You don’t.
You stay at home, the other guy wins
You stew, seethe and forment waiting for the next demagogue who promises MAGA.
I was actually hoping they’d come to their senses. But I’m been accused of naivety enough this week.
Exactly and the symptom is of rot, not just in the GOP, but in all of America. What comes after r Trump is collapse, there will never be a president that has legitimacy in both red and blue America. This is the new normal, more right wing terrorism and more extremism. The tensions that produced Trump are nothing compared to the tensions that climate collapse will produce.
…here’s the thing.
We are already “post-Trump.”
It doesn’t even matter if the Donald get re-elected or not.
So if you want to know what “comes after Trump”, all you need to do is look around and see what is happening today.
And today a District Judge ordered the FDA to stay their (over 20 year ago) approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. Last year, a Federal Judge ended the nationwide mask mandate by the stroke of a pen. Yesterday, the Tennessee House expelled two Black men for the most flimsy of reasons, but didn’t expel the white woman who did the exact same thing…but wasn’t as loud.
A few days ago in North Carolina a Democrat State Rep switched parties, giving the Republicans a veto-proof majority. A few days ago, the Democrat Mayor of New York (after calling for all city agencies to cut another 4% from their budgets) announced an agreement with the NYPD to offer annual salary raises of up to 4%…and here’s the kicker: the agreement is retroactive to 2017.
There are already over 300 anti-trans legislation on the books, many of them already passed. Yesterday, the Idaho governor signed a law making it illegal to “transport a minor to get an abortion without their parents consent”.
What happens “post-Trump” is everything that is happening right now. Its death by a thousand cuts. The boiling frog.
The goal is institutional capture. Take control of the Supreme Court. Take control of the Judges. Take control of the school boards. Take control of the cops. Take control of the States. Take the House. Take the Senate.
They don’t have to do that all at once. But this is IMHO the nightmare scenario. Because as a backdrop to all of this, we are also being subjected to a volume of targeted propaganda that is unprecedented in human history. And it is so lightning targeted, because we all personally curate our own news now and we all live in our own “bubble”, that we will probably never ever see or hear what the “other side” is being subjected to.
And this isn’t “Republicans vs Democrats.” It’s extremists vs moderates vs progressives. That’s what is playing out before us right now not just in America, but worldwide. For example, in the UK Kier Starmers Labour Party is decidedly anti-union, anti-transgender, isn’t opposed to increased privatisation of the NHS, its taking the opposite tack of everything the Labour Party is supposed to be about. The line between the extremist and moderate are becoming increasingly blurred. Eric Adams demonstrates that.
So how do you stop it?
I don’t think we can. Humanity was nice while it lasted. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
So how do I see it play out?
The best case realistic scenario for the next 10-20 years is that the moderates take and hold the Senate, the House and the Executive. Hold what they can. Retain control of the moderate states and make them sanctuary states for trans people and their families, people that want bodily autonomy, marginalised folk and anyone at risk of being persecuted by the extremists. Take back the courts.
Locally, people need to win back and hold the school board elections, win the city councils, elect the sheriffs.
Because the most important thing is this. I watched this last night.
There are more good people than bad in America. And the next generation of leadership are going to kick ass if you give them a chance. The line needs to be held. Thats the most important thing right now. Win the House. Win the Senate. Win the Presidency. Every time.
Keep fighting locally at every opportunity.
The extremists seem like they are winning because they played the long-game and right now all of the pieces are falling in place. To defeat them (or at the very least, push them back into the margins where they belong) the moderates and the progressives have to play that very same game. This is going to be a very long “cold war.” And not everyone is going to make it. But if you are going to win it, the line must be held.
We’re soon getting to a fork in the road. What comes after Trump is either one of two things:
-
A back to normalcy Republican, like Kevin McCarthy running for president, or
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Someone who’ll be like Trump but with a cleaner, less-illegal approach (DeSantis.)
I don’t see the even-crazier-than-Trump folks like Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Lauren Boebert, Gaetz, etc. actually getting a nomination.
