June 02, 2023
Arguing with Idiots: TvD Edition
Timothy Birdnow
I was arguing with a Dump Trumper who made the following argument:
Peter says:
You do understand, don’t you, that in a Democratic Republic, winning power requires a sustained majority? Donald Trump won a thin electoral college majority in 2016. He faced a number of obstacles, some of them admittedly unfair. But he had one big challenge: to win over voters who initially disliked him. To turn his Electoral College majority into a popular vote majority and to bring enough down ballot allies to have a working majority in Congress.
He failed! His angry, scowling obsession with his own grievances doesn’t win over people who don’t already love him. He failed in 2018; he failed in 2020; he failed again in Georgia Senate runoff; his hand picked candidates failed in 2022.
He is general election poison. He can’t win in 2024.
I respond:
Peter McCutcheon You DO realize that most of what you said is wrong?
In the American system you do not have to win a majority of the voters. You have to win a majority of the Electoral College vote. The EC was designed to avoid a tyranny of the majority. It's purpose was to give political power to smaller states and to avoid the largest state (then Virginia) from simply ruling the country.
In 2016 Trump lost the popular vote (well, so we've been told; we have no actual way of knowing what the popular vote was as once a state was called many precincts stop counting.) But Trump was President.
And you do realize that in 2020 Mr. Trump won more votes than any man in American history? Nobody ever won that many. Now Joe Biden had more ballots, but so many of them were dubious as you must know. Biden's victory (and the lack of a Red Wave in '22) was entirely predicated on mail-in voting. Without that Biden would have lost, and the GOP won big in the off-year election. That mail-in voting was one of the emergency protocols put in place for Covid (and illegally in many cases.) Biden had zero coattails in '20, I might add, which speaks volumes; it was clear many if not most mail-in ballots were being harvested, actually filled out to find the proper number. They didn't have time to vote for Congress.
In '22 the GOP withheld money to MAGA candidates, often giving it to candidates in deepblue districts and letting the MAGA candidates twist in the wind. The Red Wave was purposely short-circuited
General election poison? No sir; the GOP Establisment, the Mitch McConnels, the Rona McDaniels, etc. are the true infectious agents.
I do not understand how anyone could believe that some other candidate will fare any better, or if they do why we would want them. Trump was hated primarily because he was hovering over the target. He was an existential threat to the world those in power had been building for decades, the world where we had open borders, unrestricted trade at America's expense, where manufacturing was done overseas and America's role in the economy was primarily as the tech sector, where radical social policies reign. Etc. Trump was a reactionary. He wanted to restore the idea of Americans having some say in their government. The Ruline Class in both parties objected to that.
Doubt that assertion? Then WHY DIDN'T THE GOP REPEAL OBAMACARE? After years of railing against it they refused to get rid of it and Trump had to act unilaterally (and thus be overturnable). The GOP was on board with it.
I would like to know how many other Republicans will win 74 million votes in the next election?
You NeverTrumpers need to face the fact; there really is no good alternative to Trump at this point. But your pride won't let you admit that the man is our best bet.
You all seem to think DeSantis will be the knight in shining armor, and the media will continue to treat him as gingerly as now. Disabuse yourself of that; they will be coming like the Hand of God after him if he wins the nomination. It will be a new attack, too, unlike the ABC gum attack that they will have to mount against Trump. Trump has survived all they have had to throw at him (which is why they are now subverting the law and coming at him like any banana republic.) Do you believe DeSantis will take any less? And if he does, what does that say about him? Do we then want him?
What do they have they can use against DeSantis? We don't know. it is probably ultimately nothing, but they can twist it. Look at Brett Kavanaugh, for example. Trump has survived all of that. But DeSantis will look like a child molesting, dog beating, kleptomaniac neo-Nazi by the time they get through with him. And since it will be fresh lies it will be more effective (Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals "any tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag".)
If you are over the target you will pick up flak. It's why they so hated Trump, and why at the moment they don't especially hate DeSantis. That will change - and if it doesn't than we know we've been played.
As for the "kiss of death" from Trump, why do you think the media kept playing up the notion of a red wave? Why did the GOP become overconfident? They were planning on blaming it on Trump all along - including the RINO wing. I warned about this a year before the election and most Republicans were drunk with overconfidence.
And now you all are believing the media yet again when they tell you Trump cannot win. If not, why are they so hell-bent on taking him down before the election? Wouldn't they be talking about his real prospects of winning right now? Or do you believe the media really is unbiased?
No, they are rather desperately trying to take him out, and are promoting DeSantis, or at least not getting in his way, to split the conservative vote.
