His first term was a comedy show. People just have short memories.

Still waiting for him to build "The greatest wall ever and get mexico to pay for it" and to "Lock Hillary up".

To be fair, he also had sensible people around him to keep him in check, at least more than now. Now he's purposefully surrounded himself with bootlickers instead of capable people, so there's no one to object to anything he thinks of. I guess the Project 2025 folks might object if he acts against Project 2025, but I don't think a lot of people would call that desirable.

That wasn’t by design. He wanted bootlickers and sociopaths the first time around, but instead he mostly picked ethical competent staff (two exceptions were Betsy DeVos and Ben Carson, who were among the few cabinet members who lasted the whole term. His press secretaries were also incompetent). He thought they would bend to his will just because he was president. He also had a less compliant Congress. 

His first term wasn’t much of a comedy show in its last year, once COVID exposed his incompetence. It also laid bare the malice running through the American populace, culminating in 1/6/21. 

Unless his cronies have taken over everything by then - which is what they're trying to do post-haste already. Once they have everything in their tight grip, then they can either just do some sham elections or no elections at all, claiming they would be rigged against him/them, and get away with it as they control everything that would legally stop them from doing so.

This is exactly my main worry with Trump. The rest can be fixed with time, so who cares if the people elect bad leaders, but if democracy is broken enough by the end of his term, it's very difficult to fix. It is just not wise to take risks with it unless your objective is to effectively eliminate democracy in favour of whatever it is that you're supporting. And remember, we're talking about Trump, who says a lot of things, many quite extreme, and actually also pulls off some of them. Tariffs? Many said he wouldn't do them, but he did. How do you know he's not going to effectively destroy American democracy when he's been openly flirting with authoritarianism? You don't, you're taking a risk and assuming he's not serious.

Usually these dictators who destroy democracy have way more popular support than trump does. Whenever you have the time, look up his approval rating. This tends to get lower and lower every month. Trump is just a cow shit on the road of life, and right now the car is pressing it down into a disgusting pancake. But soo we will be free and in the clear.

The real question is, what kind of president will Vance become? 

Actually, nope.

What they do have is a person in power who's much, much more unpopular than Trump is at the moment to go against. They themselves are not that popular, but are supported simply because what they go against is THAT unpopular by the wide public.

I used to give him the benefit of the doubt (and I still kinda do cause he is anti war and actually trying to fix things on that end) but I realise now is he really is a child in a suit with nuclear codes who thinks business like dealings can solve political problems. In a way I suppose he is right, these things could be transactional to avoid conflict but he really lost me with the shit show with the Ukrainian president a few months back. Tact is not his thing, he has no foresight and can not plan anything past the immeadiate future and he just looks yo be doing well but is constantly kicking many cans down the road so he can blame the problems he didn't fix or caused on the next admistration. The patterns in this behaviour are now obvious in his second run.

Anyway, I have taken vow not to get involved in the news or politics but just wanted to add my two cents quickly here.

He is not anti war and never was.  Military spending got massive boosts in both of his terms.  If you are anti war you cut the military budget.  He also used way more drone strikes than Obama did in his first term.

Trump triples Obama’s drone strike rate

He currently wants to start a war with Venezuela and Iran.