I’m growing a little worried about what’s going on in southern California right now. Apparently, Trump is send in a few thousand National Guard to “handle” the situation and that’s bound to only make matters worse. If anyone gets hurt — or even worse, killed — that could prompt a wave of domestic violence not seen in decades.
And given that that is kind of what Trump is itching for at the moment, it would make a lot of sense for him then to declare martial law. That’s when I worry people like me might get scooped up just for being loudmouth cranks.
Hopefully, of course, that won’t happen. Hopefully. But I do worry about things like that.
People keep talking about how Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” may cost Republicans the House in 2026 and I just don’t see it. Republicans will do everything in their power to make it nearly impossible to vote next year and so they will be protected from any consequences of their vicious, hateful Big Beautiful Bill.
And that will be that.
Once Republicans pull that fast one, they will be embolden. I suspect they will go through with efforts to replace the income tax with a VAT at some point in the near future.
A lot of macro things are going wrong at the same time and I think this is it — the USA now an autocracy and there’s little, if anything we can do about it outside of — gulp — a revolution. Since I would prefer not to live through a revolution, I guess my next best hope is somehow I find the means to bounce out of the country and never look back.
It definitely seems on a macro basis, Republicans have gotten a little too cocky for their own good. Their plan seems to be to do a huge wealth redistribution with their “Big Beautiful Bill,” then do everything in their power to make it impossible to vote the out of office.
This is not a recipe for stability long-term.
I know, I know I talk about this all the time and then nothing happens, but my “you go bankrupt gradually then all at once” o-meter is flashing red because of the Big Beautiful Bill.
This macro plot by the Republicans seems like just the one-two punch that would push us unto chaos at some point in the next few years. Republicans have gotten really cocky and at the moment, people are too interested in watching Tik-Tok videos to do anything about it.
But when our already perilous income inequality gets even worse — much worse — who knows what historical consequences their may be. Maybe not now, but eventually the chickens will come home to roost.
It’s possible — especially if store shelves go bare — that this summer could be quite dramatic. Or not. Americans have let me down so much that I’m beginning to believe that, lulz, meh….people just refuse to risk anything in the real world because of Trump.
So, it definitely seems, at least as of now, that we’re going to drift for a few years until a crisis happens in late 2028 when Trump tries to run for a third term somehow. I really do think Trump is going to run for an illegal third term and THAT could be when the country finally buckles.
Or, maybe not.
I had all these scenarios that I wrote for years about a civil war because of Trump winning in 2024 and…nothing happened. So, we’ll see.
The United States is now an autocracy. And, yet, some of the last vestiges of the Before Times continue to linger. While Trump continues to do everything in his power to end free speech, Americans — at the moment at least — still have the ability to speak as they like and to peacefully protest.
It is only a matter of time, of course, before Trump and his MAGA Nazi toadies come after our basic rights in a full boar effort to finish the job they’ve started. I suppose we’re kind of in a liminal political space at the moment where it’s dusk, but nightfall as yet to officially arrive.
But arrive it will.
And that’s when the real test of the American populace will arrive. Trump is going to push us to the breaking point to see if we just give up or if we fight back in some way.
And, right now, I honestly doubt anyone will notice that we’ve become a legalistic autocratic state like Russia when it happens. I think the whole process will gradually happen in fits and starts to the point that in about 20 years we’ll be a Russian-style autocracy and a whole generation will assume that’s the way it’s always been.
I just don’t see Americans doing what would be needed to end this nightmare — we need a General Strike organized with the clear objective of ending MAGA tyranny once and for all. If that means we have a Second Revolution, so be it. (Not that I want that, because if it was successful, a Second Civil War would happen immediately.)
So, I continue to hope I sell a breakout hit novel so I can get the fuck out of this country and never come back. It’s inevitable that me ranting about Trump and the MAGA Nazis will come back to bite me.
The issue at the moment is Trump is the spearhead of a sever macro problem in the United States — MAGA. Something like MAGA was going to happen, especially after Obama was elected. But it could just have well been the first female president, if Obama had lost to Hillary in the primaries.
It definitely feels as though the US is imploded. We’re definitely an autocracy now and, really, it’s just a matter of where we stop on the Hungary – Russia spectrum of autocracies.
All I can say is my rage over MAGA fuels my continued writing. That was the point of the first novel (now the last two novels in this specific project.) I wanted to write an allegory about America set in a small town. I got pretty far in the project until at some point I realized that I had enough backstory thought through in my mind for a few novels, so I decided to write those first instead of saving them as some sort of potential “prequel” idea.
There definitely has been an ebb and flow when it comes to this novel project over the years.
But back to how fucked up everything is — there is a greater-than-zero chance that the US will buckle and have a revolution then civil war. A lot will depend on the economy and if Trump freaks out, shoots a few people then declares martial law.
Anyway, I just want to sell a novel that is a big enough success that I can get the fuck out of this country and chill out somewhere hot an exotic for the remainder of my years.
