Agreed.
Maybe we were just talking past each other.
Trump has complete control of the party right now; no-one dares stand against him both for fear of being primaried and also simply fear of the mob and other retribution.
It is also true that smarter people have seen this as a fantastic opportunity to get the unspeakable parts of their agenda through.
And it’s always been there. I saw one of the conservative Wisconsin supreme court justices being interviewed, and she’s nuts. As ideological, and conspiracy-minded as the QAnon shaman. And, some of the details they mentioned after the interview indicate she has always been like this.
Essentially, it’s just mask-off – Trump hasn’t steered them in this direction, things like Project 2025 is what they wanted to do all along. It’s only now where they have a captive public and media and they can just tell people what to believe that they can actually implement this stuff.
I’d say that if anything, the excerpt you provided of the legislative history strengthens the argument that Trump could be VP on Don Jr.'s ticket.
The first two examples are much more stringent in general than the amendment as ratified: if a person serves a day of one term, and a day of another, they can’t ever serve any part of another term. The fact that wholesale changes were made undermines any argument based simply on the changes between those first two and the amendment as ratified that this change was intended but that change wasn’t.
And that applies to a lesser extent to the Senate version: now it’s one year or more of two different terms that means you can’t be President again. And of course that was loosened to one term of one’s own, plus more than half of another, which is a pretty big change.
And Magnuson is aware that given his change, the succession route to a third term is still there, but being elected to a third term was the concern of the 80th Congress, and succession was ‘beyond its immediate focus.’ IOW, ‘we’re aware of this possibility, but we’re not gonna deal with it.’
Maybe there’s legislative history that comes down more on the other side of this argument, but it’s up to the other side to dig it out.
Why would the Supreme Court say that? Please explain.
The LITERAL WORDING OF THE TEXT would suggest you can succeed to a third term. That is what it actually says.
The Supreme Court is packed with Trumpists. This is, remember, a Supreme Court that said the President isn’t subject to the law as long as he’s doing something that’s part of his job. If they can rule THAT, they’re capable of anything.
So how are you so sure they’d say he can’t do that? What would the legal argument be?
Do you mean they are MAGA cultists who vote for the GOP as long as Trump is around? If so, I agree.
Or do you mean that MAGA cultists are being placed in political jobs? That I question.
Stalin spent years quietly working at the apparently low level position as party secretary. It seemed like a boring paperwork job that nobody else wanted. But Stalin used it to control job appointments. He set about removing people from political jobs throughout the Soviet Union and replacing them with people who were more loyal to Stalin. So when he decided to make his move for the top job, his rivals found that the Soviet government was full of people who would follow Stalin’s orders.
Trump does not have the patience, the initiative, or the intelligence to build up that kind of base. I do not picture Trump sitting in the Oval Office for hours reading through lists of names and picking who will be appointed to some county commissioner job. Or recognizing any of the names on such a list. Or knowing what a county commissioner does.
Trump doesn’t get involved in the details of how a government works. And that’s where coups d’etat happen.
Trump will end up like Trotsky or Hindenburg. He’ll have the big title. But in a confrontation, he’ll find out that somebody else is actually running the government that he supposedly is in charge of.
Do you mean they are MAGA cultists who vote for the GOP as long as Trump is around? If so, I agree.
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I meant politicians specifically. People like MTG and nutters like that. There are a lot of pols just playing along, however, without really believing in MAGA.
Yeah, I wonder how the whole Project 2025 thing about seeding the civil service with RWNJs is going, especially considering that DOGE is firing without hiring.
Agree but they are just going to let him die. He doesn’t have a lot of time left, so there’s no reason to go through any trouble before then.
Also, Hindenburg died of natural causes in office. Not that you said otherwise, but it doesn’t seem that Hitler screwed Hindenburg over in any way, nor does it seem that Hindenburg felt he had been screwed over. I fact-checked this understanding via Gemini, which said this:
A Complicated Relationship: Even after appointing Hitler, Hindenburg remained somewhat wary. However, his declining health and the increasing political influence of the Nazis limited his ability to effectively oppose Hitler.
