And here’s where the Democrats run into a massive problem.

The Democrats are running on two fronts: A policy position, and warning people of the authoritarianism that Trump and the GOP will bring if they return to power.

The problem is that the Republican base is basically saying “Yeah. We know. We want it that way. Screw your policies.” And they have enough on their side to actually win the election. How the hell do you compete with that?

He is making the exact same mistake that RBG just made.

This is how the GOP works now. If they can’t get you to back down, they’ll go after your family. And it’s a pretty successful intimidation tactic. It’s gotten congressmen to refuse to vote or even speak against Trump out of fear of retribution. It got Hunter Biden convicted. It got one of their own state senators to quit the race once Trump and his followers decided he wasn’t Trumpy enough for their liking.

But what’s more important is what effects it has downstream. Prominent politicians have resources at their disposal to handle threats, and even they still have to worry about this shit. Your average joe doesn’t stand a chance in hell. How the hell is your average joe supposed to protect themselves against a lone wolf attacker that could strike anywhere without warning? Where are they going to get the money for security? Are they just supposed to quit their jobs and go into hiding every time they get doxxed? Your average joe has absolutely no chance in hell of surviving the Trump Hate Machine, and no way to gather the resources necessary to even try if Trump wakes up tomorrow morning and decide that, for whatever reason, they’re the new target of the day? Ask the two election workers from GA how it is.

The GOP knows this and are capitalizing on it. They want the message to be loud and clear: Get on board, or get run over. They’ve attacked multiple family members of multiple people with infinitely more resources than you to get their results, and they’ll go after you and your family too.

Trump stands to make $1.5 million (minus expenses) from selling these. That’s pocket change to Trump. Not worth getting involved with to clear maybe $1 million after the dust settles. He seems to always charge $300 each when he peddles his crap, which makes me think that’s simply the sweet spot to maximize how much Trump can grift out of the rubes without going into sticker shock.

If this were money laundering, there wouldn’t be a limit and the sneakers would be a lot more expensive. They wouldn’t want rubes buying them because that means they’d have to actually produce the sneakers, increasing their expenses. They would simply be “available” at stupidly expensive prices so Trump’s associates can funnel thousands or millions of dollars at a time to “buy” sneakers that will never arrive. You know. For re-sale. Or as a collector’s item. Or to give away to friends/supporters. Or whatever excuse they can come up with when they’re asked where the sneakers they supposedly bought ended up.

If this were money laundering, it’s the dumbest money laundering scheme in the history of ever. Maximum exposure and risk for minimum reward. With that said, that could also be used as the reason to believe Trump would be dumb enough to do this. But he’s got $45 million a month coming from Musk alone; he’s not going to bother getting into elaborate money laundering schemes for 2% of that. Selling the sneakers to rubes is simply grabbing the low hanging fruit.

Biden just said it would take a medical emergency to get him to drop. If this isn’t a sign from <deity of your choice> that he needs to get out of the race, I don’t know what is.

Of course. When you have literally millions of suckers in your cult begging for reasons to throw their money at you, you milk it for all its worth. This isn’t geared towards the normal people who know how tacky this shit is. This is geared towards the ones that are so far to the right and have his dick shoved so far down their throat that they’re flossing their teeth with his pubes.

That, and the MTGs of Congress who will buy these just to kiss Trump’s ass “show their solidarity with the President”. 5,000 pairs of overprices sneakers isn’t tough to move when there are enough people who will buy them for the sole purpose of sucking up to him. Whether or not you’ve bought any of his products will likely be a test of loyalty in the near future, if it isn’t already.

I can think of few other Democrats as uniquely qualified to run on the “Trump is an existential threat to our democracy” platform that the DNC seems content to put all it’s chips on.

The problem is that Schiff has the personality of a block of wood. Even in pre-Trump times you needed something resembling a personality on the national stage.

The ones that will inevitably end up before the Supreme Trump Court…

It’s not under the radar. He says it right out in the open. He always, always accuses Democrats of doing whatever thing he’s planning to do next, so when he does it and the Democrats call him out on it, it appears to be petty revenge to the general public.

