Trump, yesterday:
"Dr. Oz should declare victory. It makes it much harder for them to cheat with the ballots that they “just happened to find.”
This morning Trump added:
"The Pennsylvania Oz race is ridiculous. . . . Stop FINDING VOTES IN PENNSYLVANIA! RIGGED?"
Trump is doing it again. He will be rewarded for it.
Mehmet Oz and David McCormick are within about 1,000 votes, with many precincts to be counted, plus some absentee and military ballots. The news stories are all about the uncertainty. It is too close to call. No news network posits a guess who will win.
In the midst of that Trump says Oz won, period.
The establishment media is presenting this as a flagrant example of Trump's election denialism. Now, finally, they suggest, Republicans will realize and resent what Trump does. After all, it is a preemptive strike against Republican voters. Surely this will hurt him.
I think not.
Republican voters will take a different message. This re-confirms that Trump is a fighter and a rule-breaker. He fights dirty for his team. He looks for an edge and grabs it. He is a trickster. It is a character we see in life, myth, and in literature and we like it--mostly--when the trickster is on our side. Life is war and all is fair. Fair play is for suckers.
Americans are not consistent in what we see as heroic. A few people remember that George Washington, at his moment of greatest power, resigned as General of the Continental Army and returned power back to civilians. He did the right thing. He put the country above self. We honor that, especially in military matters. Except we also respect--or at least tolerate--people who used draft deferments (Biden) and bone spurs (Trump) to work the system to personal advantage.
We enjoy the scamp character, the guy who pulls off the sting against the stuffed shirt or the naive. The Greeks used the Trojan Horse ploy. Odysseus tricked his way back across the Mediterranean. The allied armies set up a fake invasion spot at D-Day. It was smart--as Trump described himself for not needing to pay taxes. Republicans understood and respected Mitch McConnell's straight-faced assertion that it was a matter of principle not to give a hearing to Merrick Garland within a year of an election, and then to rush through Amy Coney Barrett. He had the power and he used it. Smart. Cynical.
Trump acting boldly and selfishly isn't a bug. It is a feature. It is the counter to the self-imposed feebleness and self-regulation that is part of the criticism of political correctness and wokeness laid onto Democrats. Democrats cannot get things done because two of their members oppose ending the filibuster. The have to power to do it, but don't. Democrats could announce right now that Vice President Harris fully intends to use exactly the technique asserted by Trump, Trump's attorney Eastman, and many Republican officeholders, that the Vice President is empowered to disallow electoral votes--but of course they won't do that. That would be unfair, unconstitutional, and against the rules.
Democrats are the goody-goody party now. Democrats tie themselves up trying to be punctilious about pronouns. They try to be internally consistent regarding identity and bathroom use. They say they want to reduce fossil fuel use, so they advocate policies that raise the price of gasoline, which may cost them an election.
A new Republican insult for Democrats has emerged: "cucks". They call Democrats cuckolds, men whose wives have sex with other men. Democrats are un-manly, weak, self-constrained. Democrats are the party that says "believe the woman." Democratic senators shamed Al Franken into quitting, so he leaves. Donald Trump handles accusations differently. He calls female accusers liars, and moreover, too ugly to interest him.
Of course Trump is being outrageous and unfair in saying Oz should declare victory now. It is OK because Trump fights to win. That is his brand. If Trump is on your side, you have a protector. He will smash Democrats. He will fight the Chinese. He will fight "illegals" at the southern border. Darn right he will cheat. He's not a pussy. He's a barbarian and it is better than being a wimp.
You say (not incorrectly, I might add) that Republicans see Trump as "a fighter and a rule-breaker. He fights dirty for his team. He looks for an edge and grabs it. He is a trickster," and later as a "barbarian." You might as well have used the word "god," because that is the void Trump fills in the minds of those who seemingly cannot address ... or control ... the changes they see around them and want some big white superhero to STOP all the chaos and confusion and make things right again. I would rather not be a part of that mindset, thank you, and have too much familiarity with the history and repercussions of places where that mindset became the norm to have any tolerance for it.