I don’t see any internal coup. He already skated Scot-free from J6. I think he has correctly judged that no one is going to do anything to him.
It’s an absolutely, astoundingly horrible idea. However, at some point, it might actually be better than the alternatives.
It’s starting to look pretty good actually./s
No /shit
Stupid isn’t insane. It’s just stupid.
The dangerous part is that he has more support from below now - the Trumpipsts fully own the party - and he’s being openly manipulated by Musk and a few other oligarchs.
Who would do this? The armed services have zero interest in a coup and are disproportionately Trumpist. The cabinet is Trumpist. Congress is majority Trumpist.
An albeit soon-to-be increasingly hungry bunch.
The armed services also have no interest in letting their families go hungry, their children uneducated (the above plan also includes shutting down the DOD school system), or getting their heads blown off by Quebecois partisans.
The tipping point is probably going to be when he tries to order a bombing campaign against an ally, upon which it will be “suggested” that he relocate to Mar-a-Lago to DJ at weddings and cheat at golf while Acting President Vance takes care of the boring work of running the country for him.
That’s likely why so much is getting done so fast. The real powers behind the golden toilet have been setting up their strategies and tactics to remold the government into the form they want for years, and are smoothly swinging into action now.
This hideous lie may be a new low for my vice-president.
My prediction: The coup will come no later than halfway through his term, from the Vance/Thiel cabal (an open question where Musk will be by this time), but not by an overt operation. Rather, Trump will become ill and either lapse into an irrecoverable coma or outright die in short order. There’s more than one way to deliberately produce that medical outcome and make it look plausible. So much neater to do it that way, eh?
If they can swing it, it will happen after the midway point of Trump’s term. That way, Vance could serve for 10 years.
Ah, good point, unless 45/47 is doing so much damage they need to take him out sooner.
The Republicans have shown basically no willingness to stand up to Trump, to the point of personal humiliation. People have been saying that “surely this is too far for even the Republicans” about various things ever since 2016, but it never is. I don’t think they’ll do anything but cave in short of him doing something like walking into a session of Congress and shooting random Republicans (they’d be fine with murdering Democrats).
Attacking an ally? That wouldn’t even be close to “too far”. Republicans don’t believe in allies, just victims and pawns. Unless the ally in question has nuclear weapons; that at least might give them pause. Not the morality of it, just the fact that a nuclear armed nation can retaliate in a way that might actually kill them, personally. But Canada doesn’t have nukes; so Trump could carpet bomb it into burning rubble and kill every last Canadian, and the Republicans wouldn’t care at all.
I don’t believe this is real. Can you confirm it?
MAGA worships the military. I expect no cuts there.
Even if it were real, I would suspect at least a strong possibility that the result would be for more military to opt out when their tour ends, and to make recruitment more difficult. (Though I was surprised with a quick Google, to see that actual commitments tended longer than I had thought.)
All they would have to do is encourage the old man to follow his appetites for food and (lack of) exercise. Inexorable time is on their side.
Nah, it’s too uncertain just to wait it out. I gather from watching true crime shows that there are drugs like succinylcholine that are a lot faster, more effective, and often nearly untraceable.
Oh, and mods, if this is too explicit, go ahead and deep-six it. I’m not advocating this, just speculating on what certain parties might attempt if their loose cannon is doing too much damage.
I think you’re right, though. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from medieval history, it’s that when authority is vested in the person of the king, and that king has a lot of power, that those next in line are not always above hasting his demise.
The source is a paper by Austin Dahmer, the new Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities.
Here’s the full document;