, as you can easily dig up counterexample throughout history. Hillary Clinton herself has repeatedly suggested that Trump's victory was rigged by the Russians, and as was pointed out to you, both of Bush's elections had their authenticity repeatedly and vigorously called into question. Stacy Abrams has practically made a cottage industry out of challenging the legitimacy of her gubernatorial loss, to widespread acclaim and media adulation. So, if one were to posit that such a norm did exist, it would have to be heavily gerrymandered to exclude all these examples.
The actual norm is that losing candidates do not challenge the transition of power with force, but of course Trump didn't do that, so that's not helpful to criticizing him.
This is "words have meanings" pedantry, but Hillary Clinton did not accuse the Russians of rigging the election. A "rigged" election is one where the declared result deliberately does not match the votes cast. The Russians tried to rig the election (by hacking voting machines), but failed - the Clinton campaign and affiliated left-establishment groups had conceded this by the end of November. Other people, notably including Jill Stein, continued to run with the idea after it became clear that it didn't happen, but Clinton did not.
What Hillary said, correctly, was that the Russians improperly helped Trump by hacking and leaking John Podesta's e-mails. This is "interfering" with the election, not "rigging" it. Hillary Clinton and people speaking on her behalf have always been quite careful about this distinction, even if the broader left have not. The distinction matters because calling an election "rigged" is an implicit call to change the official result to match the votes cast, but (at least in the US) a complaint about interference is a call to punish (either judicially or politically) the people responsible without throwing out the validly cast votes.
There was no attempt by the Clinton campaign or anyone affiliated with it to overturn the 2016 election on grounds of Russian interference. Jill Stein requested recounts in several key states in accordance with state law, and they didn't find anything untoward.
Politics does not work by the rules of criminal trials. In the ordinary English meaning of the word, Trump (among others) incited the Jan 6th riots, which were an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the orderly transition of power by force. He should not have done this, and no other Presidential candidate has continued to publicly challenge an election after exhausting his State-law remedies since Hayes-Tilden in 1876. The fact that we can't prove the causal link between Trump's incitement and the events of Jan 6th 2021 means he probably can't be prosecuted for it (and in any case, he would probably be protected by the 1st amendment), but it doesn't mean that he didn't do it. As I have said elsewhere, if the King says "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" and Thomas a Becket gets murdered, he loses the benefit of the doubt.
In any case, the argument that Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election by force is not restricted to the Jan 6th riot. Per the evidence gathered by the House Select Committee, Trump held a meeting in the Oval Office on 18th December at which he suggested rerunning the election under martial law. Michael Flynn made the same suggestion publicly on multiple occasions, and there is reasonable evidence that he was doing so on behalf of Trump. Again, probably not enough evidence for a criminal conviction, but enough evidence for the establishment to conclude on the balance of probabilities that Trump would have overturned the election by coup if the military had co-operated.
I think "The President does not conduct coup plots in the Oval Office" is, and always has been a norm of American politics that Trump violated.
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I think both proposed explanations I gave are wrong, or only partially correct at best. My point is simply that the degree to which hatred of Trump is legitimate, and the degree to which actions taken against Trump, such as this prosecution, are legitimate, in large part depends on the specific explanation for why he is hated and why the actions are being taken. This part of the argument can't simply be ignored or hand-waved.
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Well, now that we are actually having a substantive conversation about it:
I personally think the character of the 2016 election matters a lot to this calculus. Hillary Clinton's election was supposed to not only be a sure thing, but the ushering in of a new era: America's First Woman President. And post-awokening, people didn't just want this to be true (as they perhaps wanted it to be true decades earlier)--a large number of people (especially young, especially female, especially college-educated types) felt entitled to it. When Al Gore lost in 2000, the brouhaha over Florida was wild--and yet there was nothing like this happening, at least not where I could see it.
It made for a sobering contrast with 2008, when America's First Black President won his own anticipated victory. Even country music stars were singing his praises. In a nation that has become culturally obsessed with "firsts," with shattering "glass ceilings," and with otherwise celebrating people not for what they actually contribute, but merely for their membership in politically important minorities, 2016 was not a defeat--it was a heist. No less important a figure than former president Jimmy Carter said:
The much celebrated congressman from Georgia, John Lewis, skipped the inauguration, saying:
No wonder there were peaceful but fiery protests come inauguration time. The list goes on, but the point is that Democrats did not respond to Clinton's loss in a normal way. Florida's 2000 problems were bad, but at least they were Florida's problems--they were not specifically cultural problems, or problems caused by one or both of the candidates seeking victory at any price. There was a legitimate dispute based on plausible evidence. What happened in 2016, though, was a defection; Democrats responded by abandoning even a pretense of respecting the rule of law. For them to lose was no longer a political setback, but a failure of democracy! Catastrophe! Devastation! Revolution!
