Ugh. Where to begin with this one. It’s so easy to think up crazy-like-a-fox autocratic things Trump can do. Then he, being just an idiot, manages to bungle any tactic that any other autocrat would see as obvious and use with great gusto.
Take impeachment, for instance.
Trump apparently is having problems finding lawyers to defend him at his Senate impeachment trial. Now, remember, impeachment is, by definition, a political act. Trump has no need of lawyers. He already has the MAGA-Qanon base of the Republican Party welding absolute control over the Republican Party. Why not lean into that by defending himself?
All he has to do is rant in the well of the Senate at every opportunity and Republican Senators will be so in abject fear of the MAGA-Qanon base that they will let Trump off simply to shut him up.
But the thing about Trump is he is such a lazy idiot and not an autocrat, that he just doesn’t have the abstract thought necessary to pull such a stunt off. He’s just going to find some knuckle dragger lawyer and hope for the best. Idiot.
Of all the House Trump: Next Generation people I’m worried about, it’s Lara Trump that seems the most poised to finally strangle American liberal democracy. I say this because she’s demonstrably beautiful, smart and ambition — and something of a proxy for her much-maligned husband Eric Trump. My current thinking is something like this could happen — Lara Trump wins a Senate seat in North Carolina (because she’s actually willing to, like, work, unlike Ivanka) and after a major primary battle with any number of non-Trump autocrats in waiting, we get ourselves The Velvet Fist.
Lara Trump will be the sunny, beautiful exterior while someone like Mike Pompeo or Tom Cotton is the “fist” while serving as her veep. This would be very in line with how autocrats work. As you may know, one of the ways Putin has stayed in power for about three decades now is he kept bouncing back and forth between President and Premier.
So that’s one of several options when it comes to how the United States finally lurches into its pre-ordinaed destiny of fascist autocracy. We’ll be so busy thinking, “Oh, Lara Trump would NEVER do that, would she…” that we are totally oblivious that Mike Pompeo (or whomever) is the REAL president behind the scenes who is quickly consolidating power in the 2025 – 2027 time frame. I have really come to believe that all my dystopian nightmares that I predicted during Trumplandia will still happen, it just may be Lara Trump (face) that it happens under.
We’re just not prepared as a nation for the historial sucker punch that is about to happen to us. American liberal democracy is going to be strangled by The Velvet Fist so quickly that by the time we process what just happened, the ICE Camps will be packed full of all the people Q Anon thinks are involved in some sort of evil cabal. (Which, oddly enough is pretty much just Jewish people all over again…ugh.)
And, really, Lara Trump instead of Ivanka Trump would square the circle of how Q Nation could start killing The Usual Suspects of Jews, etc without upsetting Ivanka’s tender Jewish sensibilities. She’s so complicit that by the time SHE realizes the monster she’s associated with, she’s going to be sharing a concentration camp with the equally gobsmacked Stephen Miller. Or, put another way, anyone who doesn’t think Q is simply a cover to murder “liberals” who also often happen to be Jewish is an idiot.
But this is all very speculative at this moment. It could be that it’s not the Velvet Fist, but the Orange Fist — our good old pal deranged Trump comes back, but only as something of a Trojan Horse. He would come back tan, ready and rested, but with Mike Pompeo or Tom Cotton as he veep. They would, in the background, do all the horrific things I thought Trump would do the first time around.
The point is, again — America is an autocracy without an autocrat. Macro trends just aren’t in our liberal democracy’s favor. Something pretty huge that I can’t sketch out would have to happen to prevent Republicans having another shot at turning us into Q Nation. Again — either get out of the country in the next four years or move to a Blue State.
One of the stranger political events of my life is what didn’t happen — Trump turned out not to be an autocrat, but just a lazy idiot with autocratic impulses. Or, put another way, everyone — even me — fell into the trap of ascribing to Trump political acuity that he obviously did not, in fact, have.
So here we are.
Within a matter of days, something we all assumed was the “new normal” — Trumplandia — has vanished. The person who was in the center of the American experience for about five years, has dropped off the face of the earth. What I think will happen is we’re going to be in political neutral for about two years until the Republicans come back to power in Congress and the whole cycle starts up again.
An would-be autocrat (Trump? Pompeo? Cotton? Hawley? etc, etc, etc) will arise, use their base of support in Congress to win the election one way or another. All our fears will come true, just a few years late.
Enjoy your liberal democracy while you’ve got it — barring something pretty historic, the macro trends that caused Trump in the first place will cause a Trump-like figure (only this time younger and more focused) to win election and strangle it.
I keep saying — we’re an autocracy without an autocrat.
The moment the inevitable autocrat takes over, then, well, that’s it. We’re going to be no better than Putin’s Russia. And loudmouth people like me, who, to date, have had the luxury of a liberal democracy to allow us to shoot off at the mouth without the fear of the jackboot…will just fade away.
