(01-15-2024, 08:50 PM)Lucky2Last Wrote: Again, I am wasting my time trying to explain to you things I shouldn't have to. Your and and/or or does not matter, because your theory breaks down both ways. Either he's stupid, and he isn't orchestrating everything, or he's brilliant and he has the worst plan you've ever seen. Neither of those make sense. That's the "or" you live in. It's just nonsensical. The third option is that people have agency. They believe the election was stolen. They wanted the establishment to do something about it, but the establishment did not. They went to protest. Trump happens to be in agreement with those things. People went to the Capitol building, and the peaceful masses were lumped in with the relatively few dissidents, and the government is treating them as equals. They fear the people AS MUCH as they fear Trump, who actually gives the movement a face. That's the most likely scenario.

There's somewhere in between stupid and brilliant.  That's a gradient.   It was a pretty good plan if he just had a few more protestors and a few loyalists in key positions.  You don't know what someone's loyalty is until you test it.  From a Machiavellian perspective, if you're the kind of person who is so full of charisma and room filling energy that you're never to really tell who's with you and who's just going along but not believing, it was absolutely a brilliant plan. I mean, it's not like he's being punished for what he did, so it's pretty smart all things considered.

The fact that people have agency and believe things about the election doesn't take away the fact that those people never would have organized and protested to the level that they did, on the day that they did, with the numbers that they did, and the violent threats, if Trump hadn't asked them to.  It would have been a much smaller, much tamer group if there even was a protest at all. We could go even farther and say that any of them would not believe those things about the election if Trump had not told them they were so. Agency is a tricky thing. Some people just believe what they believe, and others believe what they are told by people they trust.

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