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There’s a fundamental difference between being bitter about an election result and actually thinking the result was actually illegitimate. I will of course grant you that occasionally the language can appear superficially similar, but the difference is real and very important. Democrats absolutely accepted the result of the election. The process was not in question, and this was telling in the actual actions taken: they thought Russia meddled a bit too much and so the solution is policy to stop it happening again.
Hell, even after 2000, Democrats still by and large accepted the result despite some very potent arguments that they had been robbed by some uncontrollable aspect of the administrative state (broadly). Sure, you had a decent chunk of individuals who continued or even still continue to believe the election result was rigged or undemocratic or whatever, but this didn’t translate to the political class, and it didn’t lead to a fundamental dispute of elections more broadly, and in the actions, Florida got its shit together and fixed a lot of the issues for subsequent elections.
The immediate reaction of Trump and his allies was not merely bitterness but action that should be disturbing to all. They tried both literally and rhetorically to do an end run around the actual election and legal processes to corruptly (mens rea according to the evidence we’ve seen) subvert the actual election, irrespective of fact.
Do you see the difference? “Let’s fix it” is of a fundamentally different character than “let’s change it”. The former recognizes that setbacks happen in politics — even unfair ones! And it recognizes that there will be other chances and that the system is more important than ego. But the second, oh boy, it’s shortsighted and selfish and threatens the whole thing. It’s kind of like a marital fight. There is a line between some things you might say to your spouse in anger, and some things which should literally never be said, because they can’t be taken back and might threaten the entire marriage. With the assumption that the marriage is a good one - here, the assumption that the system of democratic elections is a good one.
It’s not at all clear what kind of system Trump would put in its place, which is PLENTY worrying in and of itself, but I have a very hard time imagining it being better than our current one, and I likewise have I think very good reasons to believe that even if you think for example that the Justice Department needs reform and fairness, Trump is probably one of the worst people to actually do so. That Trump’s personal motivations largely aligned with the country’s in his first term wasn’t an accident but was at least in some sense lucky - but I’m not convinced this can be taken for granted in a second term to the same degree.
I don't see the difference. It feels like salami-slicing to me. You could say this about Bernie Sanders. 'Anyone who disagrees with the integrity of the process is a rebel and an anarchist' is a just-so explanation. 'It's different when we do it' is partisan hypocrisy.
Actions speak louder than words is the test. It’s disappointing but within the realm of expectations for losers to be whiny, sad but occasional for a low-status politician to actually flail around in denial for a bit, but something else entirely when the top takes actions that are demonstrably motivated by impure motives and backed by hot air.
Look. If you ask Trump — and many have! — how exactly he lost, he refuses to answer. Even if you hold up someone like Stacey Abrams, who infamously refused to concede the Georgia governor race, if you asked her why… she will fucking tell you! It’s absolutely incredible that Trump will not do the same.
But Trump doesn’t really believe the “hard” version of the stolen election hypothesis (that machines were rigged, that the numbers were physically changed, that someone added +1000 to the other guy’s total and minused a thousand from his etc) and never has. He has gestured toward it on occasion, but he doesn’t believe it.
The proof is in his many recent interviews where he talks about 2020 and having ‘lost by a whisker’ or by a tiny bit or whatever. That’s not what people who believe they lost truly rigged elections say, they say they lost because the other guy hacked the voting machines or stuffed ballots or prevented his guys from voting.
I mean, that's arguably circumstantial evidence for @Ben___Garrison 's thesis that the 2020 stolen election narrative was a cynical ploy by an unscrupulous sore loser, because Trump was definitely saying the election was concretely stolen back then. He may not have believed it personally but it was useful for him to have followers who believed it. If nothing else, he needed to at least partially legitimize his attempt at a procedural coup - you can't concede that you lost and then try to subvert the outcome. And, as noted in OP, a stolen election narrative protects Trump's status in the party and in the eyes of his followers.
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Didn’t the action they take was to spy on the Trump campaign and then bog them down in investigations that ultimately concluded the Russians did not in fact meddle? Didn’t they directly try to impeach Trump over similar issues? Didn’t the mainstream Press crow about “russiagate” for years on end? Didn’t democratic aligned judges use lawfare to nullify a democratically elected presidents policies over and over and over again? Didn’t they delay vaccine study results until after the election, murdering thousands of Americans just because Orange Man Bad?
