I can’t predict the future — no one can — but it definitely seems as though Trump is going to win in 2024. And when he does, he will go full-bore autocrat. The person we need to keep an eye on is who is veep ultimately ends up being. But let’s talk about the big issue of Trump’s second term — a Constitutional Convention.
Now, Trump is so dumb and has such a poor grasp of abstract legal concepts that he might not even want a Constitutional Convention. He may just say that he’s going to stay in office the rest of his life because he “deserves it.” Given the mass chaos that will be going on anyway at this point, there may come a point that Trump is pressured into at least accepting the calling up a Constitutional Convention to do his bidding.
Now, there is a pretty big known unknown to all of this and that is, during the transition into a MAGA-themed autocracy, is it at all possible that some sort of “Resistance Revolution” might take place that would aim to prevent Trump from turning the United States into a Russia clone in the first place. This is a huge mystery to me.
I just don’t know.
I seriously doubt it, but as I keep saying, you go bankrupt gradually, then all at once. So, it’s at least possible that as part of the passions of the day, something akin to a “Resistance Revolution” does, in fact, take place.
But back to the Constitutional Convention.
Given how existential a Constitutional Convention would be, the whole thing would definitely be a put-up-or-shut-up moment for any American who believes in democracy. I still believe that the people who would otherwise lead any sort of “Resistance Revolution” will be too busy fleeing the country to do anything about a MAGA-led Constitutional Convention.
As such, the Constitutional Convention is held, people shrug and it proceeds to staple some sort of MAGA-themed Enabling Acts onto the Constitution. Trump gets to stay in office forever (or some such) and we all wake up in 20 years and wonder why we’re invading Canada to free it from the “woke cancel culture mob.”
I’m always wrong. Always. But I love to pontificate about the future.And, as such, think it’s safe to say that one way or another, the United States is going to careen into a historic, existential crisis a lot sooner than you might think. For once, I’m not taking about the choice between autocracy or civil war.
This time, I’m talking about how we’re probably going to have a Constitutional Convention before the end of the decade, no matter what. And because of how the delegates to the convention would be selected, it’s inevitable that barring a Blue Revolution, that any such convention would be used to turn the United States into “Magadoina.”
Remember, the FIRST Constitutional Convention accidently on purpose went rouge. There’s every reason to believe that if the bonkers far Right people who want a such a convention so bad get their wish that the same thing will happen. And that the GOOD eventuality, with the bad version of this scenario being Trump gets re-elected and he gets into his ding-dong head that he wants a Constitutional Convention so he can staple onto the Constitution some MAGA “Enabling Acts.”
Or, put another way, the rest of this decade is going to be nuts. We’re coming to the endgame of the long-term historic forces tearing the country apart. Either we’re going to be all Red, or all Blue. And the process of deciding that particular situation is going to probably end the lives of a few billion people across the globe one way or another.
But, like I said, I’m always, always wrong. We’ll just muddle through, right? Right?
I talk to my far more conservative relatives about the dark path that MAGA is leading us down and a recurring defense they use is sort of, “Oh, that would never happen.” This, in large part, is a function of the extensive permission structure that’s been built up specifically to allow conservative people who are turned off by MAGA to turn around and vote for Trump anyway.
And, I have to admit, that while Trump is definitely “autocratic friendly” in the end, he was just too dumb and lazy to follow through on his more extreme anti-democratic rhetoric.
I feel, however, that anyone who lulzes the dangers of MAGA, ignores how on an systemic level, the Republican Party is now hell bent on establishing a “blood and soil” white Christian ethno state in the United States. Political history teaches us that form follows function and, as such, once MAGA inevitably comes to power again that what Trump only talked about in the past is going to become a reality.
The autocratic forces at work in the United States are just too strong. Historical determinism would suggest that there will come a point when all my dystopian hellscape scenarios are going to come true. And that’s when I wonder how my conservative relatives are going to react.
What I think is going to happen is they will become, at last, “Good Germans.” They will generally be pleased with how they can finally sleep tight at night because MAGA has eliminated any possibility of them being “canceled” simply for being conservative. Any excesses on the part of MAGA will be justifiable because the boarders will be secure, abortion will be illegal and elections “secure.”
I, being an anti-MAGA loudmouth, see things dramatically different. What is nothing more than an abstract for my conservative relatives is very concrete for me. I have no idea what the specifics of any of this will be, but the case could be made that at some point President Pompeo or President Cotton will purge the media in some way and then weaponize the existing ICE infrastructure.
As such, it’s very possible there will come a moment when my conservative relatives will be required to weigh their personal needs with my political transgressions in this new, dark MAGA fascist era. I’ve already told at least one of them to just turn me in. I know that sounds hysterical right now, but I’d much rather be turned in by my Good German relatives than have them beg me to shut up for the sake of the family.
It’s just not going to happen.
