Is he done? If you allow 20 minutes per pound roasting time, this could take a while.
Politically, he still has maybe 25% of the voters who believe that he is incapable of error and is the only one capable of saving America. Those people will not give up on him until he lies stinking in the earth.
The recent focus on the whale of Donald Trump breaking the surface has ignored the lurking shoal of predator fish that have been collecting below. The modern bent toward authoritarianism has roots going to back to Lee Atwater (and arguably Barry Goldwater before that) but Newt Gingrich has been pushing a vernacular of autocracy and oppression for decades based upon dog whistles and xenopobia, and had he not been so ignominiously forced to resign from the Speakership and House altogether we probably would have seen this much sooner; instead, we got the corporate arm of the GOP taking over to giving us Dick Cheney with his fratty puppet George W. Bush in 2000, and a Republican party that took years and a ‘Tea Party’ to get back on course toward emergent proto-fascism.
Gingrich, of course, was an early booster of Donald Trump despite much opposition from GOP leadership because he saw in Trump those qualities of an effective demagogue; a lack of self-awareness, and incipient hatred of all ‘Others’, a willingness to pander to the ‘base’ classes to fill his coffers, a single-minded embrace of simplistic and often unworkable solutions to non-existent problems, and zero fucks about hurting others to get his own way, whether it is immigrant children, wounded veterans, his own appointees trying desperately to buoy him above his self-created troubles, or indeed, the entire US population. Where Gingrich miscalculated was just how much of an emotional infant Trump is, and how, like a toddler, he can’t be guided or trained without constant supervision and correction. Like Dr. Frankenstein, he lost control of his ‘monster’ who then went flailing about the woods outside the village.
As for the ‘defeat’ of the Republicans in the 2022 mid-terms, I’ll point out that in many contested races won by Democrats, they’ve eked out by a margin of less than a percentage point; small enough to ‘credibly’ contest right now, and certainly enough to challenge with future electoral effort, getting out the vote under the cry of not allowing an election to be ‘stolen’ again. If this is what winning looks like, we are even more perilously close to a cliff than many have feared. There is maybe barely a majority of Democrats in the Senate and likely not in the House, which does not spell good things for the next two years. And if conservative leaders had been a bit more patient and not pushed the overturn of Roe v. Wade this year it may well have been that there would not have been enough of a backlash to achieve even that marginal threshold of ‘victory’. Whether Trump runs in 2024 or not, the Republican party has tasted autocracy and they are fully addicted; like an addict, they will beg, steal, threaten, and kill to get more and more until they’ve had their full measure, and then come back wanting still more. Trump was just the figurehead for this movement, and his forcible retirement or death would just make him a luminary in perpetuity.
Stranger
When Trump faces voters again and is smacked down mightily I’ll consider him done. If he refuses to run in 2024 I’ll consider him done.
A report from Trump Country–ie Tennessee.
East TN is still feverishly Trump, but I’m sensing a cooling-off here in Middle TN.
The local GOP seems to be running a “delay and exhaust” strategy, to wear the MAGAists out.
Local Government has opposed the “De-fund Police” movement, but is openly hostile to KKK/Nazi movements.
Overall–Trumpism is losing steam.
Inexperienced and lazy I’d agree with. I’ve never said that Trump was dumb, and, to the people who like him, he has charisma by the boatload. Trump is a salesman; he can quickly read his audience, figure out what they want, and know how to get what he wants from them. Once you see through him, you realize that the emperor has no clothes. But to the people who want it to be true, they project all their hopes and dreams on Trump.
I think it’s unlikely that anyone follows the Trump playbook as successfully as Trump. He was a once-in-a-lifetime combination of teflon charm and amoral huckster. Other politicians have plans and policies that they want to enact; those things distract from the single-minded pursuit of personal glory that is the hallmark of true Trumpism.
I disagree. DeSantis has no charisma, which is all Trump ever had.
Best case scenario: DeSantis gets the nomination and Trump runs as a third party candidate, thus splitting the red vote.
My sense is that The Apprentice, which is where most Americans first became exposed to his personality, displayed an anti-charisma to me, an utter repulsion to his toxicity, his absurdly inflated sense of his own judgment and importance, and put me off him forever. (He was never on my “good” list to begin with.) But I think most low-IQ, middle-America types found that personality very charismatic.
Trump is not done. How many times has he been declared so? When he started running, the party apparatus was completely against him. Years after his Presidency, he still has substantial support, and thus boggles the imagination given his views on respecting tradition, legal norms and alleged Republican touchstones. I do not think he would win a second term as President, but there are many other positions that he could win.
A moot point, since running for any lesser position after being President would be a “loser” move in his mind.
Hmm. Are there any other positions that offer legal immunity? He could become an ambassador, perhaps even for the United States.
I mean sure, but do you think Putin would appoint him?
There is some useful potential in having Trump as ambassador. I see it as fitting into a three-tier classification depending on how we feel about the other country:
We have normal relations with the other country: Appoint a qualified ambassador.
We hate the other country: Break off diplomatic relations.
We are at war with the other country: Send Trump as ambassador.
Fascinating history and prognostication. I do question your use of the word “luminary”.
