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What happens if Donald Trump wins in 2024?
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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2022 12:43 pm    Post subject: What happens if Donald Trump wins in 2024? Reply with quote

The following is a very insightful and interesting analysis in the Washington Post yesterday by David Montgomery. While it is quite long in length, it definitely is a sobering read that portends an outcome that is beyond scary for this nation. No doubt, another Donald Trump presidency would likely be the ruin of our democracy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/10/10/country-after-second-trump-term/



"Imagine it’s Jan. 20, 2025. Inauguration Day. The president-elect raises his right hand and begins to recite the oath: I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear …

It’s an anti-Trumper’s nightmare, but it could happen: 47 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents want Trump to be the nominee in 2024, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll. And if Trump and Joe Biden are the contenders, Trump narrowly edges Biden, 48 to 46 percent, among registered voters (albeit within the poll’s margin of error).

The twice-impeached president’s tenure in office was a festival of democratic norm-breaking, culminating in the “big lie” about the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 insurrection. A second term would likely bring more of the same — only this time Trump would have four years of practice under his belt.


Trump dramatically changed the presidency. Here’s a list of the 20 most important norms he broke — and how Biden can restore them.
Can Antony Blinken Update Liberal Foreign Policy for a World Gone Mad?
To help game out the consequences of another Trump administration, I turned to 21 experts in the presidency, political science, public administration, the military, intelligence, foreign affairs, economics and civil rights. They sketched chillingly plausible chains of potential actions and reactions that could unravel the nation. “I think it would be the end of the republic,” says Princeton University professor Sean Wilentz, one of the historians President Biden consulted in August about America’s teetering democracy. “It would be a kind of overthrow from within. … It would be a coup of the way we’ve always understood America.”

Based on what these experts described, here’s a portrait of a democratic crackup in three phases.


Phase 1: Trump seizes control of the government …
… And installs super loyalists.
“Among the first things he would do, in the initial hours of his presidency, would be to fire [FBI Director] Christopher Wray and purge the FBI,” says Larry Diamond, senior fellow in global democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Diamond’s research has focused on the plight of democracy in other countries, but lately he’s been thinking and writing about its ailments in America. Trump “would then set about trying to politicize the FBI, the intelligence agencies and as much of the government as possible,” Diamond continues. “He has complete authority to appoint the senior ranks of the National Security Council. So you could see [retired Lt. Gen.] Michael Flynn” — who was pardoned by Trump after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI — “as the national security adviser again, or somebody else who would not represent any of the prudence and restraints and efforts to rein in Trump’s more authoritarian and impulsive instincts.”

FBI directors serve 10-year terms across presidential terms to depoliticize the job. Wray, who was appointed by Trump but lost his favor, ascended to the post in 2017 after Trump fired his predecessor, James Comey, partly to undermine the bureau’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Comey’s firing caused an uproar and helped lead to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller to oversee the Russia probe. It’s doubtful firing Wray would cause much backlash from Trump’s allies in Congress and his base, given widespread Republican criticism of the search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home, to retrieve classified documents. But even if his allies did balk, Trump might not care; he wouldn’t have to face voters again. Trump made his own view of federal law enforcement clear at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in September: “The FBI and the Justice Department have become vicious monsters controlled by radical-left scoundrels, lawyers and the media who tell them what to do.”

“I think certainly in the power ministries — State, CIA, Defense, Justice — he will look to put true loyalists in,” a senior Pentagon official in the Trump administration, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me by email. “When I say loyalist, I mean somebody who places their loyalty to him above their oath of office.”

In his first term, Trump burned through Cabinet members at a high rate because they kept failing the loyalty test: Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper objected to using the military to put down racial justice protests. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly called Trump a “f---ing moron.”

Trump supporters chalk up the churn to a chaotic transition that failed to elevate the right talent to key positions. Now, a number of outside groups formed by supporters and former Trump administration officials are aiming to fix that problem by identifying and vetting a government-in-waiting that will be ready to serve Trump or a Trump-like president right away. “We just have to be more organized and more purposeful and more strategic, and ensure that we have the right team of people from the very top ... and then ensuring that we’ve got a structure in place that allows us to move forward our agenda,” says Brooke Rollins, director of the Domestic Policy Council during the Trump administration, now president and CEO of the America First Policy Institute.


