Giving them concessions because you’re afraid they’ll act badly tells them to act badly when they want concessions.
The right course of action is to make acting badly (like participating in a coup, or engaging in political violence or threats of it) have painful consequences.
I have no idea why concessions are still being made to these assholes.
They’re the political equivalent of the pan handlers you give five dollars to on the way into a gas station. And by the time you walk out they forgot you already gave them money and give you the same story.
They can get their way 99.99% of the time, but that 0.01% of the time you hold them to the same standard as everyone else, they start screaming they’re being persecuted.
Fuck em. They act the same no matter what so just don’t give them anything. It’s still the same amount of terroristic threats in the end.
It boils down to this: You don’t stop MAGA violence by giving in, but the opposite. You stop it by fighting back and holding people accountable. Removing Trump from the ballot, as the law requires, is a first step. It sends a strong message to MAGA: This is what happens when you use violence to get your way. By not taking his name off the ballot, states are signaling that they will accede to violent threats. We should not be surprised if rewarding MAGA violence means we see more of it.
I think it’s far simpler than that. Biden doesn’t win 2024 if his opponent isn’t Trump, his entire campaign message is designed to go head to head with Trump and only Trump. The dems don’t want him to be removed from enough ballots that someone else wins the republican primary.
I don’t think it’s entirely about “fear of backlash”. I think the real fear people are expressing is the fear of the election appearing rigged, Ahmadinejad-style. If the Republicans nominate Trump, and he goes unconsidered with “unknown numbers” of write-in votes in enough states to affect the election, he would obviously argue that he actually won on votes and might even be convincing to non-Republicans.
When the Colorado Supreme Court decided against Trump, it was a split decision by an all-Democrat panel that questioned what “due process” should be on the matter. There’s so many ways that this can be spun nationally or internationally by the modern equivalent of the way the South created sympathy through propaganda after the Civil War that survives today. Hundreds of millions of people throughout the world will likely question the legitimacy of the president or US elections after this matter no matter who wins or how chips fall.
BUT, there’s also no right answer, and none of the above reasons are sufficient to just put Trump back on the ballot and hope. It should never have gotten to this. Someone that is publicly believed by a significant percent of America to not be eligible should not have party support in the first place. And if it did, Congress should have stepped in before now.
Ultimately, the Republicans are again objectively hurting America for their own agenda.
If Republicans want a candidate on the ballot, they can nominate someone who didn’t start an insurrection. They have no shortage of choices for other candidates. If anything, that’s why the rulings should be laid out right now before the Republican Iowa Caucus.
In a vacuum, I could see the point of the world not seeing the US President as being democratically elected. In practice, this is only going to be an issue for countries that have their own problems with fascist political parties, and I’m not inclined to care.
Because that’s exactly what they are threatening, doxing, death threat, shooting up clubs hell even tried to attack the FBi and of course the attempt to overthrow the government… Literally the most successful terrorist there ever was and we still won’t call it at face value for what the maga group is…
Terrorism is to drive change and action through the threat of terror/fear etc.
He’s not in jail, his blinded followers barely got punished for the severity of their crimes and we are all sitting here talking about if it’s democratic to not put him in the ballot and fucking contemplating the very real prospect of a “one day dictator”
What other terrorist group has driven so much change in their favor? Do we all think Binladin was maybe on to something? How about ISIS …?
He is closest to really overthrowing this whole ship, unless maybe we all vote for the oldest president there ever was…
We are on a knifes edge and it’s fucking horrifying and baffling. This isn’t 2020 we all know the “it will never happen” thoughts of trump getting elected were wrong and we shouldn’t delude ourselves with thinking this will never happen either… The highest court in the land is stacked and taking bribes now openly with no consequences, our past president almost assuredly sold nuclear secrets and still lives and allowed to fuck this whole country… What higher power do you think is soundly going to hold people accountable and uphold the law, cause I don’t see it.
The “backlash” will be that the people that take him off the ballot may end up being murdered. Or their family might be killed. Or both. Sure, maybe it’s the duty of the secretary of state in each state to remove him from the ballot. But would you be willing to do that if it was likely someone would try to murder you? And consider for a moment that it’s likely that a significant number of cops that you might expect would protect you probably sympathize with political violence in favor of Trump.
