Corrupt in what way? What law did she break? The common thread I see is that Trump supporters have no problem with the "Jared and Ivanka Big Grift Show" but suddenly pretend they have such a high bar for moral and ethical standards if there is anything they don't like on the liberal side. Hunter Biden leveraged his last name for business dealings. Fani hired a man she previously had a personal relationship with. Oh, for shame! But never mind things like paying off a porn star for an affair Trump had with while his wife was pregnant, or Jared and Ivanka getting high level jobs at the White House or Jared Kushner's brand new investment company getting $2 billion from the Saudis months after leaving his job at the White House. You want to complain about immoral behavior and grift...

Unless you can cite a law that Fani Willis broke, it's just "conduct that you don't like" which is obviously hypocritical compared to worse conduct from the Trump family that you conveniently ignore.

https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/jared-and-ivanka-made-up-to-640-million-in-the-white-house/

It's totally unprofessional, and people are going to think, if she's unprofessional about that, what else is going on? — RogueAI

Do you mean the same people who don't give a shit about Ivanka and Jared being given jobs by the White House, or different people?

How is it relevant? Is everyone associated with the prosecution of a case against Donald Trump supposed to refrain from any sexual relationships until the trial is over? What, exactly, is the conflict of interest, here?

Something I read on Reddit by the poster gravygrowinggreen, which I think is worth repeating here:

"It is almost like according to the legal scholars defending Trump, that there is no appropriate way to conduct any criminal proceedings against him: if the investigator is part of the government, they're biased. If they're independent, they're unconstitutional."

Bullseye!

According to 28 U.S. Code § 533 – "The Attorney General may appoint officials— (1) to detect and prosecute crimes against the United States" so I think the appointment by Merrick Garland of Jack Smith is covered by that.

If we're going to rule out politically motivated prosecutors then how do we determine where the line is, and where does it stop? As I stated, many of the GOP members of Congress certainly seem politically motivated to want to impeach Joe Biden. If they do find evidence, should it be ignored because they are politically motivated?

The intended victims of the insurrection, or the attempted coup if you want to call it that, were pretty much everyone who voted for Biden. I am one of the intended victims. They wanted to pressure Congress to de-certify the electors from Pennsylvania and other swing states and replace them with fake (or as they called them, alternate) electors. They wanted Pence to grandstand and do this, even though he wasn't constitutionally empowered to do this. If Pence had a weak stomach and wouldn't show up that day, Grassley was ready to step into that role. If you're focusing on what is unconstitutional, maybe you should focus on that. Trump tried to pressure his Department of Justice to just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to him and his Republican allies in Congress. If you're focusing on attempts to politicize the justice system, maybe you should focus on that. Trump and his co-conspirators don't magically become innocent just because they failed.

I was refuting the claim that Trump brought it all on himself, which is absurd because one can never bring charges on himself. Prosecutors bring charges. The prosecutor’s motivations along with the frivolousness and novelty of the charges reveal the political motives. — NOS4A2

When you commit crimes and act recklessly, you suffer the consequences -- you bring it all on yourself. Blaming the prosecutors or investigators or the police is what criminals do. Instead of it being about your behavior and the choices you made, it is "they're out to get me." To me, what is relevant is whether there is any evidence of a crime or not -- that's much more relevant than speculating on the political motives of those bringing the indictments. By contrast, look at the GOP members of Congress. Obviously, they are highly motivated to impeach Joe Biden. They would love to do it. But do they have enough evidence to prove that Biden did an impeachable offense? At the end of the day, that is what matters, not their motivation.

It’s just not the case that he brought it on himself. Many of the people indicting him campaigned on doing so. — NOS4A2

I gave you four examples of how Trump brought his legal troubles upon himself and how he could have avoided them, and you didn't refute any of them. Instead, you made claims about the motivations of the people indicting him and then changed the subject to other discussion topics. I will re-emphasize the four examples I gave, and how Trump brought these troubles upon himself, and how he could have avoided them. My points stand. The motivations of the people indicting him don't matter as much as whether there is evidence he committed crimes. By contrast, the GOP members of Congress have a strong motivation to impeach Joe Biden and so are looking for evidence but can't find it. How embarrassing.

