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Mike Lindell has been ordered to pay up for his challenge to disprove some election interference evidence.
It’s a remarkable situation. Evidence of election interference should be investigated by law enforcement agencies, with no need for a bounty to disprove the validity.
The great thing is that the man who met the challenge voted for Trump twice. (I wonder if he will a third time.)
If Lindell didn’t trust government authorities to properly investigate election interference claims, he should have also known not to trust the courts to fairly (from his perspective) enforce an arbitration issue about it.
Had Lindell set the bounty to prove the veracity of the evidence (beyond a reasonable doubt), he’d still have his money.
This is like the inverse of the Balaji Srinivasan bet on inflation and Bitcoin. I think it’s great when the wealthy put their money where their mouth is. We need more bets taxing bullshit.
I realize that I’m skirting close to the ‘if pro-lifers really believed abortion was murder, surely they’d…’ argument, but there is a case to be made that this kind of applies to Trump himself. Like, if the deep state stole the election from him once, why would he have any faith they wouldn’t do it again, especially now “they” have the presidency and thus surely even more power and less oversight?
I don’t think Trump is the kind of guy who does something unless he believes he has at least a chance of winning, and I think he does believe he has a chance of winning this year.
That leaves two possibilities. Firstly, that the deep state is too weak or his margin of victory will be too great to cheat him of the presidency again or, secondly, that he never really believed he won the first (well, second) time, but was just using the claim of interference as a political tool (both to rally his supporters and maybe as some kind of gambit to stay in office).
On the third hand though what other choice is there? Make your own America? You fight until you are no longer physically capable of fighting, even if the odds are stacked against you. You will surely have a better chance of ousting the deep state as a president, even a hated one, than as a rich civilian.
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It's possible Trump believes it is rigged, but sitting it out is 100% chance of loss, vs a rigged election and some chance nonetheless.
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The argument is that in 2020 urban political machines used mail-in ballot rules to harvest ballots. This isn't an infinity-vote generator, it's a powerful-but-limited tool. So, the argument develops like this:
The pandemic is over and so the same playbook of last-minute changes to election rules will not be in effect.
Trump and his ilk now plan to build their own ballot harvesting machine instead of trying to deny the Democrats theirs.
Trump is performing better now than he did in 2020, so the amount of necessary fraud to steal the election goes up.
Biden is performing worse than he did in 2020, and key parts of the Democratic constituency may not be mobilized like they were before.
People like to say this, but nobody has ever produced any evidence that Trump doesn't believe what he's saying. Indeed, all the leaks from the Trump White House (infamously, they are legion) indicate that sometimes, Trump was the only one who believed in election interference.
No, that's not the argument Trump advanced. He claimed that the election was stolen via fraud, and asked Bill Barr to have the Justice Department investigate. Specific claims advanced at the time include over 3000 people in Nevada voting after moving to another state, or that Pennsylvania postal employees conspired to backdate late ballots.
These claims were all, of course, false.
Ballot harvesting in States where it is illegal to deliver someone else's ballot is fraud.
By "fraud" I mean something that causes invalid votes to be counted, or valid votes to not be counted, or coerces, bribes or disenfranchises voters. I'm not sure if any jurisdiction considers ballot harvesting in the absence of these other activities to be fraud. Texas, for example, explicitly defines "vote harvesting" as separate from "electoral fraud", although engaging in fraud as part of a vote harvesting organization can result in enhanced penalties.
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Trump was warning about mail-in ballots since before the votes were counted. ("Complaining about," if you prefer.)
Otherwise, I'm not sure what point you're making. Some fraud accusations are weaker than others, and we should only discuss the ones you find weakest? The version I have expounded is extremely reasonable, answering OP's idea that "the deep state stole the election," why-wouldn't-they-do-it-again.
Yes, he was complaining that they were more susceptible to fraudulent voting ("millions of counterfeit ballots").
This thread is about Trump's state of mind: why would he bother running again if his claims of election fraud were made in good faith? In that context, it's relevant that he did not invoke the reasonable scenario you presented, but rather a wide-ranging conspiracy where millions of votes can be fabricated.
I think this is a bad argument made in service of an ultimately correct position.
Even if Trump did believe the election was entirely stolen ... I mean, what would you do, if you imagine you're have the beliefs of a genuine conspiracy MAGAboomer? Just give in and say "yeah, the libs own the country now because they're more willing to commit crime with us"? No, it's a sufficiently important issue that you'd keep fighting.
I know right wingers who believe the election was stolen and as such are essentially checked out of electoral politics. It's an internally consistent position. There's no point fighting if you literally can't win.
I honestly don't know what Trump really thinks about 2020, but I do know he would be better off if he just admitted he lost because people were angry about COVID, but "we'll get them next time". He essentially blackpilled portions of his base by claiming Democrats are capable of large-scale election conspiracies.
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Here's my reference: in 1948, Lyndon Johnson created and harvested hundreds of thousands of ballots for his election to Senate. Robert Caro has documented this extensively in the second volume of his LBJ biography, "The Means of Ascent". It took decades for the people involved to come forward and talk to Caro, and only a few of them were really required. If you scale that up from one state to a dozen, millions of votes are not an implausible idea. And millions of votes were not even needed given the final tallies in a few swing states.
Now, there's a very obvious mechanism here: mail-in ballots can come from anywhere, and once they're mixed up with regular ballots it becomes impossible to prove which votes are "real". It's hard to prove what has happened. And everyone has motive. This does not need to be a "wide-ranging" conspiracy.
Trump has said many things about the election. I've never heard him say, as above, "the deep state stole the election". I've never heard him say, "there was a wide-ranging conspiracy". I have beard him say that mail-in ballots are not secure.
