The former president made multiple chilling warnings during an interview with Time magazine.
Donald Trump hasn’t quite let go of the possibility of utilizing mob violence if he loses the next election.
In a sprawling interview for Time magazine, Trump hinted that leveraging political violence to achieve his end goals was still on the table.
“If we don’t win, you know, it depends,” he told Time. “It always depends on the fairness of the election.”
And from Trump’s perspective, that’s winning rhetoric. According to him, his incendiary comments supporting a mob mentality, his early warnings of forthcoming abuses of power, and his threats to be a dictator on “day one” are only inching him closer to the White House. “I think a lot of people like it,” Trump told Time.
Because he “tells it like it is” or something. Idk. The kind of people still falling for his grift are too shameless to ever admit that they ever fell for his grift, so they’re doubling down, succumbing to the sunk cost fallacy. They just stay in their echo chambers and saturate their awareness with weird culture war shit and then never hear about what’s actually happening. Half of them probably don’t even know that their guy is a defendant in criminal court this week. Willfully ignorant.
No I’m fine with uneducated masses eating it up.
I’m not okay with judges pulling out their dentures to slobber on trumps balls over matters that threaten the whole country instead of figuratively castrating him the moment he says shit like this.
Agreed. But conservatives have learned over the past 10-20 years that they can more or less just do whatever they want without consequence because 1/3 of the people will fight to the death for whatever they do or say, 1/3 is completely unaware and uninterested in politics and current events, and the final 1/3 is people like us who want consequences but we’re too busy to do anything ourselves because survival is hard enough these days. There are a hundred things worthy of outrage and organized demonstration too, so which cause do we dedicate our summer to trying to fix? The right has an easier time because they just say “things used to be better” and then have one event where people complain about change. Pretty much everybody can identify with being pissed off that something used to be better until they changed it, and for some reason that’s strong enough to get some pretty average people to sit at the table with Nazis. There’s much more nuance and thoughtfulness on the left, so it’s much harder to get unity.
Because conservatives can grow and maintain a reliable base to keep them in power, they feel no need to even pretend to be decent most of the time. They can just fervently choose their own selfish goals over what the Constitution or other rules and laws demand. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that we’re rapidly approaching the era of post-democracy America. Some would say we’ve been there for decades already, but I think we’re in for some dictatorial, executions-in-the-streets type of shit if Biden loses. So conservatives in power who like trump or even suspect that he may win or get into power otherwise have to weigh doing the right thing which could hurt their party and draw targets on their backs vs low/no consequence siding with trump.
"If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”—David Frum