The parallel case of 2020 simply cannot be understood outside that context. Reactionaries gonna react. When you slap the "defect" button in an iterated game, your opponent is all but guaranteed to follow suit, and in this case I think that is substantially what Republicans did.
Maybe Trump's personality makes this all worse, somehow. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if Clinton had lost instead to Rubio or something. But then again--would Clinton have lost, to anyone else? Trump's ability to rally disaffected blue collar labor and increase the Republican share of black and Hispanic votes proved important. So it's difficult to guess how things might have been different, absent Trump.
But it does seem to me that Democrats were much more interested in (and expectant of) a Clinton victory; until he won, Trump was, to them, a joke (at least mostly). Losing the election is one thing; even casting protest votes in Congress against certifying a presidential election has become old hat despite the breathlessness with which the media reported on it in 2020. But being denied the apparent moral victory of being personally involved in electing America's First Woman President was (for many) apparently so, so much more than just another loss. It was, one might say, a crime.
"Somehow"?
Literally just take out his game of footsy with election denial and I would argue it'd lower the temperature.
This seems like an odd response given my demonstration that it was election denial from the Democrats that was the serious political defection of 2016.
Honestly I think Trump's Twitter belligerence does far more to distinguish him from (most of) his opponents, than his so-called "election denial." I think there's a very real possibility that I'm just wrong about all of this--that my sense of the Democratic revolt of 2016 is pure presentism, that this is all "business as usual" in American politics, and I am caught in the same trap as many of the people I am criticizing: thinking that any of this is really a meaningful departure from business-as-usual. So I have done my best to make the case that the Great Awokening is a meaningful phenomenon, and that the first presidential election post-Awokening is meaningfully different. If it is in fact Trump himself who is meaningfully different, that would be interesting; I really do suspect he's a symptom rather than a cause, but I could be wrong about that, too. It's just that "election denial" does not appear to set him apart from any of his political opposition, as demonstrated with direct quotes in my post.
Democrats pushed Russiagate after they lost cause they hated Trump. But they hated Trump because...? That is a question people are trying to answer and I was touching on.
Trump offended the sensibilities of left-wingers, obviously - which sometimes gets coded as a "threat to democracy"*. I think though that certain things like asking Russia or especially raising the specter of contesting the election was a red rag.
Trump saying "I'll accept the election...if I win" was probably a funny response to hysterics in his base's eyes. I legitimately think it scared and then enraged Democrats - precisely because there were no consequences.
It's all of a piece.
Trump's narcissism is why he can't stay off Twitter and be "dignified" (which offends sensibilities) but also why he can't just take the loss (any loss - which leads to problematic places)
I tend not to believe in Great Man theory but Trump is the biggest counter-example that gives me pause. I do think a lot of the situation (e.g. polarization and the risk that a radical can capture the party as a result of combining that with primaries, discontent with the economic and cultural consensus) were built in but Trump's particular character and nature shapes how everything turned out.
For example: a different candidate might have just folded and went into obscurity when they lost, especially if pressured by power players (look at how Ted Cruz couldn't make even a token stand against Trump).
A political entrepreneur might have realized that they could push the issue and win points from their base eventually but it feels like Trump has the exact right personality type to push things past what even his fellow Republicans thought he can get away with it (they criticized him for a lot of moves that either worked or at least weren't fatal). Either he's a political savant (of the idiot variety or not) or his narcissism dovetails really well with the polarized climate.
* See anything smeared as "populist".
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If any other Republican nominee had beat Clinton, they would have been hated, as Obama was, as Bush was, and perhaps even more due to social media turning up the temperature. But I think it's unlikely they would have been impeached or criminally indicted.
Maybe! There were efforts to impeach Bush; probably depending on what you count as "efforts" there have been at least some efforts to impeach many U.S. presidents. I still see occasional digs from the American Left to the effect of "here's your periodic reminder that Bush and Cheney are guilty of war crimes and should be in prison." So what gets us across the threshold of "generic anti-opposition talk" to "concrete action," at this point?
