Good to know. Thanks for the information. It’s always good to be aware of bias, even in bias-checkers!

Anyone who has downvoted this bot, can you explain why? I’d like to learn more.

Good job. That’s all we should ask of you. You made a mistake, learned from it, and vow not to do it again. As long as you uphold that, you’ll be an outstanding citizen, and that’s all we should ask for.

I like protected bike lanes and roads without holes in them too!

This is my worry too. We’ve survived Trump for this long because he’s not half as smart as he thinks he is, nor is he as charismatic, either. But he’s not alone in this. Republicans are chomping at the bit for “Permanent Republican Rule”, and if they have to outlaw Democrats and Democracy to do it, they will. They’re happy in a Banana Republic…as long as they are the ones in control. Which means merely getting rid of Trump isn’t enough. We need a constant campaign to keep Republicans out of office, which the Left isn’t keen on doing because the Left isn’t one unified group, but instead a loose coalition of Scientists, Academicians, Artists, Environmentalists, Civil Rights advocates, and countless other small factions, that are easily played against each other.

Go back and watch Star Wars Episode 3. That’s actually a good description of how a democracy falls to autocracy. The Republicans have been openly dreaming of a “Permanant Republican Majority” since AT LEAST Bush 43’s terms in office. And they’ve been laying the framework since Nixon – a newsentertainment channel that caters to Right-Winger fantasies, judges who put ideology over legality, partisan gerrymandering that concentrates Republican voters for power and dilutes Dem votes into meaninglessness, and political theories that basically advocate for the dismantling of our political systems if that will keep Democrats out of power even if they have a majority.

To answer your questions directly:

Can he do that? Yes. He can. Anyone can.

What would need to happen to convert our system to lifetime terms? There are a variety of ways, but they all boil down to the President doing outright illegal things under cover of a friendly Supreme Court. After all, they granted immunity to ‘official acts’, which we believe is cover for an autocratic takeover of the country.

What would need to happen to convert our system into a dictatorship/monarchy/whatevs? This is just a hypothetical situation. It’s July 2028. Mass incarcerations of Leftists, Immigrants, Muslims, and Minorities have begun and the country is in the throes of a civil war. Polling is reporting that Trump could lose the election, despite disenfranchising the Left’s voting base through various means. Trump announces he’s postponing the 2028 elections 'until things calm down, they have to get much better first before we can have a fair election." People sue. It doesn’t matter what happens in the lower courts, because they’ll appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court. The same 6 Conservative ideologues that said he has immunity for ‘official acts’ will rule that he has the right to suspend the election. And that, my friends, is how Democracy ends, with massive applause from the Alt-Right assholes that Clinton quite rightly fucking called “Deplorable”.

Can Trump actually make either of those happen? Yes. Yes, he can. The framework is already laid out. HK-65 laid it out elsewhere. Essentially, you start by shutting the Other Side out of government. You then take over all the levers of government. Then you set them so you can’t lose. You might need to just waive away the safetyguards that get in your way, and some you might use your lock on government to remove ‘legitimately’. If the 22nd Amendment gets in the way of a Republican dynasty, they’ll have it removed.

TL;DR? Never rely on checks and balances to stop authoritarianism. In the end, the Constitution IS just a piece of paper, and will be run over by authoritarian jerks if that means power.

Yeah. This can be quibbled with, but it puts the most important thing at the bottom: Polls are meaningless unless you GOTV.

I like the sentiment if not the wording here. The only poll that matters is the one conducted on 5 November. All others are just tools the campaigns use to motivate voters and direct campaigners. If you want your guy or gal to win, you need to act as if you’re 2 points down in the polls and vote accordingly.

I definitely think there is a case of Goose/Gander here. If Biden was too old, and got run out of office by opportunistic media jerks happy to harp on his age day after day, attacking things he’s done his entire adult life as if it shows he’s one foot in the grave, then by god, the Media should jump all over Trump for the same problems. This is our way of saying “Hey, if Biden was too old at 81, then so is Trump at 78, especially with 59 year old Harris in the mix. Where are you, Media?”

