President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

I had a long and very fanfic-y post about what's possible, and decided it was better for the world, or at least the people here, not to see.

The much shorter version is this: Trump doesn't concede but does declare he plans to run his third term in 2024, then launches a broadcast outlet or takes over OANN while still in office.He'll try to operate as a shadow president and will demand the same privileges and rights any former president gets, and will also try to use that status to wriggle out of investigations and eventual criminal charges.

Now to Jan. 20, 2021 has the potential to be worst time in American history. So buckle up butter cups, things are going to get super weird.

 

Come for the communal racism, leave with novel coronavirus.

 

Eventually he may be forced to accept reality.

 

BWAHAHAHA

 

I've watched the unruly drunk be carried from the dance floor. Things don't have to get weird if they don't need to.

The support has greatly eroded from yesterday. Jeffress (sadly enough) was the dagger.

The dregs of the party - Jason Miller, McEnany, Donald Jr. - are running this right now.

Zod, Non and Ursa this is not.

 

Meanwhile, should we talk about the GOP’s hardcore embrace of authoritarian philosophy that is completely outside our constitutional system?

In Georgia, two GOP senators called on the state’s Republican secretary of state to resign, alleging irregularities and mismanagement without offering evidence. Only four of 53 Senate Republicans have congratulated Biden on his projected victory. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin recently told reporters “there’s nothing to congratulate [Biden] about,” while Missouri’s Roy Blunt said the president “may not have been defeated at all.”

It’s the latest sign of the party’s lurch away from democratic ideals and practices, a shift that predates Trump but one that has accelerated precipitously since. Now, according to data released by an international team of political scientists just before the Nov. 3 election, it’s possible to quantify the extent to which the Republican Party no longer adheres to such principles as the commitment to free and fair elections with multiple parties, the respectful treatment of political opponents and the avoidance of violent rhetoric.

“The Republican Party in the U.S. has retreated from upholding democratic norms in recent years,” said Anna Lührmann, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and a former member of the German parliament. “Its rhetoric is closer to authoritarian parties, such as AKP in Turkey and Fidesz in Hungary.”



Lührmann is deputy director of the university’s V-Dem Institute, which compiled the data. For the project, researchers recruited more than 600 political scientists around the world to make annual assessments of political parties’ adherence to a number of key small-D democratic values.

Those assessments are combined into the main measure in the chart above, which tracks parties’ overall commitment to democracy. Lührmann points out that the Republican Party score started to edge downward during the Obama administration but fell off a cliff in 2016 with the ascent of Trump.

The Democratic Party, by contrast, hasn’t changed much. This is a prime example of what political scientists call asymmetric polarization — a growing partisan gap driven almost entirely by the actions of the Republican Party.

While V-Dem’s data only runs through 2018, that asymmetry has only become more apparent in the aftermath of this election, Lührmann said: “It is disturbing that most leading Republicans are still not objecting to President Trump’s baseless claims of electoral fraud and attempts to declare himself the winner.”

As a result, she says, GOP scores are likely to sink further when 2020 data is released.​

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/11/12/republican-party-trump-authoritarian-data/

 

Won't even stand under the umbrella. Must appear stronger than the weather.

 

I see Trump like Superman on the synthetic kryptonite invented by Richard Pryor

 

Electronic vote switching?

Who knew Skynet was a Democrat?

 

I may print out this chart and keep it in my wallet. After all, I need something to show the "both sides" crowd that its collective notion is full of excrement.

 

GOP money machine humming for GA Senate race

 

Yep ... more than 100,000 new infections reported per day since election day. So much for it disappearing.