The threshold does seem to be lower, now. It seems to me that, compared to 30 or 40 years ago, we spend a lot less time talking about what would actually be good for the country, policy-wise, and a lot more time insisting that the opposition's plans are actually illegal, that the opposition belongs in jail, etc. Trump certainly played his own part in that ("lock her up!") but he backed away from it after election. We're now more than halfway through his successor's first term and Democrats in power in New York (not coincidentally, I think, the state that elected Hillary Clinton as Senator!) are actually carrying through efforts to jail Trump on what so far appear to be exaggerated charges. Can a kangaroo court be far behind?
Watching the news media take shots at DeSantis in advance of his anticipated run at the White House, with headlines like "Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a Far More Dangerous Politician than Donald Trump" is interesting. Discussions of a national divorce are also not entirely novel in American political history. My worry is that the Left, which has for most of the 21st century been warning America of encroaching fascism, has decided to beat its opponents to the punch on the matter.
"Trumped-up charges" is looking to become the most consequential case of nominative determinism in American history.
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I mean, I highly doubt Marco Rubio would've tried to pay off porn stars, talk the governor of Georgia into finding some votes, or instigating an insurrection after he narrowly lost Arizona in 2020.
Why do you doubt it? Paying off hookers is probably the most archetypical thing a politician could do (and that's when they're being nice), and BLM shows insurrections are pretty common.
If anything, this shows Trump must really be quite clean, if this is all they can throw at him.
After all, he was a real estate developer in New York in the 1970s and 80s. I would have expected way worse.
Either he's super clean or the real charges would implicate people that no New York prosecutor wants to implicate.
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It does feel like Trump might have been one of the first modern candidates that had a seething hatred aimed at him from both the base and the DC political class of the opposite party. Bush and Obama seemed hated by the bases, but it didn't seem like it was anything more than "well, your turn to lead for now and we'll be the opposition" other than that.
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I am leaning in this direction that the biggest difference is the left changed after the 2016 election combined with Trump being especially good at owning the libs.
Why the left changed? Who knows. Maybe it was progressivism running about hard biological limits. They took over every major institution and still couldn’t solve things like low black academic performance. Unable to compete on substance they needed to find someone to personify why they were failing which fit perfectly for Trumps entrance. And a role he was perfectly happy to fill.
I'd also remind you of OWS, the Trayvon Martin scandal and the Michael Brown scandal between 2011-14. From a leftist point of view, these were all obvious political flops. That must have felt deeply frustrating. There was also Gamergate, which must've generated enormous leftist resentment and bitterness.
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The left changed because they couldn’t understand the reaction to Obama.
Obama said things like ‘people in rural areas clinging to their guns and religion’ ‘I support abortion because I wouldn’t want my daughter to be punished with a baby if made a mistake’ ‘if I had a son he would have looked a bit like Trayvon’ etc, etc. these things are obviously horrible things to say to the red tribe; to blue tribers they might be things that you shouldn’t say on national television, but it’s inconceivable that someone could find them offensive or wrong. And so the red tribe reaction to Obama’s culture warring got interpreted as personal animus because he’s black, which meant that republicans needed a massive reaction because they’re all evil. And, what do you know, you have a Republican nominee that the blue tribe portions of the party are obviously uncomfortable with who routinely says boorish or offensive things.
One could argue that, before Trump, Obama inspired an unusual amount of resistance and hostility from the Right. You have the above-mentioned culture-war items, paired with slightly-less-culture-war things like the ACA, and the Republicans spent all 8 of his years burning political capital on opposing Obama, to the point of government shutdown. I find it hard to say why or how things got this heated after Bush II--buried culture war from Bush II finally coming home to roost, the simple fact of Obama being a progressive Black man, the Republican coalition starting to fracture at its seams, economic strain turning up the temperature of social conflicts, social media polarization already taking effect as far back as 2008, or some or all of the above.
All I can say is that it definitely laid the ground for what happened in 2016, and large segments of the left and center-left were wholly unprepared.
Well yeah, there was an unusual amount of resistance from the right, and the GOP grassroots was so in favor of it because Obama kept saying quiet-part-out-loud blue tribe sentiments that progressives aren’t good enough at the ideological Turing test to realize would come off as callous and hideous to the red tribe. It doesn’t help that Obama decided to play hardball with the GOP in Congress early on and they returned the favor when he lost his supermajority.
If he’d delivered Clinton-level economic growth he might have gotten away with it, but he didn’t, and it was probably beyond his ability to do(objectively, fast and furious and the irs targeting conservatives weren’t as big a deal as ruby ridge, after all) so it blew up in his face.