He announced his campaign months before the first indictment — NOS4A2

True, but he knew there were choppy waters ahead for him legally. Some of that stuff had been swirling around for years... Paying hush money to Stormy Daniels using campaign funds... Property devaluation fraud in NY... The fall out and discovery from the 2020 election tampering and January 6th attack wasn't going away.. and he'd retained classified documents after repeatedly being asked to return them. The wheels of justice turn slowly, but they do turn...

As a Trump supporter, you really should consider how much of this Trump brought on himself. How much of this could have been easily avoided? Seriously, ask yourself that before jumping to the conclusion that he's being politically persecuted. He could have paid Stormy Daniels with cash from his own personal account. He could have given identical property valuations to the banks and the government. He could have conceded the 2020 election after his lawsuits failed, and not told his followers that the election was stolen and not invite them to a "Stop the Steal" rally on 1/6/2021. He could have given back all of the classified documents he took to Mar-A-Lago when he was first asked for them.

I don't get it. Is this Kiwi humour?

What does "felonies are racist" mean in the context of Trump winning the 2024 election?

I'm trying to imagine what it will be like if Trump is a convicted felon and wins the election. What will that even be like? What if he has a prison sentence? Will that just be hand-waved away when he gets sworn in as POTUS again?

I actually think Trump is running for POTUS again to get out of his legal troubles... And also to heal his ego from losing to Biden. Simply by running for POTUS he can play the "They're weaponizing the DoJ against a political opponent" card, and people eat it up. And if he wins, I'm betting he thinks he can make all of these legal troubles go away by surrounding himself with cronies who do whatever he wants.

There are intelligent people who support Trump, but in their cases it must be a political calculation rather than being true believers of the nonsense he spouts. Tucker Carlson called Trump "a demonic force." Sean Hannity said Trump was acting "like a crazy person" in the weeks after the 2020 election and also said “that whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second”. Rupert Murdoch was dismissive of the election fraud claims and called it “really crazy stuff” in an internal memo. Laura Ingraham called Sidney Powell "a complete nut" and said "Ditto with Rudy" referring to Giuliani. These are conservative media powerhouses who were pushing Trump's stolen election narrative the hardest -- doing enormous damage to our country -- and they didn't even believe it! These aren't stupid people, yet they go along with Trump out of some sort of political or career based calculation.

American culture (like so many others) is internally inconsistent, containing mutually exclusive tenets. — baker

That's true, but it doesn't explain what you said earlier about it being un-American to admit you lost. Why is that un-American, as opposed to un-Canadian, or un-Russian, or un-any-other-culture? I think this is just being a sore loser in any culture. It can't be a virtue in any culture because it undermines having a functioning society for the reasons I gave earlier. In summary:

• Refusing to give up when you're losing = virtue
• Refusing to admit you lost after the contest is over = delusional

Most contests don't last forever. They have an ending, with a winner and a loser. You campaign for a while, then the election occurs, you count the votes and a winner is declared. You can't have two winners, and you can't have your own facts when things don't go your way. That's the problem with Trump and Trump-enablers. They won't accept the loss and move on.

Admitting that you've lost is unamerican. — baker

How so? What is particularly 'American' about never admitting you lost? Think about the absurdities it would lead to. No political candidate would ever concede an election. No professional athlete or sports team would ever concede they lost a game or match. No one would ever pay up on a bet, because they'd refuse to admit they lost the bet. Society couldn't function like this. What you are describing is being a sore loser or being deluded.

Hardly anything is more American than never to admit defeat, to remain confident and hold one's head high, no matter what is going on. — baker

You're confusing two very different things. No one is disputing that it is an admirable quality to refuse to give up or remain steadfast in the face of adversity, even when you are losing. But that's different than refusing to admit that you lost, which is not an admirable quality.

