I’ve said this before in other threads: Trump’s flooring the gas pedal in a race with the expectation of either become the next President of the United States or crashing in a most spectacularl manner. First responders, big, tough guys, will say, with tears in their eyes, “Sir, nobody’s ever seen such a bigly crash.” But until today, I hadn’t considered who Trump will take with him if he does crash.
I think it’s fair to say Republican politicians are afraid of Trump. Mitch McConnell and others denounced Trump on January 6th, 2021 but quickly reverse course over the next few days for fear Republicans would lose if they didn’t stick with the Titian Golem they created. So who is going to go down with Trump if he does go down?
Some people, including the January 6th “hostages” and various false electors, have already gone down in flames or are getting ready for their day in court. But who else stands to have their careers derailed or criminal charges pressed against them if Trump fails?
This one is hard to predict, because it may relate to voter turnout.
If the Dems are better at get-out-the-vote because of Trump, that could increase Democratic success in down-ballot races as well.
Similarly, if the abortion measures increase Democratic turn-out, that may affect down-ballot votes. To the extent Trump is bragging about ending Roe v Wade, that may be attributable to Trump as well.
Problem is that those kinds of effects may be hard to measure.
I suspect most of the nationally well known ones will whether he wins or loses the election, since whether he loses the election or dies naturally at some point he won’t be available to be a focus for the personality cult the Republicans have turned into. And that’s when the metaphorical knives come out and they all go for each other’s political throats, trying to get the top spot. None of them have managed to gain the devotion of the base like Trump so it’ll be a free-for-all. Old Guard versus MAGA, individual versus individual as they settle the new pecking order.
The worst case scenario for the GOP is that, because Trump can’t and won’t go down quietly, and because of his terror of going to prison, he will call for everything up to and including violence to overturn his election loss, and while many of his party will join him, many won’t, in explicitly calling for violence. But it won’t end here - the election won’t be overturned, but a vindictive Trump will call out those Republicans who didn’t sufficiently back him by name, and work to have them defeated in upcoming primaries and such (even if Trump leads this effort from prison), and the GOP will be a minority party until Trump dies.
If Trump doesn’t win the election it’s means he’s fallen as he won’t have any of the legal protections the presidency would provide him. And like a big whale, Trump has a bunch of barnacles attached to his bloated corpus who rely on him for food. What’s going to happen to those people if Trump loses the election? I suspect he’ll beg for help from the remaining Republicans for protection but he’ll ultimately go scorched Earth attacking them in the hopes of bringing them down too.
I thought after the 2008 financial meltdown the Republican right wing would have to move towards the center or become a minority party. We know what happened by 2016 and how they never really lost control of Congress and finally stacked the courts.
After Nixon many expected the Democrats to take control for an extended time or at least a move toward the Rockefeller side of the party. Carter & Ted Kennedy frittered that away in 4 years flat and the Republicans moved towards the right.
Don’t count on Trump causing a downfall of the Republicans. They might end up moving even more to the right somehow.
If (big if) Trump doesn’t get re-elected, and if (bigger if) DOJ starts investigating him and his in earnest, it could be an absolute bloodbath. They’ve gotten away with so much for so long that you can fairly well assume they’ve been conducting themselves as if they’d never get caught.
Of course this will never happen because the powerful have a way of shutting these things down. There is no way the owner-class elite is going to risk anything like a mass accountability event form the Republican party. They have too much at stake. We’ve already seen too much of this to expect anything else.
In the presidential polls, Ohio is redder than Florida or Texas. Vance ran way behind Trump two years ago, but in a state that red he could be as despised as Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio and still win an election.
To address the OP: The Senate is almost certainly going to the Republicans in November. Despite the popular conception of it as a home for geriatrics, it’s getting younger and all the younger Republicans are trending nutcase-right. They are thrilled to be rid of Trump-loathing McConnell. The party can coast on their momentum for years.
Who’s going to fall? Almost nobody outside his personal sphere. The Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society will just ride over that speed bump and go merrily as far down the road to authoritarianism as they possibly can.
Vance is an astonishingly bad politician. He has a lot of unforced errors, whenever he gets the chance to say something bland and inoffensive, he turns it into something weird. He’s late night fodder and I’m sure the joke writers will miss him if he ever hopefully goes away.
