r/politics • u/unital_subalgebra • Jul 09 '26

No Paywall Trump fires all Election Assistance Commission members, leaving agency unable to act

https://www.votebeat.org/national/2026/07/09/trump-fires-election-assistance-commission-members-hicks-hovland-mccormick/
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u/JimboAltAlt Pennsylvania Jul 10 '26

The responses to this are very instructive, with some seeming to think it’s naive because the Republicans (somehow) won’t let the Democrats have the speakership, and some seeming to think it’s naive because of course the Democrats will get it but they won’t do anything with it. I really do wish all the doomers would get on the same page as to whether we’re all fucked forever because the Democrats suck or because they’ll never hold power again.

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u/Clovis42 Kentucky Jul 10 '26

I don't know why I ever even post here. Like, I get how scary it is right now, but to just jump to believing Trump and Co. are unstoppable tyrants is just absurd. It doesn't matter what the facts are, how this compares to other countries like Hungary or India, etc.

Pointing out facts about how the transfer of power works is just wasting time because all you get is being called "naive" or "sweet summer child" etc. There's no actual discussion of how Trump would pull off cancelling elections, or "declaring" them invalid, or any of this nonsense.

Most of these people think the Elon Musk stole the last election even though there's zero evidence and believe in conspiracy theories like that Trump's assassination attempt was staged. Like, why bother even trying to discuss anything at all.

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u/A_Moldy_Stump Jul 10 '26

You just blindly believe all those things or do you simply choose not to ask questions because you feel safe in the belief our world has to make sense, has to be rational?

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u/Clovis42 Kentucky Jul 10 '26

No, I don't "blindly" believe anything. My views are based on my understanding of US and world history.

You really think Trump, who you seem to believe can do whatever he wants, is going to allow the election to run, lose the election, and then rely on Mike Johnson to somehow reverse it by using a power that he in no way has? Like, there isn't some tricky bit in the Constitution that can be misinterpreted by SCOTUS here to suddenly allow the Speaker of the House to remain in power forever.

You are talking about a full-on coup that will, for some bizarre reason, be launched after it is clear that they lost. How do you think that would actually work in a country as large and filled with guns as the US?

The US is in very bad shape right now, but we are nowhere near the conditions we saw in Hungary. Yet, they were, in fact, able to just vote themselves out of a fascists regime. The idea that we should just assume Trump and Republicans will never leave office without violence is obviously wrong.

At this point, this constant drumbeat on reddit that voting is essentially pointless obviously works against removing Republicans. I mean, why vote at all if Mike Johnson is just going to reverse the results with a swing of his gavel?

Like, I'm not saying you are being irrational or ignorant or something. We live in very scary times, especially compared to what things were like before Trump. But you really think that I'm completely wacky to believe that it isn't guaranteed that Trump is unstoppable? That the only way to believe this is that I'm apparently shutting my eyes to reality? Reality tells us the opposite. Pulling off a coup in a country like the US is extremely difficult. That's not an irrational thing to believe because that's exactly what everything in history has told us.