Donald Trump appears to believe that the way to win elections is to discourage people from voting:
Speaking at the Monday event in Derry, Trump once again alluded to his baseless claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
“So we have to be careful, you gotta get out there and you got to watch those voters,” Trump said. “You don’t have to vote, don’t worry about voting. The voting, we got plenty of votes, you gotta watch” [Matthew Loh, “Trump Told His Fans They ‘Don’t Have to Vote’ and Should ‘Watch’ Other Voters Instead,” Business Insider, 2023.10.23].
My pragmatic response should be, you bet: stand there and watch me and 81 million other patriots save our country again from your knuckleheaded tyranny. But my philosophical and integrous response is, Don’t listen to that moron. He’s wrong about everything else, and he’s wrong about the value of voting. Standing around watching other people vote won’t stop voter fraud, since there’s no voter fraud to stop. Never assume you have enough votes to win and that you thus don’t have to turn out more votes. You want to win? Go vote!
Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin agrees with me on at least the last couple sentences. In the midst of early voting in Virginia’s keenly watched legislative and special Congressional election, the last thing Republican Governor Youngking wants is for Republicans to listen to Trump’s advice:
“Every single vote matters, and it’s the people that show up and vote that are gonna decide the election,” Youngkin said to Blake Burman on The Hill on NewsNation. “I wanna get ‘em all voting.”
…“Given the fact that the rules are the rules, and they’re the ones that I inherited and we have 45 days to vote in Virginia, I’m gonna get everybody out to vote,” Youngkin said on The Hill.
“And therefore, we’ve really pushed hard for people to go to secureyourvotevirginia.com,” Youngkin continued. “Make a plan to vote early” [Tara Suter, “Youngkin Dismisses Trump Early Voting Comments: ‘Every Single Vote Matters’,” The Hill, 2023.10.24].
Republicans, don’t listen to anybody who tells you not to vote. Or if you just can’t shake your Trumpism, meet him halfway: don’t vote… for Trump, but vote for someone else who believes in elections (which Virginia Republicans may have a chance to do on Super Tuesday, March 5, 2024).
I used to poll watch for the Democratic Party in South Dakota. I’d sit there for hours alongside a poll watcher for the Republican Party. We never found one person who was voting fraudulently. If that’s what you think the purpose of poll watching is, stay home. The purpose of poll watching is to see who didn’t vote, and then make calls to remind them to vote, to see if they need a ride to the polls or an absentee ballot. The purpose is to get more people to vote. You can tell Trump doesn’t know anything about poll watching.
Trump’s a goof. I’ve ran poll booths and I don’t see how it’s even possible for fraudulant votes with all the checks and balances. Every poll worker would have to be in cahoots and thats unlikely because they have to be from different parties.
Evidence mounts by the day that the only way MAGA extremists return to some small degree of sanity is when they realize the jailhouse doors are slamming behind them. Guilty pleas/plea deals by Trump legal team members (Mark Meadows, Jenna Ellis, etal) will likely be followed by others among the indicted. Hate Radio personalities will trash everyone taking a deal to avoid jail time and their audiences will believe every lie they promote without any thought about being played for fools and idiots. It’s truly a sad state of affairs for our state and country.
I think he said not to vote since they already have plenty of votes because he has another coup up his sleeve. It wasn’t a good idea to hand Hitler his second opportunity to gain power, knowing he committed treason already. Being a traitor is not a redeemable trait.
@AllMammal – Maybe his motive is that he’s got a Russian internet hack in place to disrupt and corrupt the vote count. Probably upset his plan when Covid allowed mail-in ballots.
Bingo- P. Aitch. Who could be surprised if Trump and Putin have a whole slew of violent upheavals in the works to disrupt this next election season even more than covid did? Just like Hitler did with the mysterious Reichstag fire that happened to burn down the German parliament. This guy is transparent if you just read history.
@AllMamml – There’s zero evidence that Trump has read any book cover to cover since he took an entire marriage to get through Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” which his wife testified in divorce court sat next to his pillow on his nightstand during their union .
