US Politics |OT|

[sc94597]

Bofferbrauer2 said:

sc94597 said:

He is nearly 79 and of below average health for his age, so that might not be too long. Also even dictators (or latent dictators, in this case) need to be popular enough in the early stages of consolidating their power, especially in a country with 500 million guns and millions of wackos with access to them. So far the bullets have missed, but there is no guarantee they'll continue to. The U.S has a very long history of assasination attempts as well as successful assasinations. 

But really who this matters is for the Republicans who don't have his non-stick status. The special elections so far are a hint of what is to come. Virginia's elections in November will be another hint. And then 2026 will tell us if they can consolidate a post-Trump authoritarian state or not based on which margins the Democrats pull off. If Democrats get more than 260 HoR, then the GOP will start to fear they're on track to be a decades-long minority party in the same way the Democrats were after the Civil War until the Great Depression, and the GOP was after the New Deal until the Reagan Revolution. Being in that place right after their president frayed the Separation of Powers and de-legitimized the courts which have been their biggest boon toward their agenda for the last forty years, will be a shock to them.

And if Trump doesn't have his dictatorship consolidated by then, then they'll want to distance themselves from him as the boat sinks. 

I'm actually somewhat afraid that an assassin might hit Trump. Vance is much younger (so the chances of dying of old age in office are very low), just as bad if not even worse (he seems to loathe Europe with a passion, Trump is more indifferent in that regard) and an assassinated Trump would easily be sold by Republicans as him being a martyr and sweeping the election due to this when it looks increasingly that the opposite will happen.

Right, but Vance's problem is that he isn't a cult-leader. Nobody can substitute Trump. All of the state-wide elections where MAGA candidates have ran and failed have shown us this. 

Again, dictatorships need popular support (or at least not that much opposition) to get off the ground. They sell themselves as "fixing" or "rectifying" things and really need to make it look like things are going that way. Causing a global depression, is not that.  

I don't think Trump works as a martyr. Trump voters want Trump. Their movement isn't ideological enough for a martyr to work. Cults rarely last without the cult leader around. 

When Lincoln was assassinated the political movement pivoted against a more radical reconstruction (which seemed inevitable until his assassination.) When McKinley was assassinated we got a far more business oppositional president in Theodore Roosevelt. Presidential assassinations have changed the political trajectory considerably in American history. 

Last edited by sc94597 - on 15 April 2025