Sorry but it doesn’t seem like they accepted Trump as the president. Wasn’t there a a whole “resistance” thing too? I mean. Sure it was fake and lame as far as resistances go, but one could argue the bureaucracy went along with it.
Spying is an overblown talking point. They spied on like, one guy? Maybe a second, and neither of them big deals?
The campaign didn’t get meaningfully “bogged down” by any investigations, not anything special counsels don’t normally do
Russiagate actually did fade pretty quickly after the Mueller report in the news and from Democratic politicians
They tried to impeach him over something almost explicitly a quid pro quo - you could argue that some presidents get a pass for that kind of thing (Nixon sure as hell did it but that wasn’t what his impeached for) but it’s still, um, bad. And note that after the effort failed in Senate vote, they dropped it. You don’t see Kamala whining about it on the campaign trail
If you think that was abnormal lawfare you have not been paying attention to politics the last several decades
Scope and scale matter. My point stands.
Catching one instance of sleazy behavior from a large group over a period of time generally implies that there's more than one instance, but that that was the instance that was easiest or luckiest to catch.
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Your point doesn’t stand in the least. You’ve marshalled zero evidence for your dismissal nor addressed most of my points
I meant the administration, and of course it did. The news covered the mueller investigation breathlessly nonstop, over an essential nothingburger. How do you think that affects an administration?
sure after about 3 years of nonstop coverage and rampant speculation (Steele dossier? Never even existed)
It’s true, the Dems have been terrible on that for decades, but it reached a zenith.
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No.
The ruling party in 2016 used multiple intelligence agencies to target opposition campaign personnel, on the basis of unfounded allegations presented by the ruling party candidate whose role in its generation was hidden due to its disqualifying nature, and subsequently overturned citizen-protection measures designed to protect American citizens from just such intelligence abuses, which enabled illegal leaks what would inherently have been classified information, to fuel election-year and then multiple post-election year conspiracies intended to undermine the opposition campaign and target up to cabinet level officials, conspiracies which were publicly pushed by party-affiliated media and legitimized by the party's leading member of the Senate Intelligence community.
...while campaigning that Trump would be an authoritarian who would commit security state abuses, and thus organizing the #Resistance that dominated media coverage for years to come and would help organize riots in several major American cities, including the US capital.
The original Russiagate lasted nearly half of Trump's time in office, and its narrative themes were later re-used to justify the first Trump impeachment and which remains a regular theme in Democratic C-lane social media campaigns since.
One of the presidents in question being Biden, who publicly boasted in his success to squash the corruption investigation the subject of which was the basis for impeaching Trump, not including the many other credible quid pro quo of the Biden dynasty.
The Trump experience of lawfare was abnormal precisely because it surpassed what any candidate had received in the last several decades, and on multiple grounds were highly reminiscent of mid-Cold War abuses that spurred the US Intelligence Community reforms of the 1970s and 1980s that were ignored in the process of targeting the Trump campaign. The abnormality of it was the subject of multiple extensive discussions and even deliberate justification articles posted in major media outlets and a post-2020 victory lap on the degree of cooperation required to 'fortify' the following election.
Scope and scale mattering is precisely why your point falls to a basic Russel conjugation critique.
'My favored party accepted the results reasonably and mostly peacefully despite legitimate reasons to believe they were unjustly denied their rightful victory, your party unreasonably refuses to accept the legitimacy of their defeat and threatens everything in ways that should be disturbing to all...'
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You put it much more eloquently than I could, and I might be yoinking your answer to reply to some others downthread.
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They did not. When Hillary Clinton says Trump is an "illegitimate President," I just don't understand how you conclude that this is "superficially similar" language with a "real and very important difference." She wasn't alone. Is it your position that because she didn't say "literally illegitimate" or "actually illegitimate," we should assume she's just being rhetorical?
Russia is an easy target, of course, but listen to the examples of outright election denialism in that video. Much of it targets process, too. There are allegations of conspiracy. Trump is louder and coarser than most, but on substance he's not saying anything Democrats haven't been saying for years.
To the contrary, I would say that it translated to the political class very well, in a variety of ways. But you're not entirely wrong: the Democrats have, I think, been better at translating their losses into action. They are doing everything they can to disassemble any part of the system that doesn't guarantee their victory and continued ideological dominance of the government and the press.
I don't want to read too much into it, but I can't help but notice that after Florida decided to take elections seriously enough to avoid a repeat of 2000, it changed from "purple" to "reliably red."
