Autocratic far right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Monday summoned dozens of foreign diplomats to give them the heads up that the October election he’s widely expected to lose by a significant margin will be stolen by fraud, the New York Times reports, describing the diplomats as being left “shaken” by the corrupt asshole’s rant. “I know that you all want democratic stability in our country,” said Bolsonaro. “And that will only be achieved with transparent, reliable elections.”

The song and dance echoes Trump in the run-up to the 2020 election, who instead of confidently predicting he was going to win by a landslide had repeated meltdowns about mail-in voting (despite voting by mail himself), and still to this day refuses to admit he lost a free and fair election.

Now it’s easy enough to call this a real-time portrait of the cowardice and malevolence of right wingers who govern as if they shouldn’t be held accountable by a democracy. That’s the “hot take” your Marc Elias Twitter follower is going to have here, and not incorrectly so. However, there’s a bigger picture concerning the question of what the fuck is going on inside the heads of Bolsonaro fans when they see their Lord and Savior saying this, and that’s why are they accepting his evident but unstated powerlessness to preemptively rectify the situation? Yeah, Bolsonaro says he’s going to get the military involved in the count, but why would he keep saying this kind of shit if he was 100% confident they were going to come through for him with an unambiguous win?

Conservative politicians rely on either willful or natural void of capacity for critical thinking from their supporters. That’s nothing new. However these are such simple questions it’s hard to understand how even the dumbest and most gullible of Bolsonaro’s fans (and Trump fans back before the 2020 election) can’t or won’t ask openly: If you know the upcoming election is rigged then why haven’t you already done what needs to be done to expose this rigging and preempt it? Why are you acting like such a whiny libtard loser instead of grabbing your balls and kicking some socialist ass? This isn’t why I voted for you so why should I vote for you again?