If Trump installed loyalists at the FBI and Justice Department — picture as the next attorney general Jeffrey Clark, the Justice official who tried to get the department to help overturn the 2020 election — then any lingering federal investigations of Trump could be dropped. An endless series of investigations of Hunter Biden, Liz Cheney, Merrick Garland, Brad Raffensperger, Letitia James and other perceived enemies could begin. “This is a guy for whom political revenge is pretty front and center,” says Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die.” “He’s going to come in and use the state to go after his enemies. He has a long list of grievances against people. … He’s going to come in like an authoritarian autocrat on steroids.”

Loyalists would lead other departments as well. While in office, Trump futilely tweeted at the Federal Reserve, seeking a monetary policy that would benefit him politically, and compared Chairman Jerome Powell to an “enemy” like China’s Xi Jinping. Powell’s term is up in 2026. If Trump could get a loyalist through the Senate, interest rates could be manipulated to juice the economy ahead of elections, says Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama, author of “The End of History and the Last Man” and, most recently, “Liberalism and Its Discontents.” Meanwhile, a politicized Bureau of Labor Statistics could lead to monthly jobs reports suddenly becoming suspect. Or how about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention? Says Fukuyama: “Do you want people who believe in hydroxychloroquine making these decisions?”


He governs without Senate advice and consent.
Democrats hope to retain control of the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. But even if they do, a Trump victory in 2024 presupposes that he will have strong coattails to sweep in down-ballot candidates — and a Trumpified Senate could reasonably be expected to approve his nominees for top jobs in his administration.

What if, however, a few Republicans balk at nominees who are just too beyond the pale? Or what if the Democrats hold a majority? Not a problem. By the end of his first term, Trump had mastered the art of governing without the advice and consent of the Senate. In part he was forced to do so by Democratic obstruction and by the terrible dysfunction of the appointments process — an already damaged corner of our democracy. But Trump, more than any other president in memory, relied on “acting” Cabinet secretaries and unconfirmed agency chiefs who wielded delegated authority. “I sort of like ‘acting,’ ” Trump told reporters in 2019. “It gives me more flexibility.”

It can also create chaos. In the last year of Trump’s term, the Government Accountability Office found that his acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and the acting DHS deputy were serving unlawfully, calling into question the legitimacy of their policy decisions. But there’s little to stop a president willing to skirt the rules and run out the clock on his term. It would take both houses of Congress to stand up to him, perhaps wielding the power of the purse as a cudgel, says Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group focused on effective government and smooth presidential transitions. And what if a gridlocked Congress failed to check an out-of-control chief executive? Stier told me: “If the president decides they’re going to install a secretary of defense that isn’t actually confirmed, and Congress isn’t going to try to respond with their powers and try to stop that, I think the reality is that there’s not much that you can do.”


He creates a MAGA civil service.
Installing loyalists at the top of government won’t be enough. As for populating the rank and file with those who echo the former president’s slogan of Make America Great Again, Trump tipped his hand near the end of his term, when he signed an executive order designed to strip as many as tens of thousands of federal employees of their civil service protections. The order created a new category of employees, dubbed Schedule F, targeting those whose jobs arguably include a degree of policymaking. Top officials would be able to fire them almost at will. President Biden rescinded the order shortly after he was inaugurated. If Trump were reelected, he’d reinstate the policy, Axios reported in July.

“They are using the language of good government to justify this, saying that this is the only way that you can discipline poorly performing workers,” Fukuyama says. “But obviously their real intention is to basically politicize the whole civil service. … Because Trump personalizes everything to such an extent, he’s going to be super looking out for revenge and therefore going after, for example, anybody that denied that he won the 2020 election. And this is going to go down to a really low, granular level of American government.”

The approach would restore a patronage system that hasn’t existed in the United States since reforms were enacted in the late 19th century, says Stier. “It is fundamentally this notion that the president should be able to decide, not on the basis of merit, but on the basis of political or personal interest, a larger segment of the workforce,” he says.