As of Monday (at the latest) I’m throwing myself back into the novel I’ve been working on the last few years. Everything is in place — I should be able to write the first draft very, very quickly.
I’ll always be the guy in the circle. Me, 2032
What started as me raging against the Trump Era now has a very different context — it’s going to be a lot more character based, a lot less preachy and…also a warning of what might be to come.
I really just want to forget the Trump Era ever happened. And, yet, given Trump’s apparent interest in the “Patriot Party” concept, I have decided to read up on Hitler. My fear is because of the “megatrends” that caused the rise of Trump in the first place, that he and his movement will come back in a big way far, far sooner than any of us might otherwise believe.
So, in preperation for the rise of honest-to-God-American MAGA-Nazism, I’m going to start to study Hitler, his rise and his use of power once he got it. My fear is that Trump — or a “velvet fist” of, say, President Lara Trump and Vice President Mike Pompeo — may finally turn us into an autocratic managed democracy like Putin’s Russia.
America is currently an autocracy without an autocrat and something pretty huge would have to happen for our democracy not to go the way of the Weimar Republic within no more than 10 years. But, let me make it clear — Trumplandia’s Fourth Reich wouldn’t be expansionistic. It’s not like Trump or Lara Trump would want to take over the world.
It would be an implosion, not an explosion.
The United States would collapse in on itself, maybe even to the point that there was a complete re-imagining of the world order. The United States would leave NATO, pull all its troops out from South Korea, etc and also have some sort of “Final Solution” for the “Liberal Problem.”
Or, to put it another way — there are some fucking dark forces at work on a macro level in the United States.
Weirdly enough, there really hasn’t been much discussion about how Elon Musk is just a few years away from ending the trucking industry as we know it. When 3 million high paying blue collar jobs fashion overnight, there are going to be a shit ton of angry men and women who might embrace neo-Luddism. And that would cause a massive jiggling of our political economy.
The Patriot Party might fuse the far Right and the far Left into an anti-technology party while the corporate elements of the Democrat and Republican parties might fuse together in response.
Anyway.
The point is — Trumplandia ain’t dead yet. Sometimes, they come back.
Well, if you want to get in on the new Trump grift, I suggest you become active in the founding of The Patriot Party. History may not repeat, but it does rhyme, so it’s very possible that Stephen Miller will ghost write a Trump book called “My Struggle” then in four years we’re going to look back at the events of January 6th as Trump’s “Beerhall Putsch.”
Trump — or some member of the Trump family — will win in 2024 and we’ll go full Nazi. Though, I doubt The Patriot Party will be expansionist. It will be more about the country imploding into itself and doing away with the “liberal problem” once and for all.
Now, history rarely goes in a straight line, so it’s very possible that the Republican Party is going to tear itself apart for one election cycle. So, in that case, it would be closer to 2028 or even as late as 2032 when Der Fuhrer assumes control.
Though, at that point, Trump himself will be so fucking old that it might be something more along the lines of a the “velvet fist” — Lara Trump as POTUS and Mike Pompeo (or whomever) as Veep. There are now a half a dozen would-be autocrats waiting in the wings to finally strangle American liberal democracy.
It’s only a matter of time before one of them becomes president or vice president. No more than, say, a decade. Probably closer to four years. The macro trends that brought us this point of being an autocracy without an autocrat aren’t going anywhere.
The United States is going to be in political neutral for about two years no matter what. We’re just going to be in something of a political daze until the Republicans — or Patriot Party? — take over the Congress and we really REALLY have something to worry about.
And, as I’ve mentioned before, if Trump was smart — which he is not — he would put his political puck where macro trends suggest we WILL BE not where we ARE: he’d really try to rearrange American politics by banking hard LEFT when it comes to technology — become a neo-Luddite. Remember, Elon Musk is just a few years away from destroying 3 million (!) high paying trucker jobs via self-driving semis. If Trump — or someone in the extended House Trump — could make saving those 3 million jobs part of a political platform, well, you got yourself a powerful political movement.
It would have to be Steve Bannon to think that up, though. Trump, himself, is an idiot.
We now know what’s potentially ahead of us now. All the overblown fears that people like me had during the first Trumplandia Reich will be a lot closer to coming true once Trump founds the Patriot Party and we have our very own Red Hats (as opposed to Brown or Black Shirts) running around, beating the shit out of people like me around election time.
I barely know anything about the Paris Commune, but I know enough to know that it may be the closest comparison one can think up when it comes to the Capitol Riot of January 6th in Washington.
But there are some pretty big differences.
If you look back at what happened on January 6th, we were extremely lucky for a number of reasons — the riot didn’t really have any leaders and it didn’t really have any long-term agenda or ideology. It was just a smash-and-grab coup attempt.
But imagine if there had been some sort of leadership on January 6th. They could have established a security perimeter around the Capitol. They could have taken hostages and they could have formed a “government” at the Capitol building.
