He hasn't been afraid to say the quiet part out loud for a while now. This isn't news, it's more like a final echo off of a once-distant wall that's just about within reach.
If enough people don't get off their ass in November and vote to put Harris, the only other ACTUALLY REALISTIC choice, into office, then the final dominoes will fall.
I'm looking at all of you casual voters who don't go every time. I'm looking at you independent voters. I'm looking at you remaining "undecided" wafflers. I'm looking at you unregistered "it's too hard “ and "I'm too busy" people.
If Trump gets into office again, that's on all of you, and you're gonna be part of the problem if you aren't part of the solution. NOBODY else is gonna do it for you. NONE of the other names that might appear on a ballot in your state will have a snowball's chance in hell. If you don't like Harris, that's fine, you don't have to like her, but choosing not to vote for Harris is giving your vote to Trump.
So get off your lazy ass for a few minutes to help save the world for what looks like it might be more than the next 4 years; it could be for a lot longer. And while you're at it, if you keep voting Republicans into Congress, State, and local governments, (where most of the power ACTUALLY is), then they will keep working us all toward this kind of position. Stop putting them in power. Period.
If Trump gets into office again, that’s on all of you, and you’re gonna be part of the problem if you aren’t part of the solution. NOBODY else is gonna do it for you. NONE of the other names that might appear on a ballot in your state will have a snowball’s chance in hell. If you don’t like Harris, that’s fine, you don’t have to like her, but choosing not to vote for Harris is giving your vote to Trump.
I have a cousin who insists on voting for Jill Stein because she doesn't want to vote for Trump but "I could never in good conscience vote for a Democrat". I know people who buy into the "I have to withhold my vote (or vote third party, or whatever) because withholding your vote is the only way to force change and bring about ranked choice voting". I know people who won't vote for Biden over Afghanistan or the Israel conflict while fully acknowledging that Trump would be exponentially worse, but saying "Voting for Biden (now Harris) would be endorsing his actions, so I can't do that."
And sadly, I do wonder how many of these people are just closet Republicans who are down with the racism and bigotry, and use those reasons to justify the fact that they just really wanted to vote for Trump in the first place but aren't ready to admit it yet.
Some of these people don't know how the system works, and others don't care. They believe they're taking some kind of "principled stance" and think that somehow, in a two-person race (none of the other independent candidates even appear on enough ballots to make it to 270 in the first place), they can get people to not vote for Biden (now Harris) but still somehow not end up with Trump, as long as they Jill Stein hard enough.
They don't understand......One road leads to Harris. All other roads lead to Trump. There are no other candidates that could even mathematically make it to 270. As the song goes, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." Voting third party, or not voting at all in 'protest', is just voting for Trump with extra steps.
So get off your lazy ass for a few minutes to help save the world for what looks like it might be more than the next 4 years; it could be for a lot longer. And while you’re at it, if you keep voting Republicans into Congress, State, and local governments, (where most of the power ACTUALLY is), then they will keep working us all toward this kind of position. Stop putting them in power. Period.
And this is where you can tell who are the closeted Republicans. If they're voting D at the top of the ticket, then voting R downballot, they're a closeted Republican. They may not want to have to justifty their vote when they're sitting around with friends and family talking about the President, or your state governor, or whatever, where voting for Trump may still be considered embarrassing. But they'll have no problem voting for the bigot to sit on their local school board because they know nobody's gonna talk about who voted for who in the school board election of East Bumfuck, Nowhere.
It's why all but the most extreme (and often unemployed, violent felons) Proud Boys or Klansmen won't show up in public with their faces exposed. They want all the racism and bigotry, they just don't want to be covered with all the stink that goes along with it. So they quietly vote these people into power so they can get what they want while still pretending to be Democrats until they think they don't need to pretend any more.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again because I have seen no reason to believe otherwise: These issues will never go away until we address the systemic racism in this country at a grassroots level. And we have not even achieved step 1: We need to acknowledge that there are a lot more racists and bigots in this country than we were comfortable admitting to, and those people see everything that Trump has to offer and are saying "Yes, we want more of that.". But as a country, we are not willing to admit how deep the problem is and have spent the past 60 or so years pretending to solve the problem when all we've really managed to accomplish is sweeping it under the rug and pretending it doesn't exist, and we are now seeing the results of pretending that a significant portion of our voting base that is just as racist now as they were back in the 60s and before are just some fringe lunatics that can be safely ignored. They are not. There are a lot of them, and Trump has successfully coralled them into a very powerful voting bloc. And until that is addressed, this problem will continue no matter how many band-aids you try to stick on it. I'm not even saying I have any kind of a solution to that problem -- I'm a straight, white guy after all, but I do know enough to be able to say I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that what we're doing isn't it.
