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  • Day-one and one-day have very different meanings, and it seems telling that he seems to use the former…

  • This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Former president Donald Trump on Wednesday again vowed to seize dictatorial powers if elected to the nation’s highest office once more but attempted to walk back his frequently made promise to exact retribution on his political enemies during a second term in the White House.

    The disgraced former president, who is currently facing more than 90 felony charges in four separate jurisdictions and is scheduled to go on trial in March for attempting a coup to keep himself in office after losing the 2020 election, promised to spend his first day of a second term ruling as an autocrat during a town hall broadcast on Fox News ahead of the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses.

    He also attempted to turn back Democratic criticism of his intention to be an autocrat by describing reporting of his pledge to rule as a dictator “on day one” as a “new narrative” meant to paper over a poor governance record by President Joe Biden, his successor and likely general election opponent.

    The ex-president again complained about press coverage of his prior remarks, accusing media outlets of failing to report that he’d limited his dictatorial ambitions to his first day in office.

    Mr Trump’s participation in the Fox News town hall comes just days before he expected to win the Iowa caucus, which he lost to Texas Senator Ted Cruz during his first run for the White House in 2016.

    And despite his frequent promises from the stump to turn the machinery of law enforcement against top Democrats, he told the television audience that he wasn’t planning on weaponising the government to punish his enemies, though he also said “a lot of people” would say doing just that is “not so bad”.

    The original article contains 719 words, the summary contains 285 words. Saved 60%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

    • Uh, no I didn't delete a comment. I'm also noticing a striking absence of lemm.ee users in the thread. Nevermind ... Odd that even though I delete the comment the data is kept, which was good for finding out I was wrong but in some ways even worse than what reddit did.

  • The time lines of America elections confuse me a bit. Is he campaigning for the election itself or is this still the point where his party (the democrats?) are choosing their candidates?

    • It’s still the primaries where the candidate for the parties are being picked. trump is part of the republican party but is likely to receive the nomination because apparently we learned nothing during the four years this trash ran the country, took foreign money, insurrection, treason, etc.

      • Thanks. With all the articles I thought I'd somehow missed him winning the nomination and we were on the actual election campaign.

        Your elections are normally in the autumn aren't they?

      • because apparently we learned nothing during the four years this trash ran the country

        His victory wasn't because his supporters were ignorant. They knew exactly what kind of shithead he was, they just couldn't admit out loud they wanted the sexism, homophobia, racism and authoritarianism.

        Remember that when he was first elected, his support flowed out from the "alt-right". They were nothing more than rebranded white supremacists, but the name change gave them enough plausible deniability to dodge deplatforming.

        When "Unite the Right" rolled around, many of them triumphantly tore of their masks, waved their swastikas, grabbed their tiki torches and started an antisemitic chant. One of them even started executing political dissenters then and there.

        But their "ha, we were nazis all along" celebration was short lived. They'd undermined their plausible deniability and their platforms were crumbling. Even Fox News was hesitant to put any alt-right figureheads on air. Even better (for us), many of them lost their jobs, girlfriends and families after their face popped up on the news.

        So the rule became "never go mask off". They could be openly advocating sending Jews to concentration camps but if someone says "that is blatantly Nazi behaviour", their reply will always "the left just call anyone they disagree with nazis".

        They still want to do it. They'll still try to do it. The vast majority of their supporters know they mean it and that's exactly why they support them.

        But as long as they never say it out loud, there will always be an army of useful idiots giving the benefit of the doubt.

    • For a country that prides itself on democracy, the process of picking party candidates Is decidedly undemocratic. Primaries weren't even used at all until 100 years ago or so, and didn't get used consistently in a binding fashion until 1972, after the shitshow that was the 1968 Democratic Convention.

      And this year is super weird. Trump is still technically campaigning for the Republican Party nomination but is so far out in front of his competition in the polls that he hasn't bothered attending any of the debates. However, due to a dispute over election scheduling, Biden won't be on the Democratic Party ballot at all in New Hampshire, and that election won't have the same proportional power at the Democratic convention that other states have.

      New Hampshire's Primary election also has the quirk that there are a lot of voters unaffiliated with either party, and in that state they can choose which Primary election to vote in. My favorite conspiracy theory of the moment is that the Biden campaign orchestrated the scheduling issues in New Hampshire specifically to give unaffiliated voters in New Hampshire "permission" to ignore the Democratic primary, and vote against Trump in the Republican one. Trump ignored all those debates out of the perception that his nomination is inevitable; even a close win by Trump in NH will be a big blow to that perception in following contests.

80 comments