How many Americans actually believe that political elections are about what is good for the people?
It seems to me that people, Americans and others, generally view any level of government officials, including the president of a country, as simply yet another job, something one does for one's own sake. The rest is just rhetoric; it's about proving that one can talk the talk. It never was about walking it. — baker

Sure, most politicians are doing what they do out of self-interest to some extent, but their job is to do what is good for the American people. Trump is just flat out saying that he wishes ill on the American people in order to have a good outcome for himself. There isn't any way to twist that around to be defensible, just by virtue of being cynical. "Oh, we love him because he hates us and is honest about it!" Yeah, right...

That doesn't really answer my question. His track record for winning elections is not good. He's running against an incumbent, which is traditionally difficult. The economy is doing better than was predicted, which makes it even more difficult to beat an incumbent. Biden has already defeated Trump once. The weaknesses they have -- old age and rambling and sometimes incoherent speeches -- are shared by both, so that's a wash. Trump probably had independents and moderates who voted for him in 2016 but not 2020 and who are even less likely to support him after the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Even if you don't define it as an insurrection, it was clearly reckless on Trump's part. Trump's support among his base seems to be as strong as ever, but what he really needs to win a general election is the support of moderates and independents. Why believe that Trump can win them over after the events of January 6th and all of his legal troubles? I actually saw an interview with Trump a few days ago with him saying he hopes the economy crashes within the next 12 months...

It's not about YOU, the ordinary American and what will be good for you and your family, it's all about HIM and what he thinks can get him back the White House. Pathetic.

Trump hates America. Trump loves Trump, and that's it.

Why do any Trump supporters think Trump can win in 2024? He's only won a single election, and that was in 2016. And in that election he won on a technicality since he got the majority of electoral votes but lost the popular vote. So, he "squeaked through." Donald J. Trump was a "squeaker" president. Since then, he's lost another presidential election, and as the de facto leader of the Republican party has overseen losses in other elections as well. His endorsements are losing endorsements. His strategy of saying "it's rigged" was rejected in 2020 and again in 2022 with Kari Lake who adopted his playbook. America doesn't like sore losers.

I would say it was hilarious the way that conservatives have so desperately tried to re-write the narrative of January 6th, 2021, if it weren't so dangerous. Don't take my word for it -- look up what Republicans said on that day and shortly thereafter. Many have completely changed their tune from that day, a day when those Republicans in Congress were hiding or running for their lives. The people they are now calling political hostages were the same ones that Senator Lindsey Graham was saying should be shot in the head. Ted Cruz called it a violent terrorist attack. Someone will respond "Who cares what politicians say?" Well, it matters if they are trying to reframe the publicly accepted narrative of what happened that day. It matters if they are contradicting what they said earlier. For one thing, it shows they are insincere and changing their stance out of a political calculation. That political calculation is to downplay January 6th to enable Trump to have a better chance to get back in the White House. If they had any integrity at all they would stick behind their original positions and stand up for the Constitution of the USA and against Trump.

Trump hates democracy, he hates America and wants to destroy it and replace it with an authoritarian state. Trump loves only Trump. He had the empathy of a lizard while watching the violence unfold on January 6th, 2021. His own people have testified to this.

Don't support him.

What you can quote him advocating is people march to the capital building and cheer on the congressmen. — NOS4A2

Do you think Trump was encouraging them to march up to the Capitol to cheer on the Republican Congressmen from the street? Outside on the steps of the Capitol? Inside the chambers where Congress was actually convening? Where, exactly, were they supposed to do all of this peaceful cheering?

If that's what he meant, then maybe he should have said, "We need to cheer like hell."

That's the way Trump works. He urges you, the Trump supporter, to do his dirty work for him. If it turns out well, he reaps the benefits. If not, then you suffer the consequences. It's like if a mob boss says "It would be a shame if something happened to your nice family." You know it's a threat. But in court, he can say that the literal meaning of his words is that he was being empathetic. So, it isn't about pointing to one instance of Trump's use of a word like "fight" and saying "he was being literal, right here." Trump's speech that day needs to be looked at in the overall context of what was going on at that time. It's not just about the words in that one speech, but also him inviting them to the rally on that particular day after feeding them the lies about the election being stolen over time to get them outraged and primed for violence. Trump didn't tell them precisely to build a gallows to hang Mike Pence with, either, but Trump was indeed the cause of it -- without him saying what he did, that gallows wouldn't be put up and no one would have been roaming the Capitol building chanting "Hang Mike Pence!"