The country already has far more politically appointed civil servants — some 4,000 — than most, or all, liberal democracies, Stier explains. We need fewer consigned to that status, not more, he says. As an example of the potential impact, Stier notes that Trump’s Office of Management and Budget reportedly identified nearly 90 percent of its employees as fitting into the new category. The OMB is the nerve center of the government, making vital decisions on budgets and regulations for all the agencies, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Internal Revenue Service to the Defense Department to the intelligence community. Political actors from OMB could reach into all the scattered engine rooms of democracy; other corners of the government could undergo similar transformations. (A Democratic bill to block initiatives like Schedule F is currently before the Senate. But even if it passes, it could always be repealed.)

Rollins, of the America First Policy Institute, rejects the charge that a measure such as Schedule F would harm government. “It’s not really about us-versus-them, or ‘they’re the bad guys in the federal government and we’re the good guys going to put in some draconian new measures that allow us to come in and clear everybody out,’ ” she says. “But what I do believe we have to put in place is a system where those who agree with the agenda of more freedom and less government have people working in those positions that also align and agree with that. It’s okay if you don’t, but maybe you should not necessarily be part of a policymaking process.”

Fukuyama maintains it would mark the death knell of expertise in the U.S. government. “It’s ridiculous when you can’t run a modern government without expertise,” he says, “and they want to try to undo that system because of these right-wing ideas about the ‘deep state’ and the need to root it out.”


Phase 2: Trump deploys the military aggressively at home, while retreating abroad.
Once Trump has centralized power through cadres of vetted loyalists across government, what will he do with it? As The Post has previously chronicled, he’s already told us, in speeches over the past several months, some of his proposals if he decides to run: Execute drug dealers. Move homeless people to tent cities. Eliminate the Education Department. Restrict voting to one day using paper ballots. But there could be much more — including profound shifts in military and foreign policy.

He uses the military to promote his own political power.
After Trump led Secretary of Defense Esper, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley and other officials across Lafayette Square for a photo op in June 2020 amid racial justice protests, Milley apologized to the public for participating in a staged politicized event, enraging Trump. In a second term, such cautionary voices will be fewer, says Peter Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University and a leading expert on civilian-military relations.

“President Trump and his team of loyalists … are going to seek to magnify the president’s already extraordinary power in this area and remove the safeguards … sometimes mockingly called the ‘adults in the room.’ ” Feaver predicts. “Those safeguards don’t prevent the president from doing what he wants to do. They slow the system down from responding to the whim that the president expresses and make sure the president has heard all sides and is willing to own the consequences.”

Some of the ramifications would be small: During a Trump presidency, for instance, expect to see armored troop carriers, soldiers with flashing bayonets and enormous missile launchers stream down Pennsylvania Avenue on Veterans Day as Trump finally gets a military parade. He yearned for one during his first term but was talked out of it by advisers and military officials. It’s “the kind of thing that would probably happen,” Feaver told me.

More substantively, Trump — taking up items listed in an aide’s memo near the end of his term on why he should fire Esper — could restore Confederate symbols to military bases, reinstitute an effective ban on transgender people serving, and dismantle ongoing diversity and inclusion efforts that his Senate allies already lampoon as “woke.” “These would be a series of dumb, dumb moves done for political stunts and Twitter troll point-scoring rather than because this is a sincere effort to improve national security,” Feaver says.


A dramatic and potentially deadly breach with tradition could come if widespread street protests erupt against Trump and his policies, or if disputes over future elections turn violent. When the murder of George Floyd sparked demonstrations for racial justice in 2020, Trump wanted to call in federal troops. Esper and other national security officials opposed the move and Trump never gave the order. But in a second term with a team of loyalists, who would tell Trump no? “This time Trump’s got a hack Defense Department and moves to repress,” says Levitsky, the Harvard professor. “We know that repression of protest very often triggers the escalation of protests; it could get very ugly, very quickly, under Trump.”

In such a scenario, the response of other elements of the federal government and federal law enforcement could be unpredictable. “What that order does is that it fractures the American federal government, because you give an order like that to fire on American civilians and then maybe some agencies will pick it up and some won’t,” says Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale University who writes about freedom and tyranny. “There’s a very real possibility that giving an order like that leads not to protest being put down, but it leads to some Americans in uniform firing on other Americans in uniform, with the people on both sides being convinced that they are doing the lawful and correct thing.”