The reasons Hillary lost in 2016 are varied.

• Poor GoTV operations in WI, MI, and PA.
• Comey fucking her over with a GOP October Surprise.
• People didn’t know what they would get with Trump. They were saying he’d turn Presidential for YEARS after he was elected. (He never did…)
• Hillary having a faint smell of corruption around her, mostly concocted by Team Trump.
• Russian Troll Farms filled with dipshits who worked overtime to fan dissention amongst the Left and Centre while empowering Team Trump.
• Targeted Troll attacks in Swing States, specifically WI, MI, and PA, that Hillary wasn’t paying attention to.

Even with all that going on, she did end up as the Winningest Losing Candidate in American history. I HOPE that they are going 50 State Strategy this time around. Trolls look for weak points that they can attack.

Thanks for this. StaySquared is too much of a chickenshit to retract his claim, I suspect.

Honestly, if it’s a choice between me and some people I don’t know half a world away, I’m picking me. That goes twice when the choices are:

• Pick the gal who will piss off the dictator to the point where he complains that he’s not getting enough bombs and missiles quick enough for his bloodthirstiness…like her former boss did.
• Pick the guy who will hand more than enough bombs and missiles to kill every single Palestinian at least once, if not more than once, while grinding American Muslims under the bootheel of Right-Wing Authoritarianism.

I’ll pick the gal every single fucking time.

You are a complete and total idiot if you follow this person’s ideas, and your choice to vote Third Party or stay home will only increase the chance that you and people you supposedly care about will be fed to the Republican meat grinders, and then you’ll have no more worry about Democrats because you’ll be in jail or just plain dead.

That’s what you’ll be enabling. Project 2025, who views Muslims as little more than animals, will be fast-tracked. If you think that’s the smart play, you are a fucking moron and deserve everything you have coming to you.

PS: Dems aren’t guilty of what this guy’s insinuating here. That’s 100% on Republicans.

PPS: This is the kind of BS that Russians and Republicans are injecting into our discussions on a day to day basis. While I won’t violate Rule 3 and outright call him a bot or shill, I WILL point out to everyone else that this is the bullshit that Team Putin and Team Pepe use to divide Democrats and suppress the vote.

PPS: I agree with @nomous that it’s weird, if not ridiculous, that this guy thinks he has a lock on the Arab American psyche. Our whole purpose here is to remind everyone on the Left coalition that come next January, either Kamala Harris will start her first term as POTUS and MAYBE slow-roll more bombs and missiles to Israel so that Egypt, Syria, and others don’t try to finish what they started in the '60s, or Trump, who will supply Israel with all the bombs and missiles he can while outlawing Muslims and forcing Christianity down their throats here in the USA via Project 2025. If you’re stupid enough to prefer 4 years of Project 2025 to whatever you think Harris will be guilty of, you deserve what you’re gonna get, sideways, without lube. And I think that makes you an idiot and a moron like the guy I’m replying to. Make the smart play and don’t listen to this fool.

Don’t forget getting Student Loans to be somewhat affordable. 5% of not just your total income, but your disposable income, accounting for basic cost of living. That actually convinced me to step away from my ongoing education and enter loan repayment. A huge deal considering how much loan debt I have…

Thanks for saying this.

In the late 70s, the Shah of Iran was a posterchild for authoritarianist shitheads. Everyone wanted him gone, from the religious Right to the academic Left and everything in between. A crowd of liberals, professors, businessmen, reactionaries, and mullahs all united to send the Shah packing. When it was all said and done, Iran had an opportunity to form a Muslim Democracy and join the world as a rising star.

Then the Left started arguing with itself. There were the Communists who wanted Glorious Revolution, and the Academics who just wanted a sane system of government, and the moderates who wanted only a LITTLE bit more socialist support for the underserved, and each of those factions split into sub-factions over some little petty policy difference or another. And while they were fighting, the Religious Right came together, unified in the belief that Gawd Himself was on their side, and promptly took over government.

Iran went from a secular dictatorship to a religious dictatorship while the Left argued.

