Trump Fake Electors Plot | Hacker News Reader

Trump Fake Electors Plot

en.wikipedia.org

62 pointssurprisetalk24 comments

It always amazes me how successfully this was swept under the rug and how few people I talk to know about this. The Jack Smith public hearing [1] was so damning, it is unbelievable how quickly the media and the public have moved on. In my mind, this disqualifies this president and his supporters from ever being taken in good faith. Not only did he put your representatives in danger on January 6, he actively did so in order to undermine the election.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z56_LJtERCI

Most of the stuff was public before the 2024 election but the US public decided to reelect Trump allowing him to stop the prosecutions. What are you going to do?

Crazy that Trump was literally recorded making a phone call to lean on an election official: "What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state" and was still reelected by the public.

It's amazing that so many people went to prison for this crime, but not the ringleader.

Just unbelievable that people voted for this guy again after this.

Here in Washington Statue, we hardly elect Republicans. There are several reasons, but one of them is that the Republican Party runs really weird candidates.

The two people who could have gotten Donald Trump elected ran against him. That's how bad the candidates the Democrats ran were: The voters would rather have Donald Trump.

> The voters would rather have Donald Trump.

This is the point many people overlook. Biden won because a lot of voters said, "anyone but Trump" and Biden was acceptable. WaPo even pointed this out, just before Biden dropped out the anyone but Trump voters couldn't really accept Biden after the debate. Harris was not a strong candidate, especially after saying, on "The View," she said she would not change anything.

That reads like racism to be honest (not you, but the general Washington voter, if true).

And of course this was immediately flagged

Hey HN Trump supporters, I know you're here, what's your spin on this?

They're not going to respond. Can't let the mask slip (more than it already has)

Usually, the strategy is to draw a false equivalence to the 1960 presidential election, specifically the recount in Hawaii [1][2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_United_States_presidentia...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot#1960_...

But that really is a false equivalence, as you state. Hawaii created a slate of alternate electors, in case the recount changed the result. But only one slate was endorsed by the governor; only one slate was presented at the Electoral College.

Having "alternate electors", who were not endorsed by the governor, and who didn't win the recount (or the court case), show up at the electoral college anyway, claiming to be the real thing... that is a whole different deal. It's not a good-faith contingency plan for if you win the recount; it's a bad-faith attempt to overthrow the vote after you lost the recount.

Wikipedia is an aggregate of "reliable sources" (read: left wing media outlets) and as such cannot be trusted as a source of fact in political matters. My spin is that I don't trust most of the claims made in the article.

For the sake of argument I will assume the article is entirely accurate. I don't care overmuch, honestly. I am not the biggest fan of democracy in general. It doesn't seem to work very well. China is running circles around us and they are not worried about voting for parties.

This is certainly a take, but to each their own.

> I am not the biggest fan of democracy in general

So fraud is an acceptable vehicle to uproot it?

There is literally no legal vehicle to uproot it, so, sure. If the law gets in the way of arriving at a functioning government, then breaking the law is what needs to happen. Not that I think what we have now is "functioning" either, but the act of subversion itself is not a big issue for me. Trump's stupid actions are an issue for me, but not so much the legality of them; if he were illegally improving the country that would be welcome.

We've moved into the "open autocratic kleptocracy" phase of conservativism, I see...

Small nit, as a legal vehicle, the constitution allows itself to be entirely replaced.

Not a supporter of him, but fairly conservative, in a very red, very pro-Trump area. Really wouldn't even consider myself a Republican. But until someone decent on the Democrat side comes along I'll probably hold my nose and vote red, and I can honestly say I've never voted for Trump.

Trump appeals to a large swath of the disenfranchised. Mostly white (though quite a few black and latino - at least in my area), blue collar, conservative, Christian, mostly middle class. In the mid to late 00s the Democratic party had built a minority coalition with support from upper middle class white people. And it worked pretty well for about a decade. But they took it too far. I think Obama is largely to blame for this - his 2012 campaign was seen as being based entirely on denigrating middle class white people (not my words - the sense I've gotten talking to neighbors and from listening to talk radio). Then it compounded with Hillary's run in 2016. "A basket of deplorables" and so on. So all those middle class white people - they got fed up with constantly being called racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic colonizers. They got angry. Trump was the response to all that.

The other thing you should know is that Trump is an insult comic - same beats, same tenor. You probably don't think he's funny but if you talk about him he's going to come back and insult you in the worst ways possible (which can be funny if you like insult comedy and aren't the target). Not presidential AT ALL, and most on the left don't know how to handle that. But the disenfranchised he's catering to - they are eating it up. Thus he's built an army of diehard supporters. He's saying the things they like to hear, making fun of the people who have made fun of them, coloring the landscape with the right things (a decent economy in his first term, highly patriotic themes like renaming DoD to DoW, hating on the left, etc). THEN you had the insanity of draconian and unscientific COVID responses, BLM riots, trans issues, safe spaces and micro-aggressions, and a Democrat president that was sadly and effectively a dementia patient. The response to the first Trump term by the left was not healthy. All they had to do was not go insane, but they did, and now you get him again.

All that to say that his base is going to back him up. If Trump says that there were fake electors his base is going to believe him. He could say (and has) just about anything and a large MAGA contingent will happily follow along. Not only do they feel represented by him but the left has acted so foolishly in response they feel justified in doubling down on that support.

How can one trust a dishonest, manipulative person?

You can trust them to be dishonest and manipulative.

It's a big reason why they were constantly accusing every opponent of being a crook. People don't want to vote for a crook, but if you convince enough voters that all politicians are dishonest and it is their only option, than they can rationalize voting for 'their' crook.

Not very dissimilar to Mussolini's tactics back in the 1920s/1930s, it's actually quite impressive how many similarities there are between Trump's and Mussolini's ways to find political power.

Every accusation is a confession

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