American global leadership is finished — much to Putin’s delight.
As for the use of military power abroad, Trump mostly favored withdrawals during his term (though he did authorize a drone strike to kill a key Iranian commander in Iraq in 2020 and, according to the Associated Press, considered an invasion of Venezuela in 2017). Trump wanted to pull U.S. troops out of South Korea, Germany and Somalia, but critics warned that those moves would be devastating to global security and alliances. A second term might see them come to pass, Feaver says: “There’s a higher likelihood that the president would take risky action, but they would be risky actions of retreat, or abandonment of allies … rather than invasions of countries, although downstream they could result in that.”

“One might argue that’s the starting point,” the former senior Pentagon official told me. “Withdraw all U.S. forces and diplomats from Africa, withdraw all U.S. forces from Germany. … And depending on his views of Putin and the conflict in Ukraine, he might just stop the flow of arms, ammunition and material to Kyiv.”


A Trump supporter holds a MAGA hat at a rally in Perry, Ga., in September 2021. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
If in 2025 Ukraine still depends on American aid for survival, halting it would hand Vladimir Putin the victory that he was denied in 2022. Recent work to restore America’s leadership and ability to coordinate allies against rogue actors would be undone. “You’ll see a Putin summit,” predicts Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who worked in the State Department for Republican and Democratic secretaries of state. NATO would be undermined if not abandoned. “Trump’s election,” says Wilentz, the Princeton historian, “means the end of the Western alliance.”

American foreign policy would not only be upended vis-a-vis Russia and NATO. “The overriding interest in the Gulf isn’t going to have anything to do with national security,” Miller says. “It’s going to have to do with the security of the Trump Organization.”

Beyond an issue-by-issue restoration of Trump’s isolationist version of an “America First” foreign policy, Miller foresees a ruinous blow to the country’s stature in the eyes of friends and foes. “The Europeans understand that the bloom is off the rose on our capacity to tell and lecture others about what freedom and democracy mean. But never before have they looked into a window where the basic concept of America, the stability of our political system … has been now replaced with one party essentially no longer being willing to respect norms and institutions that are essential to good governance. … Another four years of Donald Trump, and what that could do to faith in government, our institutions, our political stability and our values, would fundamentally open … a more permanent set of questions about America. What does this country stand for now? Is it so deeply divided and polarized that it can’t create a coherent image to the world?”


Intelligence work is harmed.
Up the Potomac River from the Pentagon, at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., a Trump loyalist ensconced in the director’s chair could damage intelligence efforts at the most basic levels, retired Gen. Michael Hayden, who served as CIA director under President George W. Bush, told me over lunch at a diner. “Seasoned people will leave,” he said.

Worse, key allies may be loath to share top secrets. Hayden recalled being able to hop on the phone with spy chiefs around the world to supplement the intelligence-sharing that happens through other channels. But after seeing how Trump handled top secrets at Mar-a-Lago, “Do you want to say something secret to the Americans or not?” Hayden said. “If Trump is in power again, after four years, many of those people won’t ever trust us again.”

In spy work, as in so many professions essential to democracy, respect for facts and the objective search for truth are vital, Hayden added. He said Trump’s reelection would be another sign the country is “spiraling down” into a “post-truth” era.


Phase 3: Political violence and democratic collapse? It’s possible.
Trump did not cause the fissures slowly pulling the country apart. He’s a symptom — but he’s also an accelerant, one whose return to the White House could provoke the final breakdown. “Trump has been able to add to the narrative that if democracy doesn’t deliver what I want, then it must be a flaw in the democracy,” says Nicole Bibbins Sedaca, executive vice president of Freedom House, a nonpartisan democratic advocacy and research group, which has recorded a decade-long decline in political and civil rights in the United States that accelerated during Trump’s term, putting us on par with Romania and Panama.

Ideological, racial and ethnic tensions ramp up.
America is already gripped by an unprecedented level of what political scientists call “pernicious polarization” — stoked and exploited by Trump — and a second Trump term could make it dangerously worse, says Jennifer McCoy, a political science professor at Georgia State University who co-authored a study of the phenomenon for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. No other established democracy since at least 1950 has been so polarized for so long. In nearly half of the dozens of countries McCoy studied, the next step after pernicious polarization was either “electoral autocracy” — where votes are cast but don’t necessarily confer power — or outright “democratic collapse.” “It’s extremely worrisome; we’re in uncharted territory,” McCoy told me. “If Trump does come back, I think it would severely deepen the crisis that we face.”

