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The reason I have a hard time accepting this is that, in hindsight, an implied condition of my request for a steel man of Trump is that it would also not negatively effect the reasons to vote for him. It's kind of hard to say "Trump is either incredibly dumb or incredibly crazy" as a way to defend him while simultaneously saying he should be president (to be clear, I'm not saying you think that he should or shouldn't be president)
The best reason to not vote for Trump is all the 2020 election stuff, so that steel man is probably the best argument to defend Trump in his 2020 election scheme, but simultaneously adds a whole new best reason to not vote for him.
But why wouldn't there have been fraud in 2020? There is significant fraud every year and it was made even easier in 2020 in most of the swing states that went for Biden. OTOH, states like Florida which implemented election security measures saw a highjinx-free election where Democrats (now deprived of their Miami fraud machine) tanked.
This is the fundamental disagreement that I seem to be ending up at with nearly everyone that replied to me. If you believe significant fraud happens every year, then it happening again in 2020 doesn't need strong evidence. But, if you don't, like I don't, then you need much stronger evidence.
When did significant fraud stop and why?
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Except the steelman doesn't say that; no matter how many times you assert it, "genuinely believes the election was stolen" does not equal "incredibly dumb or incredibly crazy."
I agree there's another option (given that no evidence of fraud exists): that he always believes what it benefits him to believe but this is actually not dumb but clever in his case because it advantages a political actor to be convinced of their righteousness. In other words his brain is built differently not for truth seeking but winning and that is a good trait in a politician who is on your side.
Personally, this is close my philosophy of Trump (minus the "this is a good trait" part). He has a different relation to the truth.
There's a certain type of boss where he tells his employee to do something. The employee says it's not possible. But he keep telling him to do it and he finds a way to say yes. There may or may not be steelman reasons he tried to say no. It may be possible but stupid. It may come with some major caveats. He might just come up with something that looks vaguely like what the boss asked for thinking it will shut him up. But to said boss, he doesn't care about the details. It's indistinguishable from the employee just not wanting to do it.
I think Trump's way of doing things is that he can get anything with the right amount of influence and schmoozing, and the details can be fudged. An example would be that in his NY fraud case, he argued:
That different forms of measurement can come up with different results, therefore it's subjective whether a property is 10,000 sq ft or 30,000.
When Trump bought Mar-a-Lago he agreed that the property was for a private social club, and this zoning could not be changed without approval. He listed it without any restrictions, on the basis that he thought he could renegotiate that if needed.
That things he own are worth significantly more simply by having his name attached.
I think he doesn't care about facts, he cares about people, because he can get people to do whatever he wants. So when he calls Raffensperger, it's not actually about whether there was fraud. He just has to convince him to find 11,000 votes. Whether those votes exist or not doesn't matter because there's always a way to accomplish something. Claiming fraud exists is no different than flattering your business partner. It's a thing you say that gets you a good result.
Yes, and it means people here claiming that he was acting in good faith when trying to dispute the election results, because he really believes there was fraud, are making a kind of category error. There is not really such thing as 'acting in good faith' for someone with a brain like his.
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I asked someone else, but I'm curious your response to this too.
At a certain point, you need to either conclude that Alice is lying about not knowing the check is fake, Alice is incredibly dumb, Alice has some sort of amnesia, or that Alice is crazy in a way where she doesn't trust anything she hears.
Edit: I read your other reply to me after posting this, so I see that the example doesn't really apply since your priors of election fraud happening are much higher than mine. In order to make it actually apply to your world view, I'd have to add "Alice has a long history of receiving checks in the mail that everyone around says are fake, but are actually real", which would match your higher prior on election fraud being a common occurrence (and not match mine)
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I mean, of the Trump-voters here, I'd say probably about 30-40% are also living in Trump-world (which totally explains their intentions to vote for him), and the rest are so shit-scared of Kamala Harris that they think Trump's still the lesser evil*.
(I'm not a Trump-voter or a Harris-voter, because I'm not American. I'm grudgingly hoping Harris wins, but my main concern is totally orthogonal to any "normal" politics concerns; I'm concerned about WWIII and Trump's advanced age, although I'd far prefer Vance to Harris as leader of the free world.)
*If I had to point to a single thing as "if it were anyone but Trump opposing her this would be a slam-dunk", I'd point to the Fair Game notice on Elon Musk in retaliation for his uncensoring of Twitter. This is an ongoing attempt to censor the press for direct partisan advantage by use of government force - the sort of thing that can easily spiral into one-party state via media control - and it happened under Biden who's known to be more moderate than Harris. Frankly, I'm deeply disturbed by the extent to which this hasn't been a massive scandal.
What’s the “Fair Game notice”?
The literal Fair Game notice was/is a Scientology term; L. Ron Hubbard would declare someone "fair game", and this meant "use any and all means to ruin this person" (frivolous lawsuits, slander, illegal spying and leaking to tabloids, framing for crimes...).
There seems to be something akin to a Fair Game notice (though presumably not with that exact name) in place against Elon Musk following his purchase of Twitter (and gutting of its censorship bureau); loads of different federal agencies have done things to screw over unrelated Musk businesses (the one I recall off the top of my head is the FCC retracting the rural-Internet grant to Starlink, on the basis that it hadn't met the target yet, despite the target not being due for another couple of years; there's a dissent from that order which lists a bunch of others, though I don't know all the details, as well as noting that Biden was fairly open about this). My understanding is that this is half of the reason Musk's star has been waning recently (the other half being that Twitter isn't his sort of business and it's distracting him).
As noted, due to Twitter being among other things a news service, this is in direct opposition to freedom of the press (as well as impartial justice). You can plausibly argue that this is significantly worse than Watergate due to the sheer scale of the corrupt operation (the Sedition Act was still worse, but that was 225 years ago). But, uh, this seems to have not been a huge scandal, which has disturbing implications about the USA.
Has Musk's star been waning? The Starship booster landing the other day was probably the technological achievement of my lifetime.
His nominal net worth was less in early 2024 than it was when he bought Twitter; it's somewhat more now, but it's still nothing compared to the ridiculous rate at which it grew before that.
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His star has been waning, in that his image is under attack.
His achievements have been waxing, and this incongruence is part of the dirty political tricks we're complaining about.
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