Democracy shouldn't be "anything goes", it should have demands of competency, it should have a logic behind candidates as representatives of their voters. — Christoffer

There definitely seems to be a degeneration in our culture. De-evolution is real, as the band DEVO would say. The American public glorifies crudity and ignorance -- so is it any surprise they love a leader who is like them? I have been reading some of Trump's latest tweets, and they have grammatical and spelling errors, and random capitalizations. They look like they were written by a 7th grader with ADHD. Can you imagine a president or ex-president from 50 years ago, 100 years ago, or any other time in our history, who would write like that? Even if you agree with the tweet -- you have to admit it just looks sloppy, careless, and unprofessional. Each Trump tweet is like a proud celebration of incompetence: "Look, I can tweet without the least bit of proof-reading or care!"

It may seem petty of me to point this out, and indeed it is the least of my concerns about Trump. But he does seem barely literate and to have the emotional maturity of a middle school kid whose favorite thing to do is come up with novel insults and name-calling. You can call him a liar and he doesn't care, but if you say he stinks he flips out. He's like a little kid. But his base seems to love it, because they also are like little kids.

Just watch: NOS4A2 is going to say something like "Trump has been accused of having really bad BO but hasn't been convicted of it"!

If you remove Trump from the equation there would be no attack on the Capitol that day, and no violence. Many Trump supporters who participated in the attack would not be in prison. Ashli Babbitt would still be alive. You ask "Who cares what the politicians say?" Well, we know the effects can be from what politicians say -- right there. Without Trump urging them on, those people would not have marched on the Capitol. Without Trump inviting them there, there would not even have been a "Stop the Steal" rally. And without Trump telling them the election was stolen and how they need to "fight like hell" they wouldn't have been angry and primed for violence. Many of the rioters who were brought up on charges said they believed they were doing what Trump wanted them to do. Trump was the cause of them being there and doing what they did. You can draw a direct line from what happened on that day to Trump's lies and schemes.

The decision was wrong. — NOS4A2

The acquittal by the Senate in the second impeachment trial was wrong. In Mitch McConnell's own words [emphasis added by me in italics] he identified Trump as the cause of the January 6th attack: "American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like. Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the Vice President. They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth – because he was angry he'd lost an election." The cause of this was Trump -- he said it right there. If this isn't a description of someone inciting an insurrection, I don't know what is. And, they all knew it was violent. On January 6th, Josh Hawley was running through the Capitol like a fast chicken. Ted Cruz was hiding in a supply closet in fear of his life and later called it a violent terrorist attack (Cruz was called out to appear on Tucker Carlson's show to backtrack his words, and if you want to see one of the cringe-inducing pieces of footage ever, check out that clip). On January 6th, 2021, Lindsey Graham said: "Count me out. Enough is enough... If you're a conservative, this is the most offensive concept in the world. That a single person could disenfranchise 155 million people." According to former DC police officer Michael Fanone, Graham told him during the attack "You guys should have shot them [the rioters] all in the head... we gave you guys guns, and you should have used them."

In regard to the Senate's acquittal of Trump in the Second Impeachment Trial, this is what I got from Wikipedia:

Mitch McConnell, who voted for acquittal, said his vote was based on his belief that the Constitution did not permit the Senate to convict an ex-president.   He noted that Trump "didn't get away with anything yet" because the criminal justice system could still deal with the situation. He added: "January 6th was a disgrace. American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like. Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the Vice President. They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth – because he was angry he'd lost an election. Former President Trump's actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty. The House accused the former President of, quote, 'incitement.' That is a specific term from the criminal law. Let me put that to the side for one moment and reiterate something I said weeks ago: There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day."

That sounds like wanting to have it both ways -- to "stay loyal" and vote with the majority of Republicans justifying it with a technicality, but also to blame and and condemn Trump rhetorically. To me, the Republican senators who voted to acquit Trump were for the most part cowards who did so out of a political calculation rather than what they truly believed, because on January 6th, 2021, they were running in fear for their lives. Ted Cruz hid in a supply closet and later called it a violent terrorist attack.

