Are you suggesting there are good autocrats and dictators out there?
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It’s been said that everything that he touches dies. Clearly he needs to touch himself more often.
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I don’t expect Trump to win again if he runs, simply because it’s unheard of for a losing incumbent to come back and win four years later in US presidential politics. [ETA: in living memory, anyway.]
And if his platform is going to be a combination of “I was robbed” and “we need to bust heads and do away with due process” he’s going to get about as much traction in the middle as he did in 2020, while scaring even more people on the left to get off their asses and vote.
So in reality I’m more concerned about the long run of GOP policy. Someone will take Trump’s playbook and run with it.
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Grover Cleveland has entered the chat…
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Ok. Fair enough.
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Even if that was true (which it’s not) there’s a ton of unprecedented stuff that didn’t stop him winning the first time. Not least of which is having no background in politics or any form of public service. There have only been 46 American presidents ever, so each one, even the more typical ones, have broken prior precedents in ways large and small. Political norms are falling by the wayside left and right, so taking any comfort in the idea that “that’s never happened before” is a huge mistake.
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Not true. They love the freedom to have as many guns as you can afford and to use them on as many insert slur here-s as you want.
All the Jade Helm conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day, uh, I mean not mention this at all.
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Lord Havelock Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork? 
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Just so long as he’s got his Vimes at hand.
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Didn’t he have a “plan” to “completely eliminate crime from Chicago in 30 days” if he was elected? He said he “knew a guy” in the CPD who told him how to do it.
Whatever happened to that “plan”, or any of the others he mentioned?
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To be fair, it’s only happened once, and that was in 1892.
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Put another way: of all the Presidents who were successfully elected for a 2nd term, nearly 5% of them did so non-consecutively. Or of all the former Presidents who ran for a non-consecutive term (Van Buren, Fillmore, Grant, Cleveland and Teddy Roosevelt) a full 20% of them were successful.
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It’s still only happened once, and the most recent attempt was 110 years ago, so let’s not pretend it’s common in modern American politics.
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I really don’t understand your point. There’s obviously nothing “common” about anything that’s happening in American politics these days. Unprecedented shit is happening all the time lately, and I’m not just talking about Trump. So my point is that just because something happened rarely in the past (and not even that rarely considering that only a few dozen Presidents have ever been elected) it should not be taken as any indication that it’s really unlikely to happen again.
And since nobody has even made an attempt lately it would be silly to take that as evidence it can’t be done, right? Maybe if more people made attempts they’d be successful. Even Teddy would have had a really good shot in 1912 if he’d managed to secure his party’s nomination, which Trump is likely to do based on current polls.
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The person you responded to initially said it was unprecedented. You said that wasn’t true. My only point is that while it’s technically true that it’s not unprecedented, for all intents and purposes, it’s unprecedented. Can it happen? Yep. Totally plausible these days. But I also think it helps to point out exactly how unprecedented all this stuff is so we don’t start thinking it’s normal, because it isn’t.
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Freedom’s just another word for “nothing left to lose.”
That’s Trump all over.
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"Only one option remains: the next president needs to send the National guard to the most dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago [and your city too] until safety can be successfully restored”
Hmmm, anyone remember Kent State University? I do, and I’m in England.
That went well…
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