If they had had any organization or forethought, they could still be there right now, hold up at the Capitol in their own “commune.” I doubt they would have called it a commune, but that’s what it would have been.
They had a very specific historic opportunity and — thankfully — they completely blew it. They “caught the car” and then didn’t know what to do with it. There won’t be a next time.
Any coup-like event that occurs in the future is going to require a shit ton more work by those involved. I still think given macro trends that while there may still be significant political violence in the coming years, it’s the 2024-2025 period we need to keep an eye on.
The key thing we have to appreciate is what a fluke the riot at the Capitol was on January 6th. While future history may prove me wrong — I’m often wrong — it definitely seems as though a lot of things went wrong at the same time on that date.
What happened January 6th was a classic instance of “catching the car.” How else do you explain how gleeful many of the people who participated were? In the moment, most of the people involved had no idea the gravity of what they had gotten themselves into. It was all a big party.
Or, once the beating the shit out of people phase was accomplished by nastier aspects of the mob, it was a party to everyone else. I almost went to DC to “cover” the event for myself and I now find myself sheepishly blanching at what I might have gotten myself into had I gone. I probably would have charged into the Capitol to cover such a historic event, only to get arrested for trespassing, etc.
So, in a sense, I dodged a bullet.
Anyway, I think, in a sense, the terrorists have won in the short term and we’re all terrorized while the actual threat is back to near-zero. So, we’re going through all this pretty much for no reason. The moment people started getting arrested for their participation in the Capitol riot, I think the threat evaporated.
There may be isolated political violence over the next four years, but the Big Ugly has been punted down the road to the 2024-2025 time frame for a number of reasons. A civil war / revolution is coming…just not right now.
It definitely seems as though Trump will, yet again, escape justice. Trump is going to behave (for once) and in the context of the change in administrations, by the time we get around to doing anything about him, passions will have cooled and, lulz, “thoughts and prayers.”
In fact, I would go so far as to say the only way we get any justice for Trump is if things go crazy with the impeachment trial in the Senate and before you know it, John Bolton is testifying and additional impeachment articles are being drawn up for the now out-of-office-Trump.
That doesn’t seem very likely.
And Trump definitely seems as though he’s prepping the way for him doing all that pardoning he wants to do so bad, so ultimately, he lives to fight another day politically. New York State will be pressured to stand down that will be that.
Trump will write his “My Struggle” book in political exile and, well, there you go.
I had a really interesting conversation with a conservative relative recently. The more I think about it, the more it epitomizes the state of the Republican Party now. He didn’t vote for Trump in 2016. He was given a permission structure to vote for Trump in 2020.
And….now he wants him to leave office early via impeachment or some other political solution.
Talk about whiplash!
What Republicans want is for anti-Trump people to see the Trump Era as value free so they can sit back and chuckle at all the young hack MAGA judges they got as well as the huge plutocrat tax cut. They want that so they can demand that the laws of politics snap back into place — suddenly we’re not talking about Big Ideas anymore, we’re talking about Kamala Harris wearing a tan suit.
Anything, but anything, to have us not talk about what just happened the last four-odd years.
And, remember, the point is that Trump isn’t an autocrat, but just a big olde ding-dong. That’s the thing people like me missed — Trump I kept ascribing to Trump political acuity and acumen that he just didn’t have. So, the United States is an autocracy without an autocrat.
All the conditions are there for us to slip into a Russian-style autocracy, but for one thing — Trump isn’t an autocrat.
The question, of course, is given how all the tools of autocracy exist to be picked up, will someone like Tom Cotton, or Josh Hawley, or Mike Pompeo or Ted Cruz finish the process that Trump began.
I honestly don’t know.
A lot depends on how, exactly, Trump ends his administration. There’s still a decent shot that he’s going to do one last thing that is so astonishing, so spectacular, that it punts our slide into autocracy down the road for a generation.
It appears as though there’s something afoot in the state of Utah. Some sort of January 6th-style assault on the Utah Capitol Building is being planned. Maybe. I know I’m getting a lot of hits on this Website from Utah about my dystopian hellscape scenarios.
Whatever it is, it’s happening soon — January 11th.
This is the same day, I think, Trump is doing his “Remember the Alamo” speech in Texas about his dumb boarder fence. The question is, how well organize is this attack in Utah and what are its goals? My concern is that they may declare their independence or something. If they successfully take the Capitol, they may setup some sort of People’s Government that unilaterally leaves the Union and calls for other states to do the same. Throw in Trump egging other states on and you have a real secession crisis on your hands.
There have been a series of assaults against state houses over the last few months and if they could successfully take over one, that might be a tipping point. If there was significant bloodshed during the Monday assault, that would take things to the next level.
But it’s possible I’ve gotten my information garbled or incorrect. And, yet, it will be interesting to see how everything plays out. Monday could be pretty wild, indeed.
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