It’s going to be pretty ironic if, ultimately, it’s Elon Musk that brings down Tyrant Trump. It’s easy to game out a scenario where Musk’s dumb disruption of basic Federal services causes the country to heave with chaos to the point that finally someone shows some grit and stands up to the Trump’s tyranny.
We’re now entering a pretty wild moment in our nation’s history. Trump and Musk STILL have a lot of political slack to play with. People are just too distracted by other things. The country is just too big and it won’t be until we reach some moment where all of the tyrannical shenanigans that Trump and Musk are doing really comes into focus will anything happen.
So, for the time being, Citizen Musk has full reign to do whatever the fuck he wants. And it’s going to keep getting worse and worse until it all reaches a boiling point. Or…maybe not? Maybe not enough people will care?
I dunno. All I know is I have a few novels to work on. Maybe I can just be a man in a high castle and be (largely) unbothered by all the chaos of the outside world for the time being.
It seems as though we’re very much on our own at the moment. No one is going to save us. The key thing that is obvious now is our democracy was much more fragile than any of us could have imagined. So, it seems as though we’re a dictatorship now.
And that’s just going to be the way it is from now on. There is a little part of me that vaguely believes that once it sinks in the gravity of the situation that at least 47% of the American population is going to freak out and demand something be done.
How that, exactly, would play out, I don’t know. All I do know is the next few months could be pretty scary. They say you go bankrupt gradually, then all at once and we’ve reached the “all at once” point for American democracy ending.
The question is, of course, when is the “all at once” for the reaction to its demise. Right now, because of how poor Democratic leadership is and how big the country is, we are still kind of in the stunned portion of the night’s entertainment.
But if the economy tanks really bad in the coming days, that might generate enough energy within the populace for….something? I don’t know what that might be, though. The media is so beholden to Trump and his dictatorship that there could be mass protests and no one would know about it.
Whatever the reaction to Trump’s tyranny that happened would have to be huge, like really huge, before it would force the hand of the media so they actually reported it. I have my doubts. But, we’ll see, I guess.
I fucking hate guns. I fucking hate violence. With a passion. But the picture on the right of Mstislav Rostropovich holding a gun during the attack on the Russian White House has lingered in my mind.
I’m not advocating anything, but I am making an observation — it could be that the only way to catch Trump’s attention is a General Strike. We — Blues — could show our economic power and really crash the (global) economy by simply collectively not going to work until our demands are met.
Our demands: A new Speaker is elected who is a respected leader. Trump and Vance resign.
Then we go back to being the greatest nation in the world. Of course, if this was successful, Red States would leave the Union and a Second American Civil War would happen.
So…lulz?
I do worry that we may see unprecedented radicalization among the center-Left in the coming days. Some pretty wild things might happen. Buckle up.
Here we go again, but worse. We live in an even more extreme version of Vichy American than we did during the first Trump Administration. The forces of fascism are currently doing a shock and awe campaign against American institutions with a great deal of success. Trump continues to use all the slack in the system allotted him to get away with some pretty brazen fucking things.
All I got is something is going to happen to Social Security. If Trump manages — with the help of Elon Musk — to fuck that up, people will sit up and take notice. But, for the time being, Trump still has plenty, PLENTY of wiggle room.
He’s going to destroy as many guard rails and institutions as he can for as long as he can until, I don’t know….people get woke en masse. The only thing I can think of is a General Strike — probably in Blue States. If THAT happened, there is a small chance that we could maybe, just maybe drive Trump out of Washington D.C. in some way.
I’m NOT advocating anything. Just making an observation.
All I personally can and will do is…gloat. If Trump gets as bad as I think he will, I can gloat, gloat, gloat. Of course, if the country collapses into chaos because of Trump, I may be on the lam from ICE death squads. I will note again that we only avoided a civil war because Trump won, now we have to worry about revolution….then civil war.
For all of Trump’s talk about coming into power with “shock and awe,” there sure has been a lot of…meh? Trump keeps doing these previously shocking things and we just collectively sigh and go about our business.
But there is one truism about Trump that we can’t escape — he always figures out a way to go to the absolute bottom to the point that he pisses off a sizable portion of the population.
So, I don’t know what it will be, but, at some point in the next four years he is going to do something so egregious that people take to the streets. What happens after that, I don’t know. I still low-key fear he’s going to run for an illegal third term.
Maybe THAT will be the thing that get people to sit up and take notice.
