Agree on DeSantis. I was completely wrong about his chances.

DeSantis is playing to a base that will never support anyone besides Trump IMO.

DeSantis seems like that guy you see at a backyard BBQ who's trying to hold court but ends up in solo conversations by sneaking up on people by grabbing their shoulder and saying something stupid loudly.

He can't lose eligibility. If where convicted on every account, he would still be eligible. The Constitutional requirements is silent on legal convictions. The craziest thing in the world would be him winning the election in Fulton county jail, which is not likely but not impossible.

There is a movement out there, believe it or no started by 2 guys from the federalist society, that he violated clause 3 of the 14th amendment and is ineligible to run.

Ultimately conviction or no the question of eligibility will be sent to the Supreme Court.

I think the chance of him being in the Fulton county jail as he wins the election is higher than that working.

Btw, hours after he said that Disney filed additional lawsuits against the state of Florida for breach of contract. I don't think they are moving on.

I don't know how it plays out, but it was a clear violation of the 1st Amendment. Guessing he wants to move on before they get to go through communication and get some of his employees into a deposition.

Maybe but this isn’t some fringe crackpot coming up with this. It’s ivy league scholars and members of the federalist society. You have to at least give it some credence.

Disney threatens small time bakeries who make Disney themed cakes. But I'm sure they'd "move on" for Ron.

I peeled off a raisin off the bottom of my shoe. I think it would make a GREAT republican candidate!

Scheduling is not confirmed yet but ...

Smart move for Trump. Smart move for Tucker. And for the first debate, I like it for the rest of the field. Gives them the ability to differentiate from one another vs. attacking/reacting to Trump.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/18/trum...r-carlson.html

It was Ivy league guys from the Federalist society who said that state legislatures can just throw out the votes of the people and decide who gets their state electors after a election. I don't trust Federalist society lawyers to come in out of the rain.

Unless I’m mistaken the federalist guys came up with it but the Yale lawyers looking at it aren’t part of them.

Apparently it's an increasingly minority opinion, but I still think it's a lot more important whether or not people are still going to support Trump than it is whether he is ruled ineligible to run. Him being ruled ineligible and people declaring victory over Trumpism doesn't fill me with happy thoughts; I'm not sure it does more than just kick the can down the road if that's all that happens.

re: ineligibility. What I've been reading says the only hope is the 14th amendment (insurrection). It'll be tested if he is convicted of that but suspect there's enough "gray" area stuff where he'll still sit in office if elected. And if it does get expedited to SCOTUS, fair chance he'll come out a winner.

So in other words, Dems need to forget their "hopism" and face reality that his name will be on the ballot. They better get their act together in supporting Joe and getting out the vote.

Thats a pipe dream. Trumpism is a cult and anyone who hasn't abandoned him at this point never will.

Best thing for our nation, at least in the relative short term is Trump is ruled ineligible, his base is disenfranchised and stays home, and this wretched current version of the GOP completes its death spiral and never holds power again.

The Supreme Court isn't going to rule Trump ineligible. All this is is an exercise for some bored Ivy leaguers.

If so, then Trump being ineligible doesn't gain us much. It doesn't address the underlying problem.

Of course it does. It ensures, at least for a time, that maniacs won't be running our government.

These people have always been here, Trump just let them crawl out from under their rocks and normalize this shit. Cut off the head of the snake and all those people will crawl back to where they came from.

We'll see, but I don't think this is the case. I don't think it's an accident that Trump emerged when he did and that a number of other nations saw a rise in similar forms of extremism to varying degrees at about the same time. We're not going to back to, for example, country-club Republicanism a la Romney and the Bushes no matter what happens to Trump. Modern democratic societies, especially but not soley the US, are more broken than that.

Do you honestly think there isn't a rather significant number of Trump supporters that will just stay home once he becomes irrelevant or dies?

For a lot of those people it isn't about politics or the GOP. They literally see him as a god like figure. They aren't turning out for anyone else.

It is why I think he has completely destroyed the party for the foreseeable future and good riddance I say. They likely can't win with him and certainly can't win without him.

It's a cult.

Why haven’t the indictments hurt?

In part it’s b/c Trump voters generally believe it's Trump who tells them the truth.
More than conservative media and their own friends & family.
Trump leads among those say it's very important a nominee is honest & trustworthy. pic.twitter.com/WwR8GWci8l

— CBS News Poll (@CBSNewsPoll) August 20, 2023

Yeah just kinda mindboggling to me, Trump has never once personally shown that he has evidence that the election was stolen. He could have released it any time and thrown the country into chaos more than it already is if it were true. After the election they lost over 60 lawsuits and won just one. But yet they keep still believing he has the evidence of Democrats cheating, even though no journalist from the right, left or independent has any evidence of it at all. People have gone to jail for years and years because they truly believed Trump's words over every one when there is nothing to back it up.



I hope the trials over Jan 6 are televised and they are finally forced to hear the evidence and Trump's lack of.

Yeah there's obviously some weird flavor of delusion going on in that world. I think if you pressed those exact same people about Trump's constant lying they would insist they know he exaggerates everything, and it's smart for him to him to cheat on his taxes, it's just good business to go bankrupt and defraud charities, it's manly for him to cheat on his wives, but in matters of politics he always tells the absolute truth...as long as you are wise enough to interpret it.

