Trump Supporters Go Way Beyond Being Poor Losers
Imagine that your favorite football team or baseball team lost a game and a group of fans refused to accept the loss. Imagine if instead of coming to terms with the loss they issued death threats against the other team, the fans of the other team, their wives and families, even threatening the umpires, telling them to change the outcome of the game after it was over so they could be declared the winners even though they lost the game. How would you feel about the behavior of those fans if that was YOUR team? You might want your team to win, but I doubt you would want your team to claim a win by reason of death threats against the other team members, umpires or their families. That’s not a win. That’s intimidation.
This is What Trump Supporters are Doing
Late on the night of April 24, the wife of Georgia’s top election official got a chilling text message: “You and your family will be killed very slowly.”
A week earlier, Tricia Raffensperger, wife of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, had received another anonymous text: “We plan for the death of you and your family every day.”
That followed an April 5 text warning. A family member, the texter told her, was “going to have a very unfortunate incident.”
Those messages, which have not been previously reported, illustrate the continuing barrage of threats and intimidation against election officials and their families months after former U.S. President Donald Trump’s November election defeat. While reports of threats against Georgia officials emerged in the heated weeks after the voting, Reuters interviews with more than a dozen election workers and top officials – and a review of disturbing texts, voicemails and emails that they and their families received – reveal the previously hidden breadth and severity of the menacing tactics.
Trump’s relentless false claims that the vote was “rigged” against him sparked a campaign to terrorize election officials nationwide – from senior officials such as Raffensperger to the lowest-level local election workers.
The threats are being investigated.
These people need to be prosecuted. They are disgusting.
And they are Trump’s most loyal base voters. Republicans need them to win elections. For that reason, Kevin McCarthy and others in the GOP refuse to condemn them or what they are doing, saying and threatening. But many people who used to work as poll watchers or election judges are not coming back after the threats they have had to put up with.
How Trump and Trumpism is Turning the American Electorate Against the GOP
Trump’s loyal followers cling to the notion that he should have won when he lost and that he will return in August when he won’t. The inability to accept the reality that he lost the election, an election that was fair and square, has become the litmus test for being a good Republican these days. Trump’s impassioned supporters demand they “win” by threatening and terrifying election workers and their families, secretaries of state and anyone who disagrees with them with death threats. Out of fear, these people who were just doing their jobs have had to leave their homes, worry about their lives and their family members’ lives being threatened. Some had to stop visiting family members out of concern for their safety. These are consequences that should have a remedy. The perpetrators should have to pay damages as well as do time in prison for their death threats.
I think the majority of sane Americans see what Trump has done and continues to do to our core values, lessening the civil behavior of people in our country. Anyone who is reasonable should have come to the conclusion by now that Trump is a bridge too far for them. Even people who once voted for him, excusing his rhetoric as over the top, but liking his policies, should understand by now just how monumentally bad Trump was and is for our country. This might just be a litmus test for sanity– do you still think Trump was a good president? Do you still want him to be president again?
What the Republicans are doing by clinging to Trump has resulted in an increasingly shrinking base:
From Gallup comes news that its regular polling on party affiliation shows the largest quarterly gap in major party affiliation since 2012, with 49 percent of U.S. adults identifying themselves as either Democrats (30 percent) or as Democratic-leaning independents (19 percent), while 40 percent call themselves Republicans (25 percent) or Republican-leaning independents (15 percent).
As it shrinks, it is the home to more and more of Trump’s craziest, the forever Trump supporters, the militias and the White Supremacists, the 3%ers and Proud Boys, which, for moderate Republicans, should be both shocking and disgusting. By the time we are closer to 2022 anyone left in the Republican Party is likely to be 100% aligned with Trump and Trumpism which means they will likely also be the craziest of the crazies out there.
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