Donald Trump and the Common Knowledge Game
September 24, 2024·34 comments
Everyone knows Trump won't accept a defeat. We all know that we all know it. But this shared certainty obscures a far more precarious question: what happens when someone with actual power decides to validate his refusal to concede? The answer determines whether the day after the election becomes a constitutional crisis or a footnote in political theatre.
• We're all watching to see who will act. Legislators can talk all they want without consequence. A governor withholding electoral votes or a Fortune 500 CEO publicly questioning the election results would be different entirely. That person would be burning their bridges to the existing political system forever.
• The risk calculation is brutal. If you're an executive with real power and you join Trump in this fight, you're betting everything that he wins the post-election struggle. If he doesn't, you're finished. The conspiracy charges alone would be significant.
• Most powerful people won't take the bet. It's hard to identify a sitting governor or major media executive who has calculated that the upside justifies the career-ending downside. Even those aligned with Trump seem to be quietly stepping back.
• There's one exception who might. Elon Musk has already suggested a Harris administration poses an existential threat to him personally and to his companies. He's already positioned himself unusually far outside the traditional political bounds for someone of his influence.
• If one powerful person commits, others will follow. That's the real inflection point. One dominant executive validating Trump's claims creates permission for others to do the same. That cascade is the threshold between a political tantrum and an institutional breakdown.
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Comments
I don’t think we will know until January if Georgia is going to hand count votes: What I do know is 49% of people will be happy, 49% will be sad, and 2% will wonder how people could have voted for either of the top 2 vote getters.
I received these two emails within literally 2 minutes of each other. LOL.
I hope you are wrong Ben. I know you dislike Trump. Many intellectuals do. What a terrible future the USA will have if Kamala wins. I live in CA. I understand the Democrat super-majority.
Zenchi( Rafa?) wrote this somewhere on the forum, not sure when but I saved it to remind me what’s important, because I never wanted to lose my self like I did in the 2020.
It is the organizing people by which we are driven to go tribal. By convincing us that there are only two views, and only two options, and if you are not this color, then you must be the other - that is how we are robbed of autonomy of mind.
that is why I am a believer in small scale, small community, small living - where the other is your neighbor and you can see them as a complete being and not some cartoonified enemy that turns us all into useful idiots.
Maybe Thomas Jefferson was correct…
As I was reading this I was just waiting for you to get to Elon.
I hate to even say this, but I think you got one thing wrong.
I think Elon has more to lose than Trump. Yes, sure, Trump probably ends up facing prison time if he loses this election. But he’s an old man and it would be a nightmare to actually jail someone with Secret Service protection. Like in all other cases in his life Trump will (probably) manage to skate by mostly unharmed.
But not Elon. I think a Harris administration is disastrous for Twitter. I think it’s even more disastrous for SpaceX, a company that is probably on balance far more important than anyone is willing to admit. His choice to go all-in on Trump seems both inevitable and also borderline suicidal if Harris wins. The danger for all of us is that he does the post-election math, realizes that he’s cooked either way, and figures he might as well go down with both phasers blazing. THAT is what would keep me up at night were I to think about it for any length of time.
Maybe they will take the next step this time…You know - Democracy must be protected.
Elon is the one guy on any social media platform that supports Trump, are people equally worried that if Trump wins Zuckerberg, Bezo’s and the lot will face a similar fate----of course not.
This quote always gets bandied about, but the emphasis is often lost. It’s “a republic, if YOU can keep it.” Franklin wasn’t worried that Powell was personally going to blow up the republic, but at that moment she was the stand-in for all the citizens of the new nation and he knew that the path from a republic to a monarchy ran through The People
.
“Donald Trump is not going to concede this election, and he’s going to call for ‘patriotic Americans’ to ‘stand up’ and ‘get to the bottom’ of it.”
Resident squirrel-brain and contrarian here; gonna propose a contrary position.
Going off-brand for the first time in my experience, he seems to be reflecting on not-winning.
And it ended with Attkisson asking Trump whether he sees himself running again in 2028 if his current presidential bid — his third in a row — is unsuccessful.
“No, I don’t. No, I don’t,” Trump said. “I think that that will be, that will be it. I don’t see that at all. I think that hopefully we’re gonna be successful.”
It’s a rare admission of possible defeat by the former president, who has spread false claims about voter fraud and election interference to explain his loss in 2020 and preemptively stoke fears about 2024. (from 9/23 NPR interview)
He’s even at the point of assigning blame if it happens.
All’s I’m saying… is that I think there is a weird, contrary signal rising above the noise, the bellicosity, the narcissism that I usually associate with The Donald. Is he trying to set the stage against getting sucked into J6-type incitement arguments? Did he all of a sudden realize that there are real deals in the Philippines, Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine that he’s just too tired to “Art” his way out of? Is the Emperor reflecting on what he might look like with no clothes, while common knowledge circulates? (Sorry I had to put that out there.)
I’m not sure he’s ready to climb on the bus with Kari; I just think there’s a weird vibe out there.
Anecdotally the very liberal rich white neighborhood that I have occasion to walk miles through a few times a week has a lot of election signs. All Democrat candidates. There’s hundreds of houses with Democrat signs and not a single one with Republican candidate signs. There are only two houses with Kamala signs. There are no Trump signs or flags.
I’m not 100% what to do with that, but that’s the truth. I interpret this as a lack of rich white liberal voter enthusiasm for Kamala in this area anyway.
On the other end of the state I do a lot of driving, it’s suburban and rural there. Lots of Trump flags and Republican candidate signs. Some Democrat signs. Very few Kamala signs. Republican area.
Again not sure what to do with this, but I believe it shows Republican enthusiasm for Trump.
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