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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).
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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