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Comment by tetrometal | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. I see a narcissist and a buffoon when I look at Trump, but none of his behavior validates anything close to the crazed response we see from the primarily left-leaning mainstream media.

It's been a constant stream of catastrophizing from them for the last four years. It was like this during the Bush years as well, though they do seem to have perfected it.

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The mainstream media provide unlimited and free ads to Trump. Trump is a savvy marketer. He plays the mainstream media like a fiddle. The outrageous remarks he said or tweeted are reported relentlessly by the mainstream media. The way I see it is that whatever Trump said or tweeted are like campaign ads. What the mainstream media have been doing is nothing but playing campaign ads with rebuttals. The relationship between Trump and the mainstream media is pretty symbiotic.

The things that the mainstream media have not reported enough is his corruption and incompetency. Instead, they constantly chase after his remarks. I will give you an example. The way USPS is undermined is nothing but sabotage. Trump and his officials claimed that they run USPS like business. The mainstream media simply reported it along this frame. However, no reasonable business would run like what they did to USPS. Besides, the moment they claimed that they would revert the changes, the mainstream simply reported what they said. No, they didn't revert their changes. By reading mainstream media news casually, we wouldn't know that USPS was sabotaged. Many people think that Trump administration simply tried to run USPS like business but they decided not to due to opposition. The reality is that USPS was sabotaged and the damage is done.

I'm not sure what you are referring to as the mainstream media. There were weeks of articles about USPS and how there were problems. There were years of reporting about collusion and corruption with regard to Russia and other scandals. Whether you were looking at Fox or at NY Times or WaPo or CNN or whatever, whether it was for or against, there was neverending coverage about the Trump scandal of the week, and that Trump's explanations were BS. The problem wasn't lack or reporting or criticizing Trump, it was that there was always a new scandal every week that needed coverage.

I refer to virtually all outlets except the conservative ones (e.g. the ones you listed except Fox). As I said, the problem with the coverage is that it is based on their framing, i.e. running USPS like a business. There are so many articles about whether USPS should be run like a business because of this framing. This is a false permise. Trump administration simply co-opted "business" for sabotage. Mainstream media fell into the trap. By arguing whether USPS should be run like business leads to the impression that Trump administration was running USPS like a business. Also, there are many articles in which if we read beyond headlines, we would find comments from opponents of Trump that Trump administration sabotaging USPS. This is merely both-side-ism at work. To learn the truth, one needs to already distrust Trump and disregard their statements.

Then, all of a sudden Trump administration said that they would suspend/revert the changes. The mainstream media all rushed to report the statements, even though they were lies. There were no reporting of similar scale once the lies were uncovered. This is also the reason why Bill Barr was able to destroy Mueller's investigation - by first lying that there was no wrongdoings to gain enormous coverage and then escape scrutiny when truth was uncovered due to subdue coverage. As I also said, the mainstream media knew that Trump administration lies consistently. They should really ignore what they said and simply report what they do and don't do.

In summary, the mainstream media are really poor in conveying the big picture because Trump administration successfully hacks them and because they are unable to adapt to this adversary.

>. I will give you an example. The way USPS is undermined is nothing but sabotage.

The post office was not sabotaged. They're foundering because mail volume has dropped to half its peak and they haven't been able to downsize their operations fast enough to keep making money.

The media and the Democrats spent the last year chasing this wild conspiracy theory about the USPS throwing the election for Trump. It never ever made any sense and, indeed, there's no evidence that mail in ballots were tampered with on any large scale.

> It's been a constant stream of catastrophizing from them for the last four years.

I've looked at a few definitions, and I don't see how it's an accurate description of what's happening here.

For example: “Catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion that prompts people to jump to the worst possible conclusion, usually with very limited information or objective reason to despair. When a situation is upsetting, but not necessarily catastrophic, they still feel like they are in the midst of a crisis.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/catastrophizing)

We have experienced “great damage or suffering” (i.e., catastrophes), not merely upsetting situations. The media hasn't been catastrophizing; they've been reporting about catastrophes.

What are the "catastrophes" that you have experienced (disregarding COVID which is a world catastrophe)?

His inaction and obfuscation caused thousands and thousands of people to die from COVID.

He publicly condoned shooting unarmed protesters, and let his DOJ kidnap people in unmarked vans.

He left the Paris climate accords.

These are catastrophic.

You left out being impeached for blackmailing a friendly country for military aid so they would dig up dirt on his rival. Also, gutting federal agencies like the EPA, silencing reports from national labs which were critical of the coal industry, and installing Dejoy as head of the Postal Service who immediately had mail equipment destroyed directly before an election which was known to most likely have large amounts of mail in ballots. Not to mention Dejoy has large stock in companies that would profit from the destruction of the Postal Service.

Edit: forgot to say numerous people close to him and his campaign have gone to jail. Steve Bannon, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone...etc.

What do you think of what happened with the Steele Dossier?

A better question: what do you think happened with the Steele Dossier? A campaign funding opposition research isn't a problem. That the Dossier may or may not have lead to a legitimate intelligence case being opened against a Trump associate also isn't a problem. John McCain hand delivered it to the FBI. There is no fruit of the poisoned tree here.

