As I was not alive in 1972 I will take your word for it. 
Seriously though, I didn’t start seriously following politics until GW Bush. How I long for the carefree days of W.
I find it hard to say, lot of factors.
- I think really old candidates may be more likely to run for the Dems in 2020, simply because Trump is the oldest President (at inauguration) we’ve ever had. That comparison helps mitigate the “too old” argument. I think this means both Biden and Sanders will be considering a run. Sanders is working hard on his political organization, he may or may not have already decided to run. X-factor for both men is, of course, at their age anything health related could happen. But Trump’s age and his general insanity make a lot of things that would give us pause 20 years ago much less likely to give us pause today. So a 78 year old Joe Biden or 79 year old Bernie genuinely winning the nomination, then actually beating Trump, just doesn’t seem that crazy to me any longer.
1a. I think Hillary will start to at least f eel out whether she can run again. I think she’ll find a lot of her institutional support gone, and won’t run, but I do think this will happen.
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I 100% believe Trump will remain in office at least until inauguration day 2021; if he is no longer President before then it’ll be because he died, not because he was impeached. The Republican response to Russiagate looks very similar to their response to the Iran-Contra Affair (which had all the hallmarks of something that ought end a Presidency), and to me it’s less likely it follows the Watergate path because Republicans just seem willing to let the President obstruct and won’t impeach him.
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I think there’s a significant non-zero chance Trump won’t want to run again. He’s basically a 71 year old playboy manbaby and I think aside from having more sycophants scurrying around him than ever before, and getting tons of attention, he actually hates his current “lifestyle.” He may decide not running again is respectable, allows him to “retire on top”, and in his mind his legacy of “biggest bad ass awesome guy ever” will be secured (because he’s the best businessman, best TV host, and now best President.) This opens up the potential for a 2020 Republican “primary”, which opens up more possible GOP candidates.
So to me the “viable list” looks something like:
-Donald Trump
-Mike Pence
-Brian Sandoval
-Marco Rubio
-Ted Cruz
-Bernie Sanders
-Joe Biden
-Sherrod Brown
-Al Franken
My thoughts being, if it’s not Trump as the nominee it’s because he’s died or not ran, so that means Pence has to be a favorite GOP nominee, Cruz and Rubio both built a lot of “steam” last time, and Cruz is probably the closest to keeping together the “Trump Coalition” of angry white men, but there’s an outside chance the party would opt for a more “respectable” name like Sandoval or a more “diverse” name like Rubio. I doubt it though, I think Trump’s win will have created the perception the GOP should just keep going as hard right and as hard white male as possible.
For the Dems, I think if they win back the White House against Trump it’s going to be with an angry white midwestern man type, so either someone who actually fits that mold personally (Sherrod Brown), or someone who can play to them (Franken / Biden / Sanders.) It’ll be someone significant detached from the “corporate Dem” wing of the party (no luck for Cory Booker.)
Note that from a perspective of strategy I don’t think the Democrats need to run an angry white man, but I think they’ll perceive they do. Trump owes as much of his Presidency to the fact that he flipped some whites votes in WI/MI/PA as he does to the fact black turnout in those states was much lower than normal, and despite Hillary doing very strongly among black voters in the primary she just didn’t turn them out very well in the general. So some form of Obama 2.0 could bring those black voters back and probably easily swing WI/MI/PA back to the Democrats along with the White House. But I think becoming the “minority party” is viewed politically as a “loser”, now. I think the Dems want to be the working class party, which in their mind will also encompass their 21st century focus on minority racial groups and social justice causes.
This is kind of what I was getting at with, ‘‘a white guy.’’
I received a survey from the Democratic National Committee asking me my opinion about how Democrats can win in 2018.
I wrote something like, ‘‘Focus on the economy. Social issues are critically important but not enough people care about them to justify making them a platform focus.’’
It sounds terrible but that’s basically what I got out of Trump’s election.
All of this assumes that there will an elections process as we know it. There may not be.
