From what we’ve seen so far, legal ammo he has available to try to undermine the results are too specious even for highly sympathetic courts to work with. And his recent allies have no incentive to help. So I’m guessing the main threat is perception of illegitimacy by his base.
Conversation
It is notable that in 2016, the Dems went for foreign interference and collusion cases rather than casting doubt on the electoral process itself. They had way more probable cause and the thing fell apart for being too weak rather than fictitious.
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There’s going to be attempts to argue an equivalence here, but it’s important to keep in mind that even the Republican senate intelligence committee signed off on the Russia case. Whatever Trump makes up will be flimsy fiction. But his base will buy it.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_i
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For the record, I personally believe the interference had an effect, but not enough to affect result. It merely fed existing sentiment a bit. Trump won legitimately enough, and the biggest distortion came from domestic media coverage choices (ugly but not illegal) not Russia.
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My problem with Trump regime was not its legitimacy, nor even its ideological leanings or low-grade self-dealing/profiteering. It was with their open attempt to destroy institutions, hold them hostage with ransomware tactics, and putting a bunch of foxes in to guard henhouses.
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Commercial break:
This portion of the livetweet thread is brought to you by renowned knight of the Trump table Sir Ben Shapiro, and is dedicated to his unrequited courtly love for the Lady Alexandria who still won’t debate him, an Arthurian legend for our times.
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Still counting for godot.
Where did I read that trump is the sort of golfer who will move his own ball if he can get away with it, but won’t ever concede the putt if you’re inches away? Is this true of his literal golfing btw?
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Update: he tried to rake his putt Tuesday night, got called on it. Now he’s trying to kick the ball or something. This is not even a metaphor. It’s a full-blown allegory for this race.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @vgr
He literally cheats at literal golf in literally that exact way, yes. golf.com/lifestyle/cele
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CNN doomscroll time. Biden’s apparently waiting for media to call it. Media is slow-walking it. I guess they want to truly Trump-proof the call.
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Still fascinated by the golf allegory. Most states are finishing the city+mail-in last, so those are the putts. The non-urban and in-person votes were the drives. In a few states that mapping is mangled. But yeah he’s trying to rake the putts everywhere at a point he was ahead.
Replying to
This is the worlds most annoying golf course, where the 18 holes are the 18 swingiest states.
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Taking these screenshots in case the kids challenge me in 2040 with ‘pics or it didn’t happen’ (though by then the standard will be 3d imagery and neural scans and thus shot will be like daguerreotypes today.
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I was in two minds about whether to live tweet this but now I’m really glad I did. I’ll have the best technically possible prosthetic memory possible. And maybe I’ll be able to port it to the pensieve whenever iOS releases it.
GIF
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The raw nature of a livetweet thread makes it suitable for playback. I think once I compile and blog this (which I plan to) I’ll be able to relive this by reviewing. Those of you followed along live and know me well enough may be able to use it the same way.
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Jake Tapper: we’re pretty sure where this is going not just because Biden’s ahead in all 4 states but because with one exception Trump’s promised legal challenges are frivolous or even preposterous (rough quote)
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They’re now talking about how Trump is mad his legal team (Giuliani, Bondi) isn’t “effective” and demanding more effective “killer” lawyers.
Tapper wonders out loud whether Trump has considered that that’s because there’s no real case, not because his lawyers suck.
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The one non-frivolous case I think Tapper is referring to is the Pennsylvania vote segregation procedural thing which apparently is a rounding error in terms of votes affected. Alito just sorta threw them a bone in that.
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GOP legal eagle Ben Ginsberg came on and made the point that a real all-star legal team cane out to bat for GWB in 2000 (including current scotus justices Kavanaugh and Barrett apparently) but nobody is coming out to bat for Trump. Ben says it’s because there’s no there there.
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Dana Bash points out that tTrump’s legal team is not just second rate but that a lot of good GOP lawyers like Ben himself simply dislike Trump and don’t want to fight for him anyway. Interesting if true. How much do you have to suck to not get even lawyers to take your money?