That you don't see that something is wrong when an intelligence agency fabricates fake evidence in order to advance a political agenda against other parts of it's own government is chilling.

>fabricates fake evidence

Source? Sounds like conspiratorial nonsense.

sure.

glen greenwald: http://archive.is/58vqu

matt taibbi: https://archive.li/acKAO

While those articles certainly highlight serious problems in spying oversight and a reckless FBI, they do not support your characterization of "fabricated fake evidence in order to advance a political agenda". For example, the pee tape doesn't represent even a majority of the potentially damaging information. While the FBI probably overstated the trustworthiness of the document, those articles don't claim the document itself was an outright fabrication or that none of the claims had any credibility.

You're splitting the line quite finely

I think "what does this have to do with Trump's numerous crimes?". What a strange question to ask.

the whole thread doesn't have a lot of focus, but the OP posted about "The country may be divided. But those divisions are manufactured and exacerbated over the last 4 years by a made-for-TV president." So the context here is about division in the country and investigation of what is either causing that and/or causing people to feel like that.

For seven weeks in 2017 it was the official policy of our government to remove migrant children of all ages from their parents and house them in a cage. Even now the inevitable bureaucratic messups have lost some of these kids; it's possible these families will literally never be whole again. Everyone has their own horrors I guess, but this was what did it for me.

Obama started this.

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/immigration-border-crisis/...

> The idea that this is simply a continuation of an Obama-era practice is "preposterous," said Denise Gilman, director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas Law School. "There were occasionally instances where you would find a separated family — maybe like one every six months to a year — and that was usually because there had been some actual individualized concern that there was a trafficking situation or that the parent wasn’t actually the parent."

> Once custody concerns were resolved, "there was pretty immediately reunification," Gilman told NBC News. "There were not 2,000 kids in two months — it’s not the same universe," she added.

That's not to say that the Obama administration didn't do some other cruel things to migrant families in an effort to deter them. Some of which got smacked back down by the courts, too. But separating families as a matter of policy was not one of those policies.

Trump destroyed the United States' Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia. Without the treaty, Russia and USA can make as many nuclear bombs as they want, as long as they say they will only use them on intermediate-range missiles.

This single action by Trump imperils all of humanity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-Range_Nuclear_For...

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/02/what-does-the-demise-of...

Total nonsense. Europe has just as many if not more cases. The idea that another president would have made any difference is pure wishful thinking.

Under Obama, the pandemic response team that Trump disbanded stopped SARSv1 (COVID is also known as SARSv2) from spreading out of China under essentially identical circumstances.

They also stopped Ebola from spreading, which is at least an order of magnitude worse than COVID.

That team operated internationally with the cooperation of local governments. When it was disbanded, many people warned the administration that it was leaving a huge public health gap, and that the decision would result in unchecked pandemics.

We’re lucky to have ended up with a COVID pandemic, and not something much worse.

Define worse. Ebola is much deadlier, but its kind of hard to spread a virus that causes you to bleed from your face.

Ebola’s R value is 2, which is enough to create large outbreaks if left unchecked.

The death rate is 50%, which is 100x higher than COVID’s 0.5% (which has been lowered to 0.125% with improved hospital care).

In the absence of a coordinated pandemic response, I count that as “worse”.

Many problems with your comment. First SARS occurred in 2003 before Obama. It was stopped primarily because it does not spread asymptomatically. SARS-COV-2 does. That is the difference.

> They also stopped Ebola from spreading, which is at least an order of magnitude worse than COVID.

Pure unmitigated ignorance.

There are many countries that have completely contained COVID, on multiple continents. It is not "wishful thinking" to follow in the footsteps of many other countries. If we could do as well as the African countries that we assisted with past Ebola outbreaks, we would have saved so many lives.

Great I can't wait for Biden to stop it.

To stop the virus, we need to treat it as a bigger enemy than we do each other. And it may be too late now, the easy time to stop it was at the beginning, when it would have taken far less mobilization and resources. Now, no matter how hard we clamp down it will remain in pockets.

I do not believe that Biden is capable of enacting any policy that will lead to the (simple) social behaviors that can stop the disease in its tracks. He can do some policy on the edges.

But if we do stop the virus, it won't be because of Biden, it will be because of the actions of a huge number of people, across the political spectrum, and a grand unification of people. We will need to build a massive virus stopping machine, and such projects are never the result of one person, anymore than the space shuttle being attributable to a single person.

I think it's possible, but I do not think it's likely.

I really don't get this constant "he didn't do anything" and "it's too late" talking points.

Nancy Pelosi was walking around Chinatown in SF after it was well known that there was an outbreak going on overseas.

The NYC department of health advised that it was perfectly safe to attend Chinese New Year celebrations shortly after.

When POTUS stopped international travel earlier than the media decided it was a legitimate issue, his political opponents called him a racist. Then you'll argue, "but but the nyc outbreaks trace to Europe!!" And I'll argue back that China has industrial factories in Italy, and ask you how the virus got to Italy/Europe in the first place. And you still won't get it. It's like the left just constant ignores common sense and hides behind reddit-teir "you got a source for that" nerdery.

All of this happened less than a year ago. It is well within living memory.

