- That is still way too much.
- Trump can and will do any damn thing he wants unless he is physically stopped.
I’m a little confused about what the topic of this thread is. The title suggests that the OP is interested in how Trump supporters think will happen to America under Trump but the first post seems to be all about what the thread initiator thinks will happen which are obviously two very different things.
As to the question raised by the thread title, I think that all of the Trump followers and Republicans believe that the country will survive a Trump reelection otherwise they wouldn’t be supporters, in fact they think it will thrive. The thing to remember is that from their point of view Trump is supported by over 60% of the country any polls that say otherwise are lying. Of the remaining 40%, most of them are just brainwashed sheep who are being lulled by the lies of the liberal media elite. Once Trump comes in, cleans house and jails all of the traitors those people will wake up and see the errors of their ways. With the traitors and leaches removed America will go back to the way it should be.
Now as to what will actually happen I highly doubt that Trump or the Republicans could manage bringing about a full on Dictatorship with a capital D. First of Trump isn’t dictator material. He doesn’t lead he follows. He doesn’t have any grand vision of what he wants to get and how he wants to get there, he just spouts whatever he thinks people want to hear and supports whatever they want him to support and tries to grift whatever he can and launch petty acts of spitefulness along the way.
The Republican party is the same way. While they have the self preservation instinct to try to subvert democracy to their own advantage in the face of coming demographic tidal waves, they aren’t really united behind Trump. They are just trying to keep ahead of the same mob that he’s channeling. They aren’t really organized enough to rule with an iron fist. Any such attempt would immediately fall into factionalism and face eating. They could barely even elect a speaker.
What I suspect will happen is that Trump and the Republicans will, try to transform the govenment according to conservative idiology as espoused by the hard right. Trump will launch investigations into all his enemies, which by and large will be heavily disruptive to their lives but in the end won’t go anywhere or else uncover some minor misdeed (e.g. Hunter faulty gun application). There will be some attempt at media and social media supression, but it will at best be whack-a-mole as its really hard to stop it all. Eventually it will become clear that solutions based on blind faith don’t do well against problems based in reality (plants don’t actually crave Brawndo’s electrolytes). Public will start grumbling in favor of throwing the new set of bums out, and many of the said bums will try to follow the new mob from the front, distance themselves from the failed ideals and pretend they always opposed them.
DJT has already been clear about some of these things, like invoking the Insurrection Act. I could easily see him doing that because of “unrest” in certain Blue cities. Sending troops to patrol “crime infested” cities like Chicago, San Fran, LA, New York, Detroit, Houston, etc would be the first places he would move on. Unlikely to go very well and my expectation and mayors and governors would push back hard on it.
Also, I’ve seen reference to discussions in his last term about sending troops across the border with Mexico to stop immigrants. I can easily see Stephen Miller pushing hard for this action and Trump going along. With Mike Flynn as Sec. of Defense and his brother General Charles Flynn as head of the Joint Chiefs it wouldn’t be hard making this happen. Manufacturing a fake reason to justify this wouldn’t be too difficult for scum like them.
Arresting or harassing his perceived enemies would be different but I wouldn’t want to be Fani Willis, Leticia James or Jack Smith if DJT wins in '24. True isn’t likely to be able to get law enforcement to arrest HRC, Obama or Biden but the lower level folks who have drawn his ire could end up locked up or hassled to within an inch of their lives.
Pulling out of NATO and cutting off support to Ukraine are givens and likely pretty easy for him to pull off. I assume a DJT reelection would give him MAGA majorities in both the Senate and House so pretty much anything Putin wants will be granted.
Netanyahu would be given carte blanche to annihilate every Arab in Gaza and likely the West Bank as well.
His followers basically expect most of these things to happen. The only degree to which they care about the survival of this country is based on the expectation that all the evil liberals will be locked up or made to live lives of misery. That’s the truth.
Right, but it is historically not normal. The groundwork has been laid for greater pushback.
Yes, I think those are good examples of the kind of thing that Trump would do to start fucking with people.
