No matter what happens to Trump after Jan. 20, we’ll still have untold numbers of right-wing militants among the population. I’m talking about all those who supported the insurrection at the Capitol.
What do you predict these militants will do in 2021?
January 20th will be a very interesting day.
What can they do? Mount another attack on the US Congress? Attack the White House after January 20th? They can plot and plan all they want, but taking down the Government would require a lot more money and resources than they will ever have. Perhaps they will organize their own political party and come out from behind the shadows… nahhhh
Murder. Murder is next. Some of them will kill those they perceive as those stealing the country, election, culture, etc.
That, and/or perhaps a few bombings of Federal or Democratic offices; nothing on the scale of the OKC incident, one hopes.
They’ll do the same thing in 2021 that they were doing back in 2016. Their four year long time in the sun is over. Now they’ll go back under their rocks and occasionally strike out against some perceived enemy when they feel they can do it safely.
Hopefully jail time.
I predict AG Merrick Garland will be their worst nightmare.
The government is under no threat of falling. But 10-20 "Oklahoma City"s are very possible
It’s looking like some of the police guarding the Capitol yesterday were cool with the insurrection. Lowering the barriers, posing for selfies. What happens when a large number of government actors are on the side of the insurrectionists in a much larger event?
If the Government, specifically the police and military, is aiding and abetting the overthrow then game over. That’s typically how a coup works. That’s not what I saw happen, even though a few Capitol Police were too chummy with the “protesters” for my taste. My guess is that they now no longer work at the Capital building.
We could only hope, and certainly without some kind of lightning rod like Trump for them to organize around they’ll just be a disordered rabble. Unfortunately, Donald J. Trump, as inept at being a demagogue as he is at being a businessman, has shown the way for a truly effective despot to harness the enthusiasm and anger of these people, stoking and organizing it into an effective political movement backed up by the use of force. And while senior military and law enforcement leaders do not, by and large, support any kind of insurrection, there are plenty of rank-and-file former and current military and police who would be onboard with political violence in pursuit of an explicitly racist and authoritarian agenda. The parallels between Weimar Republic-era Germany and the United States (along with many other European democracies that are now veering toward autocracy and electing would-be despots) are very difficult to avoid.
I doubt we’ll see acts of massed violence or serial bombings of federal buildings in the absence of a committed leadership, but we can certainly expect an increase in racial violence, lynchings, scapegoating immigrants, and the threat of violence against public officials that we have seen in the last few years.
Stranger
I’ve said all along that Trump is not a real threat. He’s held back by his own failings; cowardice, incompetence, ignorance, laziness, and a complete lack of charisma.
The real threat will be somebody who is as immoral as Trump but lacks his failings. They will see how far Trump got despite all of his failings and will do the same things he did but as part of an intelligent plan. That person might become America’s first dictator.
I disagree with this. My opinion is that what we’ve seen in the last four years are the important differences between the United States and countries like the Weimar Republic. The United States has a fundamentally strong government that has stood up for over two hundred years. Somebody like Trump can’t destroy that in four years.
Other countries were a lot less stable. In those countries there wasn’t the institutional strength that had been built up over centuries. People could look back to a time when the current political system didn’t exist and could envision replacing it with a different system. In a country like that, an incident like Trump’s insurrection this week could have triggered a general collapse.
I am hoping the answer is “GO TO JAIL”. And it seems many of them are getting arrested.
(echoing Deeg)
I would hope that if video and other evidence surfaces of ANY law enforcement being more than “chummy” with these rioters that they get charged with felony murder for the killing of the police officer by the rioters.
82 arrests as of Thursday night. I imagine it is many more now. There is a lot of video footage and idiotic social media posts to go though.
Hopefully the arrests will lead to convictions. I expect they will.
They are fat, lazy ass cowards. Yes, they rioted in Wash DC, but that was “organized” by the President himself.
They will wave their Trump flags, and stand on a few corners.
I suspect little serious activity. Maybe a lone shooter or a bomb or two. Nothing large scale, Nothing organized.
I wouldn’t count on that. Oh how I wish it were so.