Assuming you weren’t an only child, remember when you were a kid fighting with your siblings? When you ran to mom. who always won? Whoever got there first. Whoever got their second gets to hear “Leave your brother alone and knock it off”. Being the first to run to mom and dad to settle dispultes was a huge advantage, sometimes leading to whoever got there second being punished even if whoever got there first was the antagonist.

Trump has just shown that this strategy works. As long as you accuse them of doing it first, you significantly soften the blow when they accuse you of doing the same thing, because the accusations appear to be less genuine and more retaliatory.

Aaand moreover, propaganda and rhetoric from Trump and prominent Republicans who have embraced the stolen election conspiracy are empowering right-wing zealots to intimidate voters at polling places. Some even consider becoming election or poll workers to “stop the steal.”

This is actually what I’m most worried about going into this election, because of how easy it would be, how few people are needed to do it, and how few resources are necessary to pull it off.

Throw a couple of “poll watchers” into majority-minority districts to intimidate voters. Maybe call in a bomb threat or two to a couple of key polling places in swing states. Or just one or two lone wolves committing acts of violence.

Remember, they don’t need to actually win the popular vote, and winning the popular vote by millions of people doesn’t matter. They only need to skew a few thousand votes in key swing states. An attack, or even just the threat of an attack, could easily be enough to swing the state if not the entire election. You don’t need some elaborate international conspiracy that comes straight out of a James Bond movie. All you need is one idiot calling in a bomb threat, “poll watching”, or outright committing a mass shooting and you could do just as much damage with no significant resources spent and no way for law enforcement to stop you before it’s too late.

Let me tell you why this will never, ever happen. Ever.

Private companies increasing supply is supposed to be the goal. But the side effect is basic supply and demand; as the supply increases, demand decreases. When demand decreases, prices fall. When the value of people’s homes fall, they go underwater. This leads to a lot of homeowners who were on solid financial footing when they purchased the property suddenly facing financial ruin.

You will never, ever get homeowners to vote in favor of something that will put them in serious financial risk. You will never, ever get landlords, corporate or private, to vote away their primary source of income. And in the medium to long term, you would be putting the financial stability of millions of homeowners at risk if this were to become a thing, along with risking collapsing the housing market entirely via oversupply.

I’m not saying what side is right or wrong, morally, ethically, etc. I’m just pointing out the realities of the situation and what is the most likely result. I don’t claim to know what the solution to the problem is, but I do know that this isn’t it, and is likely to cause more problems than it solves over the long term.

Anonymous sources

Anonymous sources have confirmed that his anonymous sources are himself, peeking into their bedroom window at night like a creep while wearing a fake mustache and glasses

Thomas is not the supreme court. And he’s starting to alienate himself from even the other conservative justices. He’s on an island and I doubt the others would follow his lead if this reaches SCOTUS on appeal.

None of them went out of their way to distance themselves from his comments, either. They didn’t offer any kind of dissenting opinon. They didn’t speak out against his advisory opinion, which is supposed to be against SC norms. And they haven’t spoken out since. And given their rulings since gaining the supermajority, along with their “nuke it and everything close to it” approach to ruling on matters, and there’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t gladly just go along with whatever Clarence Thomas says, or at the very least, not care enough to vote against him.

This isn’t even the first time he gave an advisory opinion. Remember the literal list of cases he said he wanted to review and overturn? He wouldn’t be so brazenly and openly giving these literal roadmaps of what cases to bring before them if he didn’t believe he had at least four more votes. And none of them have given us any reason to believe otherwise.

I’m from Massachusetts. One of the bluest states in the country. I can’t vote any harder.

Ok, so in the past two weeks alone, we’ve seen:

• Biden completely collapse at a debate that he himself issued the challenge for, essentially scoring not one but two potentially fatal own goals at once, giving the RNC enough ammo to fuel months of attack ads while subsequently doing little to nothing to convince his own party he has a realistic chance to win now.

• the Supreme Court enact significant power grabs for both the President and themselves by saying that Presidents are absolutely immune when committing official acts or anything even related to an official act, essentially saying that an “official act” is anything they say it is, while also implying that an official act is basically whatever the President says it is until they say otherwise.

• One of Trump’s four cases dismissed, with the other three essentially on life support at best due to the above ruling, essentially allowing Trump to walk away scot-free.