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Ah so electoral college vote is match play but popular vote is stroke play. twitter.com/muskjames/stat
This Tweet is unavailable.
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This damp squib legal full-court press is possibly the farce to 2000’s Florida tragedy.
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This is now a golf thread. The best part of this story is the name of Trump’s opponent: Ted Virtue.
Cannot make this shit up.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @kellydigges and @vgr
This is my favorite Trump golf story. independent.co.uk/news/world/ame
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Trump’s missing his putts in AZ. New batch only whittles Biden’s leas by ~7000
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The geographic segregation of voting patterns is utterly remarkable. What is it about cities that makes people reliably Democrat past a critical size/density? And to what extent is coastal blueness explained by greater urbanization (almost entirely I suspect)
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Waiting for Bidenot to come out an speak. In the meantime,...
Commercial break: this portion of the live tweet is brought to you by Covid19, the world’s favorite pandemic.
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Bidenot speaketh! He seems tired.
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He’s basically giving the victory speech and Covid and stuff without explicitly claiming victory.
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Aaaand update from the White House is that Mark Meadows has Covid 🙄
This is a damn telenovella. Expect a long-lost twin to appear and someone to get amnesia
125k cases today. Fatalities are under some control due to better treatment knowledge but a surge will still kill night.
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CNN speculating that the campaign war room might have been a superspreader event
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Screenshot for the highlights reel: TV screen showing simultaneous Covid and election data, with Covid data helpfully coded red-scale. The Trump virus.
Biden said cases could cross 200k/day in the next surge. Hold on to your ventilators. Winter’s gonna be rough.
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Okay calling it a night. I’m guessing the networks will call it sometime tomorrow and Biden will do an actual victory speech and Trump will tweet “see you in court.” I’ll be able to end this interminable counting-for-Godot thread. We will then start a transition hell thread.
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Back to the hydrogen sonata. What are the Gzlit really up to?
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Day for of Counting for Godot. The news headlines are Cauchy converging on a Biden victory projection via Zeno’s paradox. Wish I’d taken screenshots.
CNN is currently on “Biden nears victory.”
Fox is on “America (still) waits.”
NYT is on “Biden edges closer to victory.”
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* Day four
Trumps Twitter feed right now is a flood of RTs of sketchy allegations of ballot fraud, plus a bunch of flagged tweets. He really thinks there’s a way out via some loophole. I suspect he’s applying intuitions from tax or real estate law which have way more loopholes.
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Strikes me there are two kinds of games:
1. games designed by idealists to make cheating hard
2. games designed by self-dealing elites to make cheating easy
He’s used to type 2 and elections are type 1. It takes a lot long-term more work (eg gerrymandering) to cheat in type 1
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Thing about electoral processes is that it’s not hard to cheat but it’s very hard to hide that you’re cheating. You have to resort to something blatant that people will spot to have a sufficiently big effect.
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I suspect all the minor attack surfaces from Florida 2000 (hanging chads era) have been closed off but there’s probably a bunch of new ones. But at best there’d be opportunistic/reactive room to cheat at the margins. Florida worked because it was one state and a ~500 vote margin.
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Trump’s got a fairly common personality trait (assuming everyone is cheating if you can’t see what they’re doing), coupled with an uncommon one (using that as justification to cheat wildly yourself). I know tons of people with the first trait, but very few with the second.
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Most suspicious types merely end up as angry, depressed cynics, not as cheats themselves. It’s heartening that the median person in a reasonably prosperous society is in fact NOT a cheat. The average cheating level is raised to cynicism inducing levels by fat tail of big cheats.
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Having hair-trigger cheater-detection brain wiring is not surprising. All apes probably have that hard-wired. Recall behavioral economics results that biases often disappear when a problem is framed in cheater-detection terms. In scarcity-shaped ape societies, cheating is endemic
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