I think it’s important to get the facts right and to present the best case when trying to persuade someone who disagreees with you to change their mind.
When he tells people they won’t need to vote anymore after this election that’s not rhetoric.
This one is a bad example. When I first heard he’d said this, as an Australian my initial reaction was ‘he probably means that they won’t need to if they don’t want to, voting isn’t compulsory in the US and an insane amount of resources seems be spent each election on getting people to vote at all’. And sure enough, when asked by journalists what he’d meant, he said that Christians tend not to vote in these elections, and so he’s trying to convince them they should do so in this election because he’ll ban abortion and then they can go back to their non-voting.
This seems overly charitable to someone who literally tried to overturn a fair election and ticked all the boxes of a wannabe-autocrat back in 2018 already (as described in the excellently researched How Democracies Die). I don’t think Trump will be able to stay in power without elections, but imo he’s likely to try something (if his health allows it). This seems like standard dog whistling tactics to me, but of course I can’t prove that.
It not about being charitable, it’s about what is the most straightforward explanation. I agree he is anti democratic, but this is not an example of that, and it makes it harder to convince people when you lump true and false things in together.
I think it’s important to get the facts right and to present the best case when trying to persuade someone who disagreees with you to change their mind.
This one is a bad example. When I first heard he’d said this, as an Australian my initial reaction was ‘he probably means that they won’t need to if they don’t want to, voting isn’t compulsory in the US and an insane amount of resources seems be spent each election on getting people to vote at all’. And sure enough, when asked by journalists what he’d meant, he said that Christians tend not to vote in these elections, and so he’s trying to convince them they should do so in this election because he’ll ban abortion and then they can go back to their non-voting.
This seems overly charitable to someone who literally tried to overturn a fair election and ticked all the boxes of a wannabe-autocrat back in 2018 already (as described in the excellently researched How Democracies Die). I don’t think Trump will be able to stay in power without elections, but imo he’s likely to try something (if his health allows it). This seems like standard dog whistling tactics to me, but of course I can’t prove that.
It not about being charitable, it’s about what is the most straightforward explanation. I agree he is anti democratic, but this is not an example of that, and it makes it harder to convince people when you lump true and false things in together.