No Meaningful Midterm Elections???
Not sure what Trump would mean by such. He alone can not stop elections.
“Trump Keeps Saying We Won’t Have Meaningful Midterms”
Plus “missionary lizards” and JD Vance, plus homicidally stupid press tricks, plus music.
Not in those exact words, of course; even our self-mutilated institutional press would have to report that. But he has made plain that he views a potential GOP loss as apocalyptic, and he has taken or supported measures aimed at tilting the elections in his favor, including but not limited to pressuring states into mid-census efforts to gerrymander Democrats out of their seats and pushing for ever more restrictive voting requirements.
More than that, though, he precipitated a violent insurrection aimed at invalidating his 2020 loss, and has since demanded and gotten an effort from congressional Republicans and regime officials to erase that picture and replace it with a pastoral scene of patriots handing out flowers to cops instead of beating them.
And of course he set out on a years-long effort through the courts and the reactionary media to create the enduring myth that the 2020 election was stolen—a myth that the courtroom rout of Fox News following their assault on Dominion Voting Systems, which led to a near-billion dollar settlement with the primary villain of the myth, didn’t dent.
And oh yeah—Dominion has since been sold to a former GOP election official from St. Louis, who changed the company name to Liberty Voting but promises nothing else will change. The nothing else that will change will be not changing just in time for the midterms, coincidentally.
Throughout his current term, Trump and other regime officials have been threatening to flood large Democratic-leaning cities with federal thugs and National Guard troops, and we’ve seen him both carry out those threats to varying extents and, probably more important, successfully inciting his homeland security troops, whose numbers the regime hope to increase by 10,000 or more, to violence.
One of the more extreme measures, along with declaring martial law, that Trump was urged to take by his more virulent supporters after the 2020 election was sending the National Guard in to seize Dominion voting machines in the swing states he lost. He was ultimately persuaded not to do that by, among others, the then-amazingly corrupt attorney general William Barr, who, unlike the current occupant of the office, was apparently possessed of at least one remaining democratic principle.
But, as Trump told the New York Times last week, he very much regrets that decision.
President Trump said during an interview with The New York Times that he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his loss in the 2020 election, even though he doubted whether the Guard was “sophisticated enough” to carry out the order effectively.
The remarks by Mr. Trump in the interview last week harked back to one of the most perilous moments from his first term in office, when he was urged by some advisers to order his national security agencies to take control of machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems in an effort to find evidence that they had been hacked to rig the election against him.
The headline on the story is weirdly straightforward by Times standards: “Trump Regrets Not Seizing Voting Machines After 2020 Election.” The story itself dilutes the impact of the headline somewhat by ascribing Trump a motive—something the paper has historically been unwilling to do when the subject is a love of violence, or racism, misogyny, xenophobia or some other form of bigotry.
He wanted, they say, to prove fraud; no hint that he may have simply wanted to reverse the election results at gunpoint, which would be the obvious motive if a different one hadn’t been stated—especially in light of what he did a few weeks later with his failed insurrection.
Still, the story stated plainly that he wanted to seize voting machines in states he lost and that he would have used the military to do it, although the reporters ignored the question of what would happen to the machines afterward or whether they could even be used to prove fraud if it existed.
Trump didn’t have compliant military or Pentagon leaders at that point but he does now, and he doesn’t have advisors willing to contravene what he wants. He’s been able to either compel or persuade some of his top military officers to take and give illegal orders, and he has advisors and cabinet heads, including Whisky Pete, who fetishize violence as much as he does.
None of that appears in the story, but it’s all true and it all bears upon what he’s willing to do and what his capabilities are.