You mean éminence orange, of course.
There is going to be a power vacuum, split and struggle between the Trumpers and the contemporary conservatives who are going to grow more and more embarrassed that they supported him and will repel the brand in an effort to deliver more credibility and respect to their party. They are also going to lose a portion of moderates. Democrats are going to show up in huge numbers to the polls from here on out in large part due to this Trump debacle that no one will ever forget.
Good luck to the Republicans turning out 75 + million votes next time. I think 2024 is destined to be a one sided beating and remember, the Democrats run on policies for the future, Republicans run on policies of staying stuck in time. That doesn’t bode well as the clock continues to tick, there are big ideological shifts slowly taking form in this country and they are about sustainability, not the status quo. It is inevitable that the right will need to rebrand and thats a drawn out, ugly look for them. This type of Trump thing they just did will not be met kindly a second time.
I hope you’re right. I do think it possible that Trump’s cult will refuse to back the GOP unless Trump is still in charge. Although I wonder about if they get lucky and find a Trump who doesn’t tweet so impulsively and turn so many off. It’s clear many Republicans don’t care about specific policies, only a tribe - the healthcare policy issue being emblematic of that.
I think the Republican party could split into a more traditionally Republican wing and a wing nut a/o evangelical wing.
The question is what such a split will take shape as: 50/50? 70/30? Which side gets to keep the GOP name?
Republicans in Congress, and the senators in particular, have spent the last four years stampeding over one another to be the first and loudest to proclaim their fealty to Trump. But over the last week, as Trump has caterwauled about stopping the count or counting them all, the Pubs in Congress have been relatively quiet (with perhaps a few exceptions). This is exactly why.
One of my clients is based in Alabama, and for the past five years, I’ve traveled to Birmingham regularly (though not since February, of course). When it’s been election season there, particularly when it’s primary season, the political ads for Republican candidates would always include some variation on the line “will stand with Trump.” They all clearly knew that it was the key to getting the GOP base there to vote for them.
We’ll get a sneak preview of whether or not Trump will take everyone down with him on 1/5/2021 during the Georgia senate runoffs.
True. Trump’s ego would never let him stay in the background.
Or are you referring to the jumpsuit he might soon be wearing?
I’m referring to his hair, actually. Though he would look nice in an orange jumpsuit.
I wouldn’t say it’s because Trump is a bad criminal. I’d say it’s because Trump was doing it at the court of public opinion, in a place where facts don’t matter for many.
But it’s a dumb idea to get people investigating another suspect for the crime you yourself committed. You want people to not suspect a crime occurred at all, so there’s no investigation. That way any evidence you didn’t cover up properly doesn’t get noticed.
Trump can’t win by making the election seem legitimate and credible. Trump and the GOP can only win by casting doubt on the entire electoral process, convince their base that the election was being stolen, motivate them up to violence and threats of violence, and hope the rest of the country just rolls over and lets it happen.
If the Republicans attempt to steal this election, it won’t be through respecting the electoral process and trying to shift it slightly with some technicalities, it will be through a radical attack on the elections, as they’ve been trying to do all throughout the leadup to the election.
Those of you who think that they wouldn’t cast doubt on the election if they planned to rig it - I don’t know what republican party you’ve been watching for the last few years but sowing doubt in institutions and processes and claiming rigged and faked and bias everywhere is integral to their style of propaganda.
That’s an extreme misperception of both what the republican party is now, what they’ve been doing in recent years, and what they’d require to steal this election. This is not what it would look like if the republicans thought they could steal this election and were trying to enact that plan.
There is no GOP anymore, there is just Trump. The GOP did not get 70+ million votes (estimated to end at 75 by Nate Silver), Trump did. The GOP did not get the largest share of the non white vote since the 60’s, Trump did. This are not results they can ignore, Trump is not going to go away and if he did they would be dead in the water. The problem with that is that Trump is also the reason Biden got 75 million votes (estimated to end at 82), Joe does not engender that kind of passion as we can see by the relative under performance of the Senate and House candidates. Anyone who can watch the massive turn out of this last election, driven ENTIRELY by anti and pro Trump sentiment and expects him to be ignored is deluding themselves.
Exactly.
RW passion runs on propaganda which in turn is funded by a) bilking the rubes to donate to causes or buy partisan books, T-shirts, magazines, gold bars, etc. And b) donations from malefactors of great wealth, including foreign powers.
Trump loves the attention but more than that he loves the gravy train of donations. He’s not going to shut up. And his not shutting up is what continues to drive the feedback loop that keeps the money flowing so he can talking in at least the RW media sphere if not the one the rest of us follow / believe.
As long as he’s noisy and attracts a group of followers donors, he’ll be a force the rest of the R party must contend with.
It’s pretty obvious to me that most lefties have treated the last 6 months as a long miserable slog uphill in the snow. To, frankly, scant reward.
Conversely for the last 6 months most RW’s have been gleefully driving their pickups, blowing their horns, waving their guns, and flying their Trumpish flags. The RWs are having fun with this. They’re not going to give that fun up easily.
Yes, it’ll take work for Trump to keep himself relevant for 4 years, not just 6 months. But recall that the election process will start in more like 2 years from now, not 4. The RWs never tire of an issue; they were still making Obama birther noises and running against HRC a month ago.
More accurately, the RW media machine never tires of an issue: they know they can trigger a flood of eyeballs on ads and donations to the cause at any time by shouting about any well-known boogeyman. HCR! Obama! Shouting the positive message “Only mighty Trump can save us all” works too.
Frankly, IMO we’d do better to have Trump remain relevant for the next 2 years than not. Why?
There’s some as-yet-unknown wannabe RW tyrant lurking in the wings. in fact there are several. Who, unlike Trump, might actually be skillful and competent enough to pull it off. The longer Trump remains the turd at the center of the mighty flushing toilet of RW thought, the less time that person(s) has to consolidate the extremist wing of RW power around himself.
This may end up being Trump’s most terrifying legacy – he showed that unapologetic right-wing demagoguery doesn’t just have a receptive audience, it has a massive receptive audience. In the hands of someone with just a little more self-discipline, such a movement could easily overwhelm our democratic institutions.
From the election results, it looks like a lot of people voted for Biden and down-ticket Republicans. The GOP can read the tea leaves, and they’re not going to back Trump’s flailing efforts to cast the election as a big fraud.
But millions of Trump true believers will always see it that way, and guess who’ll be out there non-stop making sure they don’t forget? Not only that, but he’ll waste no time calling out Republicans he feels have betrayed him.
The more visible Trump remains, the harder it will be for the GOP to appeal to both his deplorable base and the rest of red-leaning America who have had enough of Individual One. May they cancel each other out for the next two years!
Photo of Trump when Trump saw the election results
the bigger they are
the harder they fall
That gets them back the never Trump / Lincoln project / John Kasich Republicans. In the process, however, they lose the MAGAs that came out to vote for their orange messiah but don’t really care about voting a John Kasich Republican to be their representative or senator. Those extra voters (the people who voted for Trump this year but stayed home in 2016), and not the never Trump Republicans, are probably why the GOP did better this year than 2018.
Exactly. And if Trump continues to rally his minions and turns his spite against the mainstream GOP, the schism could cripple both sides. Pity.
All this optimism is undermined by one thing:
Whoever gives Trump the biggest dollop of cash bribes during the 2024 primaries will gain his endorsement and his fans will fall into line.
The GOP is incredibly good at quelling internal divisions when a goal is in reach.