i think tcock and I agreed that it might be best to wait a cycle. it depends entirely on circumstances outside his own choice.

if Trump doesn’t run, quietly (or loudly) tells Desantis he will back him, and Biden doesnt run again (or the harris/biden admin keeps flopping on everything), then he should absolutely give it a go

running against Trump in a primary would not be a prudent decision. Nor would attempting to defeat an incumbent that still has enough backing. defeating an incumbent in any form down now takes an unforced error by said incumbent (“no new taxes” GHWB 1992) or more recently, a near-unified, calculated, massively overreaching effort by all of his party and large swathes of the opposition party to do so. we saw this just last year in 2020 from the “fortifying of the election”

This post was edited by excellence on Oct 7 2021 09:12am

HRC exploited the FISA court system's loophole of lack of evidence requirements standard courts would need. Then peddled the RUSSIA DID THIS stories to the media, and as a result recounts and other legal actions were still not pursued. (= BAD)

Trump's team pushed shit stories and wound people of to physical violence, as well as filing frivolous cases to save face, same BS push to the media, and resulted in real court cases and recounts. (= BAD BAD)

HRC just found a way to save face without involving the courts and legal process, imo even with her massive ego she's able to take an L far better than Trump.

Maybe I'm indeed totally out of touch with the GOP primary electorate, but I really believe that DeSantis could win a contested primary against Trump if all the non-Trump forces in the party rally around him.
It will of course depend on how strong Trump's position is, going into the primaries. The poll I posted suggests that Trump is not insurmountable and that his support is starting to erode slightly but crucially.


To reiterate: what does DeSantis have to lose by that point? He'll be termed out as governor in 2026, he will most likely not be able to parachute to the Senate since both of Florida's seats are blocked with Rubio/Scott for the foreseeable future, and by that time, he's also too old and lacking seniority to have a good career in the House. And if he ends his political career and cashes out via a consultant/lobbyist job, a presidential run will only increase his profile.



Another option that I see is DeSantis becoming Trump's running mate if Biden/Harris look so vulnerable that even a Trump redux has a decent chance of defeating them.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Oct 7 2021 09:18am

good fucking luck to any candidate. watching Graham and even Trump get booed just for saying "you have a choice to do what u want but i got vaccinated so think about it" has me thinking its a hell of a pain to walk the knife's edge they sharpened the past 10 or so years.

Its more important than ever to keep republicans out of office, please get out and vote all!!!

The thing is, HRC and her campaign had very little capacity to force the FBI to do anything. Even when it came to making materially misleading statements to the FBI by pretending to not be affiliated with her campaign as they constructed their Russiaburger story. Its still 99% of the responsibility being shouldered for the FBI for the fact they intentionally subverted the supposed safeguards on domestic spying by using circular FISA evidence, doctoring evidence presented to judges, unmasking Flynn, and all the things we don't even know about that didn't get exposed. Its the FBI and its leadership that had Comey roleplaying a Le Carre novel as he set up absurd entrapment schemes to weaponize the FBI against the NSA and authorized a wild goose chase to pursue baseless politically motivated conspiracy theories in the first place.
Trump's team, when put in the same situation, took the exact opposite tact. They shut down all politically motivated investigations even to the point of erring on the side of caution when it came to obvious and provable cases of crimes being committed by officials like. Ilhan Omar. Bill Barr made it very clear that the DoJ would simply quash anything even resembling the Comey/McCabe era. So when they had the opportunity to engage in a tit-for-tat Hoover-style persecution of their political opponents and wield the powers of state to persecute them like they themselves were persecuted, they didn't do it.

Maybe theres some equivalency to be drawn by misrepresentations of HRC's team to the FBI, and the Trump team's misrepresentation to the courts about the election. But honestly in both cases they are very small offenses that have no real importance in the grander scheme. It was the FBI/DoJ under Obama that was willing to engage in all kinds of blatant misconduct and shenanigans, and it was the Trump supporting chuds who briefly emulated the George Floyd rioters. You can blame the FBI for its misconduct, you can blame the Trump supporters for their misconduct, but its not really the fault of HRC's campaign that the FBI was so corrupt (and not just in favor of HRC, more self-serving opportunism) and its not the fault of Trump's team that his supporters waltzed into the capital. People are responsible for their own actions, not able to blame it on some tangentially related statement or irresponsible prose or rhetoric that was told to them. And in both cases, it was their own allied team that got burned. Trump definitely didn't benefit from his supporters making clowns of themselves, and HRC was ready to have Comey get droned after making her investigation public.

Russia set up literal troll farms to influence the 2016 election, even recent studies show like 99/100 "christain" Facebook groups are run by foreign intel ghost agencies. did it win it for trump, idk, honestly i doubt it full on swung anything, but it certainly played a part, was targeted at the election specifically, and has contributed to domestic unrest since, and continues to go largely unpunished. perhaps cant even be stopped, idk.

Trump's campaigns claims, top to bottom, are utter bullshit. not even close to anything credible just a big stinking pile of horseshit.

Obama's FBI/DOJ certainly deserves scorn, but at least they had a puff of smoke to go looking for fire. and where was Trump's push to change FISA courts? where are the sweeping transparency gains in FBI/CIA/DOJ behavior? Trump literally asked his VP to not endorse the legal electoral votes, called him out on twitter as being too weak to do what's needed, and fanned flames for months thereafter until Powell/Guiliani's claims were so transparently hollow he couldn't anymore. Didn't correct himself, just stopped.

This post was edited by thesnipa on Oct 7 2021 09:49am

The Russian facebook groups had a reach of about 10,000 people.

The God Emperor Trump facebook page meanwhile had a reach of a million.

CNN has a reach of several tens of millions. You couldnt be more wrong about the scale.

Agreed about Trump being desultory.

lol wut. the dissemination of the memes and shit those farms churned out was pretty wild.

the difficult thing to measure is influence on a causal scale, likely impossible. the reach of the troll farms isnt and wasnt a nonissue.

From the moment Trump fired Comey, it was politically impossible for him or his admin to push for any further structural changes in the intelligence community - any such attempt would have been framed by Democrats and the media as an attempt to intimidate his investigators/tamper with evidence.