As a scientist, it causes me immense pain to see these types of points trotted out as having any sort of relevance to stopping the spread of Covid19.

Literally nothing you said here has any relevance to effective policy for stopping Covid19. Nothing. Somehow, in our modern society, you have been able to consume a very large diet of information, and have been misinformed about its basic suitability as information.

There's only one way to stop this thing: by paying attention to evidence and our best understanding, and to put aside our silly political games that have not bearing on reality. Or worse, political games that think they are the reality.

I hope that as part of the healing process, science starts having a seat at the table in these discussions.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/

You're seriously going to claim that the US wouldn't have had a better response to a pandemic had they actually had a pandemic response team?

Seems like the claim that this pandemic response team would have made a difference is the assertion that needs to be proven. I'm not terribly convinced that a bit more beurocracy would have made any difference at all.

You're not sure a team full of scientists who are experts in infectious diseases could've come up with a better plan than doing absolutely nothing? Or lying to the public about the severity of the disease? Or refusing to issue a national mask mandate? Or shutting down travel... only to China, not Europe who was also having a massive outbreak? Or flying people home on a commercial flight without any sort of precautions taken to separate them from the rest of the passengers?

You really think that would've all played out the same? I assume you didn't vote for Trump, and your opinion is based in facts and logic, and not a misguided attempt at defending his laughably embarrassing attempts at downplaying a pandemic ravaging our nation.

PS: Where's that vaccine he promised? Or were you one of the ones that thought the virus was just going to "magically disappear" after the election?

Well the WHO did such a great bang up job on letting the world know the severity, I'm sure this team would have also "followed the science" and decided it wasn't a threat either. This is government employees you are thinking that are going to do a competent job.

None of it? We'll even ignore the easy ones like violating the emoluments clause and blatant nepotism.

Withholding aid to Puerto Rico. Calling for the governor of Michigan to be locked up for implementing covid restrictions then refusing to condemn the folks that attempted to kidnap her.

Charlottesville. Sending in Federal Police to kidnap folks in Portland. Refusing to impose sanctions on Russia that had bipartisan support. Refusing to condemn Russia for assassinating citizens of other nations with chemical weapons. Jamaal kashoggi. Saluting North Korean soldiers. Outright telling governor's he was withholding Federal aid unless they did him favors. Etc, etc, etc. "left-leaning media" has absolutely nothing to do with his train wreck of a presidency.

I don't think he managed to go a single month over the last 4 years without violating the Constitution.

What would have to be true in order for you to feel that the media response to Trump’s presidency has been appropriate?

Well, they've been presenting him as a fascist authoritarian for four years, so if that were true I'd be inclined to believe their response was appropriate.

Is it appropriate now he’s declaring the democratic election invalid?

That’s what fascism is, you realise?

This really cuts to the heart of it; what does it take to get someone to change their views, when the facts don’t work?

Even if you disagree with a democratic agenda, how can you in good conscience continue to support someone who is blatantly acting like a fascist dictator right now?

I personally find it easy to distinguish Trump, who I consider an waste of air, and the GOP, who has an agenda I can appreciate.

Why is that so difficult to do?

If he believes it is invalid, I'm not sure what else I'd expect him to say.

The fact that the left has been absolutely out of their minds with hatred for the man for the last four years makes it very, very difficult for people to easily trust that they are not engaging in impropriety during the election. Their motto for removing him is essentially "At any cost" at this point.

I'm not sure why you're framing his actions or words along the lines of "fascist dictator". This is simply a continuation of the vitriolic rhetoric I've been trying to combat for years now. It's crazed, and I do not understand why you - someone who can write clearly enough that you must be intelligent - cannot see it. It's rhetoric like that that is driving so many people to distrust you.

Trump will challenge the election results in court and succeed or fail. It's as simple as that. Personally, I hope it's a failure because I don't want there to have been any impropriety. If that's the case, Trump is done. There is no fascism. There is no dictator. Please stop catastrophizing.

He did everything in his power to make sure this election would be a catastrophe (but failed, to the credit of Republican and Democratic state governments).

Now, he’s refusing to accept the results of the election.

He has appointed self-proclaimed facists and neo-Nazis to his inner circle.

His apparently illegal secret police force illegally detained protestors over the objections of the state governments that had legal jurisdiction over the protests.

He said he rushed the appointment of an additional judge to the supreme court so he would have enough votes to overturn the election results.

People claim he wants to be a “fascist dictator” because these are just recent examples of his four year concerted effort to dismantle our democracy.

He did all of these things in the open. There’s no “catastophizing” here. These are all, well-documented, uncontested facts. Most are documented by multiple videos of him, and members of his administration speaking about them. There are dozens of other examples of this behavior, also all well-documented.

Fortunately, it looks like he failed, and will soon be a former president.

>If he believes

This is the problem - Trump is a moron and everything he believe is suspect.

He believes he had the largest inaugural crowds ever, even after PHOTOGRAPHIC evidence proves otherwise. He believes his administration accomplished more in the first 100 days than any other one in US History. He believes COVID is a conspiracy, fading away, we've rounded the corner, doctors and hospitals are faking numbers to make money, the fake media only talks about it to hurt him and it will stop after the election. Etc.

>I'm not sure why you're framing his actions or words along the lines of "fascist dictator".

