I will not be joining in the post mortems on the election campaign. I have no insight into the mind of someone who wasn't sure if Trump would be better or worse than Harris and was persuadable by the right set of ads. Nor am I an expert in reaching people who pay no attention to politics. Some of the commentary I've seen appears to consist of people claiming that if only their issue had been made the focus, everything would have been fine; but a lot of it is arguments that I'm simply not qualified to judge. One thing I will say though is that if any of it is accurate, then most of the rest must be wrong or irrelevant.
In 2021 I expected that by now Donald Trump would be broke, in jail, officially suffering from dementia, or dead. Possibly more than one; or avoiding one by means of another. This is the kind of prediction that you can keep making and eventually be right, but all of them could have happened:
- he has been fined enough money that it could plausibly bring down whatever house of cards he has running with his business. That fine may survive, but I doubt it; and now that he's president again it will certainly not send him broke.
- he could have been jailed on a number of counts, but all of them were delayed long enough that he has effectively escaped accountability.
- he is clearly suffering from early stage dementia, and by 2028 I think he will be visibly worse than Biden is now. But staff can prop up someone like that for a long time (as we have seen in multiple cases over recent years) and it will only affect him politically if *his supporters* take it seriously. The Trump cult will do what it takes not to notice.
- I didn't actually have assassination attempts in mind and I very much hope none happen during his term; that would be a disaster. But he's a fat slob who eats too much McDonalds and doesn't believe in exercise; a stroke or a heart attack are always on the cards.
As much as he deserves all of them, only a health crisis will take him off our hands now.
These coming four years will be a lot harder than the first four - just having to do something like that again is bad enough, but Trump will be much worse this time.
- last time we could hope that he was old and uninterested in the job (as opposed to the position, which he loves). This time he knows he needs to put loyalists in place if he wants to keep the position, and he will warp US institutions much more vigorously to make it happen.
- last time we could hope that he just wanted to be treated as important; this time he's brought in a lot of people who are young and ambitious to make the country over into a frankly right-wing white Christian Nationalist state.
- last time we could hope that voters would see what an incompetent he was and vote him out at the end of one term. This time we know that they will not, and are willing to forgive even attempts at insurrection. Will term limits hold? Maybe it doesn't matter if he can give his Project 2025 supporters enough control of the voting system.
- last time we could hope the judiciary would limit his actions. This time he already has three personally appointed supreme court justices and will likely add two more. And they have already shown they are willing to warp the law for him even without him in power.
- last time we could hope the Republican party would stand up for itself. This time all the people who were most willing to do that have been driven out or folded up.
It will be a long four years (or however long it ends up). Will he invade Panama or Greenland? Impose ruinously destructive tariffs? Leave NATO? Destroy institutions like the FDA? Which ones are just clouds of squid ink, and which ones are serious? Trump was never a coherent policy thinker, dementia will not have improved him, and the removal of guardrails will make it more likely that random ideas just end up getting implemented.
I would like to see this as a mini-series so that:
- I can satisfy my curiosity about exactly which hare-brained/horrific schemes get implemented
- I can show it to people who thought Trump was a great idea, before they get frog-boiled into accepting it all
- I can get it over with in a few hours
- It doesn't really happen to actual human beings.
So here's a few markers to come back to in four years. Let's see if I am optimistic, pessimistic, or realistic:
- deportations will not get near 20 million or whatever; instead it will be "whoever the local cops don't like", with carveouts for industries who employ illegals but are good at lobbying or rich enough to pay bribes
- significant numbers of US citizens will be caught up in deportation sweeps and some will be deported before they can sort things out
- the US will not invade Canada or Greenland, but might invade Panama. This will make the canal more expensive not less.
- Trump will effectively abandon Ukraine. The Europeans may support them enough to keep them going, but either way China will attempt to occupy Taiwan during this term in the expectation that the US will make no serious effort to stop them.
- Tariffs will be a byzantine mess of corruption and exceptions
- Trump will do something important and bad that conservatives currently dismiss as a left-wing fantasy and will later claim is perfectly acceptable.
Meantime I will be trying as much as possible to tune out the constant garbage, and waiting to see what actually goes wrong.
