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From Trump's perspective it was about the worst possible deal he could have struck if he'd approached it from the point of view the book is trying to portray.
I've always thought this to be enormously instructive about who he is. Strip away the politics, the authoritarian-populist schtick, and he fails on his own terms, again and again and again.
In short, I believe most people who are considering a Trump 2nd term are seeing an out-of-control American political establishment, and an alternative of someone who is objectively bad (Kamala) from any angle. There is a lot more to this analysis and also there are more ways to look at it, but for sure the people who are blind zealots of Trump are in the minority.
For what it's worth I'm a filthy centrist, I like to build bridges and enjoy the chaos of the clown world. I think we can all agree the world has entered a transitional phase and is experiencing a series of historical events.
He's an extreme populist authoritarian centrist -- a centrist dictator wannabe.
(I don't think people understand that successful dictators don't need to take a left or right position, and indeed any position they do take will ultimately be sacrificed to whichever policy choice centres power on the executive.)
Trumpism is its own thing, and this is why he beat Hillary (who was a mildly authoritarian, technocratic centrist).
The 2016 presidential election did not take place on the left-right axis. It took place on the populist-libertarian axis of the Political Compass:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Political_Compass
He only had to gesture towards the people he wanted to vote for him, which he did without care for consistency.
I would say "Trumpism" is just a 3rd party that had no choice but to graft on to the Republican party, and only recently has more or less consolidated power, changing the party. Before that both parties were basically aligned on almost everything, and it never mattered who was the president.
The whole dictator narrative started even before 2016 and has no evidence behind it other than some statements quoted out of context. If Trump was left alone after losing 2020, I'm pretty sure people would have moved on, so ironically or coincidentally, the people who are trying to stop him are helping him, which is what happened in 2016 as well.
This just isn't true. Look at how he proposed to force the sale of Tiktok USA to Microsoft: purely dictatorial. And there was an enormous amount of pure strongman talk, which is a harbinger of dictatorialism.
He wasn't merely "grossly negligent" on January 6th, and anyone sane knows that. Simply because: there is no legal way the Vice President could intervene.
Everything that happened on January 6th was planned, promoted (including by Trump -- "will be wild") and deliberately focussed to put pressure on Pence to act illegally. "Mike Pence didn't have the courage".
Trump even wanted armed people to be able to gather in the protest (because they weren't coming for him).
> If Trump was left alone after losing 2020, I'm pretty sure people would have moved on
Except with all the bits where he and his campaign tried everything possible including illegal means to stay in power, on a multi-state basis.
Normal presidents don't ring up the people who run elections and ask them to "find" votes.
Let's back up before he ran for president. He was a celebrity, a businessman, appeared in movies, had a reality TV show. As soon as he wins against all projections, they start smearing him about colluding with Russia... which if true is literally treason!!... except it was all a lie and nobody cared afterward, and he was never charged with treason, and then everyone just forgot about it. If it were true we would have had president Pence. Yet nobody apologized or said "oh, i guess this was a huge lie and we messed up", absolute silence. Instead they used that as an excuse to attack him for four years, and when he lost in 2020, only THEN they admitted it was not true.
To me, this is a key event. Show me Trump colluded with Russia, and why people forgot this is treason and should be punished... or explain why nobody is holding people accountable for such a huge lie.
If they lied about that they can lie about anything, and they have. Trump is by no means a great candidate, but he is the only candidate that can withstand all of this smearing and lying, which has never happened to any other president before.
Do you disagree that his campaign -- headed by him, reporting to him, with him aware of it -- created fake slates of electors to try to steal electoral college votes? Because that seems pretty obviously to have happened.
Do you disagree that Trump knew the January 6th protests would lead to people marching on the Capitol? Do you think it plausible he didn't know and wasn't advised what would happen? He had no business organising that march otherwise -- there was nothing that could happen on January 6th to change the outcome that wasn't against the constitution.
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The Russia collusion stuff was not, in fact, all a lie, at all.
https://time.com/5556331/mueller-investigation-indictments-g...
People were convicted for actively misleading the FBI about their contacts with Russia, so it could not be prosecuted properly. That's pretty serious (and it has precedents: Scooter Libby for example).
Mueller just pulled the final punches. Including that Trump -- then a sitting president -- lied to the investigation.
Nobody has ever "admitted that it is not true" because nobody knows for sure except probably the people who lied to the FBI about pretty much everything. But there is a hell of a stink (and that stink started with Manafort, who -- surprise surprise -- Trump tried to recruit again for this cycle, and who got the 2016 RNC platform changed to stop promising to arm Ukraine)
> Do you disagree that Trump pressured the Georgia elections people to find him votes? On a phone call?
Yeah he did, but the context is that Trump thinks there was election fraud, and millions of people also had the same concerns. Even if there was misinformation on all of this, it's still within the realm of possibility that Trump believed it and was delusional about it. Being delusional and aggressive about it is completely different than intentionally stealing an election. As I mentioned before, this could have been enough for people to move on from Trump, but it seemed as if the government establishment was fully committed to going after Trump for everything and anything and has turned him into a martyr.
> Do you disagree that his campaign -- headed by him, reporting to him, with him aware of it -- created fake slates of electors to try to steal electoral college votes? Because that seems pretty obviously to have happened.
