contemplatingoutlander:

Opinion | The Key Players in Trump’s Plot to Upend the Election, Mapped

While it’s tempting to downplay or dismiss these efforts as the pathetic machinations of crackpots and fringe figures, that would be a mista

nytimes.com

This is an excellent NY Times interactive article, so the above link is a gift 🎁 link so anyone can read the entire article, even if the don’t subscribe to the NY Times. Here are some excerpts.

Upending the outcome of a free and fair presidential election is no minor endeavor. It requires time, energy, money and, especially, an awful lot of people willing to do the wrong thing — or at least go along with it.
The network of people who allegedly helped Donald Trump try, without success, to stay in power more than two and a half years ago may seem hopelessly chaotic, but there was a method to the madness. American elections are, by design, entrusted to the states and therefore decentralized. To meddle in them requires national masterminds working hand in glove with plotters at the state and local levels — a tangle of conspirators, enablers and indulgent bystanders as messy and sprawling as our democracy itself. And while it can be tempting to downplay or dismiss the entire nightmare as the pathetic machinations of crackpots and fringe figures or even to wave it off as ancient history, that would be a mistake.
Those who worked to overturn the 2020 election are the same kinds of people and groups Mr. Trump would surely surround himself with if elected to a second term: unscrupulous or timid federal and state officials, ethically flexible lawyers and Republican yes men and women. Except that in 2025 those figures would have a better sense of how to dismantle the guardrails that once stood in their way and how to exploit the fault lines and weaknesses in our electoral process.

[emphasis added]

Below is the final graphic in the article that shows all the people connected with Trump’s coup attempt, including some who refused to go along with it:

This interactive article is well worth reading, and I invite you to use the above gift link to do so.

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The text of this article is by Michelle Cottle; the graphics are by Taylor Maggiacomo and Norman Eisen.

erikag59:

batboyblog:

From time to time I think about how Fox News totally freaked out about Mr. Rogers telling kids they were special and he liked them just for being themselves, and like…. how was that not the wake up call that the conservative movement in America is purely evil?

Alisyn Camerota, Steve Doocy, and Brian Kilmeade on the Fox and Friends show.

wilwheaton:

liberalsarecool:

Tennessee Republicans are a special interest group for white supremacists.

The Republican Party is a special interest group for white supremacists.

depsidase:

modern-politics111:

Trump rambled so much in a NY fraud case deposition that a lawyer griped, 'we're going to be here until midnight'

Trump went on – and on – about his marble bathrooms while being deposed in NY Attorney General Letitia James' fraud lawsuit, a new transcrip

Business Insider

This is what he was like when I saw him at a real estate conference around 2012 or so. The other people there just talked about how sad he was that he clearly couldn’t put a coherent sentence together or stay in topic without his daughter guiding him. One of my friends kept saying, “that was fuckin bizarro, man.”

Little did any of us know how much worse things would get.