And yet nothing they did is without recent precedent in Democratic opposition to election results. Democrats have refused to certify elections results. Democrats have rioted in DC. Democrats have tried to do an end run around the actual election and legal processes to corruptly subvert the actual election. None of this makes Trump's own misdeeds good, by the by; the point here is not "whataboutism." The point here is that I can't understand how anyone can pretend with a straight face that any of this hasn't been done before by the exact people now decrying it.
No: you are treating Democratic attempts to ensure their own permanent victory as "fix" while treating parallel Republican attempted to ensure their own permanent victory as "change." There is no difference of character there, much less a fundamental one. Rather, this is simply "our noble soldiers versus your barbarous brigands" in electioneering parlance.
Are you suggesting that, if Donald Trump wins in November, you would reject the outcome of that election?
Yes, we do assume Hillary was being bitter, because action wise she didn’t do jack shit about it. For anyone paying attention, you might notice that not very many Democrats followed her rhetoric either.
You shouldn’t read into Florida’s subsequent results. 9/11 happened pushing a major Bush wave… and then Obama won it twice again. Being red is recent. This should set off warning bells in your brain about personal bias that you’d even mention Florida like that, and be so flagrantly and factually wrong.
There’s some merit to the general pattern of “Democrats break X tradition for allegedly noble reasons, Republicans then see it as fair game and break X+1 tradition harder and more effectively”. Absolutely. But there’s a level of equivalence here that is just absurd.
For example. Yes. Riots in DC. Not the same as literally occupying the seat of government. These two riots are not the same. Likewise. Faithless electors your own link is talking about, uh, celebrities advocating for doing so? The whole thing was pageantry anyways as it seemed to pretty much every legal scholar everywhere that individual electors can’t actually go rogue. Contrast the Pence convincing effort or the alternate slate effort which had a (still not crazy high but not zero) chance of creating a more real crisis. It’s insane to me that you refuse to see this. At some point we moved from random House reps doing protest votes to actual, organized attempts to submit alternate electoral slates based on a sum total of zero evidence and a “throw literal shit against the wall and see if anything sticks” approach to evidence. Not. The. Same! At least hanging Chads were, you know, real.
Now note that I’m really not reading too deeply into Trump’s every word either. When he said that we wouldn’t even need to have more elections if he won it was obvious he was simply exaggerating how effective he would be about fixing problems. But new evidence about his activities in the aftermath clearly show he is ultimately corrupt in motivation and self-serving in action.
And of course with all that said, why on earth would I have a problem with the system if Trump were to win? He can and probably will get a ton of votes, all legitimately. The voting system broadly works.
As an example unless you are a gutless loser like that Georgia governor candidate, even if some halfway shady shit happens in state elections (fights about voting on the margins of the rules, like induced turnout related stuff) the typical reaction has almost always been “well let’s try harder to win more state gov’t seats next time”.
She talked about it, and that is one thing Trump also did. Is it your position that Trump's "fight like hell" comment is irrelevant and should not be raised?
Because sure: as far as I know, Hillary didn't have conversations with election officials about "finding" votes. She knew to only cheat with the aid of close confidantes, not party randos.
I intended that to be a lighthearted throwaway comment, which I intended to signal through the "I don't want to read too much into this." Sorry that wasn't sufficiently clear, I should know better than to attempt humor around here. Though you will notice that there were no actual factual errors in my comment: it was after (i.e. later in time) the election process reforms that Florida became reliably red (for now!). That should set off warning bells in your brain about personal bias, that you'd have such a... strong reaction to factual claims, just because they happen to present a narrative you don't like.
@Dean handled this one amply, I think. This is medieval thinking from you. They're not hiding the Darksaber in the podium, and besides, we have three co-equal branches of government. Democrats didn't hesitate to storm the Supreme Court building, to say nothing of state buildings. No, Democrats did not do exactly the same thing in exactly the same place as Republicans, but you seem committed to riding the "it's different when we do it" train to the very last stop. You are engaged in special pleading.
Right back at you, though, seriously. I don't like Trump. I don't like rioting. I'm happy to condemn both. I don't think it's insane to be upset about riots, whether Republican or Democrat. I think it's insane to treat Republican excess as a national emergency, while winking and shrugging at a laundry list of Democratic excesses.
I didn't ask if you would have a problem with the system. I asked, "if Donald Trump wins in November, [would you] reject the outcome of that election?"
