My analysis is that he know's he's already lost but he has to keep all the hooting fans excited.
Or does he genuinely think 6 million people voted illegally to steal the election?
Trump himself probably thinks the Dems rigged the election, I think he is mentally incapable of accepting he got beat. Like he is still bringing up bullshit about his inauguration crowd sizes in 2020, if he can't accept that after four years he's never going to believe he lost the election to Sleepy Joe, if he did it genuinely might kill him. I think everyone around him is doing kayfabe.
The funniest thing would be if Biden's inauguration was smaller thanks to covid.
Yeah i dont think he believes it was stolen. He's just a sore loser.
Probably both. I suspect it's a case of doublethink. He doesn't want to be president any more, but doesn't want to lose. He knows that his protests are futile and ultimately won't change anything, which just inspires him to keep doing it.
His next move will probably be to try to grift ONAN...err...OANN. I recall that his kids bought in with a 25% stake earlier this year. Newsmax is another possibility. Both are extremely small-time networks (something like 1% of Fox News Channel's valuation), and they have no real viewership. But I can just see Trump's sales pitch now...he's the only one who can make OANN successful, etc.
I looked up the deal the Trump kids were doing with OANN, and it seems Vanity Fair got a super-duper-background-scoop kind of story that everyone is denying...except for the $250 million figure, which is not denied. It sounds like the owner (Herring) isn't happy about relinquishing all of his ownership. Last I checked, relinquishing ownership proportional to $$$ invested is kinda how capitalism works. Anyway, they're "still in talks".
The OANN angle the Trump crime family is running is quite amazing. I never thought anyone could divert the MAGA morons away from Fox, and Trump does it with just a few Tweets. And like you said, Fox has far more resources (I can't remember the viewership of OANN, but it's tiny), but it does seem possible that Goliath may yet fall to OANN/Newsmax/etc.
Yes...here's one about the owner denying the sale, POd about losing his private holdings, but no one is actually denying the $$$:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/trump-is-really-aiming-to-take-down-fox
There have been several articles, including a few in other papers referring to other Vanity Fair articles. Unfortunately, VF is paywalled, so you won't be able to read a lot unless you're a subscriber. (I think you get 2 articles/month otherwise). Some of the Dem/lib sites like DailyKos and Democratic Underground have covered this in the past. It looks like the Trumps were trying to use a front group (Hicks Equity) to hide their name, and it got exposed...who knows? (Another interesting question: is this the same Hicks family as Hope Hicks?).
If you're a grifter who buys your own grift, is what you're doing still grifting? :thonk:
It's a post-modern meta-grift, and here: is where I'd make a joke about Foucault if I was smart enough to have one.
I think they are just scalping supporters for everything they can while they are still able. Iirc donations to the stop the steal fund actually go into two other accounts to pay his debts down up to the allowed maximum before any cash actually goes into the thing that is supposed to be used for the court cases. One last great milking.
Edit : yes also the narcissism thing. He didn’t want to win in the first place, but he doesn’t want the hard L of defeat at this point. I agree with the other posters that it sets a narrative that allows him to leave (with heaps of cash) without admitting “defeat”
i dont think its just kayfabe, i think this whole episode is borne out of sheer narcissism more than anything self interested
He can't fade away into obscurity, he's got to stay in the spot light as a "winner" in some fashion. Its the only way he's been able to keep his grift going for the entirety of his life.
So, if he's going to go down, he needs to go down swinging. I'm betting this is him trying to keep from getting himself cucked by his own die hard fans. If he fails, and looks like a weakling, nobody will want to watch his TV shows or pay for him to come speak at their rallies.
Yeah looks like it.
There was the potential for his more zealous clingers to actually action it, and Pompeo half flirted with it, but it didn’t go anywhere.
