There has been some discussion of what will happen if Trump is elected in 24. But I wonder what folk think his long term effect will be on US politics/government/society/international standing should he lose in 24. Has he already permanently (or really long term) damaged American institutions, or will memories fade as we move back towards normal?
I started thinking about this when another thread discussed whether Trump or W was the worse president. It kinda shocks me today to think how much the passage of only 15 years - and the example of Trump - has almost normalized W. I mean, sure, the US today has considerably greater constraints on our personal freedoms than before W, and his indefensible wars were costly by every conceivable measure, but I’m not sure he changed public or political culture to the extent Trump did.
So presume Trump loses, and the prosecutions continue. Will his “movement” continue? Will the far right in Congress remain as effective as they are? Will hatred and intolerance in society be viewed as legitimate as Trump encouraged?
And eventually, he dies. Good lord - will they give us feds a day off work for that?! I was thinking about Reagan. After he died, there was a movement to almost deify him. But 40 years on, he barely gets mentioned. Will they be erecting statues to Trump, or will he vanish?
That is a really good question. I think, unfortunately, social media has allowed the consolidation of a critical mass of nasty, ignorant folk who would have existed in isolated pockets 20 or 30 years ago. Now they can keeping fueling themselves and stoking that hate and malevolence.
I also think that the generational divide between WW II and the current population has effectively removed a deterrent from authoritarianism that previously existed. Unfortunately that war is not far off from being as much of a historical event now as the US Civil War was when I was a kid. So nobody in the west has first or even second-hand knowledge of Nazism.
So I think that things are going to be very nasty and uncivil for the rest of my life anyway (I’m 64 btw)
Personally, I’ll dance a happy jig on his grave. His influence will fade, but other nut-jobs will rise in his place. Shoot, we already have Ramasmarmy to look forward to.
I’m not convinced there’s any sort of political movement with MAGA. Back in November, Chip Roy, Republican Representative from Texas, castiaged the House asking “I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One! That I can go campaign on and say we did.” The Emperor has no clothes. MAGA is a cult of personality and it will die out when Trump is gone and his followers will move on to something else.
Yeah - will the MAGA of today be the Tea Party of yesterday? Should we expect a cycle of extreme (solely conservative?) obstructionism every 30 yrs or so?
How about the true believers in Congress - Gaetz/Boebert/Greene… Will they quickly be replaced by more traditional candidates, or will extremists’ influence simply be minimized once either party gets a significant majority Congress house?
WRT to previously semi-sane critters who seem to tolerate - if not enable - Trump, I suspect they will just pretty quickly stop mentioning his name, and pretend like this particular cravenness never happened.
I know better than to expect this, but it would be really nice if somehow or another - in the media, schools, arts - there were recurrent acknowledgments and reminders of how dangerous he was to so much that we proclaim to hold dear.
There’s still plenty in his old constituency, their brains as smooth and shallow as Lake Winnebago, who maintain that Joseph McCarthy was onto those Reds in our government, and done dirty by them in the end.
And dear old Ben Stein will sing his adenoidal praises of Richard Nixon until his dying day.
America is a place where you forge your own identity, continually reinventing yourself after every downturn. This means a constant seam of denial that refines itself into resentment, there for the mining.
The trajectory of the US following a Trump loss in 2024 depends a lot on if he takes down enough GOP Congressfolk with him. If the House sticks with a small GOP majority largely propped up by the MAGA crazies, then I expect US institutions will continue to slowly degrade as a result of their obstructionism. As a practical matter, the US government needs to continue functioning, even if Congress can’t, or won’t, get its act together. At some point, whoever is the President will have to force the issue, which will end up sidelining Congress on at least some major issues.
That’s not a good thing, mind you, concentrating more power in the Presidency will likely bite the US in the ass down the road, but again, it will happen, because pragmatically, something along these lines has to happen, otherwise the Federal government will simply cease to function. If the President doesn’t step up to take these powers, people at the State level will be only too glad to do it themselves (see: the current events at the border in Texas, where State officials are blocking Federal officials from doing their jobs. Expect more of that, on many more issues).