Racism, including violent racism, is likely to increase. “The most immediate concern of Trump returning to the presidency is it would provide the greatest domestic terrorist threat of our time — violent white supremacist organizations — the ability to rebuild and spread and engage in even more violence and terror,” says Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University and author of “How to Be an Antiracist.” At the same time, “I don’t think the people who are opposed to what Trump would try to build would just go lightly into the night. The ideological collision, potentially violent collision, political collision would just be unlike anything we’ve seen since the Reconstruction era.”


Protesters march toward the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)
Trump would almost certainly return to the issue that first built his following in the GOP and still animates the party: harsh measures to counter illegal immigration. “America will not be known as the place of the Statue of Liberty but rather as the place where there’s a big wall at the border,” says Vanessa Cárdenas, deputy director of America’s Voice, an immigrant advocacy group. She predicts he’ll find another domestic use for the military: deployment to the border with Mexico. Dehumanizing rhetoric and conspiracy theories about White people losing their status will lead to more mass shootings targeting immigrants, like the one in El Paso in 2019, she adds. “He will just continue to create these really hard moments, terrifying moments, for communities.”


The bonds that bind the Union loosen.
How Trump gets reelected matters. Is it a close but legitimate victory where he loses the popular vote but takes the electoral college, as he did in 2016? Or do the insurrectionist schemes that failed in 2020 — getting state officials to block certification and substitute slates of electors — work in 2024? Perhaps by 2024 such shenanigans will have been made legal in certain swing states. Ultimately, does the GOP-appointed Supreme Court majority or the gerrymandered House of Representatives pick the winner?

The intensity and immediacy of the backlash would vary depending on those circumstances, but serious damage to the democracy may be inevitable either way if Trump is on the ballot, says David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “We have a significant percentage of the American electorate right now who have been lied to about the integrity of our elections, who believe that elections … are rigged unless their candidate wins,” he told me. “Yet it’s nowhere close to 50 percent of America overall. But if Trump were to win a narrow victory again, I could see [election denial] ideas … infecting a larger percentage of the electorate. And if a large segment of a democracy’s electorate loses confidence in elections, that democracy probably is unsustainable.”

Differences between states could deepen. “You’d be looking at states — Democratic states — which would be taking over Republican arguments about states’ rights and applying them in a different way to try to limit the reach of the federal government,” says Snyder, the Yale historian. “And then you’d also be seeing something which I think has already started to happen as a result of the overturning of Roe v. Wade: You’re going to see people moving. It might be a peaceful process at first. But I think you’re going to see populations sorting themselves out according to where people feel safe and at home, which will mean red states becoming more red and blue states becoming more blue. And that makes some kind of secession or breakup scenario in the medium term more likely.”

The message of prophets of democratic doom can sound over-the-top, but to dismiss it, experts say, would be naive.
Becker, who with journalist Major Garrett recently published “The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of the Big Lie,” says he can foresee increasingly nightmarish scenarios of democratic dominoes falling in the wake of a Trump reelection. “It would be very hard for him to keep the Union together as it is now,” Becker says. That doesn’t necessarily mean civil war; short of armed conflict, there are things “that could weaken the bonds between the states.” An example we’re already seeing is the governors of Texas and Florida sending migrants to D.C. and Massachusetts, based on “the idea that states are competitors rather than collaborators and partners,” Becker says. Actions like that to score points against blue states on any number of issues will multiply, and blue states will retaliate.

“If Trump won reelection in 2024, how long until California says, ‘Why are we sending [more in taxes] for every federal dollar we’re getting back?’ ” Becker says. “ ‘Why aren’t we requiring the federal government to pay for its use of the naval bases in San Diego and Camp Pendleton and other places?’ … There are a lot of people who would say, ‘Oh, that would never happen.’ [But] what we’ve seen in the last two years we thought would never happen.”