So it’s not clear that Hindenburg had an “Oh fuck, what have I done?!” moment about appointing Hitler chancellor. Maybe some misgivings at times.
They already were and have been for decades; they just weren’t called “MAGA” at the time. By now they are most of the Republican party infrastructure I believe. If MAGA left the party would collapse immediately. As somebody once said, the modern Republican Party is basically the flayed skin of the old GOP being worn by MAGA.
Exactly. Trump is almost certainly the most easily manipulatable president we have ever had (for the sake of argument I won’t include any president after they developed dementia while in office). He simply wants to be loved. He could have just as easily been a Democratic president as a Republican one. But the Republican party is the one that accepted him and decided to use him to further their own goals. This administration, much more than his last term, is likely being orchestrated by people around him that are convincing him to do X and Y. I doubt he cares much about Project 2025 one way or the other, but he is surrounded by people that helped him get elected that are telling him that is the best way for him to be greatest president of all time (which is what he wants to hear).
Sadly, as both sides give in more and more to the craziest members of their respective parties, people in the opponent parties will do more and more just to make sure the other party doesn’t win. We seem to have forgotten that winning isn’t everything. If you don’t keep the losing party happy (or happy enough) they become more extreme in their efforts to regain power, including doing things that should never be done.
If this is your premise, then I’ll need to reject it.
The truth about today’s Republican party is immeasurably worse than the endless lies they tell about the Democrats.
The RW fringe IS today’s Republican party. The LW fringe is tolerated by the Democrats. Also, on a global scale – looking at other industrialized nations – the Progressive Caucus of the US Democrats is slightly to the right of center.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with any of that, but the toleration of left-wing craziness over the last 5 years is part of the reason Trump won. It took a lot of people that are not Trump-aligned (so called independents) to vote for Trump to get him over the finish line. There are not enough people in his party to make him win elections. I’ve seen a lot of people around me become more and more conservative since 2020. I know many people that didn’t vote for him in 2016 or 2020 that did in 2024 because of failure to reject craziness.
It’s not that you have to keep the extremes on both sides happy. You just have to keep the people in the middle happy enough to not turn to the other side.
Yeah, that is definitely true. Biden was always a rather conservative Democrat (especially by today’s standards) which is why they pushed so hard for him to become president. He wasn’t going to do much, if anything, without some pretty heavy outside influence to change things from the status quo.
Sort of. He is easily manipulated in some ways, but he’s also very unreliable. Both because of his personality, and because he’s so easily influenced that once a would-be manipulator walks out of the room afterwards, the next guy to talk to him can influence him in a different direction.
Not at all. It isn’t that nuts are representative of the group. It’s how the group responds to its nuts. I live in a mostly liberal area with mostly liberal friends and they definitely toss the Nazi word around a lot in relation to Republicans (and especially this administration), but the Republican party doesn’t actually embrace this wing of their party. Yes, they tolerate it to some degree, but they do so with disdain and mostly openly reject what that fringe thinks. Over the last few years we have seen far more acceptance and support for left-wing nuts and it was enough to push large numbers of people over the voting line. It didn’t change my vote, but I have seen a very noticeable shift in the people around me and we all saw a noticeable shift in the polls.
That hasn’t happened with the Democrats even remotely. LOL. Very bad premise here.
Well, Trump has always had hatred of “free trade and bad trade deals”. He’s always been pro-Russia. He’s always thought that Europe was sponging off of the US for security. He’s always believed in bending and breaking laws. And he isn’t a fan of Democracy. So, these people in his administration aren’t carrying out anything that he disagrees with. It’s Trump’s worldview that is being implemented.
I’m not one to say this all goes away when Trump ages out of his 2nd term. The MAGA movement will still be around. But without Trump, I don’t think there will be as many people buying into the movement. He draws in alot of politically disengaged people. That will subside greatly after 2028.