"Hmn, I think these folks driving tanks into our town hall and lining people up against the wall... they might be up to no good, we should spread awareness!"
This is the biggest thing that pisses me off about the left, they want to remove our ability to protect ourselves and not be turned into ground human. I've said it a bunch, if the dems wanted to make the Republican party vanish over night, all they would have to do is drop gun control agenda. The republicans would fade into history in under a decade, and a new party would have to take its place.
I am willing to accept that he mostly means "we'll fix the country so it won't be a close call ever again". I also am willing to accept he subconsciously means "I just need to pardon myself and I can't run again anyway, so I don't give a crap what you do afterwards".
Thing is, both of those are disqualifying, too, so... no real good options here.
Which is totally doable, just look at some of the hopelessly gerrymandered states. Wisconsin comes to mind. A judge was elected, to maybe fix it, but it still proves a point. I’m sure there are other states.
I really want to give him the entirely unwarranted benefit of the doubt that he's saying it won't matter in 4 years bc he won't be running (making the assumption he'll win this time and reach his term limit) but having watched the video I dunno, that "we'll have it fixed by then" sounds reeeeaaally ominous.
It looks like the real benefit of the doubt is that he's hopefully talking about laws on voter ID being fixed. Still, what the hell is a presidential candidate doing telling people they don't need to vote anymore? Even with the benefit of the doubt, this shit is ominous.
Edit: to be clear, I don't give him the benefit of the doubt. All I'm saying is if somebody wants to, this is the best they're able to do. It's also important to be aware of the context of the quote, even if you believe he means it in the worst way.
Lucian Truscott thinks it is all about not having elections any longer once he gets in. I'm not so sure. I think it means more that he will get the "Christian" agenda put in place so his MAGA crowd no longer has to fight to get their ideas ensconced into law. But his entire approach has been that he will contest the election if he doesn't win. And he certainly didn't want to abide by the voters actions last election. He wants to rule for life. And then he wants his sons to take over.
A Christian agenda, not the Christian agenda. The thing that most people don't get is that in the USA alone there are at least 200 different sects of Christianity and they have some very different ideas and they feel very strongly about those difference. Any voter who thinks Trump is going to enshrine their particular flavor of Christianity as law is a fool twice over. Even if he did manage to enshrine any particular sects rules into law, the chances of it being that particular voter's flavor of Christianity is incredibly small.
I have said a version of this to a lot of rural people who vote R and do nothing. They all beg for a time when their town had a major “downtown” with ice cream shops playing 1950’s music.
What they don’t realize is once P2025 goes into action these people will have no more use for them and they will be left to die. No more welfare, no more Medicare. Most of rural America will wither away because they don’t do anything. Farms are corpo owned and operated.
Rural America will be turned into a wasteland by republicans.
So think of the SpongeBob meme where he keeps revealing more dirty diapers. We are currently at the panel where he points out the window to the mountain of diapers.
How does he know that everything deranged people want is the same as what Christians in the U.S. want? Christians and deranged republicans don’t form a circle Venn diagram
Trump is the most dangerous figure in American politics. He's a demagogue, and a fascist insurrectionist. It's certainly arguable that he's saying 'we'll rig future elections so Christians always get their way' because we know that's what he has already tried to do and what he will undoubtedly do again if given the chance.
But it's equally arguable that he's saying 'we'll have the country fixed over four years, so Christians won't need to even bother voting again.' I've watched the video a few times and I think if you listen to his stilted speech it's clear he's doing his con artist/salesman schtick and saying 'believe me I'll fix your country so good you won't need another President.' Not to say that this doesn't also betray his anti-Democratic views, but I don't think this quote is the gotcha that everyone seems to think it is