“What if the ties that bind us have become so weak that even that can’t result in the enforcement of federal court rulings?” Becker continues. “A democracy that must by definition rely upon the rule of law … is built upon an agreement that these paper or parchment documents have meaning and we will abide by them. … If someone like Trump … comes into office with a clear contempt for the rule of law, which I think time and again he has demonstrated, at what point does the rule of law evaporate? At what point does that agreement evaporate? At what point do the people who oppose him say, ‘Okay, are we going to fight him with one arm tied behind our back, even though he won’t do that?’ ”


The chances of civil war increase.
That’s when the potential for violent conflict is real. For those studying the implications of these trends, “there’s no scenario that worries us more than that the wheels just come off completely from the restraints against violence in the United States,” says Diamond, of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute. “My biggest concern is what citizens would do to citizens, and what citizens might do to legitimately constituted government authority.”

Some of the preconditions for civil war — a weakening democracy with hindrances to popular participation and divisions along identity lines — are brewing in the United States, says Barbara Walter, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego and the author of “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.” Those dynamics could intensify with Trump or a similar figure in the White House, she says. It wouldn’t be an 1860s-style civil war of states vs. states; if it did come to pass, she says, “the type of war we’re going to see is an insurgency. … [Participants] are going to fight a type of guerrilla war, a siege of terror that’s going to be targeted very specifically at certain individuals and certain groups of people, all civilians.”

‘They are preparing for war’: An expert on civil wars discusses where political extremists are taking this country

The election of Trump would not necessarily cause the kinds of people who stormed the Capitol to stand down, just because their goal of elevating their leader has been achieved four years later. “There’s a scenario by which [their aggression] accelerates because they’ve won and they’re emboldened and they have a president who, with a wink and a nod, encourages them not to allow ‘cheating’ and disloyalty at lower levels of authority,” Diamond says. The already commonplace threats and intimidation of public officials, civic volunteers and civil servants — election workers, teachers, health-care workers, librarians — could spread and strengthen, egged on by Trump, driving more from their jobs to be replaced by MAGA loyalists.

Activated rage would not be limited to Trump supporters. A narrow or dubious Trump victory would inspire massive, potentially violent protests on the left. “Then the MAGA, violent, January 6th-style extremists would take that as the signal to rise up,” Diamond says.


A rally in Warren, Mich., on Oct. 1, 2022. (Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images)
“This is not going to be something that’s just done by one side; that’s why the risk of political violence is so severe,” Becker says. “Oftentimes we talk about the passage of [anti-democratic] laws and the taking of power as if that’s the finish line. It’s just the starting line of a really violent and vicious race.”

Snyder — whose books include “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century” and “The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America” — elaborates on what could ensue: “I think there’s a very important miscalculation going on, on the right, which is that ‘if anyone makes a ruckus, it’s going to be us,’ ” he says. “Folks on the right think that chaos is a button that they push. … Another assumption that the right makes which is erroneous is that they’re the only ones who have guns. … They may be carrying more weapons than the other side, but there are so many weapons in the United States, and there are plenty of people who are not on the right who have weapons, and there could be many more very quickly.”

The spiral of violence, response and counter-response would create the kind of disorder that Trump — no longer constrained by his secretary of defense and attorney general — could use to justify invoking the Insurrection Act. Then federal troops would flood the streets of American cities — and this time, not for a parade.


Could it happen here? Would it be that bad? The message of prophets of democratic doom can sound over-the-top — “crackpot, practically,” acknowledges Wilentz, the Princeton historian. But to dismiss it, they say, would be naive — and they urge vigilance and civic engagement to prevent the nightmare from coming true.

A spokesman for Trump did not return my emails seeking the former president’s reaction to claims that his reelection could wreck democracy. A few days after Biden’s recent democracy speech in Philadelphia — in which the current president said, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic” — Trump responded at a rally: “As you know, this week, Joe Biden came to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to give the most vicious, hateful and divisive speech ever delivered by an American president, vilifying 75 million citizens … as threats to democracy and as enemies of the state. … He’s an enemy of the state, you want to know the truth. … We are the ones trying to save our democracy.”

After four more years of nihilistic energy like that, the experience of being American could well have been transformed into something unrecognizable. “If Trump wins, I don’t imagine some kind of normal inauguration in ’29,” Snyder says. “If we want a normal inauguration in ’29, we need one in ’25 which involves somebody else.”"
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cgoudie1



Joined: 10 Apr 2006
Posts: 2597
Location: Killer Sturgeon Cove

PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2022 6:32 pm    Post subject: Re: What happens if Donald Trump wins in 2024? Reply with quote

Greetings Steve,

I found this interesting enough to try a rational response. So I've removed
everything in your article except that to which I am responding.

