It was a foregone conclusion that Trump would lose the TX case, but why did he say “This is the big one?” 1/9

Because the TX case rested on the proposition that a national election can be nullified and “overturned” (a term Trump actually used in a tweet) on the grounds that it does not satisfy conditions determined by the incumbent president 2/9
and the states governed by that president’s political party--
(e..g., no votes by voters receiving mail-in ballots who do not request those ballots shall be deemed legitimate.) 3/9
This litigation was intended to nullify all the votes in all 50 states, and would have called for a new election. It challenged election procedures, not just election results. And it did not require any proof of fraud or undercounts or overcounts. 4/9
In other words, no national election can be legitimate that fails to reelect the incumbent president--in this case of course, Donald J. Trump, the Supreme Leader of the *real* America. 5/9
(Note that the litigation was entered *after* the election had been held and the GOP’s incumbent president had lost, so the litigation wasn’t even timely.)

This was an attempt to create a permanent authoritarian minority government. 6/9
In the 1930s, this sort of thing was called fascism in Europe. In today’s world it is called “managed democracy” or “authoritarian state elections”---exactly as in Putin’s Russia. 7/9
17 red states and 126 House Republicans signed on to it.

We are now faced with a treasonous war against majoritarian democracy, free elections, and the Constitutional rule of law in America by the Trumpian GOP. 8/9
As David Frum has predicted: “If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” 9/9

More from Thomas Wood 🌊

More from Trump

1. Yes, Trump will claim to intend to target GOP senators up for reelection in '22 (like he did to Thune with Kristi Noem) if they don't join in @HawleyMO's sedition on Jan. 6, but the fact is, it's not clear whether Trump will be successful in ANY of those efforts & voting yes


2. to hedge off these threats will also create fissures & fractures for these incumbents among other elements of their party that could complicate their renominations. Indeed, what worries me the most about the potential for the country to slip into @anneapplebaum territory is

3. that what should be robust and intense push back from the party establishment against actually ending democracy- bc that's what Trump's request would do, if it was granted, is fairly muted. What we SHOULD be seeing from the mainstream of the party is threats to strip committee

4. assignments, chairs, privileges, even reelection funds, if anyone gets involved in this bullshit- in the House & the Senate, and the fact that you don't see it is more than a story of McConnell & McCarthy being afraid of Trump & his base. Its a story of receptivity, of the

5. level of receptivity the congressional and party leadership is dealing with both within the rank and file membership of the party and within its donor class, and THAT, my friends, is why you find me so concerned. That, and my decision to finally pull @anneapplebaum's book
This is mostly right but strikes me as it needing said that I don't think the left or the intelligentsia have the slightest idea how low institutional trust in anything coming from a left mouthpiece is now. Except in-network, the best heuristic is "the opposite of what they said"


If you look at the situation from a predictive models perspective instead of the more rigorous and appropriate (under normal circumstances) "prove your case or gtfo" perspective, trusting the opposite of whatever the left side says has an AMAZING track record, as we know it.

Literally, the best heuristic most people have right now, in terms of how often it gets things right versus *completely* wrong, is "whatever CNN, the NYT, public health officials, and the Democrats said... yeah, the opposite." That is, they're wrong WAY outside of statistics.

They're also not just wrong. They're *completely* wrong, backwards, often transparently covering something up that they don't want known or refuse to believe. This isn't just a legitimation crisis because there's a heuristic: whatever the official left narrative is, is wrong.

There are a few reasons why such a heuristic would be more predictive than not. One of those is conspiracy, and another is mass hysteria with ideological capture. We know at least one of those is happening and have rather strong evidence both are. That makes conspiracy reasonable

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