Contrarywise, if Trump takes down the GOP when he falls, then things will over time move back towards what we still think of as “normal”. US institutional powers will be re-invigorated now that they can actually do things, without be held hostage by the Crazy Wing of the GOP, and so they’ll take back their leading roles in the work they used to do as a matter of course.
I’m afraid that dozens of congressional districts, not to mention several entire states, are now more or less permanently dominated by voters driven by bigotry, ignorance and a desire for authoritarian rule. They won’t change just because Trump’s out of the picture.
So we’ll still have plenty of Gaetz/Boebert/Greene types in Congress, and Democrats will still have to move heaven and earth to win the presidency and control the Senate even though if the majority of American voters who agrees with us continues to grow. And god forbid we suffer a serious economic downturn in an election year.
Our best hope for the forseeable future is that purple states turn gradually bluer, and some red states trend toward purple, isolating the troglodytes as an ongoing, annoying but increasingly powerless minority.
Assuming that we do indeed move back towards normal, I think that memories will fade. And I think it’s dangerous if they do, because too many people will take the wrong lessons from Trump. There will be a lot of talk about how things weren’t really so bad, and all those people who were warning about “Fascism Comes to America” were just being alarmist.
Then when the next charismatic wanna-be dictator comes along, we’ll have people downplaying the dangers. “Oh, they said the same things about Trump, and everything turned out fine. It’s all a bunch of foolish paranoia.”
Seriously, the shape of the future Republican party will totally depend on what happens in November. If Trump wins, the party will be shaped by what happens during his term. If Trump loses, the party will probably settle on the most ‘Trumpian’ moderate conservative they can find, like Nikki Haley, in an attempmto re-marry the establishment conservatives with the populist wing.
It’s also possible that the Republicans will implode under the weight of their differences. Same with the Democrats. The two major parties have never been weaker and more vulnerable to a preference cascade if an acceptable alternative arises.
A lot of people in or near the federal executive branch want to establish a hard-right single party country. A lot more people in or near red state executive branches want to establish hard-right single party states. Lots of them.
None of those people are going away just because trump does. And plenty of money is available to find and sponsor the next hard right figurehead to replace trump after his sell-by date whenever and however that blessed day comes.
I totally expect somebody from show biz (= tough guy actor), news / propaganda media, a big red state governor, or maybe some national law enforcement dude to emerge as the new hard-right champion. If put in power, that person will be a far more effective at destroying the country than trump was / would have been. They may not be as showy as trump, but they can be as hate-filled and as greedy. But smarter with better backers & aides.
I maintain that Trump is the result of an unhealthy system rather than the cause of it. He’s a bacteria that normally wouldn’t affect a healthy organism but our political body’s immune system was already strained when he came in like a wrecking ball to do further damage. Even when Trump’s time comes to an end, it’s going to take time for things to get back to some semblance of normalcy. How’s that going to happen? The American voters are going to have to reject MAGA extremist.
I forgot about that. Without Trump in the picture, the likes of Gaetz, MTG, and Boebert (if she still has an office) will start trying to eat one another’s face off. Republicans can barely keep it together with Orange Jesus in the picture, unless another strong leader emerges for the party they’ll descend into chaos.
If I buy this polling, and DJT is convicted of even one felony before Election Day, he’s going to lose by a greater than 2-1 margin. And he probably will be convicted of at least one felony count by then! Now, in reality, pending appeals would dilute the political effect. And the poll flummoxes me. Aren’t swing voters cynics convinced that Trump is a con man, the problem being that they think almost the same of Biden? That’s what anyone I know who is considering a Trump says. So why should they care what twelve strangers think? And we already know swing voters don’t care, because, in one of the most disturbing polling findings ever, Trump’s numbers didn’t budge when a jury found that he forced himself on, and penetrated, a woman in a Fifth Avenue dressing room.
So I take that December poll with big grains of salt. But if Trump really does lose in a 2-1 landslide – with a big Democratic congressional win inevitably accompanying – I do believe that Trump is politically no more, and the GOP would swing way to the American center.