I often weigh how long, exactly, it might take for this “form follows function” concept to turn us in to what MAGA wants us to be –an Americanized version of Putin’s Russia. I struggle with this because it’s very possible that for some time after we become an autocracy, MAGA autocrats won’t really touch the one thing that would make people sit up and take notice: the First Amendment.
For some time, they would likely be quite content to weld hard power via law and policy and laugh at Twitter liberals who freak out at this or that autocratic thing that has been implemented. A lot of how this would actually go down depends on the personality quirks of whichever autocrat in waiting happens to finally ascend the throne.
But, my rough estimate would be we would gradually grow more autocratic and then suddenly get REALLY autocratic. My guess right now is this would happen when the MAGA fascist leader we finally elect demands a Constitutional Convention to “pass a balance budget amendment.” They will get their convention, then it will turn around and enshrine MAGA into law for good.
Then things are really going to get shitty for people like me.
Yet, I’m sketching out things that will likely happen at some point between now and, say, 2041. Of course, there is the other option, which is we have a civil war and after we bomb the hell out of each other, we sort things out and gradually go back to the way things were. But that would be a tragedy and I’d prefer not to go through that hell.
Ding-Dong Trump is apparently teaming up with Newt Gingrich to do his version of the very successful “Contract With America” that allowed Republicans to take the House many moons ago.
My hunch is one of the points of this contract will be a demand that we have a Constitutional Convention to “pass a balance budget amendment.” This will be nothing more than a ruse. The real point of any such convention would be to pass some sort of “Second Bill of Rights” that would enshrine things like “religious liberty” and God only knows what other type of bullshit.
I’m wrong all the time, but this seems to be a gimmie.
American liberal democracy is dead, but for one thing — our national self-perception. It was only because of a very specific set of events that Trump did not win a second term and have four years to demand a Constitutional Convention that would turn the United States, at last, into nothing more than Trumplandia.
But the anti-democratic problems in American politics that brought us Trump continue to push us towards an autocratic managed democracy future. And this is when I find myself struggling to figure out what happens next. History would suggest that we’re going to quietly slip into autocracy and that will be that. It will just be conventional wisdom that for a Democrat to become president, Democrats will also have to control Congress. This won’t happen very often because of voter suppression and gerrymandering.
That will be it.
We will turn into an Americanized version of Putin’s Russia. And, honestly, it’s easy to imagine that as long as MAGA autocrats don’t go after freedom of speech head-on that there will be something of a truce in our politics — MAGA autocrats will weld hard power for generations to come while liberals will vent on TV and Twitter, accomplishing nothing.
And, yet, form follows function. It’s very easy to imagine President Pompeo, or President Cotton or President Hawley (the list goes on) growing greedy and demanding a Constitutional Convention that would do away with some pretty basic freedoms that Americans simply assume will always be there. And that’s when — if we haven’t had one already — we may very well have something akin to a civil war.
This is not to say that we might not have a civil war as part of MAGA’s bungling of our transition from liberal democracy to autocracy. That’s a very real possibility between now and January 2025.
But I don’t know. I just don’t know. All I do know is everyone is going to have to pick a side soon enough. It will be existential and unavoidable.
A Media Purge A wide-range of people Trump doesn’t like will no longer be seen on TV. It will range from Don Lemon to Stephen Colbert. They will rather abruptly vanish from the airwaves, never to be seen again.
A Political Purge The “Q” predictions will finally come true and Barr will indict a wide-range of people House Trump doesn’t like. If that doesn’t happen, then ICE will simply “vanish” these people and, lulz, who’s going to say anything about it by that point?
A ConstitutionalConvention Soon after Trump is sworn in again, he’s going to demand a Constitutional Convention to “pass a balanced budget amendment.” Given that Republican-dominated State legislatures would pick these people, it will quickly go rogue and a whole rang of MAGA concepts will be thrown into the mix. Trump will rant at every opportunity to the members of the Convention as to what he feels he absolutely needs and he will get all of it. And, remember, it’s not so much Trump but his successor all of this is for. So, it will be President Mike Flynn who gets the 10 year term and whatever else MAGA needs to turn us into nothing more than an English speaking version of Putin’s Russia.
This is our future. I simply don’t see any scenario where these things don’t happen. I guess it’s at least possible we might have about two years of a Biden Administration, but that would be nothing more than a death rattle.
Republicans will get the house back in 2022 and do a legal coup that somehow ends up with Tom Cotton being president for 10 years.
For about four years now, I have been telling anyone who will listen that I think Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Republic. The last few days have pretty much proven my case. It’s rare that I look out in the blue winter sky and wonder if I’m going to see a DPRK ICBM in the sky, heading to nearby-ish DC.
