What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[grumbler]

I think it is more insidious than that.  In contrast to 2000, when the Court waded into a process operating in accordance with state laws and procedures, here there would be 5 votes for abstaining altogether, declaring the controversy to be a political question, and washing the Court's hands of consequences.

That abstention would allow the GOP to take advantage of an asymmetry in mendacity - while close wins for the GOP candidate would stay that way as local Democrats respected the results, close (and even not so close) Democrat wins would be plunged into witless disputes.

But in your case, the republicans would be dependent on each state's supreme court to back their play, which might be tricky of there are multiple states in play.  By appealing unfavorable decisions of the state supreme courts to the USSC (as in Florida 2000), the republicans are guaranteed to succeed in their coup.  I agree with you that the USSC would prefer to simply say that it is a political decision out of their hands, but they may be directed to do otherwise if the republicans need them to act affirmatively.

[Tonitrus]

But that is exactly the form such a coup could take; 2020 was a poorly choreographed dress rehersal that failed because key GOP election officials wouldn't help stage it.  Now many of those people are gone and replaced by cultists. If legislators and activists connive to force through a bogus electoral slate to override the real one, and it one or both sides has no interest in compromise, than the institutions of state are up for grabs.

Yep.  The coup comes when Republican governors or legislatures refuse to accept the actual results of the election, declare the election in their state fraudulent, and appoint their onw republican electors in violation of the prohibition on changing the method of selecting electors after the election.  An immediate appeal to the USSC, as in 2000, would result in the USSC ruling, 5-4, that there was indeed fraud and the governors/legislators were had the power in such an emergency to override the prohibition on changing methods after the election, and that the Republican candidate won the EC vote.

It would be 100% bullshit and 100% effective.  The bent USSC can trivially kill US democracy, and the majority has the desire to do so.

I worry that some of the more nefarious state-level GOP types are doing the electoral law/procedure changes to prevent the bolded bit...by getting ahead of the vote certification/elector selection and just throwing out enough ballots/invalidating certain results they don't like, perhaps at the county or precinct level, so that they can say there wasn't any such change in method in the first place.

[Sheilbh]

One for the secession chat
https://twitter.com/VoteNewEngland
The New England Party
@VoteNewEngland
The only pro-New England independence party running candidates at every level to give New Englanders a people's vote on leaving the "United" States.

[viper37]

One for the secession chat
https://twitter.com/VoteNewEngland
The New England Party
@VoteNewEngland
The only pro-New England independence party running candidates at every level to give New Englanders a people's vote on leaving the "United" States.

I'd love to see this happen and have the Southern States declare war to preserve the Union

[grumbler]

One for the secession chat
https://twitter.com/VoteNewEngland
The New England Party
@VoteNewEngland
The only pro-New England independence party running candidates at every level to give New Englanders a people's vote on leaving the "United" States.

I'd love to see this happen and have the Southern States declare war to preserve the Union

Then maybe the Pacific States of America could also secede and we'd get to experience the thrill of a Kaiserreich scenario come to life! :woot:

[Valmy]

One for the secession chat
https://twitter.com/VoteNewEngland
The New England Party
@VoteNewEngland
The only pro-New England independence party running candidates at every level to give New Englanders a people's vote on leaving the "United" States.

I'd love to see this happen and have the Southern States declare war to preserve the Union

A nationalist loving mass death and destruction? Typical.

[viper37]

Then maybe the Pacific States of America could also secede and we'd get to experience the thrill of a Kaiserreich scenario come to life! :woot:

I'm sure the Red States would be supportive of that too, States rights&all that kind of things

[viper37]

A nationalist loving mass death and destruction? Typical.

For real, it would suck.  But as strategy game, Total War: USA sounds fun

[Razgovory]

Republicans are outraged that Mark Milley was calling the Chinese trying to convince them that Donald Trump wasn't going to start a war.  Nikki Haley pointed out, correctly, that this could happen to any President.  If Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff believed that Biden was going to start a nuclear war to punish the world for rejecting him I would support pretty much any action to prevent that from happening.

[Zoupa]

Republicans are outraged that Mark Milley was calling the Chinese trying to convince them that Donald Trump wasn't going to start a war.  Nikki Haley pointed out, correctly, that this could happen to any President.  If Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff believed that Biden was going to start a nuclear war to punish the world for rejecting him I would support pretty much any action to prevent that from happening.

Yes, but you're not in a cult.

[Sheilbh]

Republicans are outraged that Mark Milley was calling the Chinese trying to convince them that Donald Trump wasn't going to start a war.  Nikki Haley pointed out, correctly, that this could happen to any President.  If Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff believed that Biden was going to start a nuclear war to punish the world for rejecting him I would support pretty much any action to prevent that from happening.

That's true but not necessarily re-assuring. I suppose it happened with Nixon - that we know of.

The thing I find more alarming is that the Chinese needed reassuring because of how erratic Trump's behaviour and statements were - how worried were they that the nukes might be used? I don't want to say it's full Able Archer terror - but the fact this was a fear in Beijing is scary because that's the environment where someone makes the wrong decision and we're all fucked

[Admiral Yi]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMViO9dNS3k

Only 100-200 show up for Justice for J6 rally, outnumbered by cops.

[FunkMonk]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMViO9dNS3k

Only 100-200 show up for Justice for J6 rally, outnumbered by cops.

The thing that is frightening about this isn't the numbers of people involved in the protest but the outsized influence these people have in the Republican party and the right in general.

[Razgovory]

Is this meaningful?

Trump Campaign Knew Lawyers' Voting Machine Claims Were Baseless, Memo Shows


Days before lawyers allied with Donald Trump gave a news conference promoting election conspiracy theories, his campaign had determined that many of those claims were false, court filings reveal.

Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party's headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump.

But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on Monday evening.

By the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump's campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue.

The court papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless.

The documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Mr. Trump.

According to emails contained in the documents, Zach Parkinson, then the campaign's deputy director of communications, reached out to subordinates on Nov. 13 asking them to "substantiate or debunk" several matters concerning Dominion. The next day, the emails show, Mr. Parkinson received a copy of a memo cobbled together by his staff from what largely appear to be news articles and public fact-checking services.

Even though the memo was hastily assembled, it rebutted a series of allegations that Ms. Powell and others were making in public. It found:

That Dominion did not use voting technology from the software company, Smartmatic, in the 2020 election.

That Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Mr. Soros.

And that there was no evidence that Dominion's leadership had connections to left-wing "antifa" activists, as Ms. Powell and others had claimed.

As Mr. Coomer's lawyers wrote in their motion in the defamation suit, "The memo produced by the Trump campaign shows that, at least internally, the Trump campaign found there was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories regarding Dominion" and Mr. Coomer.

Even at the time, many political observers and voters, Democratic and Republican alike, dismissed the efforts by Ms. Powell and other pro-Trump lawyers like Rudolph W. Giuliani as a wild, last-ditch attempt to appease a defeated president in denial of his loss. But the false theories they spread quickly gained currency in the conservative media and endure nearly a year later.

It is unclear if Mr. Trump knew about or saw the memo; still, the documents suggest that his campaign's communications staff remained silent about what it knew of the claims against Dominion at a moment when the allegations were circulating freely.

"The Trump campaign continued to allow its agents," the motion says, "to advance debunked conspiracy theories and defame" Mr. Coomer, "apparently without providing them with their own research debunking those theories."

Mr. Coomer, Dominion's onetime director of product strategy and security, sued Ms. Powell, Mr. Giuliani, the Trump campaign and others last year in state district court in Denver. He has said that after the election, he was wrongly accused by a right-wing podcast host of hacking his company's systems to ensure Mr. Trump's defeat and of then telling left-wing activists that he had done so.

Soon after the host, Joe Oltmann, made these accusations, they were seized upon and amplified by Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani, who were part of a self-described "elite strike force" of lawyers leading the charge in challenging Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s victory.

On Nov. 19, for example, Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani appeared together at the news conference at the Republican National Committee's headquarters and placed Mr. Coomer at the center of a plot to hijack the election by hacking Dominion's voting machines. By Ms. Powell's account that day, the conspiracy included Smartmatic, Venezuelan officials, people connected to Mr. Soros and a "massive influence of communist money."

Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani did not respond to messages seeking comment on the documents. Representatives for Mr. Trump also did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Mr. Trump continues to falsely argue that the election was stolen from him, and in recent months Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani have stuck by their claims that the election was rife with fraud. A lawyer for Mr. Giuliani said in a court filing last month that at least some of his claims of election fraud were "substantially true."

And as recently as three weeks ago, Ms. Powell told a reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the 2020 election was "essentially a bloodless coup where they took over the presidency of the United States without a single shot being fired."

It remains unclear how widely the memo was circulated among Trump campaign staff members. According to the court documents, Mr. Giuliani said in a deposition that he had not seen the memo before he gave his presentation in Washington, and he questioned the motives of those who had prepared it.

"They wanted Trump to lose because they could raise more money," Mr. Giuliani was quoted as saying in the deposition.

But at the time that the internal report was prepared, Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell were both "active supervisors," as he put it in his deposition, in the Trump campaign's broader plan to challenge the election results — an effort that eventually included more than 60 failed lawsuits filed across the country. While Ms. Powell soon went her own way in claiming that Dominion had conspired to steal the election, Mr. Giuliani continued working closely with Mr. Trump and his campaign, ultimately changing strategies and seeking to persuade state legislatures to overturn the popular vote.

The motion notes that "the lines were blurred" as to whom Ms. Powell was working for at the time: herself, her nonprofit organization or the Trump campaign. Almost immediately after she promoted the conspiracy theory about Dominion at the news conference in November, Mr. Trump sought to distance himself from her. But by December, as Mr. Trump's legal options narrowed, the former president considered bringing her back into the fold and discussed whether to appoint her as a special counsel overseeing an investigation of voter fraud.

The release of the documents was only the latest legal trouble for Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell, both of whom have been sued directly by Dominion for defamation. Dominion has also brought a defamation suit against Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, for amplifying false election claims. Last month, a federal judge in Washington ruled that the cases could continue moving toward trial.

About the same time, a federal judge in Detroit ordered penalties to be levied against Ms. Powell and eight other pro-Trump lawyers — Mr. Giuliani was not among them — who filed a lawsuit that sought to overturn the election results in Michigan using the false claims about Dominion.

"This case was never about fraud," the judge, Linda V. Parker, wrote in her decision. "It was about undermining the people's faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so."

In June, a New York court suspended Mr. Giuliani's law license, ruling that he had made "demonstrably false and misleading statements" while fighting the results of last year's election for Mr. Trump.

Even recently, the new court documents say, former Trump campaign officials have continued to cling to the baseless notion that the election was marred by fraud.

When lawyers for Mr. Coomer asked Sean Dollman, a representative of the Trump campaign, in a deposition if the campaign still believed that the election was fraudulent, he answered, "Yes, sir."

The lawyers then asked, "What is that opinion based on?"

According to the court documents, Mr. Dollman gave a less than certain answer.

"We have no underlying definite facts that it wasn't," he said.

[The Minsky Moment]

Is this meaningful?

It could affect the sanctions litigation around the baseless cases brought by the campaign as well as disciplinary hearings for the attorneys involved.