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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).
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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