I think the main difference between then and now is that people were true believers in their respective governments and ways of life back then. I think Trumpers are true believers in Trump, but that is quite different than entities associated with territory, and I think that is a weakness of Trump’s neonazi movement.
Agreed.
That’s a paranoid fantasy.
Red lines that I would be looking for:
- deployment of active duty US Military across state lines
- jailing of a few high-profile Democrats for “treason”
- mass deportation of immigrants
- execution of a TV journalist
Not that I’m an expert or anything, those are just the first things that would make me think we’ve crossed a point of no return with regard to normal as we’ve known it for more than a century.
Not Canada as an invasion target: Mexico. It’s also got natural resources, it’s the source of the swarms of evil border violators, and its citizens are in general a lot darker-hued than Canadians. Plus it has a shorter length of border, the border states are mostly red, and large swaths of the American populace have already been inculcated with hatred for Mexicans. Also, no pesky winter conditions to speak of.
Yes, it’s a bit inept. Though I am curious what these dumb motherfuckers think will actually happen. Like, guys, it’s not gonna be nice and normal, right? Let’s not pretend it will be.
Except… I think a significant percentage of his supporters want Trump to end democracy and be a dictator, and in the Venn diagram that overlaps with people who want a civil war and the Red states to break free.
These people are scum, but I am deeply pissed at the Republican pols who know better, the media who know better, and the naive Trump supporters who think it will be, as stated above, nice and normal.
I think Trump is a leader, but both in therms of rhetoric and leadership style he relies almost entirely on animal cunning and instinct. Whereas a Hitler or Stalin had many, many more political skills and much more knowledge than Trump. So, ultimately, I agree that Trump is not dictator material. In theory, he could have people to whom he could delegate the tasks that he isn’t good at, but I don’t think he’s a good delegator either.
I think they are though. They are spineless followers at this point. They will not oppose anything he does in any substantial way.
They wouldn’t be the rulers. If Trump became dictator, he would either get rid of Congress or, more likely, keep it around as a sham legislature, as Putin has kept the Duma. There wouldn’t be factionalism, just Trumpism.
The picture you paint sounds reasonable. I would only counter that such a federal government would encounter immediate pushback from Blue entities.
Yes, they’re fucking nazis. A significant number of them want to get down to killing people.
But they’re also idiots and don’t see the immediate hard pushback they would face.
I can think of some others:
- Denying the results of a national election.
- Refusing to participate in the peaceful transfer of power.
- Fomenting an insurrection.
The fact that a major political party is supporting this motherfucker and the media are treating it as semi-normal is… totally fucking not normal and not acceptable. We are already in a crisis.
I disagree. They don’t want a dictatorship they want a “fair” Democracy in which they, the majority representing the real America, always win. The problem is that the deep state has corrupted Democracy and stole the election. All that is necessary is to purge the traitorous element and we can be good again. As for breaking free from the rest of the country, that is only necessary so long as the woke establishment is in control. Once the cancer of liberalism is removed there will be no need to leave.
The question is are they following Trump or are they just keeping ahead of the right wing outrage wave. As an example of what I am talking about, Trump was pro-vaccine, got booed and quickly switched gears to meet the MAGAts where they wanted him to be.
I think there are a bunch of different Trump supporter types. They range from dumb-dumbs who think they’re supporting a normal Republican candidate to self-acknowledged neonazis who want the killin’ to start soon. And there are a bunch in between who are lying to themselves about their own beliefs and motivations.
So it was with Germans in 1933. At least they had the excuse that they didn’t know about the Holocaust, since it hadn’t happened yet.
But if we say that Trumpers of one stripe or another make up 30% of the country, I would say a good solid 10% (i.e., 1/3 of Trumpers) genuinely want Trump to be a dictator, and another 10% would not oppose his becoming such. Further, as I said above, I think 90%+ of Republicans in office would take no stand whatsoever against his becoming a dictator.
Again, among Republicans currently in office, there are different types. I would say the breakdown is as follows:
- 10% have total respect for and belief in Trump and would follow him wherever; i.e., true believers.