They were alternate slates, and this has happened before in 1960 (Nixon) and 2020. There is precedent for what Trump was trying to do, and pursuing every legal path aggressively is still completely different than trying to end democracy. In the worst case scenario, it would have been like Bush/Gore in 2020 and he would have served another 4 years. There is no chance at all of becoming dictator or changing the system. The US system with the constitution and division of power cannot be easily subverted!
> Do you disagree that Trump knew the January 6th protests would lead to people marching on the Capitol? Do you think it plausible he didn't know and wasn't advised what would happen? He had no business organising that march otherwise -- there was nothing that could happen on January 6th to change the outcome that wasn't against the constitution.
It was clearly meant to be a protest to show support and then it devolved into a large riot. Here is what does not make sense: that Trump planned a half-assed insurrection just to have plausible deniability. That does not make sense, either you go in planning a full insurrection with a militia and/or the backing of the military, or you don't. I think Trump is ruthless businessman that often thinks and behaves like a CEO, which is completely different than career politicians. What is really happening is that the system does not want an outsider as a leader, they want another career politician that will be predictable and controllable.
I think the biggest difference in perspective here has to do with trust in the existing institutions. People who give Trump the benefit of the doubt are seeing institutions that are corrupt and will do anything to remain in power. I think this a justified perspective given all of the things that the US government has been involved with over the years from unjustified wars, lying to the American people (i.e. Iraq), and surveilling and manipulating American citizens (i.e. NSA).
There is overwhelming evidence that we have a corrupt system that is fighting as hard as it can against this one individual that is representing millions of people. What is more unbelievable to me is that Trump somehow convinced millions of people to support completely different issues than what they really care about. Trump is adopting the issues people care about and people are finally feeling that they have some kind of representation, and the system is pushing back as hard as it can.
Lying to the FBI to impede an investigation is not minor. It's federal time. The investigation faltered partly because of these lies. (This is why Patrick Fitzgerald indicted Scooter Libby)
> Yeah he did, but the context is that Trump thinks there was election fraud, and millions of people also had the same concerns.
No, he doesn't. All the fraud claims were inflated to try to find a way to explain his loss and hold on to power. And if they were not, he said, on that call:'I just want to find 11,780 votes’. Plenty of witnesses.
That is not concern over fraud, it's an attempt to pressure the election officials to change the result by a specific number. There's no honesty or civic function there.
> There is precedent for what Trump was trying to do, and pursuing every legal path aggressively is still completely different than trying to end democracy.
Producing alternate slates of electors is a criminal offence. Which is why they met in secret -- one group, Georgia IIRC, met in a parking garage -- and tried to sneak into the state houses. It's an obvious, anti-democratic, criminal conspiracy. And we will know how it was co-ordinated and linked to Trump because Jenna Ellis has now pleaded guilty to her involvement in attempts to create a false slate in two states -- Georgia and Arizona.
> It was clearly meant to be a protest to show support and then it devolved into a large riot.
No, it wasn't. "Mike Pence didn't have the courage" shows you what it was about. It was an attempt to pressure Pence and the legislature into an illegal action. And everyone knew what would happen. The internet was alive with what was going to happen, days before, and it could have been stopped; stopping it would have been presidential. Because he had lost the election and there was no more measure for which "support" could possibly have a legal outcome that changed it.
> Let's not forget the Steele dossier that as far as I know was full of lies.
So what if it was? And it's not clear it was. It was opposition research. Initially funded by a Republican. But written by an experienced spy who did ordinary human intelligence work and qualified all his claims.
If I were a gambling man I'd bet that it is true in substance.
> So what if it was?
It shows the gigantic double standard that only anti-establishment conservatives are scrutinized by the establishment and persecuted into oblivion. There were many riots that were condoned by the Left with fires and people getting injured. We had a several groups take over several blocks in multiple cities, and then declare themselves independent from the union (CHAZ), and that was not called an insurrection? Nobody was jailed, or charged, and the mainstream media downplayed as "mostly peaceful", with politicians even celebrating it... meanwhile for J6 they locked up people who were just trespassing or were in the wrong place at the wrong time, including some older people. They went after people for years, opened investigations, etc.
I simply don't buy the demonization of everything Trump, which started many years before there was any "insurrection". Before J6 he was still the most hated person by the establishment and those who trust the establishment.
No it doesn't. It shows that opposition research is done on everyone, and Trump (who already had an unprecedented reputation for lying, racism, sharp business practices, infidelities, bankruptcies, bullyig lawsuits and dubious associations) maybe got more.
Everyone in business and politics has always known Trump is a shady, thin-skinned bullying narcissist. Of course the opposition research on him was going to be a field day.
> Before J6 he was still the most hated person by the establishment and those who trust the establishment.
Because he's a shady, narcissistic bully with an unprecedented record of dodgy dealings.
And other politicians are much better? It shows a double standard. Let's be hypercritical about every detail in this celebrity's entire life, even though politicians have abused power and have done much worse.
> Of course the opposition research on him was going to be a field day.
They had to lie over and over, and then years later admit they were lies. It's just nonsensical that Trump is somehow the greatest evil ever and somehow his political opponents knew this even before he got elected. How convenient.
> Because he's a shady, narcissistic bully with an unprecedented record of dodgy dealings.
Believing any of it is "unprecedented" is a clear sign of bias here, or at least ignorance of what other politicians have done, from sexual affairs to warmongers that don't value human life.