True. Why is no one talking about a super volcano wiping out human life on the planet before the 2020? The remnants may choose a President with a trial by combat. In that case, I go with Joe Biden. I think he’d probably fight dirty.
Kid Rock.
Don’t even.
Just think of the inaugural concert. Everyone in Washington smoking spliffs and sipping fifths. Then reality itself gets sucked into an 11-dimensional black hole.
Pence.
I predict Paul Ryan by double impeachment, followed by Elizabeth Warren by election.
That’s true. Yellowstone National Park has been hit by 800 earthquakes in two weeks. An eruption could happen any time now. *
*Not likely, but not impossible. Yellowstone erupted about 640,000 years ago, but if it blows, it’ll be massive.
gavin newsom
The worst part is other people have made the argument that president Mt. Dew was superior to Trump.
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He knew that his country had real problems (Trump ignores climate change, President Mt. Dew realized the crops issue was real for example).
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He realized he didn’t know everything and needed help (Trump would never admit this).
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He asked people smarter than himself for help and advice (Trump would never do this)
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He wanted to solve serious problems his nation faced (Trump just wants accolades).
Trump is like a narcissistic version of president Mt. Dew.
Not a chance in hell. She’s Hillary Clinton 2.0. She was a conservative Democrat when she was in the House and is a liberal Democrat now that she’s in the Senate. She has no views that aren’t decided by focus groups and polling. IT’s really time for the Democrats to stay far away from politicians with no principles beyond getting elected.
Why, are the Republicans threatening a patent infringement suit?
If one side is getting away with it but your side can’t, it’s better to just not do it than to cry about how unfair it all is. Democrats can’t win without authenticity, or at least faking it REALLY well. Cory Booker and Kristen Gillibrand can’t pull that off, although Booker’s history suggests there’s a lot more to him than his national persona would suggest. Gillibrand has always been purely a political weather vane.
…I think you are severely underestimating the damage the Trump administration is doing to the US federal government right now. If this were only about the Department of Energy then maybe you might have a point. But we are also talking about the Department of Agriculture. The Department of Justice. The Department of Education. The State Department. Treasury. And we’ve heard the same stories across the board. Indifference. Constructive dismissals. Decades of experience and knowledge walking out the door. Ideological purges. Most of the departments are being run by people who oppose the fundamental mission of those departments.
This isn’t about “loosing a nuke.” You take a massive, complex system like the US federal government and remove the things that make it work and don’t replace them: then things are going to start to break. Just look at what hasn’t been appointed yet:
US Attorneys. Ambassadors. The copyright office.
Everything you read about the Department of Energy is happening all over the place at every level of government that Trump is responsible for.
The problem isn’t about loosing a nuke. Its that the current administration through indifference, negligence, inexperience, ideology, and sometimes plain maliciousness is not doing what it is expected to do.
You saw what the Russians did during the Obama administration. Just imagine what they are doing now. The people that are running the government are under-resourced, over-worked, and things will be slipping through the cracks.
So they might loose a nuke. Or an intern or two might be slipping information to a foreign power. Think about chaos theory. A butterfly flapping its wings in Siberia could cause a storm in West Virginia. In a controlled chaotic system like “how government has always worked” “ripples” could be managed. Problems would be identified, handled and then mitigated/fixed.
But the current White House has a Communications Director who didn’t realize that if he wanted to have an “off the record” conversation with a journalist, you need to say the words “This is off the record…right?” before you say things like he wanted to “to fucking kill all the leakers.” Scaramucci has no government experience at all. But he isn’t alone. Kushner is responsible for Middle East peace, solving the opioid crisis, diplomacy with Mexico and China, veterans affairs, reforming the criminal justice system, oh and reinventing the entire government and making it work like a business.
The Trump administration isn’t a controlled chaotic system. It is a massively uncontrolled one. Because the level of oversight and experience is going, almost all gone. And they are being replaced by people with no experience in the role that they should be able to do.
