He’s just kidding; oops no he isn’t Episode 743
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A few days ago Donald Trump said in a speech that Christians would never have to vote again if they voted for him this fall, which some hysterically overreacting people interpreted as a statement that he was planning to do away with real elections. I mean can you believe that? What kind of person seriously thinks Donald Trump is going to refuse to recognize the validity of any election he loses? Where could someone get such an absurd idea?
In fact that idea is so absurd that plenty of people immediately started giving Trump’s words a much more benign explanation, since it’s been well established that such an interpretive method is the surest hermeneutical device for figuring out what Donald Trump is really saying, as opposed to what he appears to be saying.
The one problem with this interpretive method is that it’s guaranteed to produce the wrong answer, although that problem has zero effect on the willingness of otherwise sensible people to continue to employ it (I generally admire Orin Kerr’s work on this and other matters, but the fact that he too is so prone to this sort of temporizing is a bad sign in general).
Former President Donald J. Trump on Monday repeated his recent assertion that Christians will never have to vote again if they vote for him this November, brushing aside multiple requests to walk back or clarify the statement.
Mr. Trump’s initial comments, to a group of Christian conservatives on Friday, were interpreted by many Democrats as evidence he would end elections. On Monday, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham urged him to rebut that framing, but he offered instead: “I said, vote for me, you’re not going to have to do it ever again. It’s true.”
Trump is saying that he wants to install the kind of managed (read: fake) democracy they have in places like Russia and China and Hungary, which are all run by strong powerful men he admires for their strength and power.
He says this over and over again, in the most straightforward and unmistakable way. Except it remains very mistakable, because if he what he appears to be saying is what he’s actually saying — BREAKING NEWS: IT IS — that would constitute evidence of a fundamental crisis at the core of our entire political system, which “obviously” isn’t the case, because if it were something or the other would probably follow from that.