Thread by @ZhiZhuWeb

TRUMP’S NEXT COUP HAS ALREADY BEGUN

January 6 was practice. Donald Trump’s GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election.
~@bartongellman
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

"Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024."

"The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means.

Given the opportunity, they will act.

They are acting already."

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

"Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try.

Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real."

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

"For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft."

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

"In retrospect, the insurrection takes on the aspect of rehearsal."

"The immediate shock of the event [#Jan6], which briefly led some senior Republicans to break with [Trump], has given way to a near-unanimous embrace."

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

"Republican politicians would likely confess that Biden won in 2020, but the great mass of lumpen Trumpers, who believe the Big Lie with unshakable force, oblige them to pretend otherwise."

#BigLie
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

"There are seldom words or time enough to lay a conspiracy theory to rest. Each rebuttal is met with a fresh round of delusions."

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

"Patterson assumed that only fraud could explain the discrepancy, that all of Trump’s votes were valid, and that the invalid votes must belong to Biden.

“Why don’t you say Joe Biden got 81 million and there’s only 60 million left for Trump?” I asked.

Patterson was astonished."

As Robert a. Pape watched the mob attack the Capitol on a television at home on #Jan6,
"A name came unbidden to his mind: Slobodan Milošević.
...
Just like Milošević, Trump had skillfully deployed three classic themes of mobilization to violence"

"They set about seeking systematic answers to two basic questions:
Who were the insurgents, in demographic terms?
And what political beliefs animated them and their sympathizers?"

#Jan6Insurrection
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

"Kathleen Belew, a UC historian & co-editor of A Field Guide to White Supremacy, says it's no surprise that extremist groups were in the minority. “January 6 wasn’t designed as a mass-casualty attack, but rather as a recruitment action” aimed at mobilizing the general population"

"Pape’s team mapped the insurgents by home county and ran statistical analyses looking for patterns that might help explain their behavior...

Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline."

"Trump and some of his most vocal allies, Tucker Carlson of Fox News notably among them, had taught supporters to fear that Black and brown people were coming to replace them."

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

"Pollsters ordinarily expect survey respondents to give less support to more transgressive language.

“The more you asked pointed questions about violence, the more you should be getting ‘social-desirability bias,’ where people are just more reluctant,” Pape told me."

"Here, the opposite happened: the more extreme the sentiments, the greater the number of respondents who endorsed them."

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

"Why such a large increase? Pape believed that Trump supporters simply preferred the harsher language, but “we cannot rule out that attitudes hardened” between the first and second surveys.

Either interpretation is troubling."

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

"Respondents who believed in the Great Replacement theory, regardless of their views on anything else, were nearly four times as likely as those who did not to support the violent removal of the president."

#Racism

"What Pape was seeing in these results did not fit the government model of lone wolves and small groups of extremists.

“This really is a new, politically violent mass movement,” he told me.

“This is collective political violence.”"

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

"Decades of personal and political grudges infuse Patterson’s understanding of what counts as “America” and who counts as “we.”"

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

"Patterson came from Northern Irish stock and grew up in coastal Northern California. He was a “lifetime C student” who found ambition at age 14 when he began to hang around at a local fire station."

"the department scheduled training sessions “to assist male firefighters in coming to terms with the assimilation of females into their ranks.”

Patterson’s session did not go well." [<Massive understatement]

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

"...he kept on finding examples of how the world was stacked against people like him.

“I look at the 2020 election as sort of an example on steroids of affirmative action. The straight white guy won, but it was stolen from him and given to somebody else.”

Wait. [???]"

"What to do about all this injustice? Patterson did not want to say, but he alluded to an answer:
“Constitutionally... all the power rests with the people. That’s you and me, bro. And Mao is right that all the power emanates from the barrel of a gun.”"

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

"Over the course of Trump’s presidency, one of the running debates about the man boiled down to: menace or clown? ...

Many observers rejected the dichotomy—the essayist Andrew Sullivan, for instance, described the former president as “both farcical and deeply dangerous.”

"In nearly every battle space of the war to control the count of the next election—statehouses, state election authorities, courthouses, Congress, and the Republican Party apparatus—Trump’s position has improved since a year ago."

#DemocracyInDanger
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

"The more we learn about January 6, the clearer the conclusion becomes that it was the last gambit in a soundly conceived campaign—one that provides a blueprint for 2024."

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

"The strategic objective of nearly every move by the Trump team after the networks called the election for Joe Biden ... was to induce Republican legislatures in states that Biden won to seize control of the results and appoint Trump electors instead."

[see Bush v Gore ]

"Trump was too late, barely, to strong-arm Republican county authorities into rejecting Detroit’s election tally (they tried and failed to rescind their “yes” votes after the fact)"

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

"Delegitimating Biden’s victory was a strategic win for Trump—then and now—because the Big Lie became the driving passion of the voters who controlled the fate of Republican legislators, and Trump’s fate was in the legislators’ hands."

#BigLie
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

[As an aside: Here's a thread about how GOP operatives are taking over local election offices across the USA so that they can manipulate elections and/or change election results if their favored candidate doesn’t win the most votes.]

https://twitter.com/iarnsdorf/status/1433405386044973063

"Despite enormous pressure, none of the 6 contested states put forward an alternate slate of electors for Trump. Only later, as Congress prepared to count electoral votes, did legislators in some of those states begin talking unofficially about “decertifying” the Biden electors."

This thread is getting insanely long.

I'm starting a new one (there will be a little repetition at the beginning).

Here's the link to the beginning of the new thread:

https://twitter.com/ZhiZhuWeb/status/1468244419992330255