by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Despite a lot of authoritarian rhetoric on Trump’s part over the years, it’s actually kind of rare that he goes transactional. Sure, he rants incoherently a lot, but he doesn’t often tell people to actually do something. The exception to that rule was, of course January 6th.
The January 6th Insurrection happened because Trump pounded away at the issue for months. And even then, Trump was very vague about what he wanted. He never came out and said he wanted people to attempt to browbeat Mike Pence with the threat of violence to not do his job, preferring to concoct his plan to do just that in the shadows.
But now Trump — probably because he’s unhappy that Elon Musk and Ye have cornered the being-bonkers-in-public-market — has decided to go transactional, if in a very abstract manner that the average person probably will shrug at. Trump is now demanding in a very direct way for the Constitution to be suspended so he can become president again.
In short, he’s being transactional in the sense that he’s saying specifically what he wants to have happen so he can get what he wants.
The thing is, I suspect some of this is the man never met a culturally sacred concept he didn’t feel the temptation to soil, so him demanding the destruction of America’s beloved Constitution is just par for the course in that regard.
But it is very alarming that Trump would have being a dictator on the brain, given that he’s currently the front runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. So, in that regard, Trump continues to be an existential threat to the stability of the United States in the sense that he could, unto himself, cause a civil war in late 2024, early 2025 by single-handedly driving Blue States out of the Union.
And, yet, things are very much hit or miss with Trump when it comes to his ability to actually get anyone to do any of the crazy things he rants about. But we have to take him seriously as a threat to our democracy.