Who are you making common cause with? The media, the big tech guys, the billlionaire country-club members, Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
Do you think that is a wise strategy?
Peter retorts:
yes, it’s true that in our system, you don’t need a popular vote majority. But most of the time, the popular vote winner also wins the Electoral College. If there is the occasional discrepancy — as in 2000 and 2016 — fine. But if Republicans win the EC election after election and never, ever win the popular vote, their ability to govern is very limited. Republicans need a candidate who can convince moderate and independent voters. Donald Trump is not that candidate.
Now, do I think there are problems with election security? Yes! Do I want mandatory voter ID and other systems to ensure election integrity? Yes! And I’ll go further — I think mail-in voting should be a last resort because it is intrinsically less secure than in person voting. So yes, I’d like all those policies.
But Trump and his more lunatic supporters with their unfounded claims and overwrought conspiracy theories make working for genuine election security harder, not easier. Dominion is run by Hugo Chavez from beyond the grave! Italian weather satellites are changing votes! It’s crackpot stuff, and manifestly so.
I was not a never-Trumper in 2016 or 2020; I voted for him twice. But Trump’s post election conduct has, in my view, made him both unelectable and disqualified from the presidency.
Lots of times, the left mischaracterize
In my view, having dinner with a white supremacist who wants to establish a dictatorship is disqualifying, full stop. Worse, it’s STUPID. This is a guy who lets a little bit of ego-stroking get in the way of his alleged primary objective.
I replied:
Peter McCutcheon
In the past most of the time the popular vote did indeed win, but that was well before the current political alignment. Now we have machine politics on a national scale, and that means ballot harvesting, box stuffing, illegal votes, etc. to drive up the margins. How many votes in California were actually legal? How many illegal aliens, prisoners, people with alzheimers, etc. voted?
I would argue that in the future the GOP will only be able to win via the electoral college. The Democrats have machines in place in enough big states to make any chance of winning otherwise impossible.
That was, of course, the entire point of the EC as the Founders set it up. They wanted to have a check on pure democracy, which they hated.
I would disagree that the ability to govern is limited if we win by EC and not the popular vote. Our system in no way limits the governing ability of the EC winner. The only limitations come from the cowardice of those in our own party who take the false lesson that this means we must have power sharing. The Democrats would never do that. They would proclaim a mandate.
I would add we have little idea of what the popular vote says anyway. Once called many precincts don't bother to count any longer - or they keep counting to pump up the numbers, depending on their particular political agenda. That is another reason why there is no popular vote in America; it's all about the Electoral College. We vote for the slate of electors when we go to the polls.
Time was those electors could vote as the pleased. Now most states limit that, but they shouldn't. That was another "democratic" reform that upended the Constitution. Also, there is nothing in the Constitution requiring a popular vote for President, and in fact as late as 1860 South Carolina still had the President chosen by the state legislature. It is only custom that has us put the Presidency up to a vote.
"Republicans need a candidate who can convince moderate and independent voters."
And how, pray tell, are they going to do that? This is the siren's song of the media and the Democrats, and it has been told as long as I remember (almost sixty years now). We must win the moderates! We have to not scare them off! This is the GOP consulting class argument. Move to the middle because that is what the public wants!
And it is a loser. Why didn't Bob Dole win in '96, after the craziness and obscenity of the Clinton Presidency? Why wasn't Gerald Ford Re-elected? Why wasn't George H. W. Bush re-elected? Mitt Romney?
Reagan showed - against all the advice of the consulting class - that you win by leading, not following along. You can turn these independents and moderates by bold leadership and eloqueting the conservative message.
Yes, Reagan was a charmer, but you may remember the media despised him as did much of his own party (enough so that they tried to force him to pick Ford as his "co-president") Reagan was a fighter, a point the media has made everyone forget.
Sun Tzu, Chinese military philosopher, admonished generals to go all in if they move into enemy territory. He warned "penetration but a short way leads to dispersion". You have to be all in or all out. The GOP, seduced by the consulting class and their vaunted independents, advocates dipping toes in the water and not plunging in. It's a loser's game which is why the media always promotes this very idea.
We grow our party by leading. Donald Trump picked up all sorts of new people. He won more black votes than any Republican in recent memory, for instance. Remember Diamond and Silk? He did very well with Hispanics. He brought a lot of the old Blue Collar Democrats on board.
Trump's main problem was the GOP establishment hated him for just walking in and taking "their" party without kissing their a, er, rings. They fought him at every turn. They would not move his agenda legislatively. They would not call out the damnable lies told about him.
I would remind you Trump won more votes than any candidate in American history in 2020. Not sure how you can square that with the idea Trump can't win.