He has called for jailing or imprisonment of his political enemies, suggested the election system is rife with fraud, order troops to suppress free speech, had federal agents snatch people off the streets, tried to get other countries to smear his opponents before they got aid from the US, etc. The GOP ran a political convention when HALF of the the speakers were his relatives and advanced no agenda. If he were the President of some banana republic, we would say that is expected in a failing state led by a fascist dictator. I mean the convention alone is bordering on the type of stuff North Korea would stage.

> Trump will challenge the election results in court and succeed or fail. It's as simple as that. Personally, I hope it's a failure because I don't want there to have been any impropriety. If that's the case, Trump is done. There is no fascism. There is no dictator.

It's not “as simple as that.”

He's made baseless claims about the security of mail-based voting, suggested that shifts in tallies are the results of illegal votes — instead of a predictable effect of preventing counties from tallying ballots until election day, and clearly and unequivocally claimed that he has won the election and that any other outcome must be a result of fraud.

Working to create the appearance of fraud and then pointing to the situation as evidence is problematic, even if it is not ultimately successful.

It's not just that he's going to challenge the result in court. Please, go listen to his words- they're on YouTube. Read his tweets.

He's saying things like that he would win if it weren't for all of the illegal votes being counted. That "bad things" are happening in Pennsylvania as his lead was closing. He said, months ago, that he didn't think votes should be counted after election day, which is absolutely absurd.

He's literally trying to sow doubt about the election process and trying to make people think that Biden closing and overcoming a vote gap is suspicious, when it was totally expected.

I don't throw the term around lightly, but I don't know what else to call a blatant undermining of democracy like that other than fascism. Maybe we can discuss whether or not fascism is all that bad, but I find no way you can argue in good faith that what he's saying about the election is "ho-hum. Nothing to see here."

He has also casually suggested being president for more than 2 terms. I find that to be a statement in poor taste, at best. While the constitution is a living document by virtue of amendments, it stinks of aspirations for being dictator-for-life (when being spoken by a sitting president).

> It’s crazed...

I hear you, and I know what you mean.

...but, I don’t think you can reasonably claim that now, even if, perhaps, you could previously.

I’m not trying to convince anyone; I’m just saying, for me, looking at what is happening right now, I cannot argue that the behaviour Trump is displaying is a) inappropriate for the potus, and b) scarily like what you would expect from a “fascist dictator”.

I can’t disagree with you more strongly than this: regardless of what has happened in the past, what is happening right now is NOT a continuation of the last four years of leftist media agenda.

notable fascist al gore.

When vote counts suddenly stop and then overnight the opponent starts surging, people tend to assume foul play is at hand. This is how it happens everywhere where an actual authoritarian cheats to stay in power, for instance: https://twitter.com/ajplus/status/1186630753523818502. For you to not understand something like this is grounds for people to question the validity of elections all over the world means that you don't understand much about the world, let alone what's happening in your own country. And I speak about this as a non-American who's simply watching it. You're being brainwashed by your media into believing things that aren't true.

The vote count turn is unsurprising since the in-person ballots could be quickly tallied while the mail-in ballots had to be hand-counted.

The reason the two types of balloting had such a difference in party-support is that the President in the Republican party had been telling his supporters not to use mail-in balloting because it would be rife with fraud. People took him at his word on that side of the political divide, so there's a resulting bias in the likely candidate supported by the mail-in ballots.

Hand counted, in the middle of the night, with no poll watchers around...

The PA, WI, MI GOP state legislatures refused to process mail in ballots before hand which is why it took so long. Look at Florida who voted R and counted their mail in ballots before Election Day and were able to report results that night. It was manufactured by GOP state legislatures to sow doubt.

Sources:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.foxnews.com/politics/pennsy...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurk...

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/04/931136905/we-ll-be-working-24...

Also worth pointing out that in the case of Florida the exact opposite happened and the original count was Biden winning handily but as the panhandle started being added the election swung the other way to Trump. It's not like the big shift in results was unexpected, as soon as the results for Miami-Dade came in even though Biden had a large lead the NY Times election needle immediately swung hard to Trump because they knew the lead would be wiped out by in person voting.

Funny how Trump isn't complaining about the exact same thing happening when it winds up helping him.

Additionally poll watchers were involved in the entire process, if you read what the Trump campaign lawyers said in court

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/fact-c...

There's a reason why countries like France and many others have banned mail-in ballots. When those ballots keep being found day after day and the vote counting keeps going and going without end, until the right candidate wins, people will say its fraudulent. There's nothing you can say or do about it because that's just how it will go. You should want to prevent the voting process from looking fraudulent at all. There should be no doubts about it. The only thing you can do to achieve that is preventing that kind of voting from taking place to great degrees in the first place, which I believe Trump wanted to do but his opponents didn't.

> When those ballots keep being found day after day and the vote counting keeps going and going without end, until the right candidate wins, people will say its fraudulent.

This is not what is happening, and if anything, in Pennsylvania in particular, the Republican legislature is responsible for this situation. PA is one of only a few states that does not allow processing mailed ballots until election day (i.e. they can't even open the envelopes). The Democratic governor asked to change the law to allow counting of ballots before election day, precisely so you wouldn't get into this situation, and the Republican legislature refused.