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Govt was shutdown for 27 days under Clinton (2 separate shutdowns), 16 under Obama, and 38 days under Trump (also 2 shutdowns). Clinton was impeached, Bush was not (in spite of many calls to "Chimpeach the Chimperor"), Trump was impeached, Obama was not. I'm not sure that things did get more heated under Obama - it's not like Bush Derangement Syndrome wasn't a thing prior to that.
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Isn’t government shutdown just normal politics? I don’t see how that’s anything like what’s going on now. It was a thing voted on in congress and ended up with a negotiated political deal. A lot like the Supreme Court striking down roe. We politicked to win a branch of government so now we use that power. It’s not like Capitol riots or arresting the other sides like Presidential nominee to stop him from running.
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It seems so, because it looks from the vote totals in swing states that Trump’s victories there were driven more by antipathy for Clinton than by affinity for him. In PA, the Dem vote dropped from 52% to 47.5% (4.5 pts), yet the R vote rose only 1.6 pts (46.6 to 48.2). In MI, the D vote dropped 7.2 pts (54.2 to 47), but the R vote rose only 2.6 pts (44.7 to 47.3). In WI, the D vote dropped 6.3 pts (52.8 to 46.5), but the R vote rose only 1.3 pts (45.9 to 47.2). And, in FL, the D vote dropped 2.2 pts (50 to 47.8), while the R vote was essentially unchanged (49.1 to 49).
I don't know that there is much evidence that he had a particular ability to increase the R share of the black and Hispanic vote in 2016. According to the American Enterprise Institute, in 2016 Trump’s 8 percent of the black vote was rather low compared to previous elections in which there was no black guy on the ballot. Nor was his 29 pct of the Hispanic vote particularly impressive – it was less than Bush and McCain, for example. So, there is no reason to think that a generic R would not have done just as well among black and Hispanic voters.
Also, for illustration, Trump underperformed state and Federal House Republican candidates in PA by 10,000 or 100,000 votes, respectively. To the extent you can talk about the 'generic Republican' candidate, it actually did outperform Trump.
While Toomey did underperform Trump in raw numbers, it was only a by 20,000 votes and 100,000 fewer votes were cast in the Senate race. Toomey actually beat his opponent by a larger percentage than Trump beat Clinton.
Probably any of the decent choices in 2016 would have beaten Clinton in PA and, thus, the race.
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AAQC’d.
Please avoid low effort comments - you can just submit the AAQC without announcing it.
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Yes, the fundamentals indicate that after a two term Democratic president with a not great economy and not great ending polls, the Republicans SHOULD have won. A generic Republican Candidate would have I think beaten a generic Democratic candidate all else being equal. Both Hillary and Trump were I think below par candidates. There's a universe where Trump never entered and X beats Hillary in a landslide I think.
Yeah, this is a neglected point. FYI, every election the journal PS reviews the predictions of elections models. Their summary chart for 2016 is here:
/images/16805601089851074.webp Note that some of the models actually favored the Dem candidate.
But I am not sure which of those is a pure fundamentals model
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This is an interesting take. I've stopped trying to understand the why, since it never made much sense to me in the first place. Furthermore, I don't think I do need to explain why he's hated in order to take it as a given, and use that hatred as the basis for explaining behavior.
While I can't answer why, I have some theories. First, he's a genuine outsider that has resisted cooption. Second, he's personally repugnant due to manners and demeanor. Third, he's politically repugnant, and his pet issues (immigration, mostly) mark him as low-status or otherwise 'other.' Fourth, he's a genuine threat to the status quo (similar to #1) is ways that triggers reactions from those inside the system (deep state, anyone?). Fifth, the normal demonization of Republicans, but enhanced due to #2.
Of these, I learn towards #4. I think some people are afraid of him, afraid of his appeal, afraid of the way he acts and speaks, and their fear easily turns towards hatred and hyperbole.
I don't have a good reason why he's so hated. Trump Derangement Syndrome was coined for a reason, and I think it explains plenty even when it itself is unexplained.
He was hated, and persecuted, before he contested the 2020 election. He was already impeached once and the entirety of the bureaucratic class was opposed to him by the time he walked in the door. It was this antipathy that caused the groups described in the famous Time article to collectively 'fortify' the election in advance. So I think this causation is backwards.
