We don’t know the odds of a Trump victory in 2024. Anyone who says differently is pulling your leg.
We know only that we must work as hard as possible to avoid that outcome.
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In fairness, he’s never kept a promise in his life, so his pledge to make 'Merica into one giant christo-fascist theme park isn’t likely. My money would be on 4 years of hamberders and Sharpies, and looking directly into the sun JFC I hate this timeline, followed by appointing one of his dipshit spawn as VP, then resigning to be the doofus behind the doofus behind the throne for another 8 years.
I’m not ok with any of that, to be clear, and I’m doing my part to see to it he never again soils the White House with his presence. Just saying, he’s not exactly a model of executive efficiency.
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Sadly no. Trump’s courtiers have plans to build a dictatorship for him.
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We need to take the threat he and his movement poses seriously. People have been dismissing the far right evangelical movement, and they’ve basically gotten a stranglehold on one of our major parties.
Efficient isn’t their goal - taking and keeping power is. In fact, not being efficent is part of the point. Chaos keeps everyone unbalanced and unsettled. And he doesn’t have to be, if he gets people in the right positions to impose their plans on the administrative state.
He just likes being the visible one in power, and will sit atop of whatever shit pile they’ll build for him.
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@mindysan I am sure you are right. It was terrifying enough when the right had a lot of the infrastructure and the think tanks and the governors and the school boards. Then came the tea party and then came a brief respite and now MAGA, which seems to have truly released the nazis. Given Trumps family history it actually all makes sense, but I can’t help thinking of Trump as the rich ridiculous playboy of the 70s. How can he be our President? (apologies for the simplistic and short description there)
/rant mode on
When I was a kid in the 70s I was scared of being homeless and that the ozone would be gone, and the acid rain would kill everything and gas would be $20 a gallon. I decided the only thing I can take care of is my and my family. I have close friends and relatives who are more active, politically, and it tires me out to watch them. I feel all I can do is vote. But maybe it’s time to try to do more. Not sure. Also not sure what getting out of the pool would mean here. But my wife would like to retire in France, and houses there are a lot cheaper than here. I do love it here, though. /rant mode off.
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I think that’s the point of us all working together… if we all can do a little bit, a lot more can get done.
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I think “get out of the pool” meant “get out of the Republican Party” not that you should get out of your district or state, or abandon your (R) friends or family.
I mean, you could grab a pool skimmer to try to keep your stubborn loved ones and colleagues who are still in the pool from the stink of floating ordinance, but perhaps that was what was going on pre-tea party, and so perh…{Warning: ANALOGY FULL, Please use another analogy, or consider speaking literally}
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In truth, it is a very murky pool, and we should probably drain it.
(Les Diaboliques, last nights film viewing.)
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Yeah, I think we probably don’t want to depend on that, as true as it seems. I could see this being the one that he does keep.
We need to make sure this evil bastard never gets close to being in power again.
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Agree. Maximum effort on our part, but temper it with an awareness that his J6 army was the final option, the failsafe, the all or nothing. And what they ended up doing was smearing shit on the walls of the Capitol and making damning social media posts of themselves criming, before they drove home and told everyone in their family what they’d done. The best of them, OK, PB, and the 3%ers, they’re disorganized dipshits, and a quarter of their membership are Feds. Look, I’m not a huge fan of either LEO or adolescent pew pew fantasies, but had the surge reached Pence or the Senators and began to, you know, actually try to hang anyone we’d be talking about the dozens or hundreds killed by Secret Service and Capitol Police that day. The MAGAts never stood a chance on J6, same as the fake electors, same as seizing the voting machines. All Trump’s plans have the structure and soundness of what an average, panicked 13 year old would dream up, and they’ll always fail.
We’ll put in max effort, and democracy will hold. Remember 4 Seasons Landscaping, remember the hair dye, realize that guy was one of the ‘organizers’, and be of good cheer.
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Stop downplaying this. People fucking died on that day, FFS. It was a serious attempt at a violent coup. Don’t let the details blind you to what happened on that day.
They believed they did, and they made a serious attempt at it. Trump believed he could get the military to back him up, and taking their constitutional oath seriously, they did not.
