I think you have it inverted. The self-important people in offices don’t matter; they can give whatever orders they like, and they’ll be ignored if those orders violate what Trump and MAGA want. The party infrastructure has been filled up with the MAGA types, and anything the supposed leaders command is gatekept by them. Remember, these are the same people who failed to prevent Trump taking over and have folded at every turn when confronted.
And that’s only going to become more true as the nation slides towards fascism, and all that matters is force. Just ask all the dead Russian oligarchs who “fell out of windows” how much power money and sitting in an office gives you in a fascist state. In a few years, any of those “leaders” who tries to tell “the magas and Christian nationalists” what to do will be lucky if all they get is a rifle butt to the face instead of a bullet.
Only if the votes are properly and legitimately counted. Remember when they were and the MAGA horde got so pissed off at losing for real they stormed the Capitol, threatened to hang the vice president, and Og only knows what they had in mind for the Speaker of the House at the time.
I don’t think we’re quite there yet as far as the infrastructure goes. Which is why I don’t think Trump will cancel elections or take other steps that overt.
Most of us know the old saying about “first they came for the immigrants, then they came for the gays”, and so on. It usually ends with “and then they came for me, but there was no one left to stand for me”. The thing is, if one moves high enough up the food chain, eventually it will become “and then I went for them, because I know they were planning on coming for me so I had to act first”. In other words, a hot civil war. I think Trump and his inner circle know this, and so they won’t actually try any such things.
You and I have discussed this issue before and we remain in disagreement on it.
I stand by what I’ve said in the past. The real leaders of the right wing are using Donald Trump and the magas, not the other way around. The right wing was still around after Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush and Paul Ryan. Donald Trump is dumber than any of the guys, so I don’t believe that somehow he was the one who was able to outmaneuver the establishment and take over the party. All Trump really is is just the latest face. As I said, the loudest right wingers aren’t the important ones.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - there is no way DJT, Johnson and the other MAGAts will allow loss of control in the House. There will definitely be elections but any R seats that flip D will be challenged and the D Rep will not be allowed to take their seat. In particular, any of those seats that are in states controlled by R Governors and R majority Legislatures will have the results tossed and the race will be given to the GOP candidate.
It isn’t like there are that many seats that will need to have the results falsified to be certain this will happen. SCOTUS will fail to stop it and will reverse any ruling by a lower court that doesn’t align with what DJT & gang want to have happen.
I remain unconvinced turning the Senate majority to a D majority is a fantasy.
I ‘want’ the GOP to destroy itself. I want them to collapse. But I have zero faith in the american people, and they are the ones who decide these things.
As long as 70-80 million people are willing to vote republican, the republican party has no incentive to change anything. And I don’t see any of that changing. The GOP will get 75-80 million votes in 2028 no matter how bad they fuck everything up.
Even if the GOP loses in 2026 and 2028, they know the public will just vote them back into office in 2030 and 2032.
The GOP has no incentive to change because voters keep rewarding their behavior. Even to the degree that there is infighting, its not going to cost the GOP any elections.
I’m tired of wishing the world matched the world I want to live in. But it doesn’t
Regarding a third term for Trump, I’m inclined to agree with @Stranger_On_A_Train
I think there are enough purple states where the voters wouldn’t allow Trump on the ballot that he wouldn’t have a path to 270, regardless if he finagled some way to make that possible.
Because as Stranger said, the states have to put him on the ballot.
The 2028 elections are a whole different ball of wax from the 2026 midterms, even assuming that Trump is still alive and marginally competent by that point. There is really no way to credibly interpret the 22nd Amendment that would give Donald Trump the ability to run for a third presidential term despite all of the ways his energumen have tried to distort or misrepresent the law, and so as noted there are many states that simply won’t list Trump on the ballot as a candidate regardless of whether the RNC nominates him or not.. But if Republicans are successful in their inevitable electoral fuckery in the midterms they might just decide to go whole hog and deny the legitimacy of elections at all and have Trump appointed by Congressional mandate.
Personally, I think this is unlikely, not only because I don’t think Trump is even going to be able to string three words together or even silently wave to a bizarre playlist at that point, but also because Republicans will still want to maintain a fiction of democracy and ‘free and fair’ elections. Look for them to start advancing a successor—maybe J.D. Vance, but just as likely someone else from the MAGA-sphere—while Trump is made into a ‘senior statesman’ who is really still notionally ‘in charge’ and whose name appears above the title. How well that will go over with MAGAts is anyone’s guess but it at least provides a fig leaf of legitimacy.
A major problem with scenarios where Trump or some nebulous “them” appoint a successor in 2028 isn’t just resistance from Democrats or the courts. It would be from other ambitious Republicans who get left out. If for no other reason, I think that is why the 2028 elections will be held in mostly the same way we’re used to.
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.
Dictators often start wars as a way to justify canceling elections. We had el donald’s noise about annexing Canada or Greenland. Now he is actively provoking Venezuela.
When I look at the mess he left for Biden in Afghanistan it doesn’t really add up that he was setting some sort of a trap. He thought that he would win in 2020. That would leave him obligated for the withdrawal. Suppose he was planning to get a hot war started there by stiffing the Taliban. With his eight years up in 2024, he could use the situation to justify cancelling the election.
I believe he has people around him who are capable of such planning. They appear to be particularly skilled at convincing him these things are his ideas and in his best interests.
There are now people propping up Trump who are executing long-crafted plans, and in particular people associated with The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, but in his first term he surrounded himself with people as clueless as himself and humiliated and fired anyone who demonstrated the slightest bit of initiative or objection like Rex Tillerson or Jim Mattis. The notion of Trump as a mastermind who was ever capable of plotting out intricate plans years in their unfolding is so risibly inconsistent with everything he’s ever done that it seems like an SNL parody sketch.
Not all of them are incompetent. Russ Vought (Director of the Office of Management and Budget) in particular has been doing extraordinary damage in dismantling the administrative state. Even though DOGE has gotten more of the attention for its inept fumbling of ‘auditing’ government agencies, Vought has been making sure that any attempt to interfere or reverse those changes runs into proverbial brick walls. But because he is a quiet guy who seems really boring instead of a narcissistic billionaire repeatedly making fascist salutes and spewing ‘dark memes’ from his personal social media platform, he gets very little attention, certainly not by the corporate media and even not as much as he should by the independent press. But here is a taste:
Even many the ‘incompetent’ members of Trump’s second regime are pretty destructive in a very intentional fashion. Every public health expert certainly considers RFK, Jr as an “incompetent boob” when it comes to running the Department of Health and Human Services, but if you pay attention it is clear that he knows exactly what he is doing.