The New Yorker has a stunning article about the lengths the Trump Mafia is going to insure victory, and I am wondering if this kind of threat is illegal. Writer Evan Osnos is making a comparison to the old “dead- horse-head-in-the-bed” scene from “The Godfather”:
“More than three months before any ballots have been cast at the Republican convention, Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again consigliere, has delivered the campaign equivalent of a severed horse head to delegates who might consider denying Trump the nomination. Trump’s supporters will find you in your sleep, he merrily informed them this week. He did not mean it metaphorically.
“We will disclose the hotels and the room numbers of those delegates who are directly involved in the steal,” Stone said Monday, on Freedomain Radio. “If you’re from Pennsylvania, we’ll tell you who the culprits are. We urge you to visit their hotel and find them. You have a right to discuss this, if you voted in the Pennsylvania primary, for example, and your votes are being disallowed,” Stone said.
Over the years, I’ve covered elections in Iraq, Iran, and Burma. Stone’s taunt is every bit as threatening as anything I heard in those places, which have far less experience than America with democracy. Such is the moment we currently inhabit.
By now, we know most of the chapters in Trump’s political playbook: the epithets for “low-energy” Jeb and Lyin’ Ted and Little Marco, and the bombshell provocations—about, say, a nuclear strike in Europe—as a way to draw attention away from unfavorable news and missteps. And, throughout, of course, the mockery of women. But as we approach the growing prospect of a contested convention, in which delegates can make game-time choices about whom they will support, it’s becoming clearer that Trump may seek to shape the outcome by using his most unwieldy weapon of all: the latent power of usually peaceful people.
It’s easy to mock Trump for his thin-skinned fixation on the size of his audiences, but that misses a deeper point: you can’t have a riot without a mob. Even before he was a candidate, Trump displayed a rare gift for cultivating the dark power of a crowd.”
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Now granted, Roger Stone is a political slime-mold that dates back to the Nixon era and is known for theatrics. However, I believe a case could be made that this kind of threat – to send the Redneck Ninjas out to the hotel rooms of delegates that have strayed from Trumpism – is election tampering.
Authoritarian culture that advocates violence, or the threat of violence – is the hallmark of a fascist movement. This suggestion, combined with Stone’s earlier threat to have The Trumpets riot in the streets in a Brownshirt-style “Days of Rage” may be the harbinger of “Kristallnacht in Cleveland”.
The amazing thing is that while the campaign is tossing around these triggers for their minions, they are totally screwing up their ground game, which may result in the Trumpets accidentally dropping their own delegates at a time when they need every rage-filled disaffected Republican. Take a look at this article from The Washington Post:
Once again, Trump campaign makes mistakes trying to win delegates
(Excerpt)
By Ed O’Keefe April 9
“COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The presidential campaign of Donald Trump stumbled yet again Saturday amid the complex preparations required to win Republican delegates in some states.
The latest mistakes came as thousands of Colorado Republicans were meeting at a hockey arena here to finalize a slate of 37 delegates to the National Republican Convention in Cleveland. The convention planned to choose the final 13 delegates from a list of more than 600 people who are running for the positions.
Each of the presidential campaigns and several conservative groups are running slates of like-minded candidates, hoping to pool their support and prevail among the thousands casting ballots. The campaign of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) has demonstrated supreme organizational prowess and is poised to sweep all, if not most, of the delegates by the end of Saturday.
In the hours before Saturday’s vote, Trump supporters distributed glossy white flyers urging people to vote for a slate of candidates to fill 13 statewide delegate slots. But several names were misspelled or assigned the wrong ballot number.
The mistakes were exposed at the worst possible moment: just as Colorado Republicans were walking on to the arena floor to take seats and prepare to cast ballots. Trump volunteers frantically printed new lists with new names and ballot numbers — but those lists also had mistakes.”——————————————————————
The followers of “Mein Trumpf” are boorish posers in the political world, but they are also very, very dangerous…