I'm glad you think there is a problem with the voting. If you look at what they did in '20 and again in '22 it was the implementation of everything the Carter Baker Commission warned against. Especially mail-in voting. They took Carter Baker and used it as a blueprint to steal the elections. It worked.
I suppose Trump should have just rolled over and let the election be stolen? As Richard Nixon's aid said "they stole it fair and square" in the aftermath of Kennedy's '60 election theft. That is so very Republican; surrender because it would be bad form otherwise.
You can find the lunatic fringe supporting any candidate. You can also find agent provocateurs. Nick Fuentes is hardly a core of the Trump campaign.
Presidents have state dinners all the time and do not always know who is coming. You can look at Obama, or Clinton, and see them meeting with all sorts of unsavory people But you heard about this because the Media made it a big deal, and that to get conservatives to turn on the man. I am always flabbergasted at people who take a media shibboleth and accept it as a truism. The whole Nick Fuentes business was and is and remains a media hit.
I agree; Trump has an enormous ego and it gets in his way. He's also too combative sometimes. But what are the alternatives?
Trump at least TRIED to keep his promises to America. Trump tried to take us back just a few years to reset the country where it last worked. Who else will take this kind of abuse? And if our side isn't getting this kind of abuse there is a reason, and it is that they are going to go all John Boehner on us, betray us. Trump has been through this wringer, and there isn't a whole lot more they can throw at him without sounding like parrots. DeSantis or anybody else will be fresh meat. IF D or the others will actually try to act to save the country. Sadly I fear most of them will not. Certainly not the people who are in - Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Greg Abbott, etc. DeSantis is the only one who might, but he is as yet untested. He's taking a lot of money from the RINO donors, which gives me great pause. He may be the man we hope for, but maybe not either. Who knows what they have dug up on him, or made up to look bad.
And oncce the media gets started with the attack machine DeSantis will look like the most evil man in human history. And if they don't do that it's even worse, because we know we've been played.
America does not have time to play the traditional poitical game. We are in great peril right now. We need a surgery, not a band-aid. We need an aggressor in the White House, someone who will go on offensive and not just play a prevent defense (as the GOP has been doing since Reagan.) Maybe DeSantis will do it. I don't know, but he can run in four years. Why now? The timing of his race is itself suspicious; it suggests it's a way to deny Trump.
At any rate, thanks for a great comment and for a courteous reply!
I was arguing with a Dump Trumper who made the following argument:
Peter says:
You do understand, don’t you, that in a Democratic Republic, winning power requires a sustained majority? Donald Trump won a thin electoral college majority in 2016. He faced a number of obstacles, some of them admittedly unfair. But he had one big challenge: to win over voters who initially disliked him. To turn his Electoral College majority into a popular vote majority and to bring enough down ballot allies to have a working majority in Congress.
He failed! His angry, scowling obsession with his own grievances doesn’t win over people who don’t already love him. He failed in 2018; he failed in 2020; he failed again in Georgia Senate runoff; his hand picked candidates failed in 2022.
He is general election poison. He can’t win in 2024.
I respond:
Peter McCutcheon You DO realize that most of what you said is wrong?
In the American system you do not have to win a majority of the voters. You have to win a majority of the Electoral College vote. The EC was designed to avoid a tyranny of the majority. It's purpose was to give political power to smaller states and to avoid the largest state (then Virginia) from simply ruling the country.
In 2016 Trump lost the popular vote (well, so we've been told; we have no actual way of knowing what the popular vote was as once a state was called many precincts stop counting.) But Trump was President.
And you do realize that in 2020 Mr. Trump won more votes than any man in American history? Nobody ever won that many. Now Joe Biden had more ballots, but so many of them were dubious as you must know. Biden's victory (and the lack of a Red Wave in '22) was entirely predicated on mail-in voting. Without that Biden would have lost, and the GOP won big in the off-year election. That mail-in voting was one of the emergency protocols put in place for Covid (and illegally in many cases.) Biden had zero coattails in '20, I might add, which speaks volumes; it was clear many if not most mail-in ballots were being harvested, actually filled out to find the proper number. They didn't have time to vote for Congress.
In '22 the GOP withheld money to MAGA candidates, often giving it to candidates in deepblue districts and letting the MAGA candidates twist in the wind. The Red Wave was purposely short-circuited
General election poison? No sir; the GOP Establisment, the Mitch McConnels, the Rona McDaniels, etc. are the true infectious agents.