Imagine a vegan restaurant with a CEO, some middle managers, supervisors, team leaders and workers. Now imagine those middle managers were fired and replaced by corporates from the meat industry. And then most of the supervisors and many of the team leaders just up and left, with no replacements, and those that remained just had to step up and get the job done. It would go okay for a while. But the floors might only get cleaned every second day. The tills might not balance every night, so rather than trying to find that money procedures are changed so that the tills don’t have to balance. Every day the workers try to explain to the new middle management that their customers don’t want to eat meat: because their customers are vegan.
You could keep this going for a few months. Maybe even a year or so. But you could only keep going if nothing goes wrong. But the longer you go on, the more shortcuts are found, until eventually the floors don’t get mopped at all because everybody is too exhausted at the end of the night. The tills don’t balance any more because some of the clerks are just taking the money out of the till and walking out with it. Beef burgers are on the menu. And sales are down because vegans don’t eat beef.
Things are going okay at the moment because the system will “run itself” for a while. Sheer momentum. If we are extremely lucky the world will get through the next four years, Trump will get voted out, and 2017-2020 will go down in history as the weirdest presidential administration ever.
But it won’t take a lot to start a chain of events that will spiral out of control. It could be a terrorist attack. Or a biodiversity incident. Or a financial collapse of some sort. In a controlled chaotic system, with adequate over-site that is properly staffed and that is looking out for the good of the American people these things can be handled. But with all due respect to the people of America: the morons are running the show at the moment. They don’t know how government works. They can barely communicate in a civil manner. They are arrogant, close minded and insular and won’t listen to advice. There hasn’t been a single day since Trump has been in power when I haven’t woken up, logged onto the internet and I have exclaimed: “What the fuck?”
So again: I reiterate. It isn’t about a lost nuke. Its much bigger than that. There are thousands of ways the system could fall over. The wonderful thing about chaotic systems are that they are unpredictably predictable. in an uncontrolled chaotic environment we know that failure is coming. What we can’t predict (just like a butterfly flapping its wings in Siberia) is where the storm will brew.
This isn’t Nixon all over again. This is something completely different. You can pretend that everything is going to be all right, and if we are very very lucky then yeah, Trump’s term will finish and the process of getting back to normal will begin. But considering what we’ve watched over the last six months there is no way you should take that for granted.
Onto the question of the OP: once again I agree with adaher. If Biden is healthy enough to run and wants to run: then he should run. There are very few democrats with appeal across all spectrums with enough name recognition to take on Trump IMHO. Plus he has the added bonus of having worked in the “no-drama Obama” administration for eight years, and if he can paint a vision of an America that isn’t leaping from crisis to crisis every single day then that would hopefully push him over the top.
But whoever the Democrats run: they need to hit the ground running. They need to be tapping the shoulders of a whole lot of the people that have been pushed out of this administration and get them ready to go back in. It will be four years of getting the government back to normal before doing anything else. Trumps people are not doing things properly. They are not leaving a paper trail. it wouldn’t surprise me if when they finally get kicked out of power they draw mustaches on Obama’s official portrait and smuggle the MLK statue out of the oval office. When they are finally out of office there are a lot of things that will need fixing.
I know the Vanity Fair article was an eye opener for some. But the reality, IMHO, is a hell of a lot worse. You can’t afford to be complacent. Because complacency will get you four more years of Trump.
Excellent post, thanks.
Damn fine post. One of the best I’ve seen yet.
Snicker all you want. But serious question: why do you think the White House brought in the likes of Chris Kobach and why do they want a central voting database? So that they can make sure that everyone who wants to vote gets to do so?
I didn’t suggest that there won’t be an elections system, just that it might not be what we’ve been accustomed to. Iran has presidential elections; it’s just, well, different. It’s a democracy, just a flawed one, which is what we’re turning into.
That was my point. It might very well be the case that 60% of the country opposes Trump’s re-election, and that he could still win depending on who’s “eligible”, who turns out, and how votes are counted – and where. I’m not alarmist; I’m realistic.