Let’s assume Trump does not run for an unconstitutional third term but we still get a MAGA President and Senate. At the first opportunity, I present to you
SCOTUS Justice Trump
Convince me it can’t happen.
He’s going to be really ancient by then, why would he even want it?
Do any of the Trump children have law degrees? That seems a little more likely.
Power for life. Now if you said, “Why would he want to share power with 8 others?”
He’s practically incapacitated now, so I don’t think that’s a realistic scenario.
I also don’t think the GOP would want him on SCOTUS. Sure, if they had to choose between Trump and a Liberal, they would choose Trump. They have no principles. But Trump would continue to be nuts and call attention to SCOTUS in a way that really does the GOP no good. Remember, most of these guys are not MAGA true believers but self-serving cowards. All they want is continued access to money and power.
I think half of the MAGA energy consists of the cult-like aura of Trump. With Trump gone, a lot of air leaves that balloon. The movement loses steam without its figurehead. Guys like Vance don’t have the same chutzpah and don’t inspire.
So I’m not worried about what happens post-2028, but the period of 2025-2028 will still cause immense damage.
As for SCOTUS, Trump himself would utterly rebel at the idea. He would hate wearing robes and being in court all day long.
Tiffany does.
Judge Tiffany has quite the ring.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he wanted it, it’s power over other people with no accountability, after all, and he loves that.
But the “ancient” thing will doom him. The Republicans have made a point of nominating relatively young people to the court, to take maximum advantage of that whole “lifetime appointment” thing. No way would they want to risk losing a spot on the court in just a few years, if MAGA suffers some kind of setback in the rest of the government.
This is why the people behind Trump are trying (and often succeeding) to undermine confidence and systems for assuring election integrity as well as establishing autocratic organizations with law enforcement powers outside of the Department of Justice and consolidating authority. This business of calling up or having governors send National Guard units to intimidate ‘blue’ cities is not sustainable without the pressure or personal fealty to Trump that Republican governors have, but a paramilitary force that is deeply invested out of its own institutional self-interest is a force any potential autocrat—even a personality void like JD Vance—can use. This isn’t something that started with Trump; the genesis of the Department of Homeland security was always a kind of quasi-fascist workaround to the strictures and independence of the Department of Justice that gives the executive direct control. It never grew to the size originally intended because it has always been badly managed but now they’ve been given a big slug of funding to grow to a size of armed personnel only second to the Department of Defense.
People keep trying to convince themselves and others that Trump is a unique and special case, and once he shuffles off into the great fried chicken bucket in the sky that everything will return to ‘normal’ on obtuseness that we’ve been sliding down a slope toward greater autocracy long before Trump came along, and there are people behind this regime intent on accelerating that motion. Autocratic regimes sometimes fall apart when the ‘strongman’ leader dies or absconds, but that is generally because the leader was actually assiduous in eliminating anyone who might threaten him so there was no organization or well-defined power behind him. In the case of Trump, he’s incredibly weak, distracted, and essentially a tool at this point, and even if MAGA falls apart the people who used it to get where they are and accomplish what they have been doing to the administrative state (only a fraction of which is really getting any coverage in corporate media) aren’t really that reliant upon Trump’s allure at this point.
Stranger
In newspaper columns, I have read this sort of claim before. How could an opthamologist, who was never groomed to be a leader, replace a skilled dictator like Hafez al-Assad? And yet Bashar al-Assad lasted for 24 years.
Swiss schooled Kim Jong Un? Way too soft to last long.
Compared to those guys, Trump Jr. is a fully qualified successor caudillo.
As for Vance, isn’t he supposed to be smarter than the Trumps? But dictators like a dynastic succession, so that may be irrelevant.
Not saying Trump Jr, or Lara, can win in 2028. But the difficulty would be that MAGA hasn’t yet consolidated power, rather than being a charisma issue.
Justice Tiffany. Perhaps Chief Justice.
Not even republicans are going to appoint an 82 year old (trump will turn 83 in 2029) with dementia to the supreme court. SC appointees tend to be in their 50s so they have 30 years on the court.
The scenario in which Trump doesn’t run for a third term is the scenario where he’s already died in office.
Which, to be fair, would make him a much better leader, in the Executive or Judicial, than he is right now.
Trump needs for the president to be someone who will protect his business empire. Now that the Trump Organization is so tied to crypto, this is much more true than it was in the Biden years. Donald can’t trust Vance, whose flattery is obviously based on current political necessity. But Trump can trust family. As Hillary Clinton said, “His children are incredibly able and devoted and I think that says a lot about Donald.” She said that when a moderator asked to hear something nice, but it still is mostly true (I would say the children are able but leave out the incredibly.)
Donald’s 2028 problem is not that the nominee has to be himself. It’s that the nominee has to be family — and has to, one way or another, win.
I just had to thank you for that chicken bucket in the sky quote.
Technically it won’t count as a third term if they cancel the 2028 election and extend his current term.
To address the OP directly, I see no indication at present that SCOTUS would rule differently than now if DJT was chief justice. So that unlikely scenario doesn’t scare me.
As for the thread title, the answer is yes, over and over, yes. There are so many bad possibilities along the road between where we will be in 2026 and maximal nativist totalitarianism. For lots of scary possibilities, I recommend:
The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics
P.S. I’m not totally endorsing the political science theory in that book. I’m just saying it’s a good read with loads of examples where parties with MAGA tendencies got scarier over time.
Why should the GOP be any different to MAGA than the Democrats were to the gay rights movement while dragging its heels on military service, job protection, parental and marriage rights, etc.: “ha ha! What are you going to do? Vote for those people?”
Donald Trump: NYC disco boy. Trump supporter: rural tool & die wage slave. Such an illogical beguilment can’t be recreated organically.
1940’s Hollywood gave us Ronald Reagan as the president from central casting. 1970’s feel-good TV only gave Sonny Bono and Fred Gandy as low-level politicians. 1990s trash TV mercifully spared us Jerry or Geraldo in high office. 2000’s reality TV inflicted Trump on us. No telling what the future will bring, but somebody should shoot Mr. Beast right now just in case.
MAGA, through Donald Trump, executed a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. No gay rights organization did that.
Consider this Guardian article:
It may come down to whether you think Donald Trump has some secret sauce missing from most other nativist American politicos, in or out of his family. I do not. While lots of people do not have inside them what it takes to be a dictator, I doubt the skill set is rare. If it was so rare, hereditary absolute monarchies would never have worked so often (not saying they usually work, just that it isn’t rare).
What about Lara Trump? She’s TV-proven. If the economy seems OK in 2028, and Greenland or Panama will have quickly surrendered, I think MAGA with a woman’s touch can work for MAGA better than the old man.
It’s not that I think no one else has the ability to be a dictator. It’s that Trump’s appeal is very much a cult of personality. MAGA as a movement seems very tied to Trump the man, and there isn’t an heir apparent.
The whole thing is cult like, and thus I expect that we’ll have the same turmoil of when any cult breaks up and has to take on a new leader.
It doesn’t mean things can’t get worse, to be clear. The civil war in MAGA after Trump’s downfall could be worse than the way things are now, and there’s always the ability to establish a different personality movement for a different dictator — for someone else to co-opt and remake MAGA.
I would need arguments that MAGA no longer needs Trump to be convinced otherwise. Even if he does get in one of his kids, it’s not like that guarantees the cult stays together. Some will peel off.