Maggie's Farm

AVI, I agree that there are Trump advocates that are flaky in various ways. And I agree that "obviously" and its kin are often danger signs. But more narrowly, I find a disagreement.

You wrote "If Republicans had known a year ago that Trump was going to claim that millions of votes had been stolen without being able to supply even evidence, let alone proof, that a more than a few hundreds, maybe the occasional thousand actually had been, and that he was going to turn on Pence to the point of recklessly endangering him, I don't think he would even have gotten the nomination."

If Republicans had known in gory detail how bad Trump's passive aggressive whiny impulsive tweeting schtick would be for reacting to the situation, then maybe they would've turned away. But I think probably not, even then. It's hard to get a political coalition in the US to abandon an incumbent President in any case. And what of the alternatives? The Republican establishment in general and various possible alternative candidates in particular have done a surprising amount to freak out the base in their own ways. It is customary for the bipartisan establishment to leave $100 credibility bills on the sidewalk, and to use flaming $1000 credibility bills to light their celebratory doobies. Trump still has some credibility change left over from e.g. the $100 illegal immigration bill he was left to pick up when it turned out that smacking Eric Cantor out of office wasn't nearly enough to get the attention of the political professionals of the establishment.

Also, not everyone has the vocabulary to express "reversing the burden of proof" but then many people don't know the word "schadenfreude" either. Just because they don't have the active vocabulary doesn't mean that they don't have a working understanding of the concept, and I expect many of the people in the base would willingly reveal (e.g., to a Socratic questioner) that part of their disagreement with you is that (they judge) you are reversing the burden of proof. You might think they use the wrong burden of proof, and you might go on to judge that it's mostly groupthink rooted in blind partisanship, and in many cases you might be right. But some of them (again, perhaps with some help from a Socratic questioner) might be able to make a reasoned case for their position. In short, they think they see a helluva lot of smoke, and that at some point in the past it became unreasonable to treat circumstantial evidence as "nothing to see here, move along". And this comment is more than long enough, so although probably I have more to say about that, I will leave it to another comment.

Also, for those CS Lewis fans among you, it's all in Macaulay, all in Macaulay: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools! In his History of England (available from Project Gutenberg; useful history of early Anglosphere foundations, and marvellous time capsule of at least one strand of 19th century Whiggish orthodoxy)... (1) M. makes a point (esp. re. Monmouth) that the masses can remain stubbornly fond of their flaky champions even when revealed as unworthy. (2) There is an interestingly close analogy between the prerogative to decree something like DACA and the "dispensing power" asserted by James II to nullify legislation against Catholics in the runup to the Glorious Revolution. (History only rhymes, though: the Supreme Court overruling the power of the successor to cancel the earlier decree seems to be entirely new.) (3) M. describes a reputation for deceit sufficient to get the masses to, more or less, disagree about the burden of proof regarding the authenticity of the son of James II. He also describes how it collides with the establishment's lofty disinterest in allowing credible witnesses.