I do not understand how anyone could believe that some other candidate will fare any better, or if they do why we would want them. Trump was hated primarily because he was hovering over the target. He was an existential threat to the world those in power had been building for decades, the world where we had open borders, unrestricted trade at America's expense, where manufacturing was done overseas and America's role in the economy was primarily as the tech sector, where radical social policies reign. Etc. Trump was a reactionary. He wanted to restore the idea of Americans having some say in their government. The Ruline Class in both parties objected to that.
Doubt that assertion? Then WHY DIDN'T THE GOP REPEAL OBAMACARE? After years of railing against it they refused to get rid of it and Trump had to act unilaterally (and thus be overturnable). The GOP was on board with it.
I would like to know how many other Republicans will win 74 million votes in the next election?
You NeverTrumpers need to face the fact; there really is no good alternative to Trump at this point. But your pride won't let you admit that the man is our best bet.
You all seem to think DeSantis will be the knight in shining armor, and the media will continue to treat him as gingerly as now. Disabuse yourself of that; they will be coming like the Hand of God after him if he wins the nomination. It will be a new attack, too, unlike the ABC gum attack that they will have to mount against Trump. Trump has survived all they have had to throw at him (which is why they are now subverting the law and coming at him like any banana republic.) Do you believe DeSantis will take any less? And if he does, what does that say about him? Do we then want him?
What do they have they can use against DeSantis? We don't know. it is probably ultimately nothing, but they can twist it. Look at Brett Kavanaugh, for example. Trump has survived all of that. But DeSantis will look like a child molesting, dog beating, kleptomaniac neo-Nazi by the time they get through with him. And since it will be fresh lies it will be more effective (Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals "any tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag".)
If you are over the target you will pick up flak. It's why they so hated Trump, and why at the moment they don't especially hate DeSantis. That will change - and if it doesn't than we know we've been played.
As for the "kiss of death" from Trump, why do you think the media kept playing up the notion of a red wave? Why did the GOP become overconfident? They were planning on blaming it on Trump all along - including the RINO wing. I warned about this a year before the election and most Republicans were drunk with overconfidence.
And now you all are believing the media yet again when they tell you Trump cannot win. If not, why are they so hell-bent on taking him down before the election? Wouldn't they be talking about his real prospects of winning right now? Or do you believe the media really is unbiased?
No, they are rather desperately trying to take him out, and are promoting DeSantis, or at least not getting in his way, to split the conservative vote.
Who are you making common cause with? The media, the big tech guys, the billlionaire country-club members, Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
Do you think that is a wise strategy?
Peter retorts:
yes, it’s true that in our system, you don’t need a popular vote majority. But most of the time, the popular vote winner also wins the Electoral College. If there is the occasional discrepancy — as in 2000 and 2016 — fine. But if Republicans win the EC election after election and never, ever win the popular vote, their ability to govern is very limited. Republicans need a candidate who can convince moderate and independent voters. Donald Trump is not that candidate.
Now, do I think there are problems with election security? Yes! Do I want mandatory voter ID and other systems to ensure election integrity? Yes! And I’ll go further — I think mail-in voting should be a last resort because it is intrinsically less secure than in person voting. So yes, I’d like all those policies.
But Trump and his more lunatic supporters with their unfounded claims and overwrought conspiracy theories make working for genuine election security harder, not easier. Dominion is run by Hugo Chavez from beyond the grave! Italian weather satellites are changing votes! It’s crackpot stuff, and manifestly so.
I was not a never-Trumper in 2016 or 2020; I voted for him twice. But Trump’s post election conduct has, in my view, made him both unelectable and disqualified from the presidency.
Lots of times, the left mischaracterize
In my view, having dinner with a white supremacist who wants to establish a dictatorship is disqualifying, full stop. Worse, it’s STUPID. This is a guy who lets a little bit of ego-stroking get in the way of his alleged primary objective.
I replied:
Peter McCutcheon
In the past most of the time the popular vote did indeed win, but that was well before the current political alignment. Now we have machine politics on a national scale, and that means ballot harvesting, box stuffing, illegal votes, etc. to drive up the margins. How many votes in California were actually legal? How many illegal aliens, prisoners, people with alzheimers, etc. voted?
I would argue that in the future the GOP will only be able to win via the electoral college. The Democrats have machines in place in enough big states to make any chance of winning otherwise impossible.
That was, of course, the entire point of the EC as the Founders set it up. They wanted to have a check on pure democracy, which they hated.
I would disagree that the ability to govern is limited if we win by EC and not the popular vote. Our system in no way limits the governing ability of the EC winner. The only limitations come from the cowardice of those in our own party who take the false lesson that this means we must have power sharing. The Democrats would never do that. They would proclaim a mandate.
