I wonder if Trump simply knows what a segment of the population wants.
He had a pretty good idea when he got the GOP nomination, but wasn’t absolutely sure until they counted the ~63M votes.
Yes, there were some fringe attempts. They remain fringe to this day, with some short-lived spikes here and there that led nowhere. The most recent attempt is called AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) and the so called Reichsbürger, before of that we had die Republikaner (no joke! They called themselves that and were Nazis), the NPD in various forms, factions and disguises, even terrorist groups like the NSU and the bombers at the Oktoberfest in 1972 and and and… All of them worth fighting against as a matter of principle and decency, but largely irrelevant. Thankfully.
I wish you in the USA the same for Trumps succesors: irrelevance.
Most of these people have extremely shallow commitments to Trumpism and conservatism, which themselves are entirely shallow movements. Trump will be discarded like day-old dogshit and most of these people will go back to sitting on the couch, eating raw hotdogs, and yelling at the TV.
The only snag is that Trump has abundantly shown how easy it is to exploit these childlike minds and make a boatload of money. There will be many people fiercely competing to be the the king of the idiots. I have to confess, I’m tempted to start a conspiracy theory just to monetize it. I wouldn’t actually do it, but if I thought of it, you can bet that some richer and eviler people have thought of it too. It just seems like it would be shooting fish in a barrel.
Evile candidates now know what kind of voter to appeal to.
Yes, well, Trump did campaign on a promise to drain the swamp. But nobody wanted him to drain it directly into the West Wing, which is what he did.
Hmmmm . . . Is there any way to monetize QAnon?
Yeah, that’s what worries many of us.
Junior has all the charm and charisma of cold, damp socks.
Someone like Gaetz is capable of talking the talk and has the same callous disregard for truth or the betterment of people’s lives.
I’d dispute that.
Trump has installed his friends and relatives in position of power, and pardons them when they’re inevitably found to be corrupt. And yet I’ve yet to meet a trump voter that sees any of this as a problem. IME, even among former trump voters that have now turned against him, they give reasons like the handling of covid, or the lying, not the obvious, and in many cases illegal, corruption and nepotism.
I think “drain the swamp” was only ever interpreted as something like “Let’s kick those liberal, intellectual elites, and replace them with people more like us”.
I would insert Nixon and the GOP’s “Southern Strategy” between the Birch Society and Reagan.
Many people are saying that it will take many tries to get rid of the Trump movement.
Naw, there aint no chaos in the streets.
Not many people actually like fracking. Nor offshore oil drilling. There will be no reparations.
They will ban the sale and importation of ‘assault weapons’ just like before, and just like before it wont do anything.
I think that there is merit to this, but I’d go a step further. If he loses (no matter by how much), then I think he’ll file nomination papers for 2024. Republican or Independent, it doesn’t matter; what does matter is that doing this will allow him to play to his base by holding four years of campaign rallies that will feed his ego. Of course, he will tell lies and spout conspiracy theories, and exhort his followers to resist the Biden Coup; and result in chaos and dysfunction, but the most important thing, from Trump’s point of view, is that he still remains in the national spotlight, getting news coverage (no matter how “fake”), and with supporters who love him. It’s going to be all about Trump’s ego.
I’m sure it’s already been done, the lucky bastards.
You left out the part about the ongoing paychecks from Russia. He really likes being paid too.
We’re decades away from losing the proclivity of anti-intellectualism in this country, which means that there will be a continuing market for Trumpist ignorance. And, yeah, he’ll probably run again in '24, if only as a money-making scheme. He and his cronies love their grifting and his base apparently loves to be grifted.
My take is this goes one of two ways:
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The Trump Movement is the GOP. It stays that way. You have Democrats and Trumpist. The sort of completely disconnected from reality, white supremacist, conspiracy theory driven, authoritarianism you see from Trump and his supporters right now is what is waiting in the wings whenever the democrats lose an election. And given the state of the country and economy Biden will be facing if he’s elected, and the fact lets face it he’s not the best imaginable candidate, I wouldn’t bet against that being 2024. In this case I dread to think who will be their chosen figurehead after Trump.
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The GOP splits you have an establishment, slightly libertarian leaning party and the bonkers Trumpists as their own party. In which case they will make themselves unelectable for a generation.
The latter seems like a better choice, and is why an overwhelming democrat victory is really important. I only see it a remote possibility if the there is a complete landslide with places like Texas going to the democrats.
I mean its crazy to me that the insanity, failure, cruelty and incompetence of the last four years wouldn’t result in the party responsible being banished from the political mainstream without a hope of return in living memory. But apparently that’s where we are.
I think you’ve totally nailed it with this.
I’d much prefer the party split scenario so we can go back to the traditional meaning of conservative, not authoritarian / reactionary.
But the legal dynamics & game theoretics of the set-up in the USA basically prohibit successful 3rd parties. Therefore the right factions are doomed to stay chained together to knife-fight within the Republican party. And the rest of us are sentenced to deal with that snarling monster.