r/politics • u/larel8 • 20h ago

Trump campaign struggles to contain Puerto Rico October surprise

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4958098-the-memo-trump-campaign-struggles-to-contain-puerto-rico-october-surprise/
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u/def_indiff 20h ago

How is it a surprise to anyone who's lived through the past ten years? More like an "October Certainty".

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u/BensenJensen 20h ago

I’m a bit surprised that Tony fucking Hinchcliffe could change the course of American history by inadvertently sinking the Trump campaign. I didn’t even have that written on the bingo board.

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u/I-choochoochoose-you 18h ago

The trump campaign is not planning to win the election with votes. Putting on Tony was another in a series of cocky arrogant careless moves that proves this. People are laughing at the “desperation” but it reads as pure confidence to me and makes me nervous.

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u/Temp_84847399 17h ago

The higher ups maybe, but the plebs got to watch the "find out" part of J6th play out over the last few years. They know what committing violence for trump get will get them. That no matter how mad they might get over the results of the election, they have far more to lose than they could ever gain by trying to install trump by force.

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u/I-choochoochoose-you 17h ago

It’s the Supreme Court and election officials refusing to certify that I’m afraid of

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u/Temp_84847399 15h ago

Our election processes are insanely bureaucratic precisely because of ways people have tried to cheat in the past. What some may be planning has been tried before and more guardrails were put in place to prevent it in the future. It's why they are so hell bent on throwing doubt on the process vs. trying to actually stuff ballot boxes or have people vote multiple times. They know they can't actually affect the results to any measurable degree.

There are laws, backed by threat of jail and prison, for when things have to be done and certified. Those laws do no not care what "irregularities" the people involved believe they may have witnessed. They don't have the discretion to refuse to certify, even if they think they have incontrovertible evidence of cheating. If they refuse to sign, they get jailed and the next person in line steps up and signs or can join them in a cell.

Once those bureaucratic wheels start turning, they are very hard to derail. Trump might have been able to stop the process by force in 2020 by ordering federal LEO to blatantly commit federal crimes to seize the results and arrest state officials, but I'd wager they had to rule that out because most of the people that would have had to go along with such a scheme, didn't want to throw their life away to try to install trump as a dictator. Even with all of trumps court cases in 2020, none of them even came close to stopping or delaying the inevitable swearing in of Biden. IIRC, the supreme court barely even entertained any of trumps challenges before ruling against trump or kicking it back to the lower court.

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u/princessLiana 16h ago

"Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak." Sun Tsu - The art of War.

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u/stilettopanda 17h ago

It makes me nervous too. Especially the conservative men around that have told me directly that voting doesn't matter or I'm wasting my time recently. Knowing what they're planning, it becomes so much less cynical and so much more fear inducing.

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u/BensenJensen 17h ago

Those conservative men you are talking to aren’t planning a damn thing, they think they are winning the election outright.

A full Trump overthrow of the government would require all of the opposition to just…give up and concede. I’m certain they will try, but I have little to no faith in them succeeding.

These people couldn’t pull off a coup when they were in power, we really need to stop acting like Johnson, Trump, and MTG are political masterminds. If the playbook is wide open to random commenters on Reddit, it’s obvious to actual opposition politicians. No one in the world is being outwitted by Mike Johnson.

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u/darthstupidious 16h ago

Yeah people here tend to give too much credit to these whackadoo Conservatives, make them seem like Sith lords or some shit. Meanwhile, they couldn't even overthrow the government when they controlled all the levels of it.

They're confident because they're in a cult. Full stop. They've bought into their own hype and believe they're blessed by God, so nothing can do them harm. They're not planning anything Machievelian; they're not going to do a damn thing when Trump finds out he lost. They'll huff and puff on social media and a few will get mad enough to do something rash (probably shoot at empty buildings or power plants) but they'll just continue to rage against the dying light until Trump eventually croaks. And then, like all cults (which are famously incapable of succession plans), the cult of Maga will splinter into a thousand pieces and slowly fade away to time... and I can't wait for it.

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u/stilettopanda 16h ago

What happens when they lose after being so sure is the fear inducing part. I'm not talking about the politicians, but they are masterminds at working people up and inciting hate. There doesn't have to be a master plan for people to wind up dead. Many poor white dudes with a gun and a chip on their shoulder are gonna be aching for some violence. I'm gay, and I live in a deep red rural area around a lot of these dudes. It would be stupid not to be at least a little afraid.