France has shown us that that doesn’t have to happen, by unifying in voting against the Right and settling on one candidate for each district and not letting little distractions get in the way. Unfortunately, despite this win, it shows us that the more things change, the more they stay the same and the various factions of the Left that are unwilling to compromise a single tiny bit and are willing to burn down the house if they don’t get exactly what they want, which might just cause the fall of the coalition that defeated the Hard Right in France and another risk of the rise of a Fascist government. Let’s be like France before the election, and not like France after, if we possibly can?!

Exactly this. I knew all along that if Biden dropped out, it would be going from “I’m in this 100%” to “I’m out for the good of the nation” without anything in between. You can’t do anything but that in politics, because a wishy-washy ‘we’re evaluating what’s best for the country’ would be the death of his campaign, and he’d have no choice besides “I’m out” at that point. Might as well just rip the bandaid off and go straight to “I’m out” without any intermediary steps. Be fully invested until you make the decision you can’t be anymore.

Yeah, I like to call that the 10-80-10 principle. That’s why it’s so important to keep the arguments up for why we should vote Blue no matter who. 10% want to fuck everyone over. And they’ve managed to convince another 22% that they are right. We’re all screwed if we don’t get the 68% that aren’t assholes to vote Blue.

We really don’t have a lot of facts here. What we have so far:

• He ranted against paedophiles.
• He was a registered Republican.
• There were Trump signs in his (family’s) yard.
• He was bullied in school.
• A donation was made in his name for $15 to an Act Blue subsidiary.
• He was denied being on the rifle team due to his behaviour and his lack of skill with a rifle.

And that’s about it. Not much room to base your guess.

It’s just as likely that he bought into the notion that the elites are all a bunch of baby-eating, baby-fucking Satan worshippers, but NOT the notion that that only applied to the Left, and tried to remove a Right-Winger with a history of visiting powerful men and diddling kids on exclusive islands.

Wow. You are sure of yourself there. Absolutely no way at all that Desantis, Haley, or Ramaswamy might not pick up SOME of Trump’s votes? Especially if Trump was assassinated? No chance at all the MAGAts won’t line up behind whoever takes on the reins?

All I think would need to happen is the candidate stepping in for Trump says he’s gonna make the Left pay by making sure everything Trump was going to do gets done. I don’t share your optimism that assassinating Trump will make our job any easier. In fact, I think there’ll be plenty of Trumpers with rifles looking for a few Liberals to make pay for their guy being killed.

But you do you. I’m done here.

If you truly believe this, I don’t know what to tell you. If enough of the Left believe this, we’re lost.

Ron Desantis will GLADLY step up and take over from Trump. And he’s a bit more competent than the Shitgibbon.

First, do you think Seal Team Six would carry that order out?

Do you think Seal Team Six wouldn’t possibly take Biden out after he gave that kind of order?

Do you think that some members of Seal Team Six might be highly Conservative and loyal to Trump and the Supreme Court, and not to Biden and an order to take out the Conservative Justices?

Do you think Team Red would idly stand by while Biden orders the assassination of the leaders they knuckled down for TWO DECADES to get installed?

Pro-tip: You’re on loony island right now. What will happen here is that Seal Team Six would reject the obviously illegal order, report it, and Biden would have horrible egg on his face. There’s a damn good chance that he’d then either be 25ed away, or outright impeached for illegal orders, and then arrested and tried for attempted murder, completely bereft of any of the protections you think he has. Trump would then sail easily to election over a Harris ticket, simply by pointing out that he was right all along and Biden and the Democrats were bloodthirsty murderers just looking for an opportunity to kill Republicans and impose a Socialist Communist Dictatorship on Mama’s Apple Pie and all the Bald Eagles in the world. And then we’d get a REAL Fascist Dictatorship where Republicans could roam the country looking for people they don’t like and oppressing them.

And you really have to disrespect Biden to think he’d even BEGIN thinking about doing this. The man’s a good person. He’s not looking to join Team Republican in the new Fascist paradigm.