There is a procedure for this. To simplify the answer, Kamala Harris will become President on inauguration day in any of your listed scenarios, since she’s the current VP/VP-elect.

It’s theoretically possible that if Biden drops dead today, that the DNC could manage to pivot to a new contender, but there are two significant problems with that:

1. It’s suuuper late in the process. They already called the primaries for Biden, so he has the delegates. If he dies, they go to his VP, so it would be up to Harris to give them to someone else at that point if anybody else were to be selected (essentially dropping out of the race herself). This is a bad move because giving delegates to someone who didn’t even primary will seem undemocratic, coronating somebody that the people did not even endorse for the ticket.

2. Replacing Biden with someone else doesn’t give them much time to campaign. A big part of the election cycle is traveling to swing states to convince those people to vote for you. It’s not that those people are suddenly going to go vote for the other guy (Trump, in this case), but they’re far more likely to stay home because they won’t be energized for this newcomer who didn’t have enough time to court their votes, or to convince them to turn out for their policies/platform rather than be apathetic about the outcome of the election.

I’d like to make a counterpoint here, but first I want to acknowledge that you are 100% entitled to your opinion and maybe souls-like games are just not for you. It’s a shame that people are kicking downvotes your way because this is in no way a new or controversial opinion, but like you said, the community can sometimes take their love of the game/series too far and blame the consumer for not liking the same stuff they like, which isn’t fair and just makes the souls community looks like clowns.

Anyway, my counterpoint is that I don’t feel like these games are as difficult as people make them out to be. IMO, older games were just as hard, if not harder to complete even when playing optimally. In the framework of just about every Souls-like game, you have tools that you can use to almost completely trivialize the toughest encounters if you want. DS1 can be beaten by a complete amateur if you do the gravelord speedrun (which doesn’t require any real speedrunning tricks and there are many youtube tutorials that you can follow along with, takes about 10-15 minutes from character creation) and get the gravelord greatsword which can inflict Toxic on all the bosses, so you can just hit them a few times and run away for the rest of the fight, waiting for the poison to finish them off. That’s just one example. Just about every installment of FromSoftware’s Souls’ series has some overpowered cheese that you can research to essentially trivialize the game. Some people might argue that you’re not beating the game in the “intended way” if you take such shortcuts, but I disagree. Any way you make it to the end is the right way.

For a lot of people, part of the fun of a game like Dark Souls is the adventure, the discovery, and yes, pounding your head against a tough boss trying to beat it over and over. If you’re the type of gamer who gets easily frustrated to the point where you feel like quitting when encountering a challenge that feels unfun or unfair, I can see it not being an enjoyable experience. The thing that keeps most people coming back is the dopamine hit that they get when they do finally overcome that challenge and they are rewarded with more stuff to explore, new items to pick up, and so on. I think if there were any argument to be made against making the game easier for yourself by exploiting broken game mechanics (or with an easy/story mode added or modded in), it’s that you probably won’t be super invested in the outcome and get bored easily. Without the challenge aspect, the Souls games are very much a bare bones experience. It’s essentially a generic fantasy RPG with a story hidden behind item descriptions and cryptic NPC interactions. That doesn’t exactly make for the most compelling gameplay, so there’s no trail of breadcrumbs to keep the gamer uninterested in the challenge going. There’s a sort of intrinsic value in these games that can’t be quantified, because everybody gets something different out of it.

Trump is a lot less great than that.

Been saying that for years. It’s been a quarter millennium, how about we get the best and brightest minds from every field of academia, science, philosophy, and yes, even *shudder* religion, to get together and literally hold a constitutional convention? Just toss that old scrap of parchment out and re-write it from scratch, with modern language that is unambiguous and straightforward. If the rights enshrined in the Constitution that we hold so dear to us are actually that important, I’m sure they’ll make the cut for Constitution v2.0. But while we’re in there, we might as well clarify some stuff. Let’s clarify that 14th amendment, let’s define what a “well regulated militia” is, and so on.

Of course, the people in power like the ambiguity. It means that as long as someone somewhere could interpret the constitution in some way that is favorable to them, they can have it mean whatever they want when it suits them and as long as they keep the populace at each other’s throats with an unending culture war they know we’ll never organize enough to change that. It’s a bit of a pessimistic outlook. Our fates are controlled by people who like the dysfunction and that sucks because we could very easily fix a lot of the problems by unifying, but I don’t know if that’s possible at this point.

Has he tried claiming that he hasn’t been excommunicated and storming the Vatican?

I think this is unironically how they need to spin it. Convince the Republican base that this ruling is actually better for Biden than it is for Trump by repeating their own false narratives back to them - that the Biden Crime Family will get away with everything. Albeit, the things he could actually get away with are limited to what the court determines is an official act, and given the current makeup of the SCOTUS it’s unlikely that they would side with him even if there were precedent, but he would be still almost untouchable under this new ruling no matter how you spin it.

Have a case against Joe Biden? Sorry, all of that evidence is now inadmissible in a court of law because it happened while he was president. Too bad, Republicans! Maybe if you were to… I dunno, pass a constitutional amendment that revoked that privilege. But oooooh nooooo, that would be horrible! Please, anything but that! All our nefarious plots would be undone and Biden would go to prison!

The left functionality doesn’t exist in this country. We stamped them out in the Cold War and replaced them with the new Democrats who were all for social progressivism but economically were beholden to corporate interests. Then you have the conservatives who are so socially regressive they think Sharia Law is a roadmap and are so in bed with corporate interests that they’d be fine if kids died in coal mines as long as someone at the top is getting paid.