"Hatred for Trump is a significant motivating factor in these prosecutions" is I think an almost trivially true statement. The question is whether the hatred is justified and leading to socially desirable outcomes. Hatred for rapists is a major factor in why rape is criminally prosecuted, that doesn't make it illegitimate or inappropriate to prosecute rapists.
I would say a combination of your second, third, and fifth explanation, combined with the fact that many of Trump's detractors legitimately believe he has violated democratic norms. Putting aside whether he has or hasn't, I do think they sincerely believe this and are motivated by it.
There are many pre-2016 election examples of behavior that one could believe in good faith violates democratic norms. For example, calling on Russia to release one's opponent's hacked emails and threatening to "lock up" one's electoral opponent.
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It’s worth noting that Clinton crazies were very much a thing, there was a definite bush derangement syndrome, and a decent percentage of the country literally believed Obama was born in another country.
Trump derangement syndrome is an escalation, but the blue tribe thought the Obama-Kenya conspiracy theories were a huge escalation and didn’t really distinguish between the randos who said it and the GOP higher ups who explicitly disavowed it. If Rubio had won the 2016 election we may well have been seeing the same level of derangement, admittedly with less ammo.
The "randos who said it" included Donald Trump - who became a GOP higher up when he was nominated for President. Both Trump's popularity with the anti-establishment right and his extreme unpopularity with the pro-establishment left (and large parts of the pro-establishment right) start here. When Obama published his birth certificate, Trump claimed the credit for making him do it. Per Wikipedia, Trump didn't publicly acknowledge that was a US citizen until September 2016 - i.e. after fighting the Republican primary as an ambiguously-repentant birther.
Falsely claiming that a major party candidate is ineligible is an attack on American democracy. The GOP primary electorate nominated Trump despite (definitely) or because of (probably) his willingness to do it anyway. Trump's base within the GOP is people who think that Democrats always cheat, that they get away with it because the GOP establishment are cucks, and that Republicans should cheat back harder. This is more obvious post-Jan 6 than it was then, but Trump's opponents brought receipts in 2016.
Fundamentally, the scary thing about Trump is that he behaves as if American elections are kayfabe on top of an underlying system of raw power politics, and his supporters love him for it. If American elections really are kayfabe, this makes him someone who breaks kayfabe and gets away with it, which any wrestling promoter knows can destroy the franchise. If you think that American elections are not in fact kayfabe, then he is the worst threat to American democracy since elections really were rigged in 1960's Illinois. In either case, he needs to be stopped.
Oh come on, tone down the drama. Such claims existed long before. Exhibit 1: https://www.sethkaller.com/item/1415-23425-Claims-that-First-Republican-Presidential-Candidate-is-Foreign-Born-&-Ineligible&from=12
That's 1856. Somehow, the American Democracy (R) (TM) has survived this attack, which can't be called the worse since Pearl Harbor or the Civil War only because it predates both.
So, he behaves as if what significant part of his electorate believes and observes is true - is true? What a scoundrel! The norm for a candidate is to pretend he cares about his electorate, and then once elected, wear a nice tuxedo or dress, show up at gala receptions, get the appropriate pork allocations from taxpayer's money and otherwise not rock the boat.
Now you're starting to get it. This franchise is no longer serving the people that are supposedly their clients (an apt metaphor, because most entertainment franchises, such as ones of Hollywood, also moved on from serving the people to serving a tiny sliver of increasingly bizarre elite critics) - so it's time to break some things.
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This is begging the question. The only way to determine the truth of the claim is to make the challenge. McCain's eligibility was challenged, falsely as it turns out, and Democracy seemed to survive.
Obama published a certified copy of his birth certificate, authenticated by the State of Hawaii, in 2008. Trump was pushing birtherism in 2011-2, when "falsely" is appropriate.
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It's pretty strange to see so much discussion here about why liberals hate Trump - a lot of "sore loser" theory - without Democrats or progressives pushing back on why they think he's particularly norm-breaking.
It actually makes me worry about the skew of this site and if we left a lot of left-wingers back on Reddit.
It's not just that "Trump wasn't supposed to win". He violated a lot of norms - not just red and blue norms like unconditional support for the nominee - starting with not releasing his taxes and escalating to things like playing footsie with not acknowledging the outcome of the election.
THIS was the particular red rag that was theoretically avoidable by a generic GOP candidate (as opposed to being anti-immigration - or rather: anti-some immigration)
There is obviously a thing where liberals (this can be of the left AND right variety - especially if you look at Europe) conflate their particular politics with democracy and freedom as such - which is how things like populism, Brexit, being anti-immigrant all end up being marked as "dangerous" or threats to freedom - but, in this case, Trump tied the connection himself.
We don't even need to look at the lib reaction - look at some of Tucker's leaked texts from the Dominion case if you think this reaction is purely lib derangement at a "blue collar billionaire".
There aren't very many Democrats or progressives on this forum and I'd hazard to guess most of them view trying to push back to be a waste of time - most of these arguments have been re-litigated dozens of times since Trump's presidency and the assumptions gap has been found to be unbridgeable.
This is likely true. But as a progressive Democrat myself, I wonder how many people here are like me in that I don't particularly want to push back but rather read and learn. It's pretty easy to see countless arguments that Donald Trump is a particularly norm-breaking POTUS practically everywhere I look, but it's harder to see arguments of the "sore loser" theory, especially any good or strong versions of those arguments. A large part of my motivation in reading posts in this forum is to see such things in the hopes that they actually challenge my biased perspective on various CW issues including Donald Trump, in the hopes that I can form a more accurate view of them.
For this particular issue, what I'd most prefer to see is a progressive Democrat make a case for the "sore loser" theory and a MAGA Republican make a case for the "Trump was a particularly norm-breaking POTUS in a way that was genuinely dangerous to democracy" theory, not out of charity but out of genuine, heartfelt belief. Because those are the arguments that I would find the most credible and most valuable for triangulating the actual truth of the matter. Unfortunately, such people don't seem to be particularly available, and so I want to see the strongest version of the theory I personally find distasteful or wrong on a visceral level, which is the "sore loser" theory.
I am a progressive Democrat myself, and I feel similar to you in terms of reading and learning. I myself have very little interest in “pushing back”; I find it would be absolute waste of time, and likely why you won’t find the discourse you are looking for. In my opinion, the value of a forum like this is that it allows progressives, at least such as myself, to observe a rich diversity of right-winged thinking to identify the more insidious and subtle dogwhistles indicating the traits of a conservative, so one may steer clear of them in IRL interactions.
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I didn’t want to litigate all the reasons I think he’s a defector, a criminal, and personally disagreeable. Partly because it’s very clear that the OP starts from different axioms. Partly because I wanted to talk about what happens after someone is convinced that he’s a personal enemy.
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Why? What's so worrying about it?
Also, how do you maintain your faith in democracy in the light of all the madness we could observe over the last 10 years?
Because I don't want to be in an echo chamber - which splinter-sites of witches like this can be. It felt like the original motte was skeptical of a lot of woke points (since naturally wokes had a billion subreddits to hang around out) but you still got a pushback and back and forth. It is concerning if we've lost a lot of those people in the move.
Here we have a question of "why was Trump - the most polarizing figure in recent memory - hated?" and most of the answers seem to flow in one direction, as if it's obvious.
It's quite possible I'm just wrong and it is obvious. But it's concerning that something so divisive seems to swing in one direction.
EDIT: And yes, the fact that it's cutting against me may play a role. It's natural to not want to be outnumbered.
Easy: I don't.
I think most of the main points are still present. Perhaps in a more autistic neutral way.
The big difference is on Reddit you would have one conservative and one leftist debate for 30 replies on whether Trump was serious or joking when he said Russia should release Clinton emails. Intent will never be settled. The big difference would be fighting over tone with depending on who you’re speaking with a greater emphasis on when Trump did x,y,z and it was really bad. Then a reply leftist did x,y,z on these occasions.
You would probably get some reply on HRC being the chosen one. I’ve never actually seen a leftist give that opinion but seems to pop up on right coded places.
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But it makes it all the more important to not be so worried. By being here and arguing against us, you're playing an important role in not making this place an echo chamber. Thank you for your service!
Damn.
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On reddit the participation of progressives largely felt like folks dropping by to sneer on themotte for a few comments rather than actual engagement. It felt as if a good number of them wouldn't have minded if themotte got hit by the banhammer.
That said, preaching to the choir on themotte while feeling nice doesn't give you much. But I do not have any ideas for how to improve upon that. People like places that echo their views back at them and enforce the ideological conformity for their worldview. For this use case reddit is strictly better especially if your views are aligned with the current zeitgeist.
A lot of people on themotte may want to convince progressives that their positions are not logically consistent and patently unfair. But progressives have no incentive to engage with you to be convinced or to try to convince you. Their views are already mainstream and platformed by institutions.
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Seems like the best play is to defect while making it look like cooperation.
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