• Trump survive an assassination attempt, giving legitimacy to the conspiracy theories that fuel his campaign and allowing him to exponentially ratchet up his attacks on Democrats, knowing that Democrats are on the defensive and cannot really defend themselves without playing right into Trump’s hands and giving the appearance that they supported the attempt.

• Trump not only survive the assassination attempt, but come out of it with a series of pictures that, objectively speaking, are so defiant and patriotic in the face of a real-time assassination attempt that those pictures alone would carry any other candidate to victory in a landslide. Seriously. Defiant look, fist pump in the air, blood splashed against one side of his face, perfect sky, American flag in the background. If you can’t get elected after that, your entire campaign staff should be fired, sued for neglegence, and be declared legally stupid.

And he’s carrying all that momentum and more into the RNC. At this point, this is really Trump’s election to lose. And none of this even counts all the GOP thumbs that are going to be on that scale in November.

If you think the first term was bad…

Because Thomas literally gave her that argument to make in the immunity ruling. She literally cited his comments and basically copied his ruling like a high school kid copying off the “smart” kid in the class.

He basically told her “Hey, throw the case out. We’ve got your back.”

I hate to say it, and I know it’s going to sound fatalistic, but her decision is very likely going to stand.

Clarence Thomas literally handed her this argument on a silver platter. And say what you will about him, the legal system still considers him one of nine justices of the highest court in the land, and his words still carry that legal weight.

If Jack Smith appeals, there’s (IMO), a 50/50 chance he wins on appeal. I could see the appeals court using things like logic and rational thought, kicking Cannon off the case and reinstating the charges against Trump (Or however that would work in the legal sense). But I could also see them saying that since she was merely following what Clarence Thomas told her to do, her decision is on sound legal footing, would most likely survive Supreme Court scrutiny, her decision was proper based on the SC ruling, and the decision stands. And from a strictly legal standpoint, they’d be right in doing so.

And if this case were to make it all the way up to the SC…since Cannon was literally following their blueprint, there’s 0% chance that they’ll suddenly rule against her. Nothing good can come out of appealing to the Supreme Court, and in fact it may be exactly what this supreme court wants and why Clarence Thomas added that little tidbit into the decision, so the SC can rule that all special counsels are illegal and the entire J6 investigation was unconstitutional as a result.

(Of course, Hunter Biden’s conviction will still stand, because reasons…)

This case is dead. The other three are on life support, and the doctor has already called for the chaplain to deliver last rites.

if people aren’t very satisfied with normal, offering them more normal probably isn’t going to get you very far.

Here’s the thing. You’re right, in that Trump got elected because people were unhappy with the status quo. And Trump at least offered something different.

But what we’re seeing isn’t being “unhappy with the status quo”. It’s believing in fairy tales. It’s believing in conspiracy theories. It’s making it up as you go along. Worse, it’s wanting to force you to adhere to it too.

I’ve always said that if you’re in an election where your opponent is saying monkeys are flying out of your ass and terrorizing the city, and 51% of the people believe that flying monkey terrorism is a huge problem, you can try appealing to logic and saying there are no flying monkeys coming out of your ass, but you’ll be doing it during your concession speech, while your opponent is not only making his victory speech but boasting about the fact that he solved the flying monkey problem on day one.

This is where we are as a society. A sizeable chunk of our society really is listening to Trump’s claims about whatever is flying out of Biden’s ass, and they have absolutely no appetite for things like truth or logic. Biden is trying desperately to stick to this realm of reality, but it looks more and more like he’s going to be making that appeal while watching Trump’s inauguration and listening to Trump’s supporters cheer on the chaos.

This is a shining example of people downvoting something not because it’s false, but because they don’t like hearing it. This is an absolutely true statement. Between this and Biden’s complete inability to recover after that horrid debate performance, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Trump take at least a solid 5 point lead. Minimum. This will absolutely drive every single MAGA moron in this country to the polls.

You know what’s sad about this?

If the roles were reversed, Trump would be offering the shooter a posthumous pardon and probably a medal. And no, I’m not joking. Trump would never be seen giving someone else the respect he demands from others.