Trump biographers—including me—and many Washington journalists are telling America that (a) Trump will never stop his coup attempt, (b) there's no bottom to what he's willing to do, therefore (c) there's no final "victory" over Trump we can celebrate.
I hope America will listen.
This is an ongoing effort to build an autocratic dynasty and end America.
Where are those folks now? Silent. Because now all America sees what Trump is.
More from Seth Abramson
(THREAD) To understand the second impeachment of Donald Trump, we must understand the words that preceded and augmented his January 6 incitement of insurrection. This thread unpacks four key speeches—Don Jr., Giuliani, Mo Brooks, and Eric Trump. I hope you'll read on and RETWEET.
1/ If you haven't yet seen my analysis of Trump's January 6 "incitement to insurrection" speech, you can find it at the link below. This thread will look at four shorter—but deeply consequential—speeches just before Trump's, all by Trump allies or family.
2/ DONALD TRUMP JR.
Trump Jr.'s speech on January 6—which ended less than an hour before his father incited an insurrection—is one of the most inscrutable of the day, because its beginning includes some promisingly responsible rhetoric. Then it descends into madness and chaos.
3/ "I'm looking at the crowd here, and you did it all [congregate here] without burning down buildings! You did it without ripping down churches! Without looting! I didn't know that that was possible!" Within 2 hours of his speech, Don Jr.'s audience would be looting the Capitol.
4/ So obviously Don Jr.'s opening is ironic to a historic degree, but this isn't the first time we've heard this rhetoric from him. He habitually ignores right-wing violence because he knows that his chief rhetorical canard—which marries progressivism and violences—gets applause.
1/ If you haven't yet seen my analysis of Trump's January 6 "incitement to insurrection" speech, you can find it at the link below. This thread will look at four shorter—but deeply consequential—speeches just before Trump's, all by Trump allies or family.
(THREAD) Media has yet to do a deep dive on precisely what Trump *said* in his January 6 speech in DC\u2014a speech now called an "incitement to insurrection," and the basis for an article of impeachment coming Monday. This thread unpacks the speech. I hope you'll read on and RETWEET. pic.twitter.com/ba6eaNScNW
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) January 9, 2021
2/ DONALD TRUMP JR.
Trump Jr.'s speech on January 6—which ended less than an hour before his father incited an insurrection—is one of the most inscrutable of the day, because its beginning includes some promisingly responsible rhetoric. Then it descends into madness and chaos.
3/ "I'm looking at the crowd here, and you did it all [congregate here] without burning down buildings! You did it without ripping down churches! Without looting! I didn't know that that was possible!" Within 2 hours of his speech, Don Jr.'s audience would be looting the Capitol.
4/ So obviously Don Jr.'s opening is ironic to a historic degree, but this isn't the first time we've heard this rhetoric from him. He habitually ignores right-wing violence because he knows that his chief rhetorical canard—which marries progressivism and violences—gets applause.
More from Trump
This is mostly right but strikes me as it needing said that I don't think the left or the intelligentsia have the slightest idea how low institutional trust in anything coming from a left mouthpiece is now. Except in-network, the best heuristic is "the opposite of what they said"
If you look at the situation from a predictive models perspective instead of the more rigorous and appropriate (under normal circumstances) "prove your case or gtfo" perspective, trusting the opposite of whatever the left side says has an AMAZING track record, as we know it.
Literally, the best heuristic most people have right now, in terms of how often it gets things right versus *completely* wrong, is "whatever CNN, the NYT, public health officials, and the Democrats said... yeah, the opposite." That is, they're wrong WAY outside of statistics.
They're also not just wrong. They're *completely* wrong, backwards, often transparently covering something up that they don't want known or refuse to believe. This isn't just a legitimation crisis because there's a heuristic: whatever the official left narrative is, is wrong.
There are a few reasons why such a heuristic would be more predictive than not. One of those is conspiracy, and another is mass hysteria with ideological capture. We know at least one of those is happening and have rather strong evidence both are. That makes conspiracy reasonable
I read part of the transcript of the Trump call.
— Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein) January 4, 2021
The following strikes me.
A) Trump is a true political outsider & the only one to reach the Presidency with zero government experience.
B) There is an obvious open institutional conspiracy to prevent any outsider gaining power.
If you look at the situation from a predictive models perspective instead of the more rigorous and appropriate (under normal circumstances) "prove your case or gtfo" perspective, trusting the opposite of whatever the left side says has an AMAZING track record, as we know it.
Literally, the best heuristic most people have right now, in terms of how often it gets things right versus *completely* wrong, is "whatever CNN, the NYT, public health officials, and the Democrats said... yeah, the opposite." That is, they're wrong WAY outside of statistics.
They're also not just wrong. They're *completely* wrong, backwards, often transparently covering something up that they don't want known or refuse to believe. This isn't just a legitimation crisis because there's a heuristic: whatever the official left narrative is, is wrong.
There are a few reasons why such a heuristic would be more predictive than not. One of those is conspiracy, and another is mass hysteria with ideological capture. We know at least one of those is happening and have rather strong evidence both are. That makes conspiracy reasonable
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The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.
In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.
In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.
This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.
In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.
The story doesn\u2019t say you were told not to... it says you did so without approval and they tried to obfuscate what you found. Is that true?
— Sarah Frier (@sarahfrier) November 15, 2018
In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.
In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.
This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.
In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.
