'Dangerous' Trump is 'going down in flames' and wants to take the country with him: conservative
In his column for the Daily Beast, conservative commentator Matt Lewis claimed that Donald Trump’s professed desire to delay the November election is a sign he knows he’s “going down in flames” and that should worry Republicans and Democrats alike because that makes the president dangerous.
Under a headline proclaiming “Trump Finally Admits That His Election Is Swirling Down the Golden Toilet,” Lewis — who abandoned the Republican Party due to Trump — said the president likely ramped up his claims of a “rigged election” because of terrible economic news on Thursday as a distraction only to make it obvious to all that he knows he’s going down to defeat.
As Lewis notes, there is little good news on the horizon that will save the president with the coronavirus pandemic still raging across the country, the economy still in collapse, adding that “…changing campaign managers isn’t going to shake things up, and there won’t be a convention ‘bounce’ to help, either.”
After stating Trump is “going down in flames,” Lewis suggested that Trump is at his most dangerous now since he has already shown he cares about nobody but himself.
“If this is Trump conceding to the apparently inevitable, it’s also a dangerous time. People who are forced to finally admit imminent defeat are prone to outbursts and desperate behavior. When those people are the president, and especially this president, things can get dicey,” he wrote before adding, “If the choice is between Trump’s political ambitions and the preservation of this great experiment, there isn’t much of a contest. That’s why Trump thinks it’s safe to send kids back to school amid a pandemic (that helps his re-election chances) but not safe enough to have an election on November 3 (that hurts his re-election chances).”
Writing, “it’s worth remembering that even if Trump is admitting to the evidently inevitable here, he’s still going to go down swinging,” Lewis wrote now is the time for Republicans to flee the president, oppose him and try and save their themselves.
“Trump’s tweet is an open invitation to wavering Republicans to finally jump ship. In recent days, I have noticed commentators like Rich Lowry and Erick Erickson (both originally Trump critics who sidled up to him after the election) create some distance and start to hedge their bets,” he wrote before suggesting, “For the rest of us, it’s important to keep things in perspective. Trump said something truly shocking on Thursday. But it’s mostly shocking because it signals that even he can’t deny that the jig is finally up. It’s now just a matter of time. “
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/07/dangerous-trump-is-going-down-in-flames-and-wants-to-take-the-country-with-him-conservative/Trump just gave away the game on his November plan to manipulate the election results
Despite his most inflammatory tweet of the day, President Donald Trump does not plan on moving the date of the November election. As many observers pointed out, his post floating this idea came shortly after news of the devastating economic growth numbers for the second quarter were released, and he was almost certainly trying to change the subject (not that threatening democracy will play well with the electorate). But Trump is likely aware that he lacks the power to move the election, and there’s no sign that he’s seriously lobbying his congressional allies to do so, especially since they’d need House Democrats to agree.
@realDonaldTrump: "With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???"
Yet his threat to democracy is real. Trump gave away the game on his plan to manipulate November’s results in a follow-up tweet on Thursday:
@realDonaldTrump: "Must know Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even years later!"
He has been laying the groundwork for this attack for months now with his aggressive and bogus criticisms of mail-in voting. This campaign has drawn some quizzical responses since it’s clearly discouraging Republicans from using mail-in ballots as they have done — quite effectively — for decades. Given that we’re in a pandemic, one that will surely be ongoing if not resurgent in November, it seems on its face to be a form of self-sabotage for the president to discourage his own supporters from the safest form of voting.
But Trump’s second tweet sets the stage for his strategy. If Democrats dominate mail-in voting, that may mean Trump could lead when the Election Day ballots start to get counted on Nov. 3. If Joe Biden has won, that may only become evident when the mail-in ballots are counted. Because there’s likely to be a surge of mail-in voting, state election operations are likely to be underfunded, and the Trump administration seems to be deliberately slowing down the mail, it may take a while for these votes to be counted. It could potentially take weeks.
And there are bound to be other irregularities, as well, because there always are. What happens if the Post Office slows down delivery of the mail, and it’s not clear if a certain set of ballots were sent at the right time? This kind of dispute — and many others — could lead to tense legal challenges.
The president is already making it clear, however, that he wants to simply accept the results as they’re first reported Tuesday night (he’ll surely do an about-face if Biden is the winner early on). Of course, this is a completely baseless demand. States are obligated to count all votes legitimately cast, and they are allowed time to do so:
Except that federal law gives states *at least* 35 days after the election to certify its results—and for good reason:
https://law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/3/5So there’s no legal argument on the president’s side, just as he has no authority to change the election date. But that doesn’t really matter. Many people pointed out in April that, despite Trump’s demands that states reopen their economies prematurely in the face of the pandemic, the president had no power to boss the governors around. But Trump won that argument — and triggered a resurgence of the virus — because the GOP will follow him off any cliff.
