Thread by @EmporersNewC

1. So, why does it matter that Joe Biden’s electoral college win does not rely on Pennsylvania?

2. You will notice that Trump’s focus on electoral fraud is directed at places like Philadelphia, and this matters.

3. Donald isn’t really a politician, he is a populist and that makes him distinct in terms of where he gets his support.

4. Good politicians seek to get support from tapping into people’s aspirations, bad politicians seek their support by tapping into a mix of aspiration and grievance.

5. Populists get their support mainly from appealing to people’s grievance. It is not a progressive movement, an intellectual movement, or indeed, a positive movement

6. Right now, Trump is following the populist playbook for claiming that things are fraudulent in the fact of defeat.

7. This feeds into his supporter’s feelings of grievance and helps build support and loyalty.

8. Populist supporters buy into this because, as a populist personality cult, Trump "can’t lose".

He is their MAGA messiah.

9. Supporters protect their messiah. When Farage lost in 2015, rumours start circulating from anonymous twitter accounts about votes going missing in Thanet, and that led to the police wasting time.

10. This lie wasn’t based on any fact and couldn't change the result, it was simply to protect the image of Farage's invincibility.

11. People shouldn’t underestimate the importance of that image, and it may have seemed bizarre that Trump choreographed his return from hospital to Covid and set it to music, but it’s populist playbook.

Trump is invincible.

12. Invincible leaders never lose, they can't lose. If they lose, then it's because something was unfair.

13. If Biden had won the election clear, the argument would have been that it made no sense that Biden got so many votes, and there was clearly fraud behind it.

14. As it is, that didn’t happen and Trump "won".

Or at least, he declared that he had "won" --and-- now his win was being "stolen".

15. So now, with the help of his MAGA minions and his loyal supporters, he will magnify all the hearsay, non-sequiturs, and innocent events that look bad out of context.

16. He, and they, don’t necessarily need to convince people, they just need to create a doubt in the minds of the wider public and the non-committed Trump voter.

17. Then on the back of these conspiracies, he takes it to the Supreme Court, and at this point anyone reading this will say he can’t win, and you’re right he hasn’t got anything, but he won’t lose either.

Populists never lose.

18. Cast your mind back to the first Gina Miller case in the UK. It was a close call and the result was not unanimous.

19. This led to people citing the arguments made by the judges who hadn’t agreed, and suggesting that, because it was disputed, the argument that Gina Miller was wrong was still valid.

20. Now cast your mind back to the second Miller case when she won unanimously?

21. But Boris didn't lose, because... the very fact that it was anonymous this time meant it was 'fixed'.

22. When Trump goes to the Supreme Court with a bunch of grievance seeds to throw at the wall to see if they stick, they won’t stick, and then when the Court rules against him, he will not ‘lose’.

23. He will win, and the court will then steal it away due to the establishment, the elite, corrupt procedure, or bad lawyers.

24. But the grievance seeds that bounce off the Supreme Court wall will land and begin to take route between his followers and allow them to go out and preach the second coming of their own living MAGA martyr.

25. US states have different electoral procedures, so these voter fraud grievances are going to provide a much stronger and more convincing message if they are isolated to a single state.

26. Pennsylvania had been the focus of these accusations even before the vote based on their case around the latest date votes could arrive.

That's where he will focus too.

27. If Biden wins only with Pennsylvania, then that plays into the Trump narrative, and the more states Biden wins, the more the Trump cult will sound...well...cultish.

28. If Trump does decide to attempt a second coming, it will depend on a number of things such as: How GOP react to him attacking the integrity of the Supreme Court, how old he is, his health, or if he wants to go on.

29. If he is dumped hard by GOP and he wants to run as an independent as revenge, he could try and finance the run by replicating the Brexit party model.

(It appears to work for populist personality cults)

30. I’m not sure that model can actually generate enough money to sustain a presidential campaign, but it doesn’t mean he won’t try.

31. Alternatively, he might use his personality cult to lobby the GOP with populist policies, like we see in the UK from Farage today.

32. He is in a position to assert the fact he has won the second highest number of votes in US presidential history, and that sort of following isn’t going to be ignored easily.

33. There isn’t much that can be done about what happens next, but let’s hope that Biden gets every state on offer, and the popular vote keeps growing for him.

34. This is about blocking his route to the 2020 presidency, that looks like it's over, but blocking any route to the 2024 presidency, no matter how difficult or improbable it might seem.

35. Because as far as Trumpism is concerned, Trump did not lose in 2020.

Populists...

never...

lose.

/End