The Tara Reade Story Is Tricking Progressives Into Voting For Trump Again

Note from Ben: We are doing our best to cover the continually evolving Tara Reade story responsibly here at The Banter. It’s an incredibly delicate subject and we hope to provide our readers with thoughtful, carefully researched articles that do the story justice. You can read our original story here, with new updates added: Tara Reade's Sexual Assault Allegation Against Joe Biden Is Falling Apart

We are also going to be covering the story in greater detail in the coming days as new evidence emerges, so please stay tuned. If you want to read everything we are doing during these trying times, you can now get your Banter Membership for 50% off, so please take advantage today! Members get access to all premium articles, can unlock our archive of work, and can take part in member threads.

by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC -- As many of you have noticed, I’ve been almost exclusively focused on doing whatever I can to verbally undermine Donald Trump and his entire criminal enterprise. It’s what I do now. While I don’t have the same online reach as various heavy-hitters, I’m doing what I can to expose Trump’s vast horrendousness, while forecasting the kind of damage he’s manifesting. And based on what I’ve been documenting for several years now, Trump and the idiocratic movement surrounding him is absolutely the most dangerous threat we’ve faced as a nation since World War II.

Consequently, I’m intensely driven to use my platform to help make sure Trump loses his re-election campaign this year, and loses it humiliatingly. My hope is, at the very least, to provide rocket fuel for other like-minded Americans in our national effort to destroy this monster and to marginalize if not snuff out the twisted ideology of Trumpism once and for all.

Knowing the destructive potential of a second Trump term as president -- knowing how it would annihilate the last remaining institutional impediments blocking Trump’s ongoing power grab, we ought to be extremely suspicious if not downright hostile to anyone who’s helping the president or hurting his opponent, Joe Biden. This is a political war for our collective future. This election will determine whether we’re spraying the crops with Brawndo under a Trump dictatorship, or whether America will course correct and reacquaint itself with democratic values. 

Not to belabor the point, but defeating Trump at the ballot box has to be our highest national priority this year. Everything depends on it -- one of the myriad reasons why I’m so driven. It’s also one of the reasons why I’m deeply suspicious of the motives of activists who are exploiting the allegation of Tara Reade to damage the Biden campaign, effectively aiding in the re-election of Donald Trump.

Briefly, Reade was a Senate staffer working in Biden’s office in the early 1990s. Throughout the last 30 years, she’s remained silent about what she’s alleging -- that Biden accosted her in a hallway and sexually violated her. We also know that Russian trolls and bots are actively spreading the allegation around social media and beyond, lending a thick patina of dubiousness to Reade’s claims. 

It should be further noted that the Republican Party throughout its eight year jihad against Barack Obama’s administration never once unearthed the incident Reade described. Not even Trump’s team landed on this in 2016 when it was looking to distract from Trump’s 25 rape accusers. 

In recent history alone, there have been two presidential elections with Biden second on the ticket, plus a third presidential election, 2016, in which Biden briefly explored jumping into the race, as well as the past two years of the 2020 primary process. Why is the Reade allegation coming out now during the exact same pocket of time in the 2020 cycle as the DNC emails were hacked by Russia in the 2016 cycle? Why is this only being circulated now that Bernie Sanders has withdrawn from the race after coming up short on delegates?

Nevertheless, this presidential election, like most others, is a binary choice. There are two legitimate options for your presidential vote: Donald Trump or Joe Biden. Voters have the option to vote for Trump, or they have the option to vote for Biden. We therefore have to decide which man is better suited for the presidency. Again, this isn’t merely a “what about Trump?” argument, it’s the actual binary choice we have to make. It’s a mandatory either-or scenario between two contrasting candidates. We’re not just randomly picking on Trump in reaction to the Biden allegation. If Biden is morally eliminated, Trump is the singular alternative. A vote against Biden and what he represents is a vote for Trump and what he represents. That’s how this all works.

So, let’s assume for the sake of argument that there’s some validity to Reade’s allegation. Do we vote against Biden and for Trump (whether by actual vote or by omission) because of one trespass, thereby elevating a president with significantly more awful things on his record, including 25 rape accusers? Or do we vote for the comparatively decent man with one allegation? 

Clearly, we should be voting against the president who’s obstructed justice; been accused of rape by 25 women; presided over 61,000 American deaths due in part to his incompetence and sociopathic maliciousness; praised white supremacists after Charlottesville; declared himself to have “total power”; been impeached for attempting to cheat in the election again; incarcerated children in internment camps; stolen millions in taxpayer money; told more than 18,000 lies in less than four years, and a million other things? 

Knowing this, even if Biden’s guilty, and there’s plenty of reasons to believe he’s not, he’s still leaps and bounds better, more experienced and more decent than the alternative. It’s like facing a surgery on your pancreas. Do you choose the surgeon with 20,000 malpractice lawsuits, or the surgeon with one malpractice lawsuit and it’s not an entirely airtight suit? You have to choose one or the other. Naturally, any rational human being would go with the surgeon with one negative mark on his record -- in a heartbeat. It’s not even close. 

Why on Earth would certain members of the political press, as well as countless activists who claim to believe in liberal values, deliberately elevate Biden’s single allegation to the same level or worse than the universe of allegations against Trump? Why would these people empower Trump, while damaging Biden? We kind of know why, and we also know why Russia is amplifying the charges, but it almost doesn’t matter given the reality that the Reade story will help Trump to close the gap between his mid-40s approval numbers and the 50 percent support needed to win the election -- just like 2016 where enough disgruntled progressive voters cast ballots for Jill Stein and Donald Trump to hand Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to Trump and thus the election.

Again, this is a war for the future of our republic, yet too many of us have chosen to ignore the potentially catastrophic stakes because [fill in various grievances here]. They’ve also chosen to expose their privilege knowing it won’t be them, personally, who will be hurt by the worst parts of a second Trump term.

I can’t underscore this enough: Trump is playing moneyball. He’s calculating that if he secures his 43 percent-ish base, he can reach a winning margin by convincing progressives and independents in both swing and toss-up states to walk away from Biden, just like 2016. These two voter blocs, progressives and independents, could absolutely be enough to move the needle from 43 percent to 51 percent. Between the Biden allegation, Russian disinformation, voter ID, voter purges, possible Republican vote tampering not unlike what happened in the North Carolina 9th district in 2018, and now the Reade story might be enough juice to put Trump over the top, and the nightmare scenario will come true.

There’s a cultural and political rot in America -- voters and activists who can’t see the big picture beyond their chosen messiahs, their grievances and their personal brands. Our collective psychologies, not to mention American institutions including the Supreme Court, can’t possibly endure four more years of this ceaseless insanity. Indeed, the most patriotic thing we can do this year is to vote against the metastasis of totalitarianism -- of Russian-style autocracy here. 

Some of you might believe Joe Biden assaulted a woman in the early 1990s. If you’re one of them, and you haven’t yet been convinced that Trump needs to lose no matter what, you have to ask yourself what will happen to literally all of us if Biden is damaged enough to let Trump win again, with all of Trump’s confessed raping, his bigotry, his election cheating, his criminal conspiracies, the children held in cages per his orders, and so on. Are we as a nation better off with Trump instead of Biden? Progressives who say “yes” in response to that question are rejecting the most progressive Democratic nominee in history while de-facto supporting the least. And they need to wise up about all this now, before it’s too late.

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