MAGA is a radical Populist personality cult
That I can understand. Trump is very charismatic.
about as far from American Conservatism as Pluto from the Earth.
You are on the left. If you actually believed this quote, you would like Trump, because he's far away from conservative based on this quote.
As soon as you do, you will discover that the crowd chanted for hours "Hang Mike Pence." The crowd brought effective nooses to with 30 feet of the place where Pence hid with his wife and family.
It might have been a prop, although I can understand Mike Pence being scared; I would have been too if I was in his situation. If the Jan 6 people wanted to do real harm instead of all talk, they probably would bring guns.
- Putin did it with poison. Xi overthrew the Chinese government and he only had to disappear a couple of the old school guys. Trump wants to do it using our old fashioned and unnecessarrily complicated electoral system, using it or abusing it.
Russia doesn't have the same gun spirit that MAGA people have. The MAGA crowd is so obsessed with the 2nd amendment and all that.
But with the electoral college, people know that if the electoral college was replaced with the popular vote, it helps democrats win elections. This is why democrats want to get rid of the electoral college and republicans want to keep it. Pretty much every American was fine with keeping the electoral college until the democrats learned that getting rid of it would help them in elections. Canada has a parliamentary system, where the conservatives win the popular vote over the liberals, but liberals hang on to more seats. If America did the same thing, Trump or some republican right now would be the prime minister of the US (because there are more republicans in the house than democrats). This is the GOP reason for supporting the electoral college; they may say, "The founders wanted this", "Big city control", "Balance between big and small states". The democrat's reasoning is, "One person; one vote".
People also know that old people are more likely to vote republican. Democrats want to lower the voting age because they know it helps them in elections (and this is why republicans are opposed to it). The democrats may say things like, "No taxation without representation" or, "16 year olds are more mentally developed" and the republicans may say things like, "We need more mature people voting". If younger people were more likely to vote republican than older people, the parties would switch their talking points to give their party an advantage.
So if the electoral college got eliminated (a democrat boost), but also the voting age gets raised to 21(a republican boost), I don't know which party has the significant advantage in that scenario going forward. Would you accept that?
MAGA did bring a significant cache of guns to Jan 6th., more than enough to kill a few thousand necessary to secure the Capitol.
Then why didn't they end up killing more people?
Keep in mind that DC has the strictest gun laws in the US
True (possibly), but the MAGA people say, "When Guns are outlawed, I will be an outlaw". They would open carry guns if they wanted to (irrespective of the law).
- Nevertheless, more than 123 terrorists have been charged with using a deadly weapon onto the Capitol grounds. 114 Police officers were hospitalized.
- We know of a couple of other independent caches, dudes who just filled their cars up with their home arsenals and drove an impressive array of arms including pipe bombs.
- Also, there other pipe bombs planted that failed to go off. Obviously the original plan was to bomb the DNC and RNC National headquarters simultaeously, so that most police would be away from teh Capitol when the mob arrived.
Where did you get this information?