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. |
He also has access to better healthcare than Joe Blow, and his handlers will Weekend at Bernie's him as long as they can. Some of these authoritarians have terrifyingly long lives. Robert Mugabe lived to be 95 years old. Castro lived to 90, after smoking cigars daily for 44 years.
And even once he's gone, the same voter base in the South and Midwest that put him in office based on their grievances against everything outside of their 0.8 percent share of the world's population will still be there.
