Russia is just too weak to invade the Baltics or Poland. If it was not so weak, then, yeah, I would assume they would invade much of Eastern Europe pretty soon, no question.
But Russia is too tied up in Ukraine at the moment to pose too much of a threat to Europe. Yet, I do think that Trump is probably going to make NATO moot soon enough. I think the whole post-WW2 liberal order is officially dead and something new — something unknown — is going to be formed soon enough.
It make take another World War for it to finally be birthed, but I do think that it’s at least possible something *better* might arise from the ashes of the old order.
I don’t know what to tell you, folks. We are still in the 1939 to 1941 era of this clusterfuck. The good guys still don’t know what has hit them and maybe in this particular situation, they never will.
Unless something happens I can’t predict, the USA is careening towards a full blown Russian-style autocracy sooner rather than later. Trump will run for an illegal third term, win and the point will be made, no matter what — the old Constitutional order is completely broken and, lulz, we’re going to have to think up something new.
This is just the beginning. Trump is probably going to remove troops from around the world — specifically South Korea and much of Europe. He will probably make it clear that NATO is moot, no matter what the Senate may want.
The question is — will anything stop Trump at this point? Anything? Anything?
Here’s the point of what Trump and Musk are doing. They want to fire as many civil servants as possible illegally, then fill the positions with absolute MAGA loyalists.
They know that it’s not like Blues are going to fire all these MAGA whack jobs in the unlikely event they ever win again. Trump wants a MAGA Deep State that will continue to rule the nation with his vision in mind, no matter who is in power.
You already see this with what’s going on with the FBI. Kash Patel wants to bring in UFC wrestlers — of all people — to “supplement” the existing FBI force. Good luck getting rid of THOSE guys once they’re in place. And, on that front, I think we’re well on our away to Trump turning the FBI into the Gestapo.
It’s only a matter of time before people like me are rounded up by the FBI and either shot dead on sight or put into a concentration camp. So, there you go.
We are in a nightmare situation. You just can’t unring a bell. There is just no going back. And it’s only going to get worse, much, much worse.
It seems as though the big thing we have to accept is the FBI is going to go after a lot of people for purely political reasons. So, if AOC runs for POTUS, she will probably be the subject of a lot of lawfare.
I just don’t see us ever having a traditional free-and-fair election on the Federal level again. It’s over. Stick a fork in American democracy, it’s done.
We’re in a crisis folks with no obvious endgame. I just don’t know how this one is going to end. The most obvious ending is there’s a “Reichstag Fire” of some sort, Trump and his MAGA Nazis seize total control and that, as they say, will be that.
We’ll become a literal MAGA Nazi fascist dictatorship and Trump could literally invade Canada to either “save it from the woke cancel culture mob” or to take its “resources.” Ugh.
I say this because, lulz, nothing matters. The center-Left just doesn’t have it in them to do anything about Trump and Musk. Or, put another way, it’s going take so long for Blues to get their act together that it will be way, way, WAY too late.
The other, far less likely outcome is a Blue revolt that leads to a Red secession if it’s successful. The whole country implodes into chaos and before you know it, a few billion people will have died directly and specifically because of Trump being a very stupid person.
I suppose there’s the “muddle through” outcome, but Trump has a way of making what would usually happen, not happen. He’s so, in general unpredictable that God only knows what is going to happen.
But if Social Security checks fail to arrive on time, or if other major functions of the government simply stop working as we all assume they should….we will come to a crossroads.
Maybe not immediately, but it’s within the realm of possibility that Trump’s weaponized FBI (or ICE?) will come after anonymous nobodies like me soon enough.
I’ve made my decision — I’m riding this pony all the way to the bottom. I’ve always been a loudmouth crank and, as such, it’s not like I could fit the square peg that Tyrant Trump would want me to be fit into to begin with.
So, whatever happens, happens. And I know that once it becomes clear that even nobodies like me are at risk that I’m going to feel….some pressure to just “shut up” for the sake of this or that thing or group.