Speaking of cults...


https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/s...41330997416075

I overhear some people at work or around town, I think a lot of people don't care/don't really follow any of this, they vote Republican because they think maybe their gas will be a little cheaper, or they just don't like Democrats. I think we underestimate the number of people who don't follow any of this, who might not know anything about the charges or even know that they exist.

Or, that's a me using a defense mechanism...

My mom falls into this group. She doesn't know much of anything about Trump but has voted republican her whole life and continues to do so. She doesn't even know what the wedge issues between Dems/GOP tend to be. She lives in WV and gets the vast majority of her news from facebook, though, so she knows she likes Trump.

I think this is right, but it requires a lot of moderate GOPers to vote D and that's tough to make actually happen.

Historian Jon Meacham: “The only way to fix the GOP is to have it continue to lose. I genuinely believe that it will be the ballot that convinces Republicans that they have to do something about this flight from reason.”

The only way out is through. pic.twitter.com/uyx8oOMwXB

— Heath Mayo (@HeathMayo) August 20, 2023

They haven't won anything since 2016 and they're still on the Trump train because it drives turnout.

It's amazing, really. They allowed Trump to take such a hold on the GOP because he's driven away a significant portion of swing voters, turned away suburban moms and other groups, but he's brought in enough people that generally don't follow politics to keep elections competitive. Since that base is all that's keeping the GOP competitive right now they're trying to ride out the Trump wave. Losing isn't bothering them because accepting these MAGA voters is the only way they can win an election right now and the party refuses to look at the big picture in the long term.

The GOP has had countless opportunities to take an exit away from Trump yet here we are. I think it's naive at this point to think further losing is going to do anything more than embolden them to act on the belief that the only reason they're losing is because dems are stealing elections.

We're going to see MAGA splinter groups for the foreseeable future. Whether it's moms for liberty or whatever comes along next. These groups are really good at finding weaknesses in local leadership, taking over, and creating movements into national politics.

There aren't enough moderate Republicans left because they all electorally die in the primary. Liz Cheney went from 74% to 29% in 2 years because she voted to impeach their deity. She had voted with Trump 93% of the time previously.

The GOP hasn't lost enough. They need an LBJ or Reagan style ass whipping. They need a beating harsh enough so that they can't see a way to power without modifying their politics.

That won't take a huge amount of voters. If the GOP lost ten percent of their voters they would be wiped out nationally.

Once Trumo isnt the nominee they will.

My mom and stepdad fall into this as well. I try to tell them the awful shit that is being spewed by the right, but the church they go to gets political and alters their view of the candidates.

They are good people and they don't even had cable or local TV(they can only watch movies.) They live so far off the road they can't even get internet or a landline phone, let alone cell signal so most of the information they get....best I can call it....invented. It all comes from someone else and gets put through a strange leanse that I don't understand considering how good of people they are and how many people they help. My step-dad literally went to Guatemala as a missionary and used his skills as an electrical lineman to run electric to entire towns while he was there for no compensation. Alot of these people just don't understand how far these political parties have shifted.

Somehow it was predictable that the more he gets indicted the more his support grows.

I suspect that support comes from people in the GOP who were undecided but at the end of the day would have fallen in line with him as the nominee.

If independents or dems are buying in to the political persecution theory I would be very surprised but if they are we are fucked and we would get what we deserved.

Ramaswamy with another I'm not really a 9-11 truther comment.

What the hell is the suggestion there? The same as what was spread around the time that new Jewish people were at work in the towers on 911? They knew?

He went on to ask how many federal agents were involved in 1/6, but you can get to that without going through 9/11 conspiracies. He's either a truther or he sees some sort of value in communicating to believers that he's on their side.

Stolen from elsewhere:

First question at the GOP debate--raise your hand if you think Mike Pence should have been hanged on 1/6.

And every candidate eagerly raises their hand, including Mike Pence.

re: 9/11. I think too early to judge, he's saying he was misquoted. Per his request, no idea on when he asked for it, but you'd think the reporter can provide the recording (did the reporter really refuse?).

Access to this page has been denied

re: Jan 6. This one is more interesting. Unsure what he is getting at ... so what if there were federal agents a the Capitol? Is he saying they contributed to the rush into the Capitol?

Access to this page has been denied

Vivek, next time you sit down with a reporter, just do your own recording.

He did eventually get to 1/6, but he was clearly using 9/11 as a way to get to his point about 1/6. It doesn't make any logical sense to say he was really just talking about 1/6.

He asked for the recording which I think is fair (and the reporter shouldn't have an issue providing to him) so it's put up or shut up for him. Right now it's in the reporter's court.

I believe the Atlantic reporter has publically released the audio.

Thanks, saw it. Behind a paywall so I'll wait for the pundits to analyze who is right/wrong here.

Just basic conspiracy theory mumbo-jumbo then. Open with something you know is true, like "were there uncover Federal Agents in the crowd at 1/6?" (of course there were. The question is what they were doing not if they were there) or "the government has not told us everything about 9/11" (of course they haven't. There are intelligence gathering that will probably never be declassified because it would be dangerous if it were made public).

Trump's PAC trolling the upcoming debate by calling it the Vice Presidential Debate: Vice Presidential Debate 2024

And pretty sure they have the fly on Pence's head. The fact that so many of them are so spineless and cannot believe that he will burn it all down before letting anyone else run is hard to fathom.