When I say "the right candidate" I don't mean Biden specifically. If Trump now suddenly starts overtaking in multiple states with the ballots that are still being counted, people opposed to him will also find it suspicious and be unhappy with those results. The overall point is that this kind of voting shouldn't be allowed to this degree in the first place because it only generates doubt no matter who wins. As for the PA situation, yes, that's true, but the process I described is happening or happened in multiple states, not just there.

This. I'm more alarmed and afraid that investigation into all of the allegations his campaign is bringing up will be handled lightly or handwaved as a waste of time, where nothing less than a full blown addressing and running down of every accusation should be done. I don't care who wins in the end. I care that the processes integrity is maintained at all cost. Doubt with regards to the voting process is not something any Republic can afford.

Trump made allegations about the last election as well, then followed up with his own investigation which found no evidence. Then he spent the last few months ginning up distrust of mail in ballots and instead of offering help to states to scale up their voting infrastructure he instead appointed DeJoy to head USPS who destroys sorting machines and slows down the mail.

Now he throws as many lawsuits as he can about the voting process with zero evidence. His suits are being thrown out because they are frivolous and lack credibility.

Doubt with regards to the voting process is being sown by a single person and we shouldn't doubt our institutions just because someone is screaming loudly with no evidence.

I'd still be championing the need to investigate if Trump won, and it was Biden's team calling out the discrepancies.

Admittedly, I'm still trying to track down some more info on the rumored last minute software update in Georgia I believe it was and some more info on some rather interesting age demographics.

I don't doubt that if there was an election to pique voter mobilization, it'd be this one. I just know I'd sleep more soundly knowing some of the numerical strangeness rumored to be going on was looked into wholeheartedly.

Because of the hyper-distributed nature of American elections, those with doubts can often walk down the street (or catch a bus) to the elections office, start talking to people, and find out how the process works.

Also because of the hyper-distributed nature of American elections, that's a much better way to understand how they work in one's town than to look at national news about what's happening in Miami-Dade County. If you're not a citizen of Florida (much less a resident of Miami-Dade), you might as well ask how elections are run in Germany; it'll apply about as much to how they run in your town.

Everyone knew for months ahead that this is how the votes would play out in those particular states. Nothing strange happened.

He was repeatedly asked if he would support the peaceful transfer of power if he lost, and he repeatedly refused to do so. That’s pretty much as authoritarian as you get.

This is such a blatantly false framing that it's impossible for me to believe you're presenting it in good faith.

I don't understand your position here at all. Trump is currently doing everything he can to thwart a peaceful transition of power. The fact that he is such an ineffectual buffoon is the only reason he is not succeeding.

For me, Trump trying to use the Justice Dept to investigate his enemies and thwart investigations of his friends is so beyond the pale, way beyond what any president, Republican or Democrat, has ever done that I am shocked people can think this was not a big deal. I mean, that extreme abuse of power is banana republic, end of Rome-type shit.

Put it another way: I firmly believe if a time traveler from, say, 2010 just showed up to see Trump's autocratic desires that they'd be horrified; we've just gotten used to Trump's extreme abuses. Heck, it's become something of a new favorite pastime of mine to look at Trump's own tweet storms circa 2012 and see how 2012 Trump would be condemning 2020 Trump in the harshest possible terms.

> This is such a blatantly false framing that it's impossible for me to believe you're presenting it in good faith.

Listen to his responses again. I don't know how you can interpret it any other way.

September 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR8oIitE6mI

October 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP0G4vJ5OMw

Edit: Found a September 2016 one where he does say he will support the transfer of power - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRJ8TLCZdnI

I am very interested in seeing a “good faith” framing of his statements on the topic from you. Can you provide one?

Not GP commenter, but here's one: The "will you support a peaceful transition of power" question is designed to elicit a response which could be quoted out of context in an article inevitably headlined "Trump predicts his own election defeat; already musing about transfer of power to his Democratic challenger". For any politician to answer a question posed this way would be disaster. Trump's unique problem is that he simply refuses to answer the question rather than giving a non-answer with the appearance of substance. Whether this is by choice or because he can't pull off that common trick is perhaps debatable.

(Before downvoting/flagging, please recognize that this answer is not exclusive of other explanations such as "Trump really does have dictatorial ambitions". I take no position on such non-falsifiable claims.)

This is very similar to George W Bush's "fool me twice... I won't get fooled again" gaffe. Had he completed the quote properly he could never have escaped the clips of saying "shame on me" taken out of context (remember this is before the days of deepfakes; now it would matter much less). This was predictably spun as "Dubya is stupid!" but frankly to recognize mid-quip the minefield he was about to step in is a feat beyond the average person. Of course the difference is (again) that unlike Bush, Trump really leaves open the possibility that he really is incompetent as opposed to the 5-dimensional chess that anyone supporting him really hopes he's playing.

The only reason he was asked this question in the first place is because there was good reason to doubt that he would support a peaceful transition - doubt that is well founded as we now see.

Maybe hes smart enough not to answer the question - the problem is that it should never have needed to be asked.

