After Agnew resigned, Republicans in Congress basically told Nixon the only replacement VP they would confirm was their own guy Gerald Ford -- not some political loyalist from his own administration. Could/would they do that again? Or are they all totally spineless? 2/2
The thing is that if you're going to wreck the Constitutional order, you need a loyal power center that can leverage other, potential rival power centers, and you need to be popular among some crucial segment of the population.
Without Trump, how popular will JD Vance and Stephen Miller be? Not at all on their own. They have a shot if they can invoke Trump as the sainted, dead father of the nation. Are they savvy enough to do that and will it work? Nobody knows.
What real power centers would they have behind them in the government? ICE, yes. Maybe the military, but maybe not. Red state governments. They've gone out of their way to alienate every federal department, and all of the blue states. Maybe the Supreme Court, but only so far.
Is that enough? If I were trying to shoot the moon to stay in power for generations, that's not a hand I would want to play, given how American society is put together. But it's not impossible either.
Besides ICE, the Trumpists have also got red-state National Guard and the FBI and Justice Dept to act as enforcers, and "big media" like the WaPo and NYT (in addition to FOX) as propaganda outlets. And maybe by the time Trump finally drops dead we will have lost even more of our institutions.
The National Guard, DOJ and non-right-wing media are not loyal to Trump. They can follow orders or be swayed if the political winds are blowing one way or another. My point is that this is not enough to hold onto power if the Constitutional order no longer applies.
You need people who are loyal and who will commit violence on your behalf, and they have to *win* if faced with resistance, violent or otherwise.
There are elements within these institutions that are sympathetic to MAGA, but they have not been converted top-to-bottom, and I'm not sure there are enough competent MAGA loyalists to staff all of these institutions alone.
I think it's wishful thinking that the WaPo will instantly go back to the institution it was before Bezos kissed Trump's ring when Trump is gone. All their best reporters and writers, the ones who previously held power accountable without fear, have left, and Bezos is still there.
But what happens when Trump is gone? Does Bezos want to kiss JD Vance's ass? What if Vance doesn't seem popular and is ineffective at using the bureaucracy and/or ICE to extract concessions? WaPo will be a shell of itself, but it won't necessarily be in Vance's pocket.
The problem is that the Project 2025 people have installed all the infrastructure they need. And Peter Thiel is gonna want his Vance investment to pay off big time.
They've wrecked a bunch of things in the government and purged people. However, to run an authoritarian government over time you need some state capacity. You have to *build* institutions that can put their thumb on everybody.
Russia has several different domestic police organizations doing this, and then a series of large, semi-nationalized companies. And it took Putin more than a decade, as a young man, to wrestle control over all of this.
They have ICE. Fox News and right-wing media. That's a start. What else? None of the companies or law firms or universities kow-towing to Trump have any loyalty to the GOP and all of these institutions will be happy to see them go away.
Congress, the courts or the rest of the government can be cowed. But if there's a power vacuum at the top, none of these bodies have pure ideological loyalty with the MAGA cause, so it's not clear how they will react.
I get what you are saying. But the orange potato has unquestioned control of all three branches...now, today. He has created an imperial presidency. That doesn't just disappear.
But Miller and Vance are so offensive to everyone’s amygdala that their power is going to crumble before its funeral.