Voting results
Article I
(Incitement of insurrection)
Guilty Not guilty
Democratic 48 0
Republican 7 43
Independent 2 0
Totals 57 43

A majority of the Senate thought Trump was guilty -- which included Democrats, Independents and Republicans -- just not a 2/3 supermajority needed to convict. What a shame. That would have prevented so many problems, if Trump had been convicted, because he wouldn't even be a presidential candidate right now or ever again. It would be over.

My Trump-related thought for the day is that I've been seeing chatter by Trump supporters online that they are outraged by him being taken off the ballot in Colorado and Maine. In many cases, they are hinting -- and thus threatening -- that violence or even civil war may result from this, especially if Trump is taken off the ballots of even more states. My thought is that, while I can understand their frustration at having "their choice taken away" I doubt any of them sympathize with me and others like me in swing states who voted for Biden in 2020 and were targeted by the "Green Bay Sweep" as Peter Navarro called it. That was the scheme concocted by John Eastman to refuse to certify the electors for Biden and replace them with the fake elector votes for Trump. The January 6th "Stop the Steal" rally was part of the plan to put pressure on (threaten) Congress and Pence to do this. If Mike Pence had gone along with this and succeeded, and the Republicans in Congress refused to certify Biden but instead certified Trump as the victor, then my vote would have been invalidated, even though it was a legitimate vote. My choice would have been taken away.

I think it is possible to self-deceive and to gradually change one's views according to what wants to be true. The world is full of that. But, there are also times when we know we are being deceitful, including to ourselves. Those are the moments when one can make a choice. I think a lot of Trump supporters have had that opportunity to either go along with the election fraud claim, or pull back from it. If it isn't "true" for you then you are cast out of the movement as disloyal. So, I think there is a lot of social pressure among Trump supporters to tentatively try to believe it, or at least not disbelieve it, and then try to find reasons or evidence to support it. You can especially hear this from Republicans who would dodge the question of whether they believed there was widespread voter fraud with comments like "It's important to have secure elections" or "there were a lot of questionable things related to the election that are worth investigating" or "the way the mainstream media and social media censor information is a form of election tampering." You can tell they don't believe the widespread voter fraud claim yet also don't want to contradict it... They want to appear as loyal allies.

While I agree with most of what you have said, loyalty to "the truth" is often loyalty to an ideology called "truth". When it and people stand on opposite sides the consequences are inhuman — Fooloso4

Yes, that's a good point. Being loyal to the truth may indeed be too lofty of a principle. Jordan Peterson very wisely said, and I am paraphrasing here, that we may not always know the truth, but we know when we're being dishonest -- and we can choose to refrain from doing that. I think that is closer to what I want to get across, here. I would revise what I wrote above to say we should be loyal only to the truth while recognizing that we may indeed not always know what the truth is, so at the very least we can strive to be honest with ourselves and with others.

My thought for the day in relation to Donald Trump is this: loyalty is the enemy of honesty. Loyalty is very important to Trump and Trump supporters. But that culture of loyalty is deeply corrosive to honesty. Imagine that you were a Trump staffer in early December 2020 and you believed Trump lost the election, but you are in a room full of other Trump supporters when Trump asked you, "Tell me the truth. Do you think we lost the election?" What would you say? I think you'd feel an enormous amount of social pressure to say, "No sir! We won!" or "We didn't lose it, but they tried to steal it" or something like that. If you didn't reply with something similar, you'd be cast out as an apostate RINO. When you are loyal to a person, you want to please that person, and not contradict them. But if you are honest, it is inevitable that sometimes you will disagree with other people. The desire to be honest may corrode your own perception of the truth because it alters what you desire the truth to be.

I would say the only exception to this maxim "loyalty is the enemy of honesty" is if what you are loyal to is the truth. One should be loyal to the truth, not to other people, or movements, or political parties. The truth can be ugly, and make enemies for you, but in the end it will win and is the only thing worth being loyal to. That sounds like something Marcus Aurelius would have written... I'm going to have to do some research on that.

