by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The interesting thing about Trump is on one hand his power has receded among the general populace, while within the Republican Party is personality cult is only getting stronger. As such, a lot of Twitter liberals see this and scoff at the notion that Trump might be able to win the presidency again.
And here’s the rub: he doesn’t have to — all MAGA has to do is nullify the election of Biden in 2024 and throw the election to their ding-dong Dear Leader, no matter what the actual vote count may be.
Or, put another way, we continue to careen towards the stark choice of either autocracy or civil war. If we do go the autocratic route, the big question for me is does our new autocrat at least attempt to work within Americans’ self-perception of us being the “land of the free” or does he say fuck it and bring the whole thing down, damn the consequences?
I was way too quick to assume Trump would do the latter when it turned out he was such a lazy idiot he couldn’t pull it off — in short, he was just a lot of talk. But, then again, if our autocrat was someone younger and more focused then it’s very easy to imagine a situation where people like me really do begin to get pushed out of windows by ICE.
But history has surprised me before. It could be we just muddle through this like we have in the past and while we’ll inevitably get a MAGA autocrat they won’t be nearly as bad as I fear. Though, as I keep saying, form follows function, so it seems pretty easy to imagine a scenario where things get pretty dark in the United States pretty quick.
I hope I’m wrong, I really do.
