GOP Will Eat Itself

Happy Birthday there @bump.

IMO MTG & LB are stunningly stupid people. Such that deep strategy is probably not guiding their decisions. But they’re not lazy stupid; they’re aggressive grasping stupid. The sort always on the prowl for personal advantage.

My theory:
As women, and a bit younger, they’re pretty much immune from having their own skeletons fall out of Epstein’s closet. The same cannot be said of most of the rest of the senior GOP (traditional or extra trumpy flavor), the RW influencers, and the sub rosa funders and strategists.

From MTG/LB’s POV, it’s like dropping a live grenade in the center of the elite crowd they are standing in, while knowing that they themselves are magically immune to shrapnel wounds. They can’t predict specifically who else will be killed or maimed, but they know their competition will be thinned when the smoke clears.

I’m impatient to know the answer.

I think it’s because the most feral and rabid Trump supporters are the ones likeliest to buy into the QAnon stuff. Who, then, are the likeliest to believe the argument that the Epstein files implicate all kinds of important elites and politicians. And hence are the likeliest to break ranks with Trump. They may genuinely believe Trump is not implicated in the files at all, and hence can’t fathom why Trump won’t release it, and demand that he release.

I am not eager to see how the train wreck will end up…especially since I am on that train.

I’m of mixed mind. It certainly will not improve as long as trump is steering careening the ship of state. The next phase will occur at some time. Unless one envisions somehow stopping this freight train in the next year or so, before the RW takeover becomes complete and unstoppable, I’m of the mind that the sooner we start the next chapter the sooner we end the next chapter.

The only light is at the far end of the tunnel, so the sooner we start walking along the tracks that way the sooner we get there.

I’m expecting Trump to waive the 22nd Amendment via executive order, and (no surprise) be placed on the ballot. Obama rises to the challenge, also ignoring the 22nd and despite the wording of the executive order prohibiting anyone named Obama. However, this will be thwarted by the Democratic Party. “We don’t stoop to their level!” They run either Tim Walz or Tim Kaine “It’s Time for a Tim!”

I think there’s a good chance that it will die with a whimper, not a bang. We are still quite early in this administration, and are only seeing the beginning of serious economic problems raising their heads. Crops are not being harvested (see the soy bean disaster, for one) and grocery/goods prices continue to climb because of tariffs. Anecdote: I’ve been tracking my grocery costs for the last couple of months and can tell you that every bag of groceries that I buy is $50. If I’m adding meat or snacks, it shoots up to $60. Egg prices (which seem to be the bell-weather) have NOT dropped. Gas in MSP continues to stay above $3/gal. I see no reason why any of this should change for the better, other than seasonal gas fluctuations, and will likely get much worse by another six months. I’m guessing that by the midterm election cycle, things will be completely fucked for the average consumer and there will be some serious backlash against the Trump administration by his own party, who will come to the realization that he does not have, nor has ever had, their best interests at heart. Hey, I can dream.

Walz has announced for a third term as governor. He’s going to face a stiff race, as fraud scandals are rocking the government to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars that disappeared, even though there was supposed oversight by some government office. I have my doubts that he can dodge that bullet, as taxpayers are royally pissed.

Republican approval of the president averages 90%. Wake me up me when it gets down to 60%.

I don’t know… that’s definitely a possibility.

Then there’s Ted Cruz saying that the FCC acted gangster-like in their threats toward ABC w.r.t. Jimmy Kimmel.

‘Dangerous as hell’: Cruz blasts FCC’s Jimmy Kimmel takedown - Live Updates - POLITICO

That’s also something I wouldn’t have expected. He’s usually so pro-Trump (this is a guy whose wife Trump called ugly, yet he’s still a Trump toady) that this is very out of character. What he says is true- this sets an awful precedent that could backfire on the Republicans in the future, but I’m surprised he said it.

I have seen predictions of the imminent collapse of the GOP for at least the last 10 years, frequently on these very boards.

A lot depends on what happens in the midterm elections and of course in 2028 but I highly doubt the Republican Party will collapse any time soon. It may in fact require the military taking action to remove them from power if they actually lose an election.

Far more likely is the demise of the Democratic Party, either by action of the MAGA authoritarians or their own impotence as a political force.

I disagree. He isn’t being anti-Trump, Ted Cruz knows better than that. He’s positioning himself as being anti- whoever tries to succeed Trump in the “Let’s take Jimmy Kimmel down / crack down on speech we disagree with” lane of potential Trump successors. And there is going to be a lot of lanes, both pro and anti to various aspects of the current party line, in numerous combinations. At the end of it all, a retiring Trump is still going to be there, preventing whoever comes out on top of the Republican primary as becoming the next True Dear Leader because the rank and file MAGA voters will still be looking at Trump rather than the actual nominee as the leader. That’s why I think Democrats have an advantage in 2028.

the average consumer doesn’t matter to Trump, or the GOP.. What might make a difference to them is the above-average voters…the CEO’s , the investor class, the movers and shakers at the stock market, etc. If they start to lose money, then the GOP will listen.

