I predict utter and complete physical decline for him, soon followed by a natural death from a massive heart attack and/or stroke. I also predict that this will happen before he can be sentenced or convicted for any of his crimes. He is spiteful enough to die his way out of being held to account.
And he will be President while doing it.
@Velocity is most sincerely dead wrong about the balance of probabilities.
If he loses I have a strong suspicion that he’ll become largely politically irrelevant in the direct sense due to ongoing mental decline, and a sudden lack of people propping him up in hopes of using another Trump presidency to their benefit. The Trump cult will still be around and dangerous, however.
If he wins I expect a fascist dictatorship, and him being mostly a figurehead until the Republicans’ hold on power is secure enough they can get rid of him.
This is what I think will happen also. He’ll do his best to stay in the public eye, hold rallies for his remaining cultists, comment on issues of the day to his favourite media sources, and so on. Mind, it will come off as somebody basically saying, “Look at me; I’m still important,” while the rest of America moves on.
If he loses he’ll be as relevant as Putin & the other media controllers (Koch, Murdoch, Musk, Theil) want him to be.
If they can advance their agenda with trump as carnival barker they will. If not, suddenly his microphone will quit working and some else’s mike will be turned up to eleventy.
But rest assured there will be a Fascist demagogue w a loud amplifier blaring regardless of who wins the election or whether trump is capable, deranged, senile unto inert, or dead.
I’ve made my prediction. If Trump gets re-elected the Republicans will spend the next four years laying the groundwork. If they can safely steal the 2028 election, they’ll allow a fig leaf of an election.
If it looks like the Democrats have a chance, the Republicans will act. They’ll give the word to Trump and he’ll announced that he’s cancelling the election and declaring himself dictator for life.
And then the Republicans will announce they are shocked at what Trump has said. They’ll pretend to be totally surprised by Trump trying to seize power and have no idea where he got the idea. But now that Trump has revealed himself, all Americans must unite together to oppose him.
And what are the Democrats going to do? Declare their opposition to the Republicans and fight for Trump? Or course not. They’ll work with the Republicans to bring down Trump. And when the Republicans say we need to temporarily declare martial law and give the anti-Trump alliance emergency powers, the Democrats will have to agree. The alternative after all is a Trump dictatorship.
But the Democrats will find that after Trump has been defeated and shot, the Republicans will be the ones holding all the important positions. And the “temporary” emergency powers will remain in effect until some unspecified future date while the government works on flushing out pockets of pro-Trump loyalists.
That’s far more sophisticated than they are capable of and would work anyway, since their base is dominated by Trumpists. If the Republicans called for a war agaisnt Trump their own base would turn on them.
I suspect he’d at least try for more farewells than Melba, ranting away on ever less significant TV channels and ending up trying to sell even more tat.
If the leaders of the Republican party were all as dumb as Trump, they wouldn’t be a problem. And the magas are essentially the sheep in the flock; they may outnumber the shepherd but they’re not in charge.
And the magas are only a minority on a national level. If they actually were a majority, the Republicans wouldn’t need to put all this effort into stealing elections; they could just win elections.
So the Republican leaders would have no problem turning on Trump and his magas if they could get control of the entire country by doing so.
Actually no, they are in charge. The Republicans spent decades recruiting them and sleepwalked into the fact that the result over time would be that they’d become the party, including its infrastructure. The “Old Guard” has repeatedly demonstrated its inability to do anything about them.
And the Republicans are dumb. If they weren’t they’d have taken over long since given how feckless and ineffectual the Democrats are.
The thing that I don’t understand about your scenario is how the Republicans end up at the lead of the anti-Trump resistance. If Trump declares himself dictator they will by 100% in opposition to him from before day one, while the Republicans will be divided. It won’t be the Democrats joining the Republican opposition it will be what remains of the Republican party after 50% of their support sticks with Trump who will be joining the Democrat’s opposition.
I disagree. The magas aren’t running the Republican party. Their purpose is to distract public attention away from what the Republican leaders are doing.
Look past the shouting and the rioting. Look at what the Republicans have really done; things like lowering capital gains, corporate, and inheritance taxes; funneling mega-billions to corporations; gutting anti-trust laws; abolishing union protections; protecting for-profit healthcare - are you arguing any of this is the maga agenda?
The people who run the Republican party own corporations, not hoods and sheets. They took over the party back in the eighties - long before Trump and the magas came along. And they’ll still be in charge after Trump and the magas are gone.
Project 2025. If Trump wins, the Republicans will have a free hand to spend the next four years laying the groundwork for a coup. Trump thinks he’ll be the beneficiary of this; he doesn’t see he’ll be the patsy.
The Republicans are going to spend four years filling critical government positions with Republican loyalists. People who will follow orders when the word goes out.
Betraying Trump won’t be the opening move of the coup; it’ll be the start of the third act. The Democrats will suddenly find themselves in the middle of a work in progress and will be playing catch-up while the Republicans are already putting down the finishing touches.
As for any Republicans supporters who declare their loyalty to Trump, who cares? The point of this exercise will be to move past things like elections or public opinion. The Republican leaders will be in charge and they’ll have made sure they control the people who run the military, the police, and the bureaucracy.
I was amazed, upon reading the zombie part of the thread, how everyone seemed to feel that we had seen the last of Trump. Obviously, we were all wrong about that and I don’t think he will go away even if they win a large enough that even John Roberts &co can’t figure out how to nullify it. It is like a carbuncle on the body politic.
I wonder if McTurtle just wishes he had pushed for conviction in the second impeachment.
This assumes the Republicans have way more sophistication and unity than they have ever displayed. The idea that they could do a 2025 replacement of the federal workforce with a shadow government in Trumps name but that is secretly more loyal to… I’m not sure who, some cloaked Republican illuminati? And that no Trump loyalist will blow the whistle on this or have it all splinter into factionalism. They can’t even elect a speaker for the house without Democrats helping out. There is no way they can mastermind a clandestine coup.
The only way that 2025 works is if they have an easy way to see who is a MAGA loyalist versus who supports legitimate government, so that they can quickly put thousands of former in power. If they start looking for who is loyal to Republicans but not Trump, there is no way to fill their quota without word getting out and their finding themselves on Trump’s shit list.
There are ~ 1000 insurrectionists in prison that Trump could pardon. Some are mighty pissed off, but would take a federal job to get out of prison. That’s a start.
Is there a sign up for this shit list? I want to be on it.
Don’t confuse what Republican voters are shouting about with what Republican leaders actually care about.
The shouting stuff is just to distract public attention and motivate Republican voters. Which it does.
The stuff Republican leaders care about is all business. Look at the list I posted. Every one of those things is something that has happened; not something they just talk about. And it was all done quietly.
Why would they want MAGA loyalists in power? Those are the ones who are most loyal to Trump.
They want the MAGA loyalists out on the street causing problems while they put people who are loyal to the Republican leaders into important jobs.
I was talking about Republican leaders. They were the ones who weren’t able to elect a House speaker after umpteen ballots until the Democrats decided to bail them out.
How do you set up an employment system that identifies thousands potential government employees are loyal to the Republican Cabal but not to Trump? Its easy to find pro-Trump MAGAs you just need to check their social media feed for the past few years. But what you are looking for is not going to be easily to see without basically asking them directly at which point, if you guessed wrong the secret is out.
They won’t need all that time. Given Trump’s accelerating deterioration, he’ll be dead or at least completely incapacitated within a year and President Vance will be sworn in and executing Project 2025.