Those are the stakes for the people that need to remove him from the ballot.
Are you ready and willing to fight? Because you might have to.
EDIT: People seem to think that my comment about getting ready to fight is in support of Trump. It’s not. If you believe in this 250-year experiment in Democracy, you might have to be willing to fight–as in, with guns and bullets–to preserve it, and that means fighting against the Trump followers that want to end democracy for a totalitarian gov’t. It happened in Germany in the 20s and 30s; don’t think that it can’t happen here.
We had four years of a populist far-right president that brought out the very worst in his cultists. The only reason we were (past tense) better than this was because we believed we were.
If I took an oath of office you bet your ass I’d be willing. That’s what it means to serve your country in office. If you aren’t willing to uphold your oath, resign.
I would hold no ill will to any person who resigned their position because they are unwilling but if you want to do the job, do it.
Would you though? Would you really? If you got a email of a photo of your family getting out of their car at Target or Walmart, would you really think, yeah, I’m willing to trade the life of my spouse and kids for this job? Would you be willing to do it that if you took it to the police and they just shrugged and said they didn’t see anything actionable? The fact that we haven’t heard of political figures being assassinated by Trump supporters yet doesn’t mean that it’s not going to happen; religious fanatics have blown up doctors offices and killed doctors to ‘save babies’, and Trump cultists literally believe he was chosen by their god to rule.
Asked and answered, it’s not going to change because you rephrased the question.
If I took an oath of office you bet your ass I’d be willing. That’s what it means to serve your country in office. If you aren’t willing to uphold your oath, resign.
I would hold no ill will to any person who resigned their position because they are unwilling but if you want to do the job, do it.
It wasn’t all that long ago that people got lynched in the part of the country I live in. A candidate running against MTG–she’s the next district over from me–had so many death threats and close calls that his wife divorced him and he ended up having to move out of the state to save his own life. Maybe you would be dumb and principled and do the right thing though; if so, you’d probable end up dead, esp. in a lot of the states that have really deep red pockets. Then the next person who takes the job, well, they’re probably be a lot less interested in being right and dead, and more interested in being able to go home at night.
I also “fear backlash” if he runs and loses the election. He won’t hesitate to get his followers to commit acts of violence. According to the logic of the “for fear of backlash we should allow him to run” people, we should just annoint Trump President for Life. After all, we can’t do anything that might cause MAGA to become violent, right? /s
It’s a habit I formed back when I frequented Reddit. You sometimes couldn’t tell if someone was being serious or not and since I didn’t want anyone to mistake my sarcasm for MAGA-ism, I used /s liberally.
Why does that matter? If you’re not convinced you can be effectively sarcastic then don’t be sarcastic. Putting that at the end is tantamount to going ‘LOOOOOOOOOOOL JK DON’T DOWNDOOT PLZZ!!!’.
No, it’s not, that stupid thing highlights several different problems, chief of which being that people would rather ruin a joke than risk being downvoted.
This is the kind of trend that’ll just stunt weak, impressionable, scared people’s cognition and impact their poor communicative skills further.
I think it’s useful. It’s not uncommon for people to not pick up on written sarcasm. I actually think we should adopt diacritics that denote emotion. Like emojis but more systematic.
Do any of you that let this man live rent free in your head realize he hasn’t been CONVICTED of anything that would invalidate his candidacy? Indicted =/= guilty.
The 14th is self-executing which means that you don’t have to be convicted in order to be disqualified. The reason it’s self-executing is that it was originally designed to prohibit former Confederate officers from holding federal office, and since there was no way that every one of the tens of thousands of former Confederate officers could be tried and convicted, it was written to be self-executing meaning that a simple finding of fact rather than a conviction was sufficient to bar one from running for federal office.
Now, you may not like that and if you’re a constitutional scholar you may even have some decent arguments as to why it doesn’t apply to Trump, but leaving that aside, you are absolutely full of shit when you imply that he needs to be convicted before the 14th applies. That’s why it’s a question for the SCOTUS and not random idiots like yourself.
Sorry for being a dick, I’m just tired of this stupid phony talking point.
if it’s so “self executing” why does SCOTUS need to hear it? some people are just so blinded by hate they can’t comprehend that things in this country are not guilty until proven innocent. but no one will convince you of that.