In my opinion, Trump is indeed a symptom and a accelerant for a cultural
dissatisfaction. As stupid as I see him, he knows how to exploit
dissatisfaction . The real issue is, in my opinion, a cultural shift towards
greed in a broad sense, and we taught that to our people. Maybe greed
is bad, maybe greed is good (Like Gordon Geko and John Galt say). At
this point it doesn't matter. This is what was taught to our children, and their children.

Personally, I'm a fan of capitalism, but it has it's issues. Obviously strict
communism doesn't work. Socialism doesn't appear to be the best benefit
for it's people either (and don't get me started on Theocracies). The Chinese
appear to be making an improvement for their people as they evolve towards
Capitalism (they have ethical issues that will ultimately need to be
addressed though). My bet is they'll be dealing with this same cultural
divide in about 3 generations.

I guess my point is whether it's Trump or Buttigieg (or Biden), if we
don't change what we value (and reward) in our culture, we'll continue
on the same schismous path, and we'll have the same dissatisfaction.
In fact, we may have to wait two generations for anything rational (my daughter's debate).

But we could start now because a virtuous leader can make things work
(a la P.J O'Rourke's Eat the Rich) in almost any cultural system.

If the republican party is stupid enough to nominate Donald Trump again,
and democrats have and use the same tactics to discredit him, we'll go
around this same silly game yet again. We're still talking about the evils
a celebrity television show host (not even a real actor) perpetrated on
the world, two years after his name should be all but forgotten. Maybe
looking forward would be a new and fruitful approach.

I think deep down most people know what virtue is. That's what I'll be
voting for in which ever party it comes, barring that I'll be looking for the
most rational "leader".

-Craig

p.s. If we end up with another President Trump then a awful lot of us must
have wanted it, again, consider that!

p.p.s yes I did make up a word, but it follows English rules and conveys well,
I'm keeping it.


swchandler wrote:
The following is a very insightful and interesting analysis in the Washington Post yesterday by David Montgomery. While it is quite long in length, it definitely is a sobering read that portends an outcome that is beyond scary for this nation. No doubt, another Donald Trump presidency would likely be the ruin of our democracy.


Phase 3: Political violence and democratic collapse? It’s possible.
Trump did not cause the fissures slowly pulling the country apart. He’s a symptom — but he’s also an accelerant, one whose return to the White House could provoke the final breakdown. “Trump has been able to add to the narrative that if democracy doesn’t deliver what I want, then it must be a flaw in the democracy,” says Nicole Bibbins Sedaca, executive vice president of Freedom House, a nonpartisan democratic advocacy and research group, which has recorded a decade-long decline in political and civil rights in the United States that accelerated during Trump’s term, putting us on par with Romania and Panama.

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vientomas



Joined: 25 Apr 2000
Posts: 2343

PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2022 9:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

A thoughtful response cgoudie1, but I have to ask, and I mean no disrespect, merely attempting to engage in a discussion without name calling...

Definition of capitalism: an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.

Do we in the US truly participate in a "free market"? The goverment provides many a subsidy and tax breaks for various businesses. How does that square with "capitalism"? What about lobbyists who shill for their employers in the halls of Congress and go so far as to draft legisiation which benefits their clients? All good in the name of "capitalism"? Concentration of wealth among a few? that's OK too? Let them eat cake? An expectation of continued and unending growth on a planet with finitie resources. Burn in down in the name of "capitalism"?

Sorry, I can't agree and I'm no ecomomist, and I can't put a name to a superior economic construct, but I can say with some certainty that we in the US are NOT in a capitalist economic system by definition and that continuing down the path we are on...is no bueno.

I encourage a civil discussion. BTW...good day at The Wall yesterday! Hope you got some.
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MalibuGuru



Joined: 11 Nov 1993
Posts: 9293

PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2022 11:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The world that is spinning out of control will return to normal
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cgoudie1



Joined: 10 Apr 2006
Posts: 2597
Location: Killer Sturgeon Cove

PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2022 11:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Greetings and I'm glad the Wall was good for you. It's been a long time
since I saw good conditions out there, and I'm not in town until the end
of the Month, so I missed it.