A lot of commentors on Twitter keep saying, “We can’t go through four years of this.” Sadly, we went through four years of it last time and I think we’re probably going to live through more than four years of it this time.
But, just for “fun” let’s imagine what a revolution might look like. Well, at the moment, I can’t really game it out. I say this because there are huge protests in the States all the time and…nothing happens.
So, I think if there was an actual “Second American Revolution” it would have be a lot more dramatic that anything we’ve seen before. One way I could imagine it happening is if there were big protests, Trump ordered the troops to fire on them and then all hell broke loose and Trump imposed marital law.
Even then, I think Trump Tower would have to be stormed in a big way. Or NYC would have to be turned into a commune or something. I guess….maybe Blue States might rebel en masse against Trump and that would buckle the country to the point that Trump MIGHT be deposed.
But I think the US military would probably stay loyal to Trump, so lulz. But if Trump really went full Mad King on us and the US military decided to step in, I think it would collapse because most of the enlisted men and women would be MAGA.
Once that happened, all bets are off. The whole thing would be a massive culsterfuck. It would be far, far worse than the French Revolution and many, many, many, many, many people would die for no damn reason.
If Trump was successfully deposed, then Red States would bolt from the Union and a huge, long, protracted civil war would happen.
The truly sad thing is I’m even thinking about this bullshit. But, here we are. America is ripe for this type of shit to happen. We’ll see, I guess.
Oh boy. I saw today where the United States has greater income inequality than France before the revolution. Yikes. And, given the absolute existential push towards tax cuts for plutocrats on the part of Republicans, its only going to get worse. Much worse.
I’m a little worried that Trump and his toadies are going to push the USA into revolution then civil war. I really don’t want that to happen. It would be horrific because of the number of WMD floating around the USA domestically.
And that doesn’t begin to address how WW3 would happen while the USA was indisposed. Ugh. It’s just horrible. Just the idea of a revolution then civil war gives me the heebeejeebees.
The thing about Trump is he’s a one person stress test for the system — and right now the system is failing, collapsing. Just don’t know what we’re going to do about that.
I just don’t see us doing what we want to do, which is “muddle through.” I think something painful and dramatic MIGHT happen within the next four years. I hope not, but I tend to try to make my abstract fears concrete, so here I am worried about a Blue revolution then a civil war between Blues and Reds.
This summer, it seems as though we are determined to careen directly into a techno-government-economic perfect story clusterfuck. All three of those elements of our society could be “disrupted” in a big way for various reasons and it will all happen at the same, exact time.
The key thing everyone is missing, of course, is Trump would rather murder people in cold blood than relinquish power. And, what’s more, the press is so beholden and co-opted by the fascist Trump MAGA regime that whatever protests there are would have been REALLY BIG and last for a LONG TIME before they would be willing to give them the proper attention.
Though, I suppose if the Social Security Administration collapses then there is a good chance that Trump will be in SERIOUS TROUBLE….but not enough to be deposed. We’re suck with the fucker for the rest of his life.
So, lulz, my prediction is if there are some protests that Trump will just declare martial law and that will be that. That will give him the excuse he needs to start shooting people or rounding them up and maybe even going so far as to end regular elections — at least on the Federal level.
There’s a chance that he will let state and local elections continue as either a safety valve for discontent or make them so unfree and fair that they’re moot anyway.
Meanwhile, as all of this is happening, what might otherwise be a moderate recession might become a severe one as AI causes a huge disruption. The economy will stumble as huge swaths of it are revolutionized by extensive AI use.
At the moment, it seems as though programming and advertising will be two sectors that will be really disrupted in a huge way. They will either contract or be so revolutionized that thousands — millions? — of people simply will not be able to find a job in those fields anymore because of AI.
A lot of people are so wrapped up with how excited they are about the new developments in AI that they totally miss the cold, hard reality of this new world: I just don’t see how many jobs will be left in any number of fields because the changes are just happening too quickly.
Despite all the gnashing of teeth by liberals and progressives, Trump simply is going nowhere for as long as he lives. He’s going to be president for life. I don’t know, exactly, he’ll do it, but he will.
He’s going to destroy everything before he shuffles off this mortal coil and it will take decades — generations maybe — for us to sort things out afterwards. I think that’s Trump’s historical purpose — to destroy the Second American Republic founded by Lincoln.
What happens after that, I don’t know.
Probably some sort of dystopian techno-autocracy is my best guess. Maybe the Singularity will come while Trump’s still alive and Elon Musk will upload Trump’s into the cloud and he’ll be our Max Headroom-style AI overlord.
Now, obvious, we might have a revolution — especially if Social Security checks stop being cut on time — but then we’d have a civil war and I really would prefer not to have either one of those things happen.
I just want to live in a traditional liberal (Western) democracy. But that is not to be because we just don’t have to grit to fight back against Trump. We’re totally fucked. Totally, completely fucked at least for the rest of my life.
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