> The "will you support a peaceful transition of power" question is designed to elicit a response which could be quoted out of context in an article inevitably headlined "Trump predicts his own election defeat

Then why wasn't Biden asked the same question? Or anyone else? If this was just a gaffe factory then surely it would be a staple of the presidential interview genre, no?

But it's not. Only Trump got asked that. Ever, as far as I know. And the reason isn't because we were looking for a gaffe but because there was (AND REMAINS!) significant doubt as to whether he would support a peaceful transition of power.

I mean, the current circumstances right now disprove the theory you just proposed. Read his twitter feed, for goodness sake.

> Then why wasn't Biden asked the same question? Or anyone else? If this was just a gaffe factory then surely it would be a staple of the presidential interview genre, no?

That doesn't even make sense! Biden isn't the sitting POTUS. The question "will you support a peaceful transition of power" only makes sense when asked of a sitting POTUS, not an incoming POTUS. Biden doesn't currently have any power which he's required to transmit to Trump!

I know TDS can be a powerful effect, but surely you're not asking me to believe (or to take seriously) that there's someone else other than Trump who currently holds the position of POTUS.

Just today: the president has begun purging the defense department, the attorney general has rolled back rules about interference in in-progress elections, and the majority leader has signaled support for overturning the election.

Would you care to revisit your priors as to whether or not it was appropriate to ask Trump about his support for a peaceful transfer of power?

It's pretty much the standard interpretation.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/24/trump-transition-us-ele...

> Well, they've been presenting him as a fascist authoritarian for four years

He literally called them the "enemies of the state". He routinely calls for the prosecution of his political enemies, and has apparently directed his own Department of Justice to that effect.

I mean, sure, it's true that he may not "be" a fascist authoritarian. But he sure acts like one. Is it wrong to report that?

he said "enemies of the people"

Oh yes, that makes it ok then. Carry on...

Trump said he would only accept the result of an election if he wins it, way back in 2016[0]; he has a pattern of firing anyone who doesn’t do or say exactly what he wants, especially when it comes to persecuting his perceived enemies[1]; he’s used his presidential power to commute the sentences of members of his personal circle who are tried and convicted of crimes[2]; he’s called into question, without evidence, the integrity of American elections[3], since even before he was the president[4]; he constantly attacks the credibility of the free press[5][6], more recently questioning even the reporting of Fox News[7][8]; he bypasses congressional checks on his appointments[9]; he has deployed the military against peaceful protesters and threatened to violate the Posse Comitatus Act[10]; his White House is being investigated for politicising the FDA and CDC[11]; last month he authorised a new executive order that would enable him to more easily fire government employees[12]; he refused to just say that he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses[13].

If this is not sufficient evidence that Trump is a proto-fascist authoritarian, what more would be needed, in your mind, to meet that bar? Or, perhaps putting it another way, can you explain to me how all of this stuff is cool and normal and not a clear pattern of proto-fascist authoritarianism?

I did my best here to source examples from multiple media outlets in order to try to mitigate against the paradox that your main complaint is that the media is distorting the truth. Once someone decides that, not just one source, but the entire media apparatus is lying, it’s incredibly difficult to source information in a way which is acceptable—which is why a free press is so important, and why it’s particularly dangerous that Trump and his party have been spending so much energy on undermining it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQJzt48wXbA

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/all-the-presidents-d...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/article/trump-pardons-commutations.h...

[3] https://nypost.com/2020/11/05/trump-to-speak-from-white-hous...

[4] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/worl...

[5] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lesley-stahl-donald-trump-said-...

[6] https://cpj.org/reports/2020/04/trump-media-attacks-credibil...

[7] https://www.thewrap.com/trump-attacks-fox-election-day/

[8] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-attacks-fox-ne...

[9] https://www.npr.org/2020/03/09/813577462/how-trump-has-fille...

[10] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-mobilizes-mili...

[11] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

[12] https://www.globalgovernmentforum.com/trump-extend-hire-fire...

[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ2AvqLSjSs

Trump actively campaigned as the "law and order" president.

That is, by definition, fascist and authoritarian.

I think Trump has many character flaws (and that's putting it lightly), did many not-so-good things, etc. It is fine that this is highlighted by the mainstream media.

My main problem is that the same treatment is not applied to the democrats. This means that in order to find similar stories from the other side, one needs to start (1) reading extremist-leaning news. These also contain many half-truths and outright lies, so on top of that one has to (2) try to verify themselves the veracity of those claims. Most people don't have the time to do that (obviously), so they stop at the first step.

he would've have actually had to consolidate power in any kind of meaningful way instead of simply bumbling through the logical continuation of bush/obama policies while being undermined by the intel community/ his own generals and the the gop itself every time he tried to do anything that broke from neocon consensus. his own justices even repudiated him. ironically, an actual fascist would've used the pandemic as his own reichstag fire, seized power & curtailed liberties to effectively contain the virus instead of simply mismanaging a dysfunctional, under supplied & under funded federal health apparatus that effectively let the states just do whatever. italy had tanks in the streets, south korea and taiwan created invasive ethically dubious surveillance programs to control movement. the actual white supremacists are mad that trump didn't do exactly that.

aside from the bizarre alternative-universe psychodrama that corporate media has been airing for the past years, trump in reality was basically just unremarkable and incompetent.

