Is this embarrassing period in US history finally over? Most of his endorsed candidates for congress and state offices lost, and what should have been an easy Republican takeover fell drastically short. Even though they’ll take the House, Republicans will have a hard time getting majorities on major votes. It seems that enough Americans finally figured out (what the majority knew all along) that Trump is a conman (perhaps the greatest ever?). With DeSantis’s resounding win in Florida, I can’t see how Trump has any future in politics.
Related thoughts:
How quickly will Republicans drop supporting Trump with his legal troubles? It almost seems like it would be in the best interest of both parties to see him wind up in prison for life.
How big was that Supreme Court leak on its abortion view? It’s not mentioned a lot, but I wonder how much of the Republican demise can be attributed to that leak.
Not as long as he’s preparing to announce his candidacy for president, he’s not. It’s not like he cares about the health of the Republican party, so I don’t see any reason why what happened to them would change how he acts.
DeSantis’s support is only infuriating to him, which is why he declared war on his former ally.
He’s not done. Which is bad news for everyone including the Republican Party. A DeSantis vs Biden race is an easy win for DeSantis. Trump vs Biden is another toss up with Trump losing the popular vote and it being uncomfortably tight in battle ground states.
I hope he’s not done. I want to see the Republican party split into two factions and implode from infighting. Or if Trump were to split from the Republicans and become an Independent, it would reduce the power of the Republicans dramatically to win elections, without Trump being elected to anything again. Plus do you think Trump cares what the Republican Party thinks about him? He’s bigger than any political party in his pathologically narcissistic mind.
Likely true. But right now, it looks like we’re shaping up for a Trump vs DeSantis vs Biden race and Biden has a good shot at that. Trump doesn’t have enough support to win but he does has enough support to stop any other Republican from winning. Which means the Republicans have two years to figure out how to get Trump to do something that doesn’t benefit him personally.
That only happens if Trump forms his own third party and gets his act together well enough that it actually appears on the ballots during the general elections.
I don’t see that as likely, but I do think it would improve Biden’s chances if it did.
IOW, if we separate “Trumpism” from Trump, did they find a formula that works and will help them with their “we’re not generating enough angry old white guys for the long haul” demographic problem.
… whether or not the Cheeto-Faced Shit Gibbon strokes out, gets primaried, or is imprisoned.
Make no mistake, Trump has unleashed an openly fascist, anti-democratic, white nationalist, authoritarian movement. It’s not going away soon, with it without him.
Trump is not done. But that is not in any way, shape, or form a good thing.
Because Trump is as done today as he was in 2015. Way back when all the “responsible Republicans” were assuring us “never Trump.” And of course the Democrats were oh so confident that if the GOP were to nominate Trump, it would mark the end of the Republican Party.
I still remember reading—and believing—opinion pieces in respectable neoliberal news outlets insisting that the Republican Party was on the eve of collapse in the days leading up to November 8, 2016. The party had suffered a fatal blow when he emerged as nominee, and they’d wear him like an albatross around their necks. There was just no way Trump could win, and the voters were sure to reject the Republican Party along with him.
Which is the real concern. As bad of a president as he was, he and his clown car of floundering fools were their own biggest impediments. Even though they had control of the executive branch and both houses of Congress, they couldn’t get out of their own way in effecting any of part of their own stated agenda, and Trump’s buffoonery meant that he didn’t even make effective use of the broad executive authority of that office. A competent would-be tyrant wouldn’t have wasted time on the fruitless exercise of “Wall”, “quid pro quo” efforts to get foreign leaders to do bogus opposition research for him, or pointless social media “wars” with mostly has-been celebrities. A capable proto-autocrat would have gone about actively undermining legislative authority, cultivating deep loyalty in civil service authorities (especially in law enforcement and intelligence services), establishing executive precedent, and generally ensuring that even an adverse electoral outcome would still leave him with plenty of hooks into government whether he was the titular head or not. (See Putin, Vladimir for example of.)
Trump’s most effective measure as bending the government to his will was the wide appointment of conservative justice to the federal bench, and this was hardly his idea as the setup for this was Mitch McConnell and Chuck Grassley refusing to accept nominations from then-President Obama for consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Trump spent most of his time going to rallies to fête his own narcissism and futilely trying to impress other strongmen while avoiding shaking hands with Angela Merkel at all costs because he knew she would put him in an armbar and force him to tap out. It didn’t even occur to him until after he’d lost the election that he should have some means in place to pressure officials certifying electoral results to deny votes, resulting in that blubbering phone call to Brad Raffensperger to find him “11,780 votes” and an insurrection that seemed drawn straight from a Marx Brothers movie.
If Trump were actually good at anything but being a t.v. show host and professional real estate huckster we’d be living in Margaret Atwood’s fundamentalist nightmare right now. But Trump did show the way for an actually competent demagogue to take control of the reigns of government and drive the country into the pseudo-fascism it has periodically veered toward before lurching aimlessly away for the last couple of centuries.
No, Trump is far more done in 2024 than he was in 2015. He’s literally already lost against Biden, and he’s only lost supporters (and gained detractors) since then. We know we can rally voters behind Biden against Trump.
DeSantis on his own has a better chance, but he still needs a united party behind him, not a split party due to Trump running against him, taking out the (previously considered) unlikely voters who would get behind Trump. Trump had to pull in tons of those to even lose to Biden.
Trump’s value in 2016 was as an outsider, an unknown who could bust up the system. And he needed a Hilary who they could tear down to even barely squeak out a win. Biden is stronger—even the Republicans admit that.
It makes no sense to act like Trump is a political unknown, a boogeyman who we can’t topple. We toppled him, and he’s only lost power since.
It’s not about his legal problems, it’s about whether or not he can bring votes to the party.
Many (most? all?) Trump backed candidates did poorly in the mid-terms. That will count against him more than an actual conviction and prison sentence would
As long as Trump is alive and ranting he’s not going away, not entirely. The question is whether or not his ranting remains relevant.
Extremely unlikely, of course, but what a dream scenario! And Trump’s delusional narcissism could conceivably drive him to do it if he is denied the nomination. It would finish off the Orange Peril for good.
What happens if Trump (a) doesn’t actually run as a third-party candidate, but (b) just does a lot of loud speechifyin’, to anybody who’ll listen, about why he thinks people shouldn’t vote for DeSantis?
Impossible … does not compute! Trump never has and never will do anything that is not directly in his own self-interest. Sure, one could speculate that he would try to sink DeSantis to revive his own chances in 2028, but by then he’ll be 82, and even more senile than he is already. This is not a guy with a lot of spare brain cells.
I contend that the reason Republicans did not perform as expected is that Americans do not like having rights taken away from them. Striking down Roe v Wade, and the repeated use of the phrase “even in cases of rape and incest” on the campaign commercials is what hurt Republicans.
Trump may be done, and I’d welcome that. But I’ll count him out when it’s good and obvious.
I doubt it. Republicans get an idea in their head and then stick with it for decades. Trump worked for them once, so there will be some Republicans who will believe that it should happen again, and again, and again. There are voters who believe, or can soon be convinced, that the solution to every problem is “more Trump”.
Why do you believe the leak was still significant? The actual ruling was released a few weeks after the leak. It’s November now; what difference does it make that we knew about the Dobbs decision in May rather than June?