Hard to say. I suspect the goal is for Couchboy to sweep in and reorder the Felon’s chaos, making him look like some sort of savior. But the Rs are not terrified of him and there may be backlash. What I worry about is him putting a kinder, gentler face on P2025, making it look less insane. The biggest question hs whether he can win over the MAGAts, and whether attempting to do so will compromise his broader cachet.
I don’t see Vance succeeding. Like the others said, Trump has some sort of secret sauce that only he knows how to work - charisma, whatever you call it. Nobody else in the GOP can imitate it, and when they try, they just look silly. Guys like Vance come across as awkward and unconvincing and will get zero cultish following.
Right, which is why I think Vance is smart enough to realize that maybe his best bet for historical legacy would be to be seen as the person who reined in the worst of the Trumpian excesses, and reintroduced a measure of bipartisan politics and responsible governance.
One can hope, anyway.
I agree with Velocity and bump above.
Vance wants to be president, but he will feel like a failure unless he’s elected (and if Trump can make it two more years, which I absolutely don’t think he can, reelected). I think he has three main strategies by which to attempt that:
- Be a Trump replacement, which means working the MAGA base and purposely antagonizing the rest of the country. I don’t think that would work for Trump if this were his first term, and it certainly won’t work for the anticharismatic Vance, as Velocity points out.
- Do what bump says above, which amounts to pivoting away from Trumpism and trying to be a good president. I doubt this will work either, but it’s Vance’s only chance, IMO.
- Try to do both 1 and 3 in some proportion of each. This will be extremely tempting to Vance, especially with all the MAGA freaks that will be surrounding him when he takes over the Trump administration. This would be a guaranteed failure, however.
I think the most likely outcome is that Vance takes over from Trump well before the end of Trump’s term, is nominated in 2028, and loses soundly.
So Trump is doing pathetic little invasions of US cities… My perception is that they are not going well for him and are not redounding to the benefit of his would-be fascist order.
One can’t say that invading one’s own country is “straight out of the fascist playbook,” as it isn’t. When did Hitler or Mussolini ever have to quell a rebellion in their own countries, and when did they ever arbitrarily invade a region of their own countries so as to “start shit” in order to further consolidate their power?
Answer: Never.
Reason: Antagonizing their own citizens (outside of specific political enemies and selected victims) wasn’t part of the playbook.
Example: When Hitler abolished free trade unions on May 2, 1933 (i.e., within months of taking power), he did so to eliminate an important power center in Germany, not to piss off as many people as possible. It was a totalitarian move, a dick move IMO (like everything the guy was doing), but it was effective and not gratuitous.
Trump is a troll, and MAGA generally are trolls. They’d rather fuck with people, “pwn the Libs,” etc., than actually succeed with some sort of fascist program. All he’s going to do is destroy the GOP for a generation, possibly (and hopefully) forever.
Memphis has a democratic mayor in a state with a republican governor. The governor approved the national guard in Memphis. The mayor said that they could pick up trash.
We haven’t heard too much about that one.
^Lol. Yep.
It’s hard to know what Trump even imagines these invasions will do for him, even if he has a clear image at all. My guess is that it’s what Jamelle Bouie has been calling “Cargo Cult Fascism,” wherein, if the government does something that seems and feels fascist, then a Trumpian fascist dictatorship will spontaneously arise.
In reality, every failure (or simple non-event) that happens (or non-happens) just makes the fascist wannabes look like, well, wannabes.
My guess is, he really thinks that these cities are violent burning hellholes in a state of war against “illegal immigrants” and “antifa”, and the troops will be able to just show up and “restore order”.
I have to agree with this. Most of the time I think Trump simply tells the most convenient lie that he thinks makes him look good in the moment. But it’s also important to remember that Trump is living in an information bubble much like the rest of his MAGA supporters.
If reporting is accurate that he’s being shown footage that’s 4 or 5 years old from the height of the pandemic during the George Floyd and BLM protests. He might genuinely believe there’s things going on that aren’t real. I’m not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt but he’s also not living in the sphere of reality.