“Donald Trump may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. When he claims that ‘nobody’ showed up at a 10,000 person Harris-Walz rally in Michigan that was live-streamed and widely covered by the media, that it was all AI, and that Democrats cheat all of the time, there is a method to his madness,” Sanders said in a statement.
“Clearly, and dangerously, what Trump is doing is laying the groundwork for rejecting the election results if he loses,” he added. “If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be hard to convince them that the election returns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere are ‘fake’ and ‘fraudulent.’”
[…]
“This is what destroying faith in institutions is about. This is what undermining democracy is about. This is what fascism is about,” he said of Trump’s campaign falsehoods. “This is why we must do everything we can to see that Trump is defeated.”
Bernie continues to espouse truth.
Except for the “Trump is not stupid” part.
Stupid is a stupid does, and smart is just the ability to efficiently accomplish your objectives with the resources available to you.
I would argue that Trump is smart in that he has managed to, with limited intellectual, strategic, or character resources pull off one of the largest con jobs in American history.
He doesn’t want to do good for America, he wants to do good for himself and has achieved heretofore not possible levels of graft and extortion and all of this without facing any real consequences himself.
He’s not a good man, He’s not an intelligent man, but he is a smart monster. He not an imbecile, he’s not witless, but he is a stupid business man.
Trump proves that you can be stupid and smart at the same time because they can apply to different qualities of a person.
He is undeniably a bad American.
True. I’d qualify him as more manipulative than intelligent though, but I guess you can be smart at being manipulative. I’m not sure he’s even that because he’s just been afforded every opportunity in his life to take the most advantage of being manipulative so if he was not a millionaire by birth, I don’t think he would be anywhere near as good at it.
He’s good at subconsciously transmitting divisive/extremist messages with such “genuine innocence/ignorance” (not sure about this word, but he seems to be genuinely unaware of when he is lying) that other susceptible people absorb subconsciously too. It does not go through the rational part of the brain, so this is not about being stupid, being stupid probably helps him be genuine when he makes the most blatant lies, unlike JD.
He was born rich, all the stuff he does is because he got started on third base and even then lost it all.
His saving grace was him being entertaining, not intelligent.
You don’t give him enough credit.
He didn’t just lose it all, until the presidential graft, he had lost a couple orders of magnitude more money than the substantial fortune he inherited.
Read about his past, he lost it all and then made the apprentice which he only could do because he was famous.
…and he only got that job because of how hard up for cash he was after somehow managing to lose money on a casino.
In the world of business Donald Trump is boldly pioneering the frontier of incompetence.
Lots of people are saying it. Everyday someone comes to me to say Donald Trump is an amazing loser of money. Big strong men come to me in tears saying No one can lose money quite as confidently as Trump, (with the possible exceptions of Cathie Woods and Elon Musk).
There is a difference between intelligence and low cunning.
Trump has the latter, not the former.
I will always cherish my time volunteering for him.
He offers very little in the way of remedy.
What do you do in a country with a two party system when one party is openly caught trying to cheat the election results? What do you do when that party loses and then accuses the other party of doing the same? What do you do with the millions of Americans who don’t trust the winning party to lead?
The Dems’ answer seems to be capitulation. Give Republicans what they want to demonstrate bipartisanship. Put Republicans in your cabinet. Cherry pick “the good Republicans” and pretend they represent the secret heart of the rival party. Then compromise away every piece of legislation that becomes the subject of right wing hysterics.
How do you govern like this? How do you govern in a country where one party can break the law with impunity absent any consequences? How do you govern when breaking the law gets your opposition rewarded whether or not you win on election day?
This is why turnout matters. If enough people vote against Trump the mandate will restore faith in the election results. Harris/Waltz need to win with a clear mandate. If not we will still be dealing with MAGA going forward.
“We need to score 3 points for every 1 they make in order to win” is a rickety formula for success. It assumes you can run up the score every season and doesn’t question what happens when you lose.
We are ~11 weeks from Election Day. What do you propose we do?
This is what we have in front of us. We can’t get upset about what could be or would’ve been. It’s mid-august 2024, time’s up.
I don’t actually know. But what I do know is that the GOP is recruiting 100,000 election “observers” (read: saboteurs) and we’re gonna need way more tactics beyond just turnout to counter that!
I completely agree but also remember that they have no power and have to keep a certain distance. They do anything funny don’t even engage them. Report them immediately. Especially if they are wearing any Trump merch. Easy to accuse them of campaigning too close to a polling location.
They did the same shit in 2020 and 2022. Gotta be vigilant.
We can and we should
While also remembering to stop the bleeding any way possible(vote), even though we’re upset that we haven’t built the hospital yet, or trained the doctors.
Are we having a serious discussion or not?
Its what we got. Win here and then throw out FPTP immediately. We can’t change how voting works right this instance, Varuca.
Uh huh
The Right intends to play fuck around with the election.
“How could the Democrats do this?”
Go home Russian propaganda.
It’s not enough conseqences, but it’s not none: https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-capitol-rioters-jailed-sentences-january-6-1826075
That is a list of disgusting America hating criminals and all patriots should revile their names as long as they live.
And long in to history. Absolutely.
Uhh huh
You seem to be ignoring the obvious here, this is intentional. The Democratic party leadership actually wants the same as the old Republicans. It’s just that the Overton Window has shifted so far to the right that we no longer see actual Left views to compare against anymore.
And both parties are fine with using social issues to mask everything else because those are always in your face and easy to take a side one way or the other, and the two-party system excels at that.
It’s always possible to go further left, but I think being pro-union, anti-trust, pro-regulation, pro-equality, pro-school meals is far enough left to qualify as left in the historical US political spectrum, no?
Careful, you’ll get called a Putinista Wumao Trump Bot Account for saying things like this.
Social issues tend to be the symptom of underlaying economic issues. They’re just easier to talk about, because we can frame the discussion as “opportunity” and “freedom” rather than “economic restructuring” and “wealth redistribution”.