A coke fiend I used to know used the phrase “horrible want-mores” to refer to the craving.
So what? Trump may have a lock on his base but he will never again move beyond his base. And his base by itself is not strong enough to put him back in office.
Our best hope is the fact that while a lot of Republicans may like the idea of autocracy, only one of them would get to be the autocrat. All the guys reaching for the crown will knock down the other guys they see reaching in the same direction.
I think many Republicans think they could be another Trump. Not likely. This is much harder than it looks. Trump has had decades of preparation, publicity seeking and perception management practice. He has a very special set of shills.
I use the term in somewhat sardonic fashion; Trump has not intentionally educated anyone (certainly no
‘students’ of Trump [Not A] University), but through his actions he has shown the lamp forward of how to contest legitimate elections, subordinate legitimate political structures, and in general how to run the long con…all by simply not giving a fuck about legitimacy or indeed legality. The social contract is all that really stands between civilized society and the trampling herd, and Trump has demonstrated that there is no real downside in disregarding it so long as you are not predicating your authority upon legitimacy, and Trump has never been legitimate about anything in his life, from his real estate deals to his personal conduct.
For what it is worth, I genuinely think that most of the die-hard Trump supporters know that there was no real fraud and that he legitimately lost the 2020 election, and they simply do not care. They have given up on democracy as a concept (insofar as they ever really thought about it), and not without some justification. After all, it was our system of ostensible democracy that sold out the American industrial base to cheap offshore labor, undermined individual farming for agricultural conglomerates, and has generally sold out the middle class to fête corporate profiteering. If Trump isn’t exactly the kind of would-be profiteer himself he can certainly sell the done-wrong-by grievance culture like nobody’s business. He’s a Poor Little Rich Man who understands the plight of the disenchanted even as he tells them how irrelevant they are to his interests and would fleece them blind in a New York minute if they had something for him to take, but his sense of entitlement to be important is their own, and his resentment of anyone who might take something he isn’t getting even if he started with more than most people will ever have is a palpable self-victimizing that is readily shared by people who are actually hurting or fearful.
Trump boosters are on the “Stolen Election” train just because it makes them feel substantial and important to ‘count votes’ and ‘protect elections’, and so forth (especially if they get to walk around with firearms and tacticool gear), and if they could place Trump in power and put an end to any further elections they absolutely would because they don’t feel that they have any other input into the electoral process. And Trump going away—by non-electability, prison, or death—won’t really change that. Trump is a disaster, but he’s not the genesis any more than a volcano is the cause of an eruption but just the expression of it. Trump is such an awkward, gross, ungainly figure it seems improbable that he could actually be viewed as some kind of a leader, but one can say the same of Napoleon, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, and frankly most of European royalty going back to the Roman Empire, and yet these people determine the lives and deaths of millions of people and the futures of the civilizations they rule. So it goes.
A “special set of shills” he has indeed. However, I think you overestimate Trump’s “decades of preparation”, at least insofar as some deliberate self-development. He has just figured out that giving no fucks about what anyone thinks can be a successful political strategy in an environment were people are angry at the current establishment. Trump’s biggest asset is his complete lack of self-awareness or any concern about being self-consistent. He’s good at shameless self-promotion and has zero concern about throwing grade school insults at his opponents, and Trump’s supporters just wish they could be so bare-assed about it themselves.
Stranger
I hope and wish, but I doubt it. If I never had to listen to his aggravating, annoying, stupid, and ignorant style of speaking again, I could die happy. It’s not gonna’ happen soon. He’s going to hang on to his notoriety with everything he’s got.
A school of fish follow their leader wherever they go, even if it’s into a shark’s mouth. Trump still controls 30-40% of the party absolutely and the Republican brand will carry another 20%. Now imagine the fish are piranhas. The Republican House will inflame their worst instincts. The country is in serious danger.
I was in utter despair on Monday, only to awake on Wednesday to a near miracle. I couldn’t in my wildest dreams have imagined a headline like this appearing.
Take a moment to let that warm your cockles and then forget about it. We saw the same message flicker for a firefly moment after 1/6. Trump will announce his candidacy next week and suck all the opposition air out of the room. His followers will rally. His toadies will suck up. Tucker Carlson will denounce all backsliders.
After that, who knows? Politics once made a sort of sense, with surprises explainable with proper reflection. That era is over. National politics proffers a history of demagogues and nincompoops in high office, but also an establishment who may have been vile in their own ways but kept the crazies in check because of the potential damage to their own interests. The Republicans have excommunicated their establishment. McConnell is presumably suffering excruciation of the wattles because Nevada was just called for the Democrats, guaranteeing them 50 seats even before Georgia. Trump once again snatched away the power that was at his fingertips.
No future historians will believe that a nation of 330,000,000 could stay so evenly divided for so long. Gerrymandering helped but is not the full answer. Such a situation is utterly unstable. A sharp push will push it violently to one side. Trump will, probably before 2024, be an impetus, maybe because he’s done or maybe because he’s not done. Imagine a 2000-mile tall pencil balanced on a point. That’s our future.
I would have blamed that on capitalism rather than democracy.