The idea here is really plain: the election wasn't stolen by some unalterable cabal that runs the world in secret. There is not a central committee that decided 2020 was not Trump, so that now we have to answer why bother with 2024 at all. Election fraud is boring and quotidian stuff. It can be greater or lesser depending on lots of contingent factors. And Trump can think he has a better show this time, while still also thinking 2020 was stolen.
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My personal but totally evidence free belief is that Trump, circa 2020, wanted to be bought out. It makes perfect sense from a real estate development perspective: if you have a claim, even a weak claim, you hold onto it until someone pays you. A weak claim might not be worth a ton, but it'll be worth something to get you to shut up.
It's extremely common in complex real estate transactions. "I have a letter of intent from two years ago, that pre empts your deal!" "Actually the estate was never closed and THIS brother claims a share in ownership!" "According to organization by laws we did not have a quorom at the meeting where I was removed so I'm still in charge and my successor had no power to sign those documents!"
Trump didn't think he won, and he didn't think he'd win. But he thought he had enough that the Democrats would buy him out, would offer him a deal to step down. It would have been the rational thing to do, give Trump something to make him go away. But the Dems were never going to do that, they're not equipped to do that.
Once you pay the Dane-geld, you'll never be rid of the Dane.
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I don’t think that tracks. To this day he’s acting as if he believes the election was stolen. He never gave any indication that he believed otherwise. He did back down from other beliefs. At first he took COVID seriously enough to send a hospital ship to New York, and to go along with the CDC on lockdowns. He changed his mind later, and his statements back that up. But he’s absolutely firm on the stolen election claim. He’s never changed his story, even when he should stand to benefit from at least backing down from the claim.
I don't see where he'd benefit from backing down, what would that look like?
I think the fact that 4 years later he’s still talking about the stolen election probably hurts him in the polls among mainstream voters who don’t think the election was stolen.
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What did the Dems have to offer him? Not prosecute him?
I don’t think that has any value to Trump. It’s why voters vote for him because he legitimately won’t back down. Now I think Trump mostly just cares about Trump and wants the crown for his own ego.
I think just agreeing to enhanced election security measures for future elections would have assuaged Trump's ego.
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Not prosecuting him is step one, but there's lots of other things to offer. Public Acknowledgement. An appointment to a powerful and important position. One or more Trumpian policies publicly enacted, with full credit given to Trump. One or more of his children, or Kushner, appointed to important positions.
Ok so you know there was zero chance the Dems are every giving him a high ranking position?
I mean yes, we know that. But why is it true? Why couldn't they do that? Trump, of course, would have to play along, which is the most major impossibility. But Kamala called Biden a racist just before campaigning on his ticket, Dems are perfectly capable of flipping the narrative when necessary.
Certainly Ivanka or Kushner could have been given a plum job, and if Trump in turn conceded and mildly endorsed Biden it would have been a win-win.
Trump was also friends with people like the Clintons before he ran against them. He created chants of "lock her up" and then did nothing to precipitate that. I just don't think Trump sees political acrimony as a permanent, fixed thing. He thinks they're just being theatrical and playing the game, as he is.
Exactly. Trump could accept it. But he'd need to behave and color inside the lines to be successfully co opted.
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You did say "evidence free" so I don't want to slam you in an unfriendly way or anything. But Trump absolutely believed he was going to win 2020, and nothing has ever come out to indicate he pushed election fraud claims for cynical reasons.
Sorry, that wasn't clear, I meant that I don't believe Trump ever actually thought (past maybe December 1 2020) he was going to succeed in retaining the presidency by procedural games. His actions throughout the process make far more sense if seen in the light of trying to solidify a weak claim, rather than in light of an attempted coup d'etat (justified or unjustified).
I appreciate the kid gloves for my shit post.
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What kind of deal are you proposing as hypothetically possible here?
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If he wins the popular vote there are basically two possibilities:
Either way he wins so long as he gets enough popular support, right? Not too different from a normal election.
Even if he wins he is surely unlikely to win the popular vote, given historically unpopular Hillary had 3 million votes on him in 2016.
If he does win the popular vote, I agree given Republican electoral dynamics that means he’s won comfortably and undeniably, but it’s unlikely.
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As I pointed out a few times earlier, if Trump honestly believed the 2016 election was rigged against him with millions of fraudulent votes (they just barely didn’t have enough to quite win the electoral college…), then his first order of business should have been a major investigation such that it couldn’t happen again.
Actually, even if he didn’t believe it and was merely saying it for propaganda purposes, it would have been a classic political maneuver to use a pretense for a major corruption investigation to defeat enemies and ensure ongoing political power.
Trump has the right instincts to be a strongman, just not the heart to follow though. Same thing goes for the meddling in the 2020 election outcome and that whole bit where Pence was supposed to play along, but instead there was a March on the Capitol to threaten his decapitation. It’s like a LARP of a would-be autocrat (along with threatening to imprison Hillary, bombing various countries, etc.). Trump has plausible deniability in the minds of many due to the half-hearted and bumbling attempts. I’ve had arguments with Trump supporters/defenders where one will say “of course he doesn’t mean it” and another will say “I’m excited for Trump to expose the corruption and jail the pedophiles.” A lot of MAGA takes him seriously and literally.
While I think plenty of Trump’s most vocal critics have cried wolf more than once (I define “TDS” as anyone who is more critical of Trump than I am), it does amaze me that people I formerly respected as “constitutional conservatives” don’t seem too concerned about Trump’s antics in terms of their present effect, or the potential effects down the road. I’d be a lot more concerned if Trump was 55, but his lasting effect on the GOP might still be pretty bad after he is out of the picture.
Hopefully we regress to a more sane political climate mean instead of pursuing a downward spiral.
Trump tried to do this but Barr basically refused to take it seriously.
(This user has me blocked, but this is worth pointing out anyways.)
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