Pressured speech:
"Pressured speech is speech at an accelerated or frenetic pace that conveys urgency seemingly inappropriate to the situation. It is often difficult for listeners to interrupt pressured speech. It is often a sign of mania, often linked to bipolar disease or psychosis. In psychosis symptoms may include thought disorder, fear, auditory hallucinations."
Maria Bartiromo let Trump talk. Trump sounds unwell to me. Decide for yourself.
No one needs to listen to all 46 minutes of the interview. Any two-or-three minute segment taken at random will tell the story.
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| Click: YouTube copy of Fox Interview |
Trump describes a massive, systemic fraud carried out in multiple states, involving hundreds of County Clerks and Secretaries of State, both Democratic and Republican. It required software he says was designed by and for communist and socialist dictators. It required the connivance of Republican officials in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. It required neglect and malfeasance in office by the Republican director of cyber security to oversee the election, a person he appointed. It required the legal errors of judges he and other Republican presidents appointed. The conspiracy required the failure of his own FBI and Department of Justice to investigate and find the massive fraud and election theft, a failure both of the top people he appointed to run those agencies and the career people who serve under both Republican and Democratic presidents. He is angry with the Trump-supporting Republican Secretary of State and Governor of Georgia who oversaw a hand audit of the paper ballot receipts of the machine vote, an audit that confirmed the accuracies of the election.
Listen to Trump. He seems frantic; he jumps around; he makes extravagant claims. Everyone is wrong but him. He just knows there is fraud and that he won, big, overwhelmingly. He can tell he won; it was obvious to anyone. Surely no one voted for Joe Biden. Trump sounds manic and psychotic to me.
Trump appears detached from the simple reality that in an election that was generally very good for Republicans nationwide, there was one, very intuitive and predictable standout result: The American public had had enough of him personally. The election was a referendum on him and the job he has done. Voters didn't give a mandate to Democrats. In Senate, Congressional, and state races in close contests they supported Republicans. The same ballots that counted votes for Biden counted them for Republicans down-ballot.
He was intentionally polarizing as a president, and it worked spectacularly to turn out votes both for and against. More were against, just as polls have consistently shown. Simple as that.
Trump's current behavior has long-lasting implications. The most serious is the potential normalization of losing candidates--especially presidents--discrediting elections as a credible expression of the public will and using the power of their office to influence others to go along. Without elections there can be government, but not democracy.
A president who rejects an election result has now firmly entered the "Overton Window," those political ideas which sometimes move from crazy-impossible into plausible-but-extreme into mainstream. A president said aloud, without sharp contradiction by people in his party, that state legislatures could, if they chose, ignore the popular vote and award their electors to him. Trump says it is the right thing to do. They should do it. In states with a legislature that favors a party other than the one that won the vote, there is an opportunity. If there is opportunity, opportunity can become necessity.
GOP officeholders are in a wait-and-see mode right now. So far, most of them--like Maria Bartiromo in this interview--are not openly disagreeing with Trump or saying the idea of rejecting the vote is shameful, only that it is unlikely to work. It is a technical problem--lack of the right kind of evidence--not a moral one involving respect for democratic government. Trump's problem is that the potential electoral failure he claims did not take place. County clerks were ready. There weren't power outages on election day. The computers worked. There were no endless lines. Republican County Clerks and Secretaries of State are not inclined to say their elections failed. The public did not see failure.
This could work next time, especially for a candidate with the likely partisan array as we see now, i.e. close votes in crossover states with Republican legislatures. All that is necessary is clearer evidence of problems on election day, perhaps some civil disturbances by people that interfere with same-day voting. Such disturbances could easily give cover to say the election result unfairly harmed a Republican candidate. These disturbances could happen organically, or they could be nudged into being.
The pieces are in place for legislatures to choose the electors. The Constitution allows it. Trump has called for it. GOP leaders don't disagree. Legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia are gerrymandered to elect Republican legislatures, and the strong vote for down-ballot Republicans this year will perpetuate and maybe increase that power. The Supreme Court was OK with it and with the addition of Barrett, even more OK.
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| A Pennsylvania Legislative District |
Who would do this kind of partisan gerrymandering? Every state that can.
There is little political cost to legislators in partisan districts to support a gerrymandered map. In the event of an election in which Trump--or some more broadly acceptable Republican candidate--has a close election, a state legislator in a solidly partisan district pays little price for joining colleagues in taking charge of the allocation of electors to the Republican candidate. The legislator only needs the political cover of saying the election is undetermined. Trump is showing, right now, that such cover is readily available, if only there were some evidence.
That risk is for next cycle, not this one. Trump will not succeed in getting legislators in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan to make the switch. Trump himself is now part of the problem. He doesn't present to the public as the sound, legitimate leader of anything, and the secure hands into which to hand a muddled election.
He sounds like a kook.
4 comments:
"He sounds like a kook"
Really? What was your first clue?
You are right to focus on the Republican party. Every single one of them should be held accountable for enabling this American tragedy. We are fortunate to have averted what could have been a fascist regime, but it's only for the moment. Let's not forget that Hitler was imprisoned and returned to power. Trump is angling for the same kind of martyrdom, and it's likely only his age will stop him, absent the SDNY.
My problem is not the apparent mania of our President. My problem is that 74 million of my fellow citizens either lack the emotional intelligence to have recognized his severe deficiencies, or they just didn’t care.
Liberal blindness to the valid basis of Trump’s appeal will lead to their repeatedly being blind-sided.
I understand the valid basis of Trump’s appeal. I understand the pain and hopelessness of working people who have seen their prospects of economic success disappear as Republicans attempt to destroy the safety net and dramatically increase the economic disparity between the wealthy and everyone else with regressive tax laws.
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