The wild card: Trump is progressively deteriorating with dementia. Grit your teeth and watch an interview with him from ten or twenty years ago. Then watch a recent interview. He was an idiot back then, but an idiot who could speak in coherent sentences and form paragraphs. He is speaking in formulaic phrases now, interspersed with free association. He has better and worse days, but it's obvious.
The progress of the disease is frustratingly hard to predict. Some sufferers suddenly decline. Some plateau. Some decline in steps of random length.
Nevertheless, it is inexorable. I imagine he is taking some carefully designed cocktail of drugs to try to maintain him, but that only lasts so long.
What happens when he becomes loses the power of speech entirely, or becomes so incoherent that even Fox can't explain it away?
Vance has no popular constituency. The MAGA crowd barely pay attention to him. The finance guys back him and a cadre of techno and Christo fascists. He has zero political instinct and negative charisma. He won't be able to focus the resentment of the white Christian supremacists. He's smarter than Trump by a mile, but that won't buy him love.
The locus of all this power is a fragile vessel, and on his way out. We can't rely on that in the short run, but all the talk of a third term is ridiculous.
I just hope they don’t get Great Depression or WWIII worse. I hope that the selfish republicans will go after Trump and his entire regime and boot him out. Many maga will suffer for trump but I’m counting on the fact that people don’t want to lose their homes or their creature comforts.
Venezuela is at this point full authoritarianism. Election results are falsified to the extent that their results have nothing in common with what the people voted for.
A good chunk will and many surely have. While that will translate into fewer votes next election we still have the problem of Trump (or Vance) refusing to leave office and trying to overturn the result.
Most likely it will be not results to be overturned, but faking the elections, including jailing opponents, spoiled opponents, in 2026 and in 2028, censorship. Like in Russia of the 1990s and 2000s.
The wild card: Trump is progressively deteriorating with dementia. Grit your teeth and watch an interview with him from ten or twenty years ago. Then watch a recent interview. He was an idiot back then, but an idiot who could speak in coherent sentences and form paragraphs. He is speaking in formulaic phrases now, interspersed with free association. He has better and worse days, but it's obvious.
The progress of the disease is frustratingly hard to predict. Some sufferers suddenly decline. Some plateau. Some decline in steps of random length.
Nevertheless, it is inexorable. I imagine he is taking some carefully designed cocktail of drugs to try to maintain him, but that only lasts so long.
What happens when he becomes loses the power of speech entirely, or becomes so incoherent that even Fox can't explain it away?
Vance has no popular constituency. The MAGA crowd barely pay attention to him. The finance guys back him and a cadre of techno and Christo fascists. He has zero political instinct and negative charisma. He won't be able to focus the resentment of the white Christian supremacists. He's smarter than Trump by a mile, but that won't buy him love.
The locus of all this power is a fragile vessel, and on his way out. We can't rely on that in the short run, but all the talk of a third term is ridiculous.
I just hope they don’t get Great Depression or WWIII worse. I hope that the selfish republicans will go after Trump and his entire regime and boot him out. Many maga will suffer for trump but I’m counting on the fact that people don’t want to lose their homes or their creature comforts.
Venezuela is at this point full authoritarianism. Election results are falsified to the extent that their results have nothing in common with what the people voted for.
War with Iran
Except Authoritarianism is off the table because of this:
https://youtu.be/YJSehRlU34w?si=UVmCdvJrhNdTGAht
What would be the situation and results of Trump voters realizing what they have done?
A good chunk will and many surely have. While that will translate into fewer votes next election we still have the problem of Trump (or Vance) refusing to leave office and trying to overturn the result.
Most likely it will be not results to be overturned, but faking the elections, including jailing opponents, spoiled opponents, in 2026 and in 2028, censorship. Like in Russia of the 1990s and 2000s.