The problem is that there are some who are not taking this seriously enough and believe that our institutions holding is just going to happen. There is still a real threat to be taken seriously, especially since some of us have already lost a basic right, and there is another group of people in our country under a genocidal attack right now.
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Clears throat … Have you been watching? This ain’t over yet. There is a slow roll of insurrection happening in the States RIGHT NOW.
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Hehe. Got it. Thankfully my inner circle are all progressive. No family members outside the fold.
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It’s not letting the details blind me as much as it’s letting the details define the event. In this case, Trump told a bunch of people to show up on J6, then hand waved vaguely in the direction of the Capitol and nothing happened. Sound and fury. Yes, people died and that sucks, it really does, but the possibility of it working out the way he envisioned it was precisely zero, and that shouldn’t be ignored. It failed because he’s an idiot.
The military not backing him up had less to do with oaths than with the officer corps, by definition, being college educated. You need a degree to be an officer, with a few vanishingly small exceptions. Line grunts and lance corporals may be MAGA, but officers are educated, traveled, much more politically diverse, and a holy metric fuck ton smarter. Forget constitutional oaths, they didn’t back him up cause the man is a moron and smart people can see that. Also, illegal.
Trump and his ilk are a real and present threat, no doubt, but he’s not invincible. He’s barely sentient. Hyperbole, panic, and pearl clutching are the responses bullies crave, and I refuse to give him that validation. Fuck that clown. Democracy will hold.
You’re ignoring the fact that there was an organized group with serious intentions to overthrow the government. There is a reason they the proud boys got much longer sentences, because they are relatively well-organized group who came out of a longer history of far right groups both infiltrating the GOP (which, I will note has been largely successful!) and organizing on the grassroots level.
Nor should it make us rest easy that the threat is behind us. It’s not.
Never said he was, but we should not act as if the threat is over, as it’s not.
Not if we ignore the threat it won’t.
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You’ve told me now what I’m downplaying, and what I’m ignoring, and that’s not accurate. I’m choosing to see J6 factually and without hyperbole; on Jan 6 2021 several thousand disorganized, and a couple hundred (arguably) organized dipshits tried to overthrow the government by disrupting an entirely ceremonial congressional event. They did this at the behest of their king dipshit, a man too stupid to know the thing he was trying to interrupt was ceremonial. If all their dreams came true it would have seen a lot of people from the crowd and a lot of cops dead for absolutely nothing. Trump would not have continued on as President. The whole thing was just dumb.
Yes, PB and OK were organized, like Sydney Powell, John Eastman, and Rudy Giuliani were ‘organized’. Like the Gretchen Whitmer kidnappers were organized, as they patiently explained all their plans to the FBI informant in the group. Like Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly, also very organized. Finding some like minded dingbat to join you in a delusion doesn’t always empower. It just aggregates the stupid and makes it easier to point and laugh.
So sure, we keep the pressure on, but a clown is a clown is a clown, and when the baddies beclown themselves, I laugh. I refuse to elevate their nonsense to any level higher than it merits. Bullies hate that.
You don’t need intelligence or competence or a working understanding of government to tear down our most important institutions. You only need those things to run them.
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Fascism isn’t a byproduct of supreme intelligence. It’s school yard bullies, all grown up, seeking to impose their will on an entire country using force. That doesn’t take much brains.
These people still pose a danger, and the only people who are pushing the line that they’re not are those who are not directly in their crosshairs.
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Even without considering all the details of what they were planning, the idea that a president-led mob executing the vice president for not complying with his plans to overthrow the election would have had no influence on what happens next is ridiculous nonsense.
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There were a couple windows during J6 when the mob was ~30 seconds or less behind Mike Pence or key Democrats. For all the crap, they were way too close for comfort to their operational objectives.
If they had caught Pence and kept him from fulfilling his (yes, ceremonial) duty, Grassley was in place to push out the certification. Once the certification is pushed out (or pushed to Congress to decide) the legal framework gets really muddy. Would it have been an illegal coup? Yes! Would we have been able to dig out of it without violence? Maybe. But it was far too close of a thing.
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