I have even begun to pace out how I would know it had happened. The EMP burst would zap all electronics in the general area of the nuclear blast and so, well, nothing would work. I have thought about how many sites the DPRK would target and the likelihood they would actually be able to blow them up. I love Koreans, but they have no “medium” switch on a cultural level. So if president crazypants managed to get them to the point where they wanted to take us down with them, then, then they would probably shoot as many as five ICBMs towards us. They have a pretty nice H-bomb arsenal at this point and the means to deliver them across the entire United States.
But they haven’t really had a chance to test the whole system, so there’s a good chance what would really happen is we would all collectively shit our pants at how fucking close we came to 10+ million dead (at least) in the United States alone. We aren’t really prepared on a psychological or emotional level to deal with THAT many dead in the context of civilization continue to exist. But that would be a real possibility — as long as the Chinese and Russians sat on their hands, any nuclear war between the DPRK and US would be on the low end of a “limited exchange.” Given how fucking bonkers Trump is, of course, he would probably nuke the North Koreans out of existence using not just tactical nukes but h-bombs. You could probably turn most of North Korea into an unlivable radioactive hellscape with as few as 5 h-bombs. Think about that. That’s pretty deep.
The point is, however, that we’re definitely lurching towards what I’ve suggested all along — things are going to get so extreme and so surreal pretty soon that we’re going to learn a lot not just ourselves as a people but something pretty basic about our nation as a whole. If there’s nothing Trump can do that will lesson his support for any reason, what happens if he get’s so bad on a mental level that we all start to think maybe we’re entering The Dead Zone. Maybe the reason there’s no intelligent life in the universe is inevitably an ET Donald Trump pops up and blows the planet to bits? Is it possible that Trump’s not just an existential threat to the Republic, he’s an existential threat to the species?
I suspect that we’re just fucked. MAGA just needs Trump cognizant enough to make it into his second term. That’s it. By that point his new Veep — The Kooch, Kris Kobach, Tom Cotton, Tucker Carlson or Don Jr? — will be in place to pick up the slack. So I fully expect one of the scenarios we face is Trump uses any war in the Middle East to win re-election and the he promptly turns into a psychological puddle and we get the American Hitler we’ve all been expecting in Trump.
I just can’t see ANYTHING that will force Trump out of office for any reason other than a peaceful death sometime in the next 10 years. He’s just one tweet away from demanding a Constitutional Convention to “pass a balanced budget amendment.” He will get it, they will go rouge and pass Enabling Acts on a Constitutional level and I die in an ICE camp sometime in the next two to three years. Lulz!
Another, far darker scenario is Trump doesn’t make that far. He manages to crater on a psychological level not when MAGA needs him to (any point after Jan 20, 2021) but, say, sometime in the January-October time frame. If things get as mindblowingly surreal as fear, Republicans will have three lines of defense, 1) Let the people decide 2) If only we back off and give him some space, he’ll make America Great Again 3) The Pence Piviot.
The last one is one of the more clever moves they might use. If things get so absolutely extreme that the Republican Lizard People finally face the unthinkable of having to admit that, well, maybe Trump really WAS a worse choice than Hillary Clinton, they will simply say that Trump needs his rest and Pence is making sure Trump’s vision of America (ugh) becomes a reality. We’re safe because of Pence, in other words.
But let’s say that doesn’t work. Then what. What if what I’ve mulled before happens. I mean, what if Trump really finally flips his lid — and in the middle of a major regional war in the Middle East, no less! Then what. Poor old Hugh Hewitt’s brain may break. If you’re such a cockholster for The Dear Leader and finally reality comes crashing into the situation in a way that even you can’t spin or deny, then, well, things are going to get fucking lit. A lot of smart, educated grown-ass men have debased themselves absolutely for the sake of Trump and every day Trump gets worse and more dangerous for not just America but the FUCKING WORLD.
The single most surreal event of my life will be if Dennis Prager+Hugh Hewitt+Matt Schlapp get on TV and have a complete, total mental and emotional breakdown when, like The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy, they realize they hitched their “lives and scared honors” to the wrong guy. This is unlikely to happen, but thinking about it happening is kind of chilling. That level of bonkers behavior on the part of a “public intellectual” would be rather disturbing.
Only if, say, a few million people died and everyone blamed Trump for it could I see that happening. In real terms, those guys have gotten what they wanted from Trump — a tax cut and young, hack MAGA judges. They have no shame and our media ecosystem is so broken that the moment Trump is no longer politically viable, they’ll change their tune in mid-conversation and act as if nothing happened. Fuck those liars.
Anyway, I generally don’t think any that extreme is going to happen. Far more likely is Trump will always be just on the cusp of losing his mind and yet never quite get so bad that Nancy Pelosi strikes by sending the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate so they can be used essentially as the 25th Amendment. He will drift into his second term and The Kooch (or whomever) will be the person who puts me in a camp and is indirectly responsible for my death in American Killing Fields. (In upstate New York maybe?)
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