It’s not going to be a 'normal" Republican, becuse both Democrats and Republicans are long past ‘normal’. The treatment of Romney by Democrats created Trump. Romney was the ‘normal’ Republican, and Democrats and the media turned him into a dog-abusing bully who kept women in a binder and cheated on his taxes. So that ship has sailed.
Then Democrats went and spent millions pushing ‘Maga’ Republican candidates in the last election, which drove Republicans further to the right and helped ensure they would elect someone who ‘fights’. Right now, that’s Trump or DeSantis.
…this is not correct.
I think things will be ugly for a while. People talk past each other and at each other but rarely communicate. The “old guard” of white Anglo-Saxon Christian America is seeing the end of their domination and control, so they’re fighting tooth and nail. It’s the death throes of the Traditional America. They want to legislate us into all being their idea of American, but that simply isn’t who the average American is any more. Hence all the fighting.
Minorities are not in the minority any more (or won’t be soon). Secularism is overcoming church-going at an alarming rate (to them). Many young people are growing up with a completely different worldview, a completely different set of values, and are embracing the acceptance of things that the “old guard” considers wrong. The melting pot has melted into something that some don’t want or recognize as America. But it is, and it will be. I believe that.
So we’ll all fight for a while. It will be trying and difficult. Maybe we’ll overcorrect sometimes. But I think in the end everything will settle down into some semblance of what America is supposed to be- out of many, one- because the “old guard” will frankly die out, either literally or figuratively, and the new wave of younger, more diverse, more liberal folks will take their place. If you look at any poll of desired American values it’s consistently the younger people or people of color who tilt solidly to the left. Not all of them, of course, but as a group. And those are the people whose population is on the rise. Those are the people Republicans want to keep from voting. Those are the people protesting for change. And those are the people who, I think, will be ascending to power in the next decade or two.
(I am neither young nor a minority, but I am a woman, and the Republicans are really pissing me off, too.)
So let a new party hatch from the corpse of the Republican party. For the rest of my life, I won’t vote for them unless they admit what happened January 6th and repudiate Trump and his ilk.
And that utterly leaves out the EMPLOYEES of Fox that are in the process of suing Fox for ‘forcing’ them to mislead in their testimony. And for anyone fired during the ‘embrace all lies’ portion, who were forced out for a nasty desire to tell the truth/fact check. Or employees being sued for their direct actions, trying to push responsibility back onto Fox to cover their personal assets.
If, as currently seems likely, actual malice is proven, it’s going to be blood in the internal as well as external shark tank.
It’s one of the very, Very few things I’m cautiously hoping to see in a swarm of terrible events.
The country will have to confront large amounts of piled-up debts:
driven by decades of neoconservatism-neoliberalism:
as more countries start moving away from the dollar:
and in a world that’s becoming multipolar.
Yeah, I don’t find “look at what you made us do!” a very compelling argument either.
What a joke that is. Trump was spreading racist, evidence free conspiracy theories about Obama before Romney’s candidacy, and that’s what catapulted him to the nomination. That’s what Republican voters wanted - raw, unfiltered hatred. And that’s what they got. It had nothing to do with Romney, who wasn’t treated any worse than Obama or any other major candidacy.
Moderating:
This thread is to discuss what happens after Trump, not to relitigate what went before or what is happening during, since he is still with us. Drop this hijack, now please.
It’s not even wrong.
Moderating:
@Euphonious_Polemic, the mod note just above your post applies to you, too.
Drop the relitigation of the past in this thread.
Sorry, posted before I saw the note…
@ralfy Suspended 1 day pending review as spammer and ignoring Mod instructions.
More to come.
Yesterday, by Interstate 90-94 in rural Wisconsin (but only 50 miles from liberal Madison), I passed two hand-painted signs: “God loves America,” and “He sent us Trump.”
Wish I could put a billboard up across the road facing this morons house. An electric one that I could change the message on. What fun that would be.