This was going to happen. Trump did advocate for violence. If I were to take Trump's side, I could point out that all living US Presidents have advocated for violence while in office. I could say that Trump didn't specifically say "Go into the Capital building, break stuff, and see if you can kidnap some Congressmen." What he did say is that the election had been stolen from him. He said this even though Biden was polling way ahead of him prior to Election Day. He claimed that the mail in ballots were fraudulent because they were mostly for Biden.
Now, some people are more concerned than I am about the pandemic, and some people are less concerned than me. I wear a mask in public, I've avoided any meatspace political meetings, but I've also had close friends come over to visit. I really wanted my vote to count, so I voted in person. I would guess that people who are more concerned about the pandemic would be more likely to vote by mail in 2020, and would have been more likely to vote against a President who hasn't been taking the pandemic seriously.
Perhaps Trump sincerely believed something fishy was going on. If that were the case, he was correct to file lawsuits so to get at the heart of the matter. However, he didn't have enough proof for the courts. The preponderance of evidence as it stands now is that Joe Biden had more popular votes, and also won in enough states to win the Electoral College.
Part of democracy and due process is accepting the results even when they don't go your way. The hope is that when things do go your way, the other side will accept those results. To be sure, the results are never even close to fair, but the idea is to produce an outcome that is acceptable to enough people that life can go on. You can still go to work, you can still buy food at the store, and trash still gets picked up every week. If more people voted against you than voted for you, that's a huge sign that you probably don't have the numbers to win a civil war. Trump supporters might have expected the support of the military, but the military gets their funding from Congress. All those cool tanks and planes need spare parts and fuel, so the US military can be expected to try to stay on good terms with the US Congress.
Can we all agree that elections are more pleasant than wars? In an election, you get to wear cool shirts and buttons. In war, you have to wear camo. In elections, you can talk to your friends and try to get them to join your side. In war, you're not going to get much of a chance to hear from anyone who joined the other side. Most elections, you can go to rallies if the weather is nice, or just stay home if you don't feel like it. In wars, you go out on patrol in shitty weather whether you feel like it or not. You'll never learn from Call of Duty what MRE's taste like, what latrines smell like, or what it really feels like to get shot. I personally would rather lose the worst election than win the best war.
So when a President denounces the outcome of an election, that puts the country at risk of a war that's not even going to make the Top 50 of wars. He has already gotten people killed. Everyone who died at the Capital riot had voted for Trump, including Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick. Sicknick might very well have been tempted to join the mob and help them round up members of Congress so that they do their bidding. He might still be alive if he had done that. Instead he did his duty and was beaten to death for it.
Sicknick also no longer has access to Twitter or Facebook.
Like all private companies and public traded corporations, Twitter and Facebook have an interest in having customers who are still alive and able to buy products from their advertisers. If lots of people die, this will run counter to their interests. This is as basic as economics gets: dead consumers stop consuming. Banning Trump from their platforms was the right thing to do, from both a financial and moral stand point.
I agree that elections are better than war.
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