I know there’ve been a lot of “what if” threads about trump’s reelection, regarding what might happen, or what could have happened if this or that factor had just been different. This post is…another one. I apologize if I’m just piling on to all the hypothetical trump election scenario threads, but I’ve been wondering about this.
A lot has been speculated about how much damage this second trump admin can do, and yes, it may be a lot. Some have said, well, trump had both houses of congress for the first 2 years of his first term and didn’t get much done, so don’t worry too much now. But others point out that now trump and his cronies are now much more ready to initiate their awful agenda, and now have a packed SCOTUS to back them up. Some are raising alarms that trump may go full fascist and stop elections, or make them puppet elections, round up enemies, et cetera.
I’ve tried to make the point in a couple threads that not that much can be done in 4 years. The entire playbook of Project 2025 isn’t going to be put in play by 2028. The US Government is just too enormous an entity to change that quickly, even if all you’re doing is tearing it down.
So, my question is, if trump had been reelected in 2020, would that 8 years of momentum have been worse than the 4 year time-out in-between? I think it really takes 8 consecutive years for a Presidential term to really build a legacy, for better or for worse.
Or was the 4 interim years of trump stewing in rage, while the Heritage Foundation has time to write their 900 page screed, actually worse? Maybe if trump had had 8 consecutive years, America would be much more ready to move on now, like the way we were back when the wheels were falling off in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration.
8 consecutive years if the plots to overthrow the election had succeeded would be worse. I’m assuming that a legitimately-reelected 8 years would have been better than what we’re going to experience, but who knows.
I think this will be worse, simply because Trump and his backers had four years in the wilderness to plan what they would do when they regain power. Hence, they’ve got plans like Project 2025 to draw on.
As I noted elsewhere, consecutive terms would have been way worse for Ukraine and way better for Russia. (No idea how it would’ve affected Gaza.) We might be even more impacted by Covid. And there’s no guarantee that we’d avoid Project 2025. Hell, we might not even know about it and have President Vance right now because of it.
A lot can actually be done in four years; the basis for our entire national infrastructure and communications was built between 1933 and 1938 (most of it in about three of those years); and we spun up to fight WWII, built the worlds largest military capable of fighting a two front war, and invented the nuclear bomb between 1941 and 1945.
For sure, these Heritage Foundation fucks are going to be tripping over their own dicks once they realize that it is way more difficult to build things up than tear them down, and that they need the bureaucracy (or at least the structure of it) to execute their plan of petty vengeance upon American society. But they’re going to do plenty of damage and do a lot of harm in the meantime, perhaps in ways that makes it fundamentally impossible to return to a pre-MAGA norm of governance.
Having two non-consecutive terms has given time and distance to reflect upon the things that didn’t work in the first Trump Administration, and while Trump himself is not a man prone to self-criticism there are plenty of people who are now willing to “help” him achieve his dreams of being the oldest second grade fireman in the White House Fire Brigade while they help themselves to heaps of executive authority. Four more years of the continuing prior Trump regime would have been terrible, for sure, but the last couple basically fell into a routine of media outrage, public malaise, Trump getting into a “Twitter war” with some millennial celebrity, Kanye West saying something bizarrely racist to win approval, rinse and repeat until it was punctuated by the 2020 pandemic. Now, we have actual Christian Nationalists with a plan to install a totalitarian theocracy that seems to be almost exactly modeled on Margaret Atwood’s literary nightmares, and while they are likely to ultimately fail in this it won’t be a for a lack of trying or a reluctance to to hurt innocent people.
I suspect this will be worse than if he had won reelection, and by quite a bit. He has revenge on his mind now due to the lawsuits that should have seen him die in prison. Plus: time to plan, official acts immunity, knowing that the GOP won’t even hold you to account for attempting a coup, open oligarch support. End of the republic is totally on the table, IMO. Of course, it also was at the end of the first term too.
Remember that no one, including him, expected him to win the first time. So he was completely unprepared, including knowing who would to name for any of the hundreds of appointed positions. That’s part of the reason for the chaos the first time around. No such luck now.
That’s a good distinction to make. I did mean if he had been legitimately re-elected in 2020. If he had managed to get away with stealing the election, that scenario would have been much worse, I agree.
Yep, with that first two years of trump in power and both houses of Congress red, the one saving grace was that they were colossally unprepared. Then both houses of Congress turned blue in 2018, somewhat stymying him for the next two years. Now trump and his minions are much more prepared, they have both houses of Congress again, and a packed Supreme Court. Going to be a bumpy ride, for sure.
It would have been better, in that Trump wouldn’t have been motivated by revenge, but it would have been worse, in that he’d have fucked up the pandemic even worse, and completely whiffed on the post pandemic recovery that we did have. I have no idea what the weighting of those options should be.