We can’t have the true left back until we get voting reform. Ranked choice or approval voting is essential to allow 3rd parties to have a chance to flourish without causing a spoiler effect. That will also pull the Overton window back to the left again as the two major political parties will have less of an incentive to court extremists and will see better results at the polls if their platforms appeal to as many people as possible.

Correct. There’s absolutely nothing stopping Biden from doing exactly what Trump already tried and failed to do. He could put pressure on Governors to “find x number of votes”, submit a fake slate of electors to cast doubt on the results, outright threaten people if they don’t comply with his wishes. I’m sure this SCOTUS will find a way to interpret any of Biden’s would-be illegal actions as actually illegal, but tiptoe around Trump’s sedition and fraud.

I can’t believe that the prevailing opinion of the times is that the president can literally break the law, even ones specifically meant to bind them and only them such as campaign finance laws, and be immune from consequences under almost any circumstance as long as the court says it’s official. Congress effectively can no longer act as a check against the Executive. Only the Judicial can say what is official or unofficial.

This isn’t power anyone should have.

Except for the whole retiring from public life part. I wish Trump would just retire from life entirely.

You are correct. I retract my statement.

The feeling of helplessness is overwhelming.

If they toss out this guilty verdict, I’m going to burn it all down. No justice, no peace.

What Biden needs to do, like right fucking now, is pack the courts. AOC trying with a token effort to get them impeached is cute, but will ultimately fail because Republicans won’t turn on their own. The Senate is tied (if you count Bernie as one of the dems) and Harris has the tiebreaker. The house is controlled by the Republicans, but only 7 individuals need to break from their party in order to get a simple majority to save the future of America.

Biden could expand the SCOTUS from 9 seats to 13 and immediately submit 4 liberal justices for confirmation to be seated. Expanding the court doesn’t require congressional approval, so Biden could do this unilaterally and as long as he is able to get butts in those seats, they’re there to stay even if Trump squeaks his way back in. They could then challenge and overturn the immunity ruling, as well as all the other dogshit rulings that have come out in the last couple of years like Dobbs.

He threatened to do it before. He needs to actually pull the trigger.

I am aware of the situation, and its the same things that democrats would do in the same situation.

That which is asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. No proof that democrats would do the same in that situation and we have 200 years of peaceful transfers of power to prove that.

You assume that I am a trump vote, but I am not.

Nobody simps this hard for Trump if they aren’t also planning on voting for him too. It’s okay, I already think you’re an idiot, I can’t possibly have a lower opinion of you right now. You might as well just say the quiet parts out loud. I’m certainly not trying to convince you to change your vote at this point. I already know whose “team” you are on anyway, since you seem to think this is just a game.

I just know that your team sucks more than his team and does worse things, like try to throw the most likely presidential candidate in prison.

The RNC had two whole years to pick another candidate. Two years knowing that Trump was under felony indictment and could very likely be imprisoned right around the election. This was not an accident - they are using the fact that Trump is being tried in court as a political weapon. The Republicans think you are stupid and will try to convince you that this is a plot by the democrats when in reality, Trump did this to himself by committing the crimes he did. If Trump doesn’t want to go to jail, maybe he should have thought about the consequences.

…by submitting a fake slate of electors. I feel like this is not that complex of a concept to grasp, but I’ll simplify it for your FOX News-addled mush brain:

Imagine a scenario in which 10 people eating at a restaurant all want to decide what to have for dessert. After some discussion, they’ve narrowed the choices down to Key Lime Pie or Cheesecake. The kitchen will only make one dessert for the table, so the table has to pick one or the other, they can’t have both. Naturally, the table takes a vote to see which dessert a majority of people will be satisfied with. 6 people vote for Key Lime Pie, and 4 people vote for Cheesecake. Key Lime Pie wins. So the table sends one of their group to go and take the order to the kitchen, making it official. But along the way, one of the Cheesecake guys decides that they don’t give a shit if most of the people at the table wanted something different and they intercept the guy delivering the order. They tell that person that a few people at the table changed their minds and now Cheesecake actually won so they should tell the chef to make that instead. Of course, the people at the table did not change their minds, this was a lie meant to trick the person delivering the order into doing what they wanted rather than what the majority demanded.

Given that scenario, don’t you think it’s unfair that the people who voted for Key Lime Pie would have been deprived of the dessert that they actually wanted and most people agreed on had the person who submitted the fake order actually succeeded?

Same thing here. Trump was the government, so there was nothing to overthrow. He overturned the election to remain in power past his mandate. Hence why I’m wondering why you’re talking about needing fighter jets to overthrow a government because that’s not what we’re talking about, nor is violent revolution always a prerequisite for a coup d’état.

Who said anything about overthrowing the government?

His failed plot to overturn the legitimate election by submitting a fake slate of electors? Yes, we remember.

You probably wouldn’t hire a convicted felon either, but here we are.

We’re waiting at this point for the lower courts to to decide which of Trump’s egregious crimes were “official” or not. In the meantime, all his trials get suspended. In January, if he takes office, they will vanish when he becomes a dictator on day one (his words).

Like seriously, I’m tired of whining on the internet about this shit. Where can I go to learn about joining a protest? It’s better that doing fuck all by tut-tutting the establishment hellbent on fucking us over while they count their money.

I’m clairvoyant and I can see the future: They won’t. It’s always been all bark and no bite when it comes to armed revolution here in the states.