I'm no lawyer but I've worked with enough of them to know they often focus on the exact language, i.e. the "letter of the law." And that's how this argument would be made. The 22nd Amendment doesn't have language about being sworn in. The relevant part of the language here is [bold added by me]: "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once." So the relevant legal question is whether Trump was elected twice, or not. Was he?

They really said that Trump believes he won the election and if that were true, which they argue it's not, then he's ineligible because he's won twice. It’s just a troll at this point for their foamy-mouthed base. — NOS4A2

If it is trolling, it is brilliant trolling, because it is pointing out that you can't have it both ways. That's true! You cannot, out of one side of your mouth, claim that Trump won two presidential elections -- and then, out of the other side of your mouth, claim he is still eligible to run again in since he was only elected once. Which is it? Was he elected once or twice?

Today, when I heard about how Biden and Trump are so close in the polls, I thought about who is responsible for putting us in this situation. Trump deserves a lot of the blame, for being a malevolent sore loser and a liar. But all of you Trump supporters deserve even more of the blame for enabling him. A sane society would repudiate Trump as a sore loser and say "It's time to move on and admit you lost. Grow up!" But, we live in a time of great cowardice. I am reading the book ENOUGH by Cassidy Hutchinson. That young woman shamed many Republican men, some over twice her age, by showing more courage than they have and doing what they should have done. I'm talking about people like Mark Meadows, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz. How embarrassing for Republican men to be shown up by a young woman like that.

Right, but according to Trump his alternate slate of electors were the ones that should have been counted.

Any time I encounter someone who claims Trump won the 2020 election, I always want the details. If he won, how many votes did he win by? How many electoral votes did Trump get and how many did Biden get? From what I can tell, the typical Trump supporter who likes to blurt out "Trump won!" because "it pisses off the liberals" cannot answer these simple questions. I don't see how one can make the claim that Trump won if one cannot answer these questions. I would have liked to have seen more journalists press Trump on this claim that he won with these specific questions. Of course, he doesn't have the answers, either, since he started claiming he won on election night before all of the votes were even counted ("Stop the count!"). But it is worth repeatedly exposing the claim to victory for what it is: something entirely lacking in evidence, reason or hard numbers. In other words, a Big Lie.

Trump is so unhinged that he recently claimed winning all 50 states in the 2020 election.

I feel bad for anyone who is intelligent and still trying to support Trump's insane claims. Imagine the tortured reasoning and twisted logic one must engage in to justify supporting such an obvious liar.

I never thought of that before, but for everyone who defends Trump by saying he isn't lying if he truly believes he won the 2020 election when he claims that, then one consequence of that is according to his own beliefs and claims he has been elected to the office of the POTUS twice and is therefore ineligible.

Isn't there a legal principle about not being able to judge one's own case? I think that would apply to not being able to pardon oneself even if the Constitution doesn't explicitly say this. Otherwise, it creates a legal loophole where a President can commit any crime he wants and then pardon himself, over and over. No one should be above the law in this way.

Nemo judex in causa sua... These examples are from Wikipedia: The maxim has been invoked by the United States Supreme Court in various cases, such as the 1798 case Calder v. Bull ("a law that makes a man a Judge in his own cause [...] is against all reason and justice") and the 1974 case Arnett v. Kennedy ("we might start with a first principle: '[N]o man shall be a judge in his own cause.' Bonham's Case, 8 Co. 114a, 118a, 77 Eng. Rep. 646, 652 (1610)").

If Trump becomes the Republican candidate after the primary is over, but then is convicted of a felony prior to the general election, are the Republicans stuck with him as their candidate or can they switch to another candidate in light of this development? Can a convicted felon even serve as POTUS? What if he gets a sentence of prison time? Can he serve as POTUS from prison?

This is crazy that we even have to ask these questions. Trump has caused himself so many legal troubles, and I've never seen anything like it from another POTUS. Nixon wasn't anywhere close to this. And with Trump, a lot of it looks like a combination of clever scheming and sloppy bumbling.

That's right, Mikie. Many Trump supporters said they would still vote for him if he is a convicted felon. In the August debate, six of the eight Republican candidates indicated they would support Donald Trump for president even if he were found guilty of at least one felony. So much for the party of law and order.

