All respect to Dan, but the bar for “right” here shouldn’t be set at “Trump attempts procedural coup and fails,” or “Dem landslide buries Trump’s election stealing ambitions.” Both of these standards are actually testaments to how far we’ve slipped. https://twitter.com/dandrezner/status/1315976395869298689

The first normalizes shocking abuse on the grounds that it’s unlikely to work out the way Trump wants, the second creates the unacceptable expectation that the liberal party needs to win landslides to claim power uncontested. This is a broken discourse.

Trump could lose by 10, rendering him unable to steal the election in court, but then turn around and fan (more) street violence and sabotage the transition, and under the incompetence standard this would just stand as evidence that the hysterical libs worried too much. Really!?

As I and @theplumlinegs and others have pointed out, nobody has taken for granted that Trump’s schemes will work the way he imagines them. Quite the contrary. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/07/trumps-corrupt-schemes-save-himself-keep-blowing-up-his-face/

The problem is that simply setting them in motion is degrading and destabilizing and undermines the fairness of elections. Incompetent or not, it’s authoritarian to even try. A 1 percent chance of success is unacceptably high, not something to shrug off because the odds are low.

More on this point here, from May. https://crooked.com/articles/trump-incompetence-dodge/