Trump’s not a reader and it shows.
Honestly? I’m terrified the GOP will assassinate our POTUS and VPOTUS then install the newest Republican Speaker of the House who would name Herr Trump his Veep then step down.
You’re completely right, P. It shows the only book Trump has ever read is “Mein Kampf”. His drilling and repeating of the big lie, using simple language, warning about losing the purity of the blood, trying to undermine the press, using scapegoats, etc. He has only read one book; the dictator’s playbook. He has been bragging how he discovered the spelling of US and us are similar. Hahaha. How can he be any worse than he was the day prior? It’s incredible.
Mike Johnson is one scary Earth hating christian who is entirely detestable enough to have Joe and Kamala murdered then ascend the throne.
https://newrepublic.com/post/176439/republicans-elect-mike-johnson-speaker-christian-election-denier
Mr. Kurtz, that would be the start of the balkanizing of the US. The ballot boxes will be the prize and we all have to keep our eye on that prize. think when the madmen pull their rabbit out of the hat and declare that Social Security, Medicare and women’s rights, are gonna be eliminated, we might just eat the rich.
I hope you’re right, Jerry but predict nary a whimper nevertheless.
Trump discovered that empowering angry minds to see themselves as “victims” was his key to being revered.
Trumps probably claimed to be a victim of someone or something more times than he’s told a lie and there’s a solid record of every lie he’s told since entering politics.
It’s hundreds of thousands by now.
Mike Johnson’s own words “We have to get back to [entitlement reform] as a No. 1 priority. The CBO [Congressional Budget Office] says that entitlement spending, which they define as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt—those four obligations, we’ve eclipsed GDP in, what, a dozen years or something? I mean, this is not— this can no longer be kicked down the road. You can’t wait eight years to address this. It has to happen yesterday. So we have to have our hand at the wheel and do this. We are completely derelict in our duty. We’re rearranging furniture on the Titanic if we don’t get this problem under control.”
Mike Johnson will throw Granny off the cliff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGnE83A1Z4U
All Mammal is correct to look to the history of the fascists of the 1920s-1940s to see where the Republicans would take this country. A good book on that history is “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s rise to power and the downfall of the Weimar Republic” by Benjamin Carter Hett. It’s startling to see so many parallels to the Nazis in the way the modern Republican Party behaves. I read this book about six years ago and thought that a major difference between the fascist parties of the 1920s-1940s was that the modern Republican Party does not have a squadristi or Stormtroopers to mete out political violence. That difference no longer is true, as we saw on January 6.
Another good book about the lead-up to WWII is “In the Garden of Beasts,” by Erik Larson. The names, “Hitler,” “Goebbels,” “Goering,” “Heydrich,” et. al., could easily be interchanged with Trump, et. al.
If the place ever gets balkanized, California is the place ya otta be, load up your truck and move to Beverly. “Governor Newsom Meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping
Published: Oct 25, 2023
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: Governor Newsom met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and other high-level Chinese officials to discuss climate action, economic development, cultural exchange, human rights concerns, and democracy.
BEIJING – On Wednesday, Governor Gavin Newsom met with President Xi Jinping in China’s capital city of Beijing. The Governor also met Wednesday with Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Vice President Han Zheng and signed a new climate-focused Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the National Development and Reform Commission Chairman Zheng Shanjie. The Governor was joined by U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns for the series of discussions.”
Damn good idea to keep those gates open. We will be just fine here even against all of these mikey headwinds.
It’s my aspiration that the MAGA crowd follows their orange lemming over the cliff: not voting and drinking chlorine to prevent COVID.
The US needs the MAGA zealots like the US needed the Tories and confederates. They all deserve the same fate, sooner rather than later.
Now that MAGA are all-in on stolen elections, they must not vote because losing the election needs to be the proof that violent insurrection is the only path to proper installation of leaders (and freedom).
Even as I type that, I realize that the MAGA cult is so detached from reality and reason that there is no such thing as reason and evidence. The narrative is what Donald Trump says it is — end of story.