I agree Trump is much more of a "proof of concept" of how an actual fascist could operate. Instead, as you say, he is blisteringly incompetent and lazy. Remember he accidentally became president when all he wanted was to build a hotel in Moscow.

His tweets clearly show the mindset of someone who wants to use levers of power which are massively beyond his constitutional powers (shut down the media, overthrow elections, imprison critics). But he had neither the energy or the political skill to accomplish any of that. What he did have was the ability to convince millions of people that the US government should be turned over to a TV reality clown.

Have you not been watching? They literally manufactured a Russia collusion story and then spent 4 years beating Trump over the head with it. Then they orchestrated a hijacking of the Democratic primary to prevent Bernie from being on the ticket. Trump is a despicable human, to a degree only surpassed by the folks running and representing American media.

You're getting down-voted without anyone else actually providing a rebuttal. But what you're saying matches, roughly, my understanding of what happened. Perhaps their issue is with the way it is phrased, sounding sort of like rhetoric.

So I'll add because I'm more or less with you: I'm sincerely confused how we can spend years alleging Russian interference and now that on a really close election, with contention over the way the ballots were counted, it's being called by the media without presenting doubt despite polling being pretty off? The inconsistency is concerning, in my opinion. What am I not understanding?

If I'd introduced a new system in at work (my understanding is the mass mail-in ballots are new at this scale, but please correct me if I'm wrong) and was testing it and it gave a weird result, I'd at least double check it.

There is no contention over how the ballots were counted. There are allegations which have been repeatedly thrown out or debunked by judges and press across the country, including those friendly to the parties making said allegations.

So I’d say that’s what you’re not understanding, though I’m puzzled as to how you could have missed it if you spent any time looking into it at all, since every reputable source has reported the rebuttals right alongside the allegations.

There is no question in this election. The margins are not close. They are not surprising. They were not even terribly unexpected. The only party alleging any of those things is the party that has repeatedly eschewed facts for 4 years and longer. The one that has repeatedly pushed useless investigations that they themselves conclude are baseless. And in fact it’s not even the whole party, it’s mostly the parts of the party working directly for the loser.

Does that help clarify your confusion?

Yes, that helps, thank you. I'd read of some officials denying it, but the information around judges is new to me and I will explore it further.

Who do you consider to be reputable sources? I will include them in my reading.

I'm also interested in why it was necessary to refer to the president as a "loser." I thought your point stood without it and all that did was clue me in on the possibility of bias in the rest of the response. Staunch supporters would likely discard your reasoning entirely because of it.

I did indeed mean loser as the opposite of victor, as mentioned in the sibling response, rather than as an ad hominem.

Reputability-wise I focused on the American press in general (Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NYT, etc). My main through-line during the week was following the 538 live blog, which did a good job of linking out to a variety of sources as several of the cases unfolded during the week. A decent summary is the one at https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/election-2020-trump-campaign... . You'll find the legal challenges so far are largely about technicalities rather than actual allegations of voter fraud, despite claims otherwise, and that the ones that have been heard have mostly either been dismissed or they have resulted in minor adjustments to procedures, at times to the frustration of the presiding judge (finding in-person recounting of the proceedings requires digging deeper than the above article).

Not featuring in the legal proceedings are other allegations, such as those that certain people who were supposedly deceased had submitted votes. These have mostly turned out to be clerical errors, many of which were already fixed but hadn't necessarily propagated to the systems that the allegers were looking at. As a bonus, here's a 538 feature from 2016, when the groundwork for this kind of argument was once again being laid just in case now-president Trump lost: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/voter-fraud-is-very-rar... .

FWIW, I read that part in the non-insulting context, like as in "loser" versus "victor".

Oh, thank you. I can see that now. Perhaps that is how they meant it.

Taking your question in good faith, it's because the argument isn't that "Russian interference" happened. It's that the argument is "Russian interference in favor of Trump" happened. So clearly, if Biden won, the belief isn't that Russia helped Biden, it's that Biden's victory was able to overcome whatever interference was still trying affect things in favor of Trump.

For those who don't recall, Russia had big reasons to endorse Trump over Hillary in 2016: Hillary was bellicose about Russia and Syria, to the point where people echoed worries she'd plunge us into "WW3". That, compared with Trump's contrarian sympathies toward Russia and irreverence about the U.S.'s moral highground (and conservatism AND clear, probable incompetence) of course motivated Russia to support him.

They also hoped that he would come to the table and legitimize Russia as a fellow superpower and usher in a new era of diplomatic relations. The fact that Trump utterly failed to do that probably chilled Russia's interest in the 2020 election though.

China has good reason to endorse Biden; should we assume that Biden has colluded with China in efforts to “hack” our election (whatever tf that means)?

Not solely because of motive, no. You'd need evidence, which is different than motive. Russia having a motive wasn't the only reason to suspect collusion, either.

Because the polling majorly favored Biden and the results showed far more Trump votes than anticipated could rationally be interpreted to mean that mail-in ballots were flawed in a way that favored Trump.

I'm not claiming this is the case but providing an example of how subjective and spinnable any set of facts can be made.

The downvoting could also be because I asked a very basic question and they responded to it with a non sequitur that did not even attempt to answer the question.