- 40% do not have full respect for Trump but like the vector he represents and would do nothing to oppose anything he does and would more or less support his worst impulses.
- 40% are spinless opportunists without strong feelings about him that would turn on him if it were advantageous to them. They might have qualms if he becomes a dictator, but, again, they are spineless.
- 10% are roughly the same as the spinless opportunists but would actually gain a conscience if he started hurting people worse than he already has.
Most Trump supporters think he’s our salvation. They believe Biden is a criminal who is opening borders to let people vote for the Democratic, excuse me, Democrat party, ushering an era of communist/socialism, and who will bring about the destruction of the United States.
“So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause.” – Senator Amidala (Oregon I think)
This is about the crux of it. Those diehard Trump supporters will deny that Trump is an authoritarian. They’re living in their own private Idaho, except their Idaho has even more right wing extremist bigots. I’ve always tried to empathize with Trump supporters to understand where they’re coming from. For a lot of them, I think this is about feeling as though they have a voice. That we have no choice but to listen to them now. If Trump wins the next election I don’t know how bad it’ll get. I don’t know if it’ll get that much worse under Trump or if he’ll widen the floodgates and make it possible for things to get worse down the road.
Those numbers sound about right to me.
My problem is that government of the United States seems to depend upon those who hold office to be gentlemen and respect the democratic process. When one loses an election, one calls up the guy who won, despite his odious political beliefs, and congratulates him. Truman and Eisenhower. Eisenhower and Kennedy. Kennedy even called upon Eisenhower for advice.
Romney is a jerk and treated waiters at a revenue raising advent as slaves, yet he remains gentlemanly and honest.
Now one insults opponents and upon losing an elections claims there were voting irregularities.
The nature of politics has changed.
This is a tough one. Even though I despise Trump supporters (after 1/6, none of them have any excuse left), I still want to be fair and accurate about the content of their heads.
I don’t know how much Trumpists actually believe what they say, just as I don’t know how many QAnoners really believe QAnon (strong Venn diagram overlap there). Belief systems are about a lot more than beliefs; they are focal point for community formation and a rallying point for specific actions.
As an example, fascists choose an easily victimizable Other as a focal point for their rage and political action. It didn’t really matter whether the Nazis believed in the anti-Semitic content of the party. Their movement was built on violence and bullying the Other and stoking rage.
Not for one second do I believe that Trumpists believe and act as they do because they happen not to like Democrats and Democratic policies. Rather, they are who they are by nature, and they want action, they want to break things, and they want to hurt their perceived enemies. They want to follow an authoritarian leader and feel part of a victorious collective. People like this exist in every society, unfortunately. That’s why it’s totally fair to call Trumpists nazis: they are motivated in exactly the same way as nazis were in the 1930s.
So, in sum, while again I think there are a range of types, I think Trumpists by nature are people who don’t care about the truth at all and join together in a collective myth because that’s effective for them.
Yeah, that’s another thing: even though Trump lost in 2020 and will most likely lose in 2024, he has already deeply degraded and destabilized our political system to the point where I don’t think it will last much longer.
Absolutely.
Trumpists are stupid and ignorant and are not looking at the game theory aspect of election denial.
Even if Trump is honest in his motivation to deny, any success he might have based on such denial would tempt dishonest people to deny elections in order to obtain a similar result, which in turn would erode the salutary principle and custom of the peaceful transfer of power.
A sophisticated person trying to pull what Trump did would at least say something like, “I do not make these accusations lightly, and I consider the peaceful transfer of power to be among the most important and sacred principles of our democracy.” But Trump is a crude dumbass with no capability to say such a thing.
IIRC, one reason Al Gore made as little a fuss as he did in 2000 was that he did not want to harm American democracy.
As another Canadian I agree with this; it could be potentially catastrophic for us. And, as I was in the military for much of my life, I have serious concerns about a host of possible strategic negative spinoffs that could result.
I used to wrestle with the question of whether Trump supporters believed his baloney, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it makes no difference one way or the other. It’s only important to know that they’ll go along with what baloney Trump spews for one reason or another.
Very true.