That was a really foolish expectation and I spent the months before the election trying to explain to several of these folks all the reasons to believe Trump II would *not* look like Trump I, but it is also reason to suppose they will react to Trump II *differently* than Trump I.
The concern I have is not that Trump is going to be popular forever - he isn't popular now - but the 'race' between his declining popularity, the end of his term and the efforts of his administration to build the apparatus of repression necessary to remain in office unconstitutionally.
There’s another option as well, the whole cult of personality falls apart if he dies and the rest of the party have to spend whatever political capital they have trying to grab whatever they can. Vance isn’t nearly popular enough to get away with what Trump has.
A complicating factor is Trump’s health. I think a lot of people around him (Miller, Vought…) are racing to create facts on the ground, because a Trump health crisis could make it hard to start new things.
Yeah as I said elsewhere the whole cult of personality fails if the figurehead of that cult dies (or really is even seen as sickly).
The more cynical part of me thinks that part of their plan is, make sure everyone associated with the administration does so many crimes that they can't afford to ever let Democrats come back into power--so they *have to* stick together even when Trump dies or goes into a coma.
I just think there’ll be someone that breaks rank and I don’t have faith that Miller and Vance can hold the rest of them together even with the threat of repercussions.
My sense is that, for all the nasty bad things the administration is doing, they are on balance losing that race - though the militarization of DC is a very bad unwelcome sign which has made me less confident. But I wish the anti-Trump coalition was more effective at slowing them down.
I mean elections have consequences and with all branches in Trump hands there is little really to slow it down. For now I see the states as the main area where he could be resisted. I think there may also be republicans breaking with him if electoral Armageddon beckons in the midterms..
The majorities in congress is quite slim. Only one or two handfuls of senators or representatives breaking the party line in the most egregious cases will check many of the worst shenanigans.
My related concern is that the 'race' between unpopularity, term limits and authoritarianism is not zero sum. There's a distressing and quite large 'grey zone' where the administration is entrenched enough to trigger mass violence but not entrenched enough to win the mass violence.
On the flipside, you can tell that the administration is not confident of their position because they keep doing impotent 'show of force' actions and going after people who can't vote anyway, rather than actually attempting to suppress dissent. If they could shoot LA protestors, they would have.
The quirk in all of this is that the people you need to reach do not read the NYT (or the WSJ) or watch MSNBC - they watch Fox, if anything. And Fox isn't ever going to help you. So you need changes in their material conditions to trigger reevaluation.
Which recontextualizes the 'race' discussed above to being really a race between authoritarian consolidation on the one hand and the administration being understood to have *caused* 1) an economic downturn or 2) social upheaval and chaos or 3) a foreign policy disaster.
In that grim calculus, there is no good news, but there is the recognition that the administration is 1) very bad at authoritarian consolidation and 2) actively producing the predicates for both an economic downturn and social upheaval and is being openly noted as doing both.
Don't sleep on #3, as well, between his attempts to exert force against Russia and Ukraine despite being unable to hold a consistent policy, the growing unpopularity of Israel, China, etc. Even the fact that the "no wars!" guy just might invade Venezuela for no real reason.
I read the list and thought, "I bet we'll end up having all three." The problem is, there is nothing that would move the needle on that third one which isn't even worse than the implications of the first two.
It would be very nice if these folks might notice (2) there and say, "Trump is *trying* to do the things I don't want" and recalculate, but in practice for all sorts of reasons of sunk costs and social pressures, they will only recalculate when he actually *does* tank the economy or start a riot.
Based on all of that, the ideal outcome is 'victory by term limits' followed by 'minor clarifying crisis' and in either case the best thing is to slow down authoritarian consolidation to give max time for the buzzer to go off while the administration can still be removed without mass violence.
I'm expecting attempts to arrest US citizens before the 2026 elections, using the military. In fact I think fascist CEOs want to automate the process, though I doubt they can do it by next November. I think you should be telling everyone CEOs want to replace God with AI, and must be stopped.
I don't remember if I've seen you discuss this, at least more than in passing, but what do you think is the likely outcome if he just keels over one day?
I think we are, unfortunately, well past this point. If there’s not major reform, worse is inevitable.
I'd give your best case as Trump dying of natural causes before the midterms. Without Trump putting the fear of MAGA into Republican politicians I suspect enough would come around and stop what's happening. If Trump is alive after the drubbing he'll take in the midterms... I fear for your Republic.
"Minor clarifying crisis." If any member of ICE, the Trump admin and whatever organizations support them(national guard, local police, etc.) isn't in jail after this shit, they'll have won.
But Trump IS trying to do things they want: hurting minorities. A small section of Trump voters might be tricked, rubes or protest voters, but most of them are entirely willing to suffer personal hardship to hurt minorities.
Except a significant portion of the people who actually switched sides from 2020-2024 are part of the primary minority group he is targeting.
The catch here is that the institutions which should be taking advantage of these weaknesses are instead largely trying to ignore the issue and/or contain the dissent they’d otherwise need to trigger an uprising.
In this framing -and I do think is the simplest accurate one- the question becomes how to make this information flow (what and whose fault) faster and more reliable. Things have to be very personally bad in very clearly attributable ways to vote against... 1/
... strong partisan and social affinities mediated by an actively disingenuous information environment. It's not hard to recast terrible outcomes as Those People's fault absent clear causal models, and anyway it does take a while to screw up that deeply a country as rich and powerful as the US. 2/2
They scroll short form video on fb, insta and TikTok! If something’s sensational enough you can reach them there. One of the reasons they aren’t gunning down protestors in LA and its where the Epstein shit has some traction.
Also true.
I think this is the key. Trump’s best performance was with people that claim the consume no news. If “culture” social media is showing bad things those voters are likely to turn against him
And of course, that's likely part of the reason for his unconstitutional refusal to enforce the TikTok ban. It is very easy for him to lean on them to nudge the algorithm/moderation in whatever direction he feels like on any particular day.
Asserting your rights with the brown shirts and peacefully baiting them into on camera blow ups (warning this may involved getting your arse kicked and arrested) is a great way to reach low info voters. Very patriotic thing to do and vital to film it.
Careful. I wouldn't be surprised in the least that a shooting happens soon.
Part of how we got here is that this gang is incapable of being satisfied, confident, or secure. They will keep pushing boundaries unless and until someone stops them.
I guess that 1/6 doesn't quite qualify as mass, but it's getting up there.
Unpopularity also has the issue that barring being so unpopular that you get torn apart by an angry mob, it only matters during election years, so for another year it'll be largely irrelevant as a factor.
I actually don't want the Administration to win at the mass violence phase.
I would prefer to remove the administration without a mass violence phase. Failing that, yes, I would prefer them to lose rather than win. But I'd much rather not have a violent convulsion.
I'm not sure our druthers are on offer.
Yeah the single biggest thing that has me wigged out is that civil society hasn't been mobilized against the administration's deportations and military street shows, for now
I think this a function of the cooling effect of him winning the PV and the ideological realignment in certain elites post-Covid (the revolt of the bosses)
However I don't think those cooling factors hold up very long in the face of a major escalation (shooting protestors) or if we get an economic snap (or for only so long following continuing grinding into stagflation)