Fuck that. I’d rather die on my feet that live on my knees a slave. So, if that means becoming a political prisoner to Tyrant Trump, so be it. Hopefully, of course, it won’t come to that.
Hopefully, something dramatic will happen and I won’t have to worry about such bullshit. What that might be, I don’t know.
We’re rushing towards a tipping point. I think the canary in the coalmine will be late night TV. The one person I could see rather abruptly quitting would be Stephen Colbert.
The man has nads of steel and if he was pressured into toning it down with his Trump barbs — he probably would just quit. Also, now that the FBI is being transformed into Trump’s secret police, I suppose it’s possible that lawfare will be used against late night TV so it goes dark — and I’m including Saturday Night Live.
Anyway, I got nothing against the FBI. Those guys work hard to keep us safe. But I do have a problem with fucking Nazi MAGA fascists turning the otherwise upstanding FBI organization into a secret police for ding-dong Trump.
There is pride before the fall and I’m beginning to worry that Trump is going to really do something crazy with the FBI to the point that people might…begin to care?
If Trump actually makes good on his desires for a police state then, at least in some of the Blue States, this is going to cause some problems. I’m a man of peace, a man of ideas, but the idea of some sort of Blue revolution does seem in the greater-than-zero range right now.
I hope, I really hope, that doesn’t happen, but if Trump uses the FBI to literally snatch people — like me! — off the street then, well, we got a problem. But hopefully that won’t happen. Hopefully.
But it definitely, at least, SEEMS that we are headed in that direction. What will be interesting to see is the reaction on the part of the population to such thuggish shenanigans.
I suppose what Trump might do is purge the FBI to the point that he has to find whack jobs in police departments in Red States to fill all those high paying positions and then he uses them to do is bidding in Blue States. That causes mass protests, he calls in Red State National Guards and, tah-dah, we’re a military police state under martial law for the foreseeable future.
The United States is now an autocracy. Everything I kept ranting about for years has or is happening. The only big miscalculation I made was about protests. I thought if Trump went full tyrant from the beginning that there would be a General Strike or mass protests.
But, fun fact, no.
I know we’re still early in Trump’s administration, but it is clear to me that even if there were massive protests, there’s a good chance that the mass media is so beholden to Trump that they wouldn’t even cover any of it. I do think a prolonged General Strike with very strong leadership and a clear agenda could probably bring Trump and his regime down…but that’s just not going to happen.
People on the center-Left are just too busy being keyboard warriors to do something as dramatic as actually risk their “lives and sacred honors” in the real world. So, here we are, an autocracy.
The only lingering question is who gets to be the guy or woman who is president for 40 odd years once Trump shuffles off this mortal coil. I honestly don’t know at the moment. Maybe it’s going to be Musk, his legal inability to have the job be damned? Who knows?
I suspect the person is going to be a Trump, one way or another. And given Trump’s fascination with being a king, I wonder what would happen if he styled himself an emperor. Would anything happen? Anything at all?
Much of what I predicted over the years — and a lot I didn’t — has happened in the short time since Trump became president again….and….nothing. No General Strike, no mass protests, nothing.
So, as of this moment, it seems as though the path is clear for Trump to become a Putin-like figure. He will transition us into a legalistic autocracy and the real question becomes who will be his successor, the one who will be president for decades to come.
I have no doubt that Trump is going to run for and win an illegal third term. That goes without saying. But he is old and he’s not going to live forever, someone, somewhere, is going to pick up the autocratic mantel. It’s probably going to be someone named Trump.
If we were still a democracy, I would say someone like AOC or Jon Stewart would have a chance to swoop in and fix a lot of the problems Trump has caused by the time 2028 rolls around. But I think our elections will no longer be free and fair and Trump will rule by decree for the most part, leaving the legislative and judiciary branches as moot.
We have to take seriously the prospect that the FBI is going to investigate and arrest AOC, Jon Stewart and anyone else who might actually have a chance against Trump in 2028, even if the elections won’t be free and fair.
So, this is it. They will come after me soon enough, I suppose, probably by pushing me out of a window.
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