Because you said:
I read this as you genuinely worrying that Trump would bring about an end to democratic elections. This seems like an insane worry to me, but I can imagine believing this for real. And if you did believe this for real, wouldn't it be in your interest (and the interest of the nation) to do whatever you could to prevent Trump from taking office?
Because for a lot of people in 2016, and 2020, and 2024, that seems to be the thinking. Cheating in debates or stacking primaries may not be the literal same thing as calling election officials with pointed questions about unusual polling circumstances (a water main? really?)--but it comes from the same mental attitude, namely: winning this election is more important than any standards, norms, or traditions that might be in my way. I agree that Trump gives zero fucks for standards, norms, or traditions. But it would be nice if we could stop pretending (and insisting!) that Clinton, Biden, Harris, etc. are any different in this regard. They're just (usually) slicker and sneakier about it.
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Of course not. One riot was politically favored for prosecution and led to among the largest prosecutions in American history, and the other riot was disfavored and was not, as well as many following riots of similar partisan vein. This difference in interest of prosecution of prosecutable riots being the critical difference in prosecution is the basis of the critique, not an argument that one is not a prosecutable offense.
January 6 is not prosecutable on grounds of 'literally occupying the seat of government.' It is prosecutable on grounds of intent to disrupt the government processes, the publicized prior intent to take actions, the recorded evidence of illegal actions taken, and the jurisdiction of where it occurred. There is no distinction in the lawfulness of the acts between whether the disruption occurs inside the Congressional building itself versus other government buildings, or other places in the capital. January 6 wasn't the first time in even the preceding year that violent, disruptive, and/or intimidating protests had forced a relocation of senior government officials in the capital.
The prosecutable equivalence between events of political violence that is intended to disrupt is that they are political violence intended to disrupt. 'But their political violence was categorically different!' is special pleading, particularly when the difference is not the degree of severity of prosecution, but whether to prosecute at all.
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Because of other actions surrounding what they said? While I really don't like that Hillary said the election was "stolen" and that Trump was "illegitimate", I still think there's a big difference between her comments and what Trump did. Hillary conceded almost immediately after the 2016 results were in. To my knowledge, Trump still hasn't conceded for 2020. Hillary never made phone calls demanding governors and secretaries of state "find" enough votes for them to win. Trump did. Hillary never egged on her followers to go to the capitol to protest or disrupt the electoral count. Trump, obviously, did.
You linked an article where the Dems put forward abolishing the EC in favor of a direct popular vote (or some other system), but this doesn't seem germane to the argument that EverythingIsFine is making. There wasn't a broad rejection of election results by D leaders. The closest was probably Stacey Abrams refusing to concede in Georgia, but 1) she got a ton of pushback from this from her own party, and 2) even in this most extreme example, she didn't try to interfere directly like Trump did.
What Trump did was fundamentally different from normal election reform, and thus his actions deserve to be seen differently. Dems saying we should abolish the EC (in future elections) or Rs saying we should require IDs to vote (in future elections) are very different proposals from Trump's "we need to overturn the votes from certain states (in an election that just happened).
I am utterly unmoved by your repeated resort to "it's different when we do it," which is why I asked you the question I was interested in hearing an answer to. That you have written two responses to my downstream tangents while avoiding a direct answer to my direct question strengthens my impression that your original question was disingenuous and "boo outgroup" rather than sincere, as I had hoped.
Because ultimately if you're actually interested in the government (or anyone!) doing something to convince Republicans of the legitimacy of election outcomes, such that no one riots, or questions the legitimacy of the proceedings, or attempts arcane procedural shenanigans... that same "something" should presumably also prevent riots, or questions, or shenanigans, from Democrats.
If you can't think of a way to prevent Democrats from rioting in case of a Trump win in November, then why in God's name would you think it should be possible to prevent Republicans from doing so in case Kamala wins?
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A bit of an admission against interest for me, but my prior is that FL has just had an unusually-competent run of GOP state leadership with JEB Bush (who, for all his neo-con wimpiness, appears to have been a good governor), Rick Scott, and Ron DeSantis. Also, it probably says something about the state of the FL Democratic party apparatus that their two most recent standard-bearers have been an ex-Republican (Charlie Crist) and a guy who almost got pinched for laundering his campaign funds and later got himself arrested in a hotel room with overdosing gay prostitutes and meth (Andrew Gillum).
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