You are right that the Capitalism we practice in the US is not the Ayn Randian
stuff from your Webster's definition, it has a number of corrupted elements,
(though we can debate about whether lobbyists are a corruption, or a true
representation of the practice). Are there less corrupt versions? I don't
know any, but I'm not an economist either. I'm a fan of the concept,
because it gives you a personal reason to excel, and the way I see human
behavior, skin in the game seems to be a prime motivator. One of it's
unfortunate side effects, is that it can condense power into some small,
groups and if they get no oversight, well, that's what regulation is about.
So already, our capitalism (or what ever you want to call it) is "corrupted"
by regulation. If people were perfectly virtuous pure capitalism might
work, but we are the product of at least 80,000 years of evolution (plus
a lot longer before we were creatively sentient), so we have a component
of selfishness that we recognize as keeping us alive (and maybe that's not
a bad thing, it's hard to say).

We do need an even better system, on that we agree (I think). I'd start
with what we currently call capitalism in this country and make modifications
(maybe you'd start with something else). I'm no shaman though, I've got
all the standard human failings, and a pretty limited intellect.

But I'm recommending that we start with rewarding behavior( we could
call that teaching) that improves the lives of our families, ourselves, our
tribe, and the human race. I think that the current practice of "look at me
look at me" that our culture rewards heavily is probably too selfish, and
causes a lot of dissatisfaction, and division. Wouldn't it be grand if
instead of exploiting those issues to make themselves powerful by
manipulation, our potential "leaders" thought about what would
improve the quality of life for their families, themselves, their tribe,
and the human race.

-Craig



vientomas wrote:
A thoughtful response cgoudie1, but I have to ask, and I mean no disrespect, merely attempting to engage in a discussion without name calling...

Definition of capitalism: an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.

Do we in the US truly participate in a "free market"? The goverment provides many a subsidy and tax breaks for various businesses. How does that square with "capitalism"? What about lobbyists who shill for their employers in the halls of Congress and go so far as to draft legisiation which benefits their clients? All good in the name of "capitalism"? Concentration of wealth among a few? that's OK too? Let them eat cake? An expectation of continued and unending growth on a planet with finitie resources. Burn in down in the name of "capitalism"?

Sorry, I can't agree and I'm no ecomomist, and I can't put a name to a superior economic construct, but I can say with some certainty that we in the US are NOT in a capitalist economic system by definition and that continuing down the path we are on...is no bueno.

I encourage a civil discussion. BTW...good day at The Wall yesterday! Hope you got some.


Last edited by cgoudie1 on Thu Oct 13, 2022 5:34 am; edited 1 time in total
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Wed Oct 12, 2022 12:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

POTUS lies will diminish (and the left's outrage will continue regardless of these facts):

Trump Administration Accomplishments
by Connie Beard

One Hundred And Twenty One Accomplishments By President Trump And His Cabinet.

Here you go. Easy to Google and double check. Checking for yourself is always best. This list is not all inclusive. There are more to add to this list every week.

Trump recently signed 3 bills to benefit Native people. One gives compensation to the Spokane tribe for loss of their lands in the mid-1900s, one funds Native language programs, and the third gives federal recognition to the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians in Montana.
Trump finalized the creation of Space Force as our 6th Military branch.
Trump signed a law to make cruelty to animals a federal felony so that animal abusers face tougher consequences.
Prior to the recent violent Antifa protests, violent crime has fallen every year he’s been in office after rising during the 2 years before he was elected.
Trump signed a bill making CBD and Hemp legal.
Trump’s EPA gave $100 million to fix the water infrastructure problem in Flint, Michigan.
Under Trump’s leadership, in 2018 the U.S. surpassed Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest producer of crude oil.
Trump signed a law ending the gag orders on Pharmacists that prevented them from sharing money-saving information.
Trump signed the “Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act” (FOSTA), which includes the “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act” (SESTA) which both give law enforcement and victims new tools to fight sex trafficking.
Trump signed a bill to require airports to provide spaces for breastfeeding Moms.
The 25% lowest-paid Americans enjoyed a 4.5% income boost in November 2019, which outpaces a 2.9% gain in earnings for the country's highest-paid workers.
Low-wage workers are benefiting from higher minimum wages and from corporations that are increasing entry-level pay.
Trump signed the biggest wilderness protection & conservation bill in a decade and designated 375,000 acres as protected land.
Trump signed the