Comments like these reinforce my conviction that comment threads like these are ultimately useless.

I believe that an exchange of views is possible in a way that will be illuminating to both "sides", but it just isn't possible in a forum like this.

"They literally manufactured a Russia collusion story" is an assertion presented as fact. It obviously has a very deep argument behind it that has convinced the author. But given the context of the discussion, it's impossible for the author to explain why he thinks that is true, in a way for a counterpart to verify and explore.

Similarly, those on the other side who believe the Russia collusion isn't a "manufactured story" also have very deep arguments that can't be included here.

It's the same with "orchestrating a hijacking of the Democratic primary". It's an assertion that comes across as completely ridiculous to people who don't believe it, based off of counter arguments that are also very deep having to do with the intricacies of how the primaries work.

And so then of course the conclusion is that Trump is bad but the media is worse, based off of those previous two assertions being true. And the discussion goes absolutely nowhere.

I am literally highly interested in the thinking behind why the Russia collusion story is manufactured, and how the Democratic primary is hijacked. Yes because I believe those conclusions are false, but I want to respectfully explore where in the argument I think it falls down. But to do it would take a long exchange, probably with time in between to research, that just isn't supported by forums like this.

Manufactured? you should really read the Mueller report and see that there was plenty of wrongdoing. Saying it was manufactured is pretending like all of the evidence, meetings, etc... didn't happen.

I see russian bots commenting on Facebook all day every day for the last 4 years. Today one glitched and commented on a completely unrelated post under the name "hispanics for Trump" on a post for a car.

Krebs has an article with evidence on this phenomena as well: https://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/twitter-bots/

Edit: Specifically https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/08/twitter-bots-use-likes-r...

So that is your Russiagate story? That is the collision we spent 4 years talking about?

Russian bots... the lefts favorite cop out argument of 2020. Please provide an example, otherwise your claims are nothing but rhetoric.

Dude, there actually are Twitter bots every where. I see multiple accounts posting the same exact tweet over and over. You look at their profile and its a obvious its manufactured history. Have you even tried looking?

It's everywhere online https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/08/twitter-bots-use-likes-r...

You seriously believe it hasn't happened?

This is HNN.

"if it is what you say it is, i love it" is a real thing they admitted to and all the proof you need that the story is in no way "manufactured"

> It's been a constant stream of catastrophizing from them for the last four years. It was like this during the Bush years as well, though they do seem to have perfected it.

And the Republicans did the same thing with Obama, which is why he is so reviled among the right. The pendulum swings harder at each cycle, and how people still cannot see how thoroughly they're being manipulated by their party of choice continues to astound me. I get the tribalism, and I get the basic cognitive gears at play, but it takes only a modicum of self awareness and attempted empathy to understand the other side enough to open up the door to doubt, and only the tiniest degree of curiosity to find more nuanced understanding of issues at play. I do see this in some places, but I see ignorant partisan propaganda far more, and the pendulum swings ever harder.

The devil is the one we make, seemingly blind to the ingredients we carelessly continue to throw into the cauldron that will continue to produce them, even as one group rejoices that the latest one has been defeated.

> ... none of his behavior validates anything close to the crazed response we see from the primarily left-leaning mainstream media.

Yeah no ... at this point if you honestly still believe that, we have to agree to disagree, and I'm glad that more people in America disagree with you than agree with you.

At least there were actual catastrophes caused by Bush. Under Trump it was conspiracy theories about Russian collusion.

So covid response wasn't a catastrophe? Ok

I'm not sure if it was, really. What's the baseline? If Biden was President, how many people would have died instead? More than 0, right?

The United States has structural issues, many of them features and not bugs, that make a coordinated effort to suppress a contagious virus basically impossible. Biden never made the case for what he would have done different; he didn't really have to.

That's the thing about a crisis. When your opponent is in charge during a crisis, you can always say he was incompetent, and no one can prove that you're wrong.

There were recent headlines on a study done that estimated unnecessary deaths; deaths that wouldn't have happened had we had a reasonable response. Should be easy to find.

I know we're in like, mystical "follow the science" land, but any study on this matter can really only make projections based on a model.

It certainly can't say what Biden would have called a "reasonable response" at the time, whether he would have followed through on it, etc. We actually know what Biden was saying to do in the early days of the pandemic, and Trump's earliest actions were roundly criticized by Democrats.

My theory is that if Trump had come out hard for lockdown early on, Republicans would be pro-lockdown and Democrats would be anti-lockdown. I view the partisan divide on COVID handling as...well, purely partisan.

The WHO recently said the lockdowns Biden says he's bringing back were causing more harm than good. That should be easy to find.

The early CDC tests, during the period we might have been able to maintain contact tracing, were faulty. A different president wouldn't have changed that.

Republicans didn't embrace masks, but it's unlikely a Democrat president would've done a better job convincing them.

In my opinion Trump's worst fault here is that he lacks the temperament for one of the most important things we needed: fireside chats. Trump is a pretty good hype man, cheering on good times, but abysmal at the somber tough message delivery we needed.

FWIW, I searched for your first point, and the first google result was https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2020/10/13/who-warning...

Which implies your summary of the point is based off of one of the several misreadings out there.

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