Chris Crucial: Don't say you weren't warned 🚨

PLUS: Dog-gate, continued

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1. Believe what Donald Trump says

Donald Trump is many things. One thing he is not is deceptive. He says pretty much everything he thinks. Out loud. All you have to do is a) listen and b) believe him.

Which brings me to two quotes from Trump that have surfaced over the last few days.

In an interview that Time magazine published on Monday, Trump was asked how he would react — and whether violence was an option — if he lost in 2024.

“I don't think we're going to have that,” responded Trump. “I think we're going to win. And if we don't win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.”

And then, on Wednesday during a trip through Wisconsin, Trump was asked by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel if he would commit to accepting the 2024 results.

“If everything’s honest, I'll gladly accept the results. I don't change on that,” Trump said. “If it's not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

It doesn’t take a whole lot of analysis or interpretation to understand what’s happening here.

Trump is hiding behind words like “fairness” and “honest.” Those words, in his world, don’t mean what they, well, mean.

When he says he will accept the election results as long as they are honest and fair, what you should hear is this: I will accept the election results if I win — and only if I win.

Which is not how this is supposed to work! Trump is setting up a two-step logic process that defies logic:

a) If the election is fair, I will win.

b) If I don’t win the election, the election was not fair.

And then there’s this dangerous corollary: If I don’t win — because the election was unfair — all bets are off as to how I and my supporters behave after the election.

Again, it doesn’t take much imagination to consider what that might look like. We KNOW how this story ends. It ends like this: