Do Trump followers and Republicans think the country would survive his reelection?

Politics & Elections
1

I asked this question two years ago:

My new question is obviously related. Do Trump’s many dead-enders and his cowardly Republican enablers think that, if he were to be reelected, the rest of the people would just sit back and say, “Aw geez, he got reelected. Sucks but what can you do…”?

I would say that there is a 95% chance that the country unravels within a few months. The only exceptions I can see are:

  1. Trump immediately dies, becomes incapacitated, etc.
  2. Since Trump is old and looking tired and has gone beyond his usual incoherence into outright infirmity, I think there is a small chance that he won’t really be able to do much.
  3. Hi, Opal!

But the smart money is on his immediately doing stupid, crazy, fascistic shit and… the country will come apart.

Yes, it’s a truism that political polarization is at an all-time high. Beyond that, however, we have some 30% of the country that wants a right-wing dictatorship. They want Trump to take over like Hitler and start killing people. They’re fucking Nazis. Trumpers don’t represent a potential failure of American democracy. The fact that so many people in our country want such an evil future and a major political party is enabling it is a current and ongoing failure.

While that is the most significant factor, I would say the second-most-important and soon to be fatal factor is the Supreme Court. People on both sides of the political spectrum hate the Court–and rightly so. The Conservatives were always correct that the court legislated from the bench; it had to do, since our democracy, and yes our constitution, are so dysfunctional that we can’t get anything done without the court stepping in and making the change. Sometimes we Liberals have liked the changes (abortion legalized, gay marriage made legal in every state) and sometimes we have not (abortion thrown up for grabs again, Citizens United, eh pretty much everything), but I think most people agree that this isn’t how a democracy should be run.

But the Court at least used to try to put a patch of erudition and respectability on its demeanor and decisions–and now it doesn’t. We now have illegitimately selected justices, a justice who can’t even be assed to hide his corruption, and crazy, unhinged decisions.

We can’t and aren’t going to tolerate such a shitty, completely undemocratic system infiltrated by even shittier judges. It’s over, it’s done, and it won’t be long before it–and the current American order–are swept away and replaced with something else.

So here’s how it’s likely to go down if Trump is reelected:

  • Trump does crazy shit.
  • There is pushback, and it goes to the Supreme Court.
  • If the Court doesn’t support Trump, Trump flagrantly disobeys the Court = constitutional crisis.
  • If the court supports Trump, individual states refuse to obey the Court, perhaps citing the Court’s illegitimacy and Trump’s criminality = constitutional crisis.
  • Both roads to constitutional crisis, however, play out much the same: Trump tries to get his way, and states and other entities disobey him and band together. Now you have two sides in a cold Civil War 2.0.
  • Trump tries to use the military to turn the cold war hot, but it’s not clear that they would obey (I actually don’t think they would, especially based on how Trump has treated and talked about the military over the years).
  • If the military refuses to obey Trump, then it’s game over for the US: the constitutional order has lost legitimacy, there is a huge power vacuum, and it’s a clusterfuck. What happens next is anybody’s guess.
  • If the military obeys Trump, then we have a hot war, and what happens is still anybody’s guess. It’s far from a foregone conclusion that the Right will win because “they have the guns” (idiots). Other countries may also get involved as well.

I actually don’t think Trump is going to win the election. I think Biden will. Even so, I think the same type of constitutional crisis will happen anyway in the next few years: the ongoing abortion crisis is more than enough to set it off. Individual states are already in something close to a cold war over the issue, and it’s only going to get worse. Biden would never involve the military in any conflict, but we are going to see the same type of collapse sooner or later, with the Supreme Court being told to fuck off by states, whether on the right or left.

And that’s really only the tip of the iceberg. Americans on the right and left are both sick of corporations, sick of debt, sick of our inability to get anything substantial done as a country (and this is part of a global trend of people in general just being sick of the current way of doing things). To stupid, authoritarian-minded people, Trump has seemed to be a solution, exactly in the same way that Hitler seemed to a stubborn minority of Germans in 1933.

But there is no easy, off-the-shelf solution. None. Not a dictatorship, not communism or socialism. Nothing. A Civil War-style “national divorce” is also impossible. The only smart thing to do is plod forward and work for incremental change to make people’s lives better and the system fairer. It’s too bad that 30% of the electorate is too dumb and dark-hearted to let that happen.

What happens next is impossible to see, but it’s gonna be a slog.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

2

If Trump did get reelected with a legit or even semi-legit election outcome (like a repeat of 2016,) I think America would foam at the mouth for a few weeks but eventually grudgingly go along indeed, just like they did in 2016. As is the case in any nation, the cost of individuals standing up to resist is high, and the cost of individuals sulking and keeping their heads low is low. I don’t see any reason why Trump’s 2nd term would be met with substantially more resistance than his first - people have a remarkable ability to tolerate awful governance and just plug on and carry on.

3

Yes, and Trump finds he can’t do a tenth of the crazy stuff he wants to.

4

Had Trump not denied the outcome of the election and peacefully left the scene in 2021, I don’t think we’d be having this discussion. In 2016, we didn’t know yet what he would do. Now we do.

I also think it all depends on what Trump would actually do after getting elected.

True. I don’t think there would be a grassroots rebellion against Trump. I think you’d have actual government entities and other actors opposing him.

The reason is his record–especially what he did after the 2020 election.

5

A lot of fights in life start with something small. If I bump into, say, a biker at a biker bar, he may not notice or he may be in a bad mood and (try to) beat the shit out of me.

Similarly, Trump could do one crazy or even not-so-crazy thing that triggers substantial opposition, leading to a constitutional crisis.

Heck, we could even see it from a Trumper’s viewpoint: a state with Trump Derangement Syndrome could tell him to fuck off for no reason, thereby triggering the crisis.

Either way, he’s just bad (i.e., imminently fatal) news in the current political climate.

6

I think it would rather lead to a bipartisan impeachment.

His sycophants will feel the way the wind is blowing, and just how Republicans went from attacking him to praising him, they’d switch back again.

7

You may be right but if, as I have premised, Trump did something “crazy” to trigger such an impeachment, then I think it’s highly unlikely that he would recognize it. He would have to be torn from the White House. If that happened more or less smoothly, then OK, but if not…

8

If he has to be torn from the White House, it really wouldn’t be too hard. Secret Service aren’t going to prevent it.

9

If anything, Secret Service would likely be the ones ‘assisting’ him out of the building.

10

I’m not sure this is correct – or any more correct than it’s ever been. But if it is, unfortunately, when people are “sick of the current way of doing things” their alternatives tend to be simpler, stupider, and far more violent. (Cite: USA, 2016-present) Good luck engineering any incremental change for the better.

11

I’m not sure why you would be certain of that.

People are afraid that Trump could become a dictator. To assume that he could not obtain the loyalty of the Secret Service would seem to be to assume that his becoming a dictator is absolutely impossible.

I don’t think Trump is disciplined enough to succeed in becoming dictator, and I don’t think he could acquire enough power soon enough to make it happen, but I think it’s likely that he would make stabs in that direction.

12

For the GOP to support impeachment and conviction, it would have to be magnitudes crazier than anything in his first term. I’m not sure there is actually anything crazy enough to get them to say, “Enough already.”

13

I don’t think Republican politicians will ever, ever consider impeachment (eta - conviction) for Trump. He could order some “constitutional sheriffs” to arrest, try, convict and hang a bunch of Democrats, (Biden included) and the Republicans in the House and Senate would refuse to do anything. Even if Trump’s orders were obeyed and he immediately pardoned the “sheriffs”

14

Getting back to the OP, it is certainly reasonable to believe America would survive Trump’s reelection. I would bet a substantial number of non-Trump-supporting or non-Republican people would believe it would survive. Damaged, yes, but very much surviving and carrying on. We’ve been through much worse as a nation.

15

The statistics are pretty clear that people used to believe in the System a lot more: government, corporations, etc. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s and yeah, there was a lot of cynicism even then, but the national mood was totally different. If I may cite one fact: In 1984, Ronald Regan won every state except Minnesota, which was the home state of his opponent, Walter Mondale.

Exactly my thought.

16

Right. The man fomented an insurrection. Had he succeeded in overturning the election, I think 90%+ of Republicans would have gone right along with it.

17

Indeed. They are nothing more than Nazis in the Reichstag at this point.

18

As just some higgnorunt furriner, that is precisely what I’ll be doing.
… whilst setting a comfy deck chair and restocking the drinks cabinet with suitably strong liquor. Watch the best reality TV show going round.

I don’t give credence to your timeline … though there’ll be much colour, light, heat and posturing. But more like Elizabeth from Knoxville.

The biggest consequences will be in what the US doesn’t do externally while its attention is absorbed with internal affairs.

Under what scenario do you think “other countries” would get involved in American Civil War 2.0?

19

The consequences of a Trump win in November is a subject that has been much on my mind, even though I’m not American and don’t live in the US, simply because the US is important to the whole world, and since I live right next door to the US, it’s even more economically and politically important to us than to most other countries. The next Trump presidency would be an unmitigated disaster, far worse than the first one. It would begin with his use of presidential powers to escape the consequences of his criminality and wreak vengeance on his perceived enemies, the classic hallmarks of a banana republic. I also don’t think he would voluntarily leave office this time. “The end of American democracy” isn’t just a scare phrase, it’s a real possibility.

20

The problem since 2015 is that the media have perceived it as such and thus enabled Trump. But yeah, it would be “interesting”… Even if he loses, he and his Hitlerjungend are not going away soon.

I fear I don’t get the reference.

Indeed. Now is not the time to let up on the Putins of the world.

If the thing is in doubt, I think you could see both sides calling out for foreign assistance. I’m sure Putin would love to support the Trump faction, for instance. I could see the EU and Canada supporting the good guys. It could be weapons or boots on the ground.

While it’s true that individual dickheads like the Koches support the right wing in the US, I don’t think big business in general wants the chaos (and reduced profits) that a civil war would cause. Multinational corporations would therefore mediate the participation of countries on Side Blue.