SebastianBlue
President, International Julian Alvarez Fan Club
- Joined
- 25 Jul 2009
- Messages
- 57,736
The frightening bit of the bolded sentence is that it is an *optimistic* projection — current trends lend to much worse unemployment (do to a second wave of lockdowns, deaths/hospitalisations, and better data collection/reporting reflecting actual functional unemployment) and higher death/hospitalisations.
And you are absolutely right about his campaign no longer even pretending to be courting new supporters — which is interesting given his base is less than a third of the voting population by most assessments. He is running as George Wallace, if anyone gets that American political reference: a racist, white supremacist, fascist, conspiratorial ‘populist’. In many ways Trump is just retreading his 2016 campaign, only now with added division and new villains to be portrayed: “leftists”, BLM, Antifa (whoever he and Barr decides they are in this case), progressives, anti-racists, anti-Confederates, and “anti-Americans” (which include all of the ones before mentioned).
It is one of the things that makes many people — including many of us in this thread — very nervous, as it is something dictators (or soon to be dictators) tend to do before popular elections in order to indirectly ‘deputise’ their supporters as voter suppression, intimidation, and retaliation officers. If you can get 30% of the population to act aggressively (even violently) against even a portion of the other 70% leading up to and on Election Day, you can potentially shift things just enough to allow for a woefully problematic Electoral College to give you a narrow (optically “legitimate”) victory. Or, more likely in this case, get the “legitimate” vote count close enough to a victory to allow for less-obvious manipulation and tampering to get you the rest of the way.