Lol a presidential candidate for one of two major parties I'm the most powerful country in the world threatens to literally be fascist and go after political opponents from day 1 .
literally be fascist and go after political opponents
really? you don’t see what’s going on from the other side? LITERALLY doing just this? and you think the people the the R next to their names are the fascists? Are you in the market for a bridge perhaps?
Lmao. I bet you don't even know that Colorado Republicans are the ones to push the initiative to get him off the ballot. Or do you watch enough right wing nonsense to think the court cases against the man who openly admits to his crimes are political attacks?
Do tell though - What is the Democrat equivalent of Project 2025? When did the party not only allow the idea of subversion of democracy but have a large chunk of it cheer it on? When were political opponents unjustly targeted? Why did the Republican led Senate committee release an intelligence report saying how corrupt Trump was?
Indeed. It was specifically written to be self-executing because it would have been impossible to charge, try and convict all of the tens of thousands of former Confederate officers it was meant to bar from federal office. Because it’s self-executing, a simple finding of fact is sufficient for it to apply. The question then isn’t whether it requires a conviction, but rather whether it applies to Trump.
To me it pretty obviously does apply to him, but I’m definitely biased as fuck.
Anyone with eyeballs and ears understands what this man is, what this man did, and what he evokes from his followers. Why do I need a court to confirm it for me to want him nowhere near the levers of power ever again? He'll stop living in my head when he stops trying to take control of the country.
It’s always hilarious when someone pulls the “you let this guy live rent free in your head” card about the greatest current threat to American democracy. Yes, we should just pretend he doesn’t exist. It’s almost always followed by one or more arguments that show they lack even a surface level understanding of the details of the situation. This post manages to live up to that ‘standard’.
This is what happens when you have an uneducated populace. A lack of critical thinking skills leads to the adoption of nonsensical viewpoints based on emotion instead of reason. When those viewpoints are challenged, they’re similarly met with typically meaningless, emotion-driven responses (a la “he lives in your mind rent free”) as the adopters lack the capacity to respond with reason.
What Judicial body? Every currently standing ruling regarding the merits of Trump’s eligibility to be president under the 14th amendment have found that he is not eligible (although all are still in limbo pending the inevitable SCOTUS appeal). There is a colorable technical argument to be made that he is not excluded, but most of the legal community is not convinced by them.
The legal arguments about his eligibility to appear on the primary ballot are more nuanced, but seem kind of silly if he ultimately is inneligable to hold the office.
The states that have ruled that Trump can remain on the primary ballot all did so on some sort of procedural ground. Typically of the form “state law does not require a candidate to be elligable to hold office to appear on a primary ballot”. In fairness to those states’ lawmakers, what sort of braindead political party would try nominating someone who was inneligable to hold office?
Whenever someone devises a system to be foolproof, someone goes out and finds a greater fool. The Republican party is nothing if not overflowing with greater fools
It’s going to get fucky, because no presidential candidate is actually on a citizen’s ballot. We don’t vote for the named candidate; we vote for a panel of unnamed electors pledged (but not obligated) to support the named candidate.
We need to be talking about “faithless electors” and the “National Popular Vote Interstate Compact”, as the conditions are ripe for these to play a major role in the next election.
I think this is a lot more true than many people here suspect. What we’re realistically looking at is relatively low-intensity insurrection on the level of, say, Northern Ireland during the height of The Troubles. It’s still a very bad thing, but it’s not existential and if the comparison to The Troubles is accurate, the violence will mostly target federal law enforcement and any military that’s brought to bear should Biden invoke the insurrection act.
The real existential threat is Trump actually winning another term.
Trump miscalculated. He thought Pence was spineless. Had Pence stopped the transition as they wanted and instead assisted with the fake electors they created and intended to deliver that day the insurrection would likely have worked. Trumps lawyer has already agreed to testify about the faked electors, and we know Pence got thrown off that day and then thrown to the wolves. I think Trump wanted the crowds of his followers there so when they submitted the fake electors and denounced the official vote he could have video of “everyone” cheering on live TV and he could look like he stopped a stolen election while he himself stole it. Narcissistic idea one might say.
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