by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
All systems continue to be go for a massive, catastrophic clusterfuck in 2024. Before I go any further, however, I will note that on an situational basis, Trump is so popular within the center-Right that he could win the nomination and the 2024 presidential election fair and square.
Don’t let the anemic crowds at his tour with Papa Bear Bill O’Reilly fool you — Trump has Gotterdammerung-levels of power over the Republican Party. He is their Fuhrer in exile at the moment and the sole obstacle to Trump single-handedly turning the United States in to the modern day equivalent of Nazi Germany is he’s an old, poorly focused ding-dong.
So, what will happen is he will win election again in 2024, strangle democracy once and for all and then we all sit around to see who will be America’s Putin. That’s it, that’s our fate. We’re fucking doomed. Get out of the country while you can, or figure out what you believe in so when ICE starts murdering people for political reasons you will know what to do.
But.
There is a chance that when we get to the weakest moment in this dystopian hellscape scenario — the final transition from democracy to autocracy — that Trump self-owns and we have a civil war instead. But this would only happen in the context of Trump somehow not winning outright.
As such, if that did actually happen, then it’s very easy to see the events leading up to a civil war, where it’s Blue States, not Red States that leave the Union, being done under the rubric of “Stop The Steal.” In fact, the only reason why Red States weren’t fat, smug and sassy in the lead up to Certification Day 2021 is how God-awful stupid, lazy and idiotic Trump is an a would-be autocrat.
ANYONE ELSE in Trump’s position in 2020 would have brazenly stolen the election on a political basis. But Trump is so, very, very stupid and lazy that he could not pull it off. So we punted the inevitable choice of autocracy or civil war down the road four years.
And because of how much Traditionalists have come to align themselves with MAGA, when the autocracy comes, the shift in perception from democracy to autocracy could be so subtle that the average Traditionalists will STILL call people like me hysterical even as we begin to check off the qualities of a fascist state one by one.
Not until I get rounded up and shot dead by an ICE agent will the Traditionalist in my family go, “Gee, maybe I should have made common cause with him, after all.”
But, by then, I’ll be a rotting “hysterical” corpse in some unmarked grave.
The other option is, of course, that my family is divided for political reasons. I flee to a Blue State, while they stay in their Red States and, well, I don’t like to think about the rest of that. But that’s the future we’re hurtling towards, one where brother is pit against brother, just like what happened in the first civil war.
And, yet maybe I am being hysterical. Maybe something will happen that will punt this particular problem down the road one more presidential cycle. Or, I dunno, aliens might land? WW3 starts? The pandemic goes all The Stand on us? Whatever it is that prevents the existential choice of autocracy or civil war for America in the 2024 – 2025 timeframe has got be pretty big.
What’s more, it could be pretty much any time between now and 2025 that we have a civil war. Trump unexpectedly dying of natural causes, or him being indicted or whatever — something to do with Trump — could very well be enough for Red States to call up snap secessionist conventions.
Things really are that fucked up in the United States right now. And it’s only going to get worse.