I would add we have little idea of what the popular vote says anyway. Once called many precincts don't bother to count any longer - or they keep counting to pump up the numbers, depending on their particular political agenda. That is another reason why there is no popular vote in America; it's all about the Electoral College. We vote for the slate of electors when we go to the polls.
Time was those electors could vote as the pleased. Now most states limit that, but they shouldn't. That was another "democratic" reform that upended the Constitution. Also, there is nothing in the Constitution requiring a popular vote for President, and in fact as late as 1860 South Carolina still had the President chosen by the state legislature. It is only custom that has us put the Presidency up to a vote.
"Republicans need a candidate who can convince moderate and independent voters."
And how, pray tell, are they going to do that? This is the siren's song of the media and the Democrats, and it has been told as long as I remember (almost sixty years now). We must win the moderates! We have to not scare them off! This is the GOP consulting class argument. Move to the middle because that is what the public wants!
And it is a loser. Why didn't Bob Dole win in '96, after the craziness and obscenity of the Clinton Presidency? Why wasn't Gerald Ford Re-elected? Why wasn't George H. W. Bush re-elected? Mitt Romney?
Reagan showed - against all the advice of the consulting class - that you win by leading, not following along. You can turn these independents and moderates by bold leadership and eloqueting the conservative message.
Yes, Reagan was a charmer, but you may remember the media despised him as did much of his own party (enough so that they tried to force him to pick Ford as his "co-president") Reagan was a fighter, a point the media has made everyone forget.
Sun Tzu, Chinese military philosopher, admonished generals to go all in if they move into enemy territory. He warned "penetration but a short way leads to dispersion". You have to be all in or all out. The GOP, seduced by the consulting class and their vaunted independents, advocates dipping toes in the water and not plunging in. It's a loser's game which is why the media always promotes this very idea.
We grow our party by leading. Donald Trump picked up all sorts of new people. He won more black votes than any Republican in recent memory, for instance. Remember Diamond and Silk? He did very well with Hispanics. He brought a lot of the old Blue Collar Democrats on board.
Trump's main problem was the GOP establishment hated him for just walking in and taking "their" party without kissing their a, er, rings. They fought him at every turn. They would not move his agenda legislatively. They would not call out the damnable lies told about him.
I would remind you Trump won more votes than any candidate in American history in 2020. Not sure how you can square that with the idea Trump can't win.
I'm glad you think there is a problem with the voting. If you look at what they did in '20 and again in '22 it was the implementation of everything the Carter Baker Commission warned against. Especially mail-in voting. They took Carter Baker and used it as a blueprint to steal the elections. It worked.
I suppose Trump should have just rolled over and let the election be stolen? As Richard Nixon's aid said "they stole it fair and square" in the aftermath of Kennedy's '60 election theft. That is so very Republican; surrender because it would be bad form otherwise.
You can find the lunatic fringe supporting any candidate. You can also find agent provocateurs. Nick Fuentes is hardly a core of the Trump campaign.
Presidents have state dinners all the time and do not always know who is coming. You can look at Obama, or Clinton, and see them meeting with all sorts of unsavory people But you heard about this because the Media made it a big deal, and that to get conservatives to turn on the man. I am always flabbergasted at people who take a media shibboleth and accept it as a truism. The whole Nick Fuentes business was and is and remains a media hit.
I agree; Trump has an enormous ego and it gets in his way. He's also too combative sometimes. But what are the alternatives?
Trump at least TRIED to keep his promises to America. Trump tried to take us back just a few years to reset the country where it last worked. Who else will take this kind of abuse? And if our side isn't getting this kind of abuse there is a reason, and it is that they are going to go all John Boehner on us, betray us. Trump has been through this wringer, and there isn't a whole lot more they can throw at him without sounding like parrots. DeSantis or anybody else will be fresh meat. IF D or the others will actually try to act to save the country. Sadly I fear most of them will not. Certainly not the people who are in - Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Greg Abbott, etc. DeSantis is the only one who might, but he is as yet untested. He's taking a lot of money from the RINO donors, which gives me great pause. He may be the man we hope for, but maybe not either. Who knows what they have dug up on him, or made up to look bad.
And oncce the media gets started with the attack machine DeSantis will look like the most evil man in human history. And if they don't do that it's even worse, because we know we've been played.
America does not have time to play the traditional poitical game. We are in great peril right now. We need a surgery, not a band-aid. We need an aggressor in the White House, someone who will go on offensive and not just play a prevent defense (as the GOP has been doing since Reagan.) Maybe DeSantis will do it. I don't know, but he can run in four years. Why now? The timing of his race is itself suspicious; it suggests it's a way to deny Trump.
At any rate, thanks for a great comment and for a courteous reply!
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