My point is that they vote. And pissed off voters can swing elections.

If Trump shows up anywhere on the 2028 ballot for President, either as the Republican party’s official nominee or as an independent, that almost guarantees the start of the next Civil War - especially if it gets to the electoral college vote and, somehow, he wins that, and the Supreme Court upholds it.
And yes, I firmly believe that there will be a Presidential election in 2028, as well as Congressional elections in 2026 and 2028.
Of course, nothing stops MAGA from getting Trump’s hand-picked successor elected in 2028, with Trump being “the power behind the throne.” For those of you who think, “It’s going to be hard for Trump to give orders from behind the walls of a maximum-security New York state prison,” that’s nothing the Army can’t solve.

I don’t think “Trump” and “hand-picked successor” are compatible concepts. He’s more of an après moi, le déluge kind of guy. The kind of guy who, perhaps more than the rape itself, enjoys knowing that his victim will now be traumatized with any other man in the future.

I’m not even certain there will be an election in 2026. Trump could declare that the country is facing a state of emergency and that it is too dangerous to allow the possibility of the extreme left antifa terrorists taking over congress. I shudder to think what happens then.

Next would be the adults in the room preventing such a thing.
Ha ha ha, oh I kill me.
Seriously, next would be the corrupt courts of America green lighting the plan.

Elections are controlled by the states, which barring martial law will continue to hold elections because they are legally mandated to do so (by state law as well as federal statute). Whether those elections are meaningful in the numerous states that have taken various measures to suppress voting and gerrymander districts, as well as undermine the infrastructure to assure election security and transparency so they can come back and claim that particular elections were ‘rigged’ if they don’t go for the GOP, but there will be elections. Hungary, Türkiye, and even Russia still hold elections because the era of just being a straight dictator is mostly over, and it makes it easier to claim how free these countries are with a straight face even if the results are absurdly unrealistic.

If Trump (or rather the people actually running things) thought they could get away with declaring martial law, they would, and in fact all of this deploying National Guard units to cities is a kind of ‘soft open’ to that to condition the general public to accepting uniformed troops in cities, but frankly that isn’t really going all that well because NG service people are kind of tired of being pulled away from their families and jobs to pick up trash and walk around having pictures taken of them. However, the story that isn’t getting a lot of press is how the Department of Homeland Security is recruiting people (especially for ICE) for what is basically an executive-controlled paramilitary that is both independent of the Department of Justice and not subject to the Posse Comitatus Act, ostensibly for ‘immigration enforcement’ but really to do whatever the executive demands. It still isn’t going to be a force that can put the entire country under martial law, but it can certainly lock down a handful of major cities, and not just ‘sanctuary cities’.

As far as the GOP eating itself, it has been consuming its more outspoken members but it seems to be pretty satisfied with what has been accomplished under a burgeoning autocracy, and the more Republican Congresspeople get a hostile response at constituent town halls the more inclined they are to go along with a scheme that assures reelection by hook or crook. I suspect many of them are quite aware that they can be thrown under the MAGA bus any time they are anything less than totally obeiscant by a more devoted upstart, so they are between a rock and a hard place for having sold out and now unable to get off the barge without drowning.

The demise of Donald Trump alone will not change that because toeing the line of GOP dogma is the only thing they have that even approximates an ideology at this point but some combination of an even more extreme faction trying to up the ante while fiscal and business conditions cause mass upset even among their ostensible supporters might result in a kind of Dixiecrat-like split. I wouldn’t count on that happening by 2026, though, nor does it seem that the Democratic party is going to get their support aligned behind a particular cause or candidate short of the emergency of another, Obama-like once in a generation personality. Mostly, we’re just going to get a lot more of ‘Mayor Pete’ and Gavin Newsom, who are perfectly cromulent middle-of-the-road politicians with small policy ideas and able to get some significant backing but can’t actually sustain enthusiasm or present ideas radical enough to pull fence-sitters into the voting booth or appeal to people who want ‘Real Change’.

Stranger

Nah. Assuming that did happen, and I highly doubt anything of the sort is even a remote possibility, next would be some military officer(s) mobilizing their troops against Trump on order of some top Democratic official or another. It would basically be the start of a hot civil war. Even Trump wouldn’t want to risk such a thing.

ETA. And probably with significant Republican support, because of things as noted above like Ted Cruz jumping in to defend Jimmy Kimmel. If Trump cancels elections that means that along with preventing Gavin Newsom, AOC, etc. from appearing on a ballot, it also meant that Ted Cruz and any other ambitious Republican will also never get the chance to appear on the ballot. And that’s something they definitely don’t want.

I tend to agree.

A lot of people tend to think that the loudest right wingers are the important ones. They’re not. The important people in the Republican party are quietly giving orders in office rooms.

The only reason the rabble has mattered to the right wing is because they’ve needed them to win elections. And the Republican leaders are taking control of the election process. Once they’ve done that, the magas and Christian nationalists and other members of the right wing base will find that the people running the country don’t care about them anymore than they do the rest of us are.