There is already a movement a foot within far Right circles to hold a Constitutional Convention so they can make MAGA bullshit legal firmware. But I think we need some sort of Constitutional Convention regardless because I really worry that Trump is going to run for an illegal third term.
It seems to me that our traditional Constitution order is collapsing and it’s time to start from scratch. Now, obviously, this is a very dangerous proposition because, well, the bad guys could win.
And, yet, a lot could happen between now and whenever we fucking get rid of Trump and finally get around to being in the position to have a Constitutional Convention.
I worry a lot about Trump being so absolutely dumb and lazy that he somehow gets deposed then that causes a civil war when Red States leave the Union. Once all THAT is sorted out, maybe THEN we would have a Constitutional Convention.
There’s a pretty good chance that there will be a political Fourth Turning at the same time we have something akin to a Petite Singularity. Nothing is for certain, but there is a pretty good chance that just as the USA buckles we will see AI take off in an unexpected way.
I have been messing with AI a lot of late and I’ve been stunned at how good an unexpected it is at times. It’s *possible* that the first use of LLMs in androids will be in some sort of dystopian American Civil War / Revolution that happens in conjunction with a global WW3.
Oh boy!
Or not. What do I know.
I do know that the CONDITIONS are there for some pretty fucked up shit to happen starting in a few months. I just don’t see how we make it through the 2024 election in any form of peaceful existance.
The American Constitution now has a pretty profound logic-trap built into it. If a president has immunity for “official acts,” what’s to stop him or her from engaging in a lot of defenestration towards anyone who gets in his / her way — including SCOTUS?
Now, obviously, a lot — A LOT — of people a lot smarter than I am are probably writing 10,000 word New Yorker pieces about this very thing as we speak. But the fact remains — we’re fucked.
And I stand by my prediction that given how stupid Trump is that we what might happen is he is deposed in early 2025 — if he wins — then there is a civil war. I only say this because Trump just doesn’t have the nuance of a Putin who turned Russia into a very legalistic autocracy. Trump is a very dumb, very lazy thug with a poor sense of the consequences of his actions and statements. What’s to stop Seal Team Six from murdering some person Trump doesn’t like when he tweets something along the lines of, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”
Wouldn’t that be an “official act?”
And couldn’t Trump just pardon Seal Team Six for murdering Tom Nichols or Tim Miller or Rich Wilson whomever the fuck Trump doesn’t like? This is no longer a theoretical — this is a very real future the US faces if and when Trump becomes POTUS again.
I say there would be a civil war in such a situation because Trump could be such a dumb thug that he’s deposed in some way — maybe through a General Strike? — then Red States leave the Union….and there’s a civil war and WW3 happens with about 2 billion dead.
I don’t know what I’m going to do. I think it’s inevitable that some sort of MAGA secret police will throw ME out a window. I’m just too much of a loudmouth crank. Oh well. So long and thanks for all the fish.
The issue about any sort of civil war or revolution because of ding-dong Trump thrashing around history is how much it would suck, suck, suck. It would be not sexy or fun. It would be a horrible tragedy.
And the more I think about it, the more I realize that we could very well be on the cusp of nothing short of the most powerful nation in the world bombing itself into the stone age because of…vibes. Once you start things like revolution and civil war, it is very, very difficult to stop it.
So, it’s very possible that we could have a solid decade of death and destruction starting in late 2024. Now that really sounds hysterical, but there is an air of inevitability when it comes to Trump coming to power again that is very eerie. It’s like we’ve just decided that we all have to “go through some things” to get it all out of our system.
And remember none of this catastrophic tragedy would happen in a geopolitical vacuum. If the United States is imploding, that will mean that the greater world is exploding into WW3. At least a billion people could die specifically and directly because of ding-dong Trump because he will have caused the US to implode into civil war / revolution.
I know how hysterical that all sounds, but we have to start taking shit like that seriously. We have to sit up and take notice about where things are heading. And part of that is taking seriously how bad this new, war-torn America would be for the everyday person.
The chief thing is how any form of communication would probably be a premium. Command and control would be the first thing each side of any war in the United States would try to knock out and, as such, there’s a good chance that once the ball started rolling most of us would have no idea what the fuck was going on outside of our immediate neighborhood.
And if the absolute worst happens, we’ll all be so busy struggling to eat and avoid various explosions that we just won’t have time to worry about what our pronouns are any other form of identity politics — it’s hard to be “woke” when everything is very, very existential on a daily basis.
But only time will tell. It could be I’m overthinking all of this and we’ll either drift peacefully into a MAGA themed autocracy or Trump will lose and he’ll just slink away into the political darkness.
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