Trump’s real power is his control over his voters and his party. He’s coaching them to treat mail-in ballots as illegitimate — even as he hopelessly tries to make a distinction between mail-in and absentee ballots, which he uses (they’re the same). If he wins the Election Day vote, but fears — as seems likely — that a deluge of mail-in ballots will hand the race to Biden, he could push to undercut these votes.
And he’d have multiple allies in that fight. For example, Republicans control the legislatures of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan — three crucial swing states. State legislatures are fundamentally in charge of determining how electors get selected for the electoral college. Of course, right now, in most states, the candidate who wins the most votes in the state gets all the electoral votes. And in theory, the legislatures shouldn’t be able to change the rules after the votes have already been cast. But what if the ballot counting is dragging on, and legal disputes are breaking out. Irregularities will abound, and feed conspiracy theories. A GOP swing state legislature infected by Trump’s propaganda may try to claim that the election is inherently corrupted, and it may decide to take matters into its own hands — and hand victory to Trump.
Could it actually do that? It’s hard to say in advance, but any attempt would inevitably end up in court. There, the legal challenges would meet more Trump allies in the form of conservative judges and justices, who just happen to have a majority on the Supreme Court, where any consequential dispute would inevitably end up.
Chief Justice John Roberts may give the president’s opponents some hope. He has been willing to break with Trump and the entire Republican Party in many high-profile cases in recent decisions, sometimes shocking his liberal critics. So there’s no guarantee that he’d be in the bag to hand the election to Trump.
There’s a big caveat here, though. One consistent feature of Roberts’ jurisprudence, including in recent rulings, is a clear hostility to voting rights. The only consistency in his judgments on this front seems to be favoritism for moves that suppress the vote and help Republicans. So it wouldn’t be surprising if Roberts led the court in a repeat of Bush v. Gore in some heated legal battle, handing the election to Trump.
It wouldn’t even need to be this blatant, because the key to Trump’s strategy is chaos. If, after some set of legal disputes and quarrels over which ballots are legitimate, there’s no clear winner in the Electoral College, the decision gets sent to the House of Representatives. But because of a quirk in the Constitution, each member doesn’t get their own vote — there’s only one vote per state. This system would seem to favor Trump.
It’s not clear the president has thought all this through and gamed out a complete strategy. He’s not much of a planner. But he clearly knows the polls are not looking good for him, and it’s undeniable that — as he did in 2016 — he’s laying the groundwork for challenging the legitimacy of the election. The terrifying thing is that it could work.
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/07/trump-just-gave-away-the-game-on-his-november-plan-to-manipulate-the-election-results/'I'ts time for him to go': MSNBC's Morning Joe called on GOP senators to force Trump off the ticket
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough called on the Republican Party to force President Donald Trump off the ticket or face political ruin.
Trump suggested delaying the election as his approval ratings continue to plunge, and he’s acting as an anchor around GOP lawmakers across the country — and the “Morning Joe” host urged them to pull the plug on this presidency.
“This guy is leading you to ruin,” Scarborough said.
GOP incumbents are trailing or narrowly leading polls in traditionally conservative states like Arizona, North Carolina and Texas, and Scarborough blamed Trump’s growing unpopularity.
“I know you’re not surprised, so what are you going to do?” Scarborough said. “You really want this guy at the top of your ticket in November? I know you don’t, so what are you going to do?”
“[Sen.] Barry Goldwater in 1974 got off his ass, went to the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue, and told Richard Nixon it was time to go,” he added. “Do you have the courage to do that? The last four years suggest that you don’t, but I will just say, at the end of July, 2020, the same thing I warned you about in February of 2016, before Super Tuesday, that Donald Trump will lead to the end of the party of Abraham Lincoln. Maybe not this week, maybe not this month, maybe not even this election, but it’s coming, and your window is closing.”
Trump’s continued failures on the coronavirus pandemic will doom his re-election chances, and likely cost Republicans their Senate majority — possibly for the foreseeable future, Scarborough said.
“Maybe you didn’t care about a pandemic sweeping across America, but you care about your own political career, your own political party,” Scarborough said. “Understand the window is closing. The time is drawing near when you go past the point of no return. Are you going to walk down to the White House? Are you going to get in your car, go to the White House, and tell Donald Trump that it’s time for him to go? It’s your choice.”
“If you don’t, let me tell you what’s going to happen,” he continued. “You’re going to lose the election, lose the Senate, lose the House and you’re going to have to complain about Democrats running this country the rest of your life. But it’s your call.”
“Maybe it’s worth blindly following a [former] Democrat who contributed to Hillary Clinton, seven, eight times, who contributed to Anthony Weiner, to Elliott Spitzer, who contributed to Kamala Harris,” Scarborough added. “Isn’t this exciting if Joe Biden picks Kamala Harris. You will have Donald Trump running against a vice president that he contributed to in 2014 — 2014 — not like 1998, 1999 when he was hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein, with a bunch of women — I’m sorry, yeah, young girls.”