I'm a Pennsylvania resident who voted for Biden. My vote is one of the votes that Trump wanted to invalidate with the "Green Bay Sweep" plot pressuring Mike Pence to return the real electors to the Republican held state legislatures of swing states to replace them with the fake electors. You might feel differently if your vote was among those targeted by this scam. It's not a "fever dream" since it really was attempted.

Maybe you don't even know what happened.

One possibility is that many Trump supporters -- like Trump himself -- don't really care about democracy. They may pay lip service to it at times, but in reality they don't like it or don't understand it. They may see it as sharing power with people whom they see as evil. From their point of view they think "why should the good guys share power half of the time with the forces of evil?" If you pay attention the rhetoric being used in conservative media, this is what it is being done. They define liberals and Democrats as an evil, an existential threat to "our way of life" and "the America we grew up with." They describe Democrats as communists, Satanists, and the worst labels they can think of to arouse fear, hate and disgust in the conservative base. Any Republicans who try to work across the aisle get cast out as apostate RINOs. The unspoken conclusion is: "It would be better if we permanently took power away from these people. Why share power with evil? Wouldn't it be better for good to permanently remain in power?"

Today I was wondering if Trump supporters are the least bit worried that Trump will become a dictator. If not, I wonder why not. Trump has a history of not accepting election results when they don't go his way. He openly admires dictators of other countries. He joked about being a dictator. He suggested terminating rules or regulations found in the Constitution. He asked National Security Advisor Michael Flynn about using the military to overturn the 2020 election results. He was part of a plan to not certify the 2020 election results, and return the electors to the swing states or make use of fake electors from those swing states. These are all huge red flags indicating dictatorial ambitions. I just don't see how a Trump supporter can be unaware of all of this -- or, if aware, then unconcerned.

I often see Trump supporters call his detractors "Trump haters" as if our judgment is clouded by some irrational emotion, as if our mere dislike of him is itself evidence that we aren't capable of any sort of objectivity or reason. Well, I'd like to address that in this post. I didn't always hate Trump. I was disappointed he won in 2016 but I wished him the best. I thought he was sort of a demagogue, a buffoon and a non-serious person... But I also hoped that as a political outsider he might do some interesting and different things.

I didn't hate Trump right away, but then I began to realize he was a habitual sore loser. I hate sore losers. I hate them when they are the neighbor kids, I hate them when they are me, and I hate them when they are the POTUS. That is the core reason I hate Donald Trump. He's a malevolent sore loser who puts his own ego before the country's interests. He's like a spoiled kid who was never taught by his parents the very important maxim: "Don't be a sore loser." This isn't just a hollow platitude, it is one of the principles that allows us to function as a stable society. It is especially important in a form of government like a democratic republic because we are constantly having elections with winners and losers. We are constantly engaged in the peaceful transition of power in order to respect the will of the people who do the voting. Without people who accept losing graciously, the fabric of this system becomes frayed, and eventually will rip apart. Donald Trump isn't doing this accidentally, or unintentionally, either -- we can see he has history of using the recurring claim that the only way he (or his side) can lose an election is if it is fraudulent. Saying the election was stolen cannot be a belief based on evidence when he starts claiming this prior to the election taking place. And he does it over and over. He did this in 2020 with Joe Biden. He did it in 2016 with Hilary Clinton. He did it in the 2016 Iowa primary with Ted Cruz. He even did it by proxy for Mitt Romney in 2012 when he tweeted "This election is a total sham and a travesty" and "We can't let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty." It has enough frequency that we can call it Trump's modus operandi.

The difference between a child who is a sore loser and an adult like Donald Trump or Kari Lake being a sore loser is that children can learn to stop doing it and overcome their emotional immaturity. The adults know better -- or at least have no excuse not to, at this point -- but choose to be sore losers as a form of strategy. Trump's refusal to graciously accept defeat (and attempt to disrupt the peaceful transition of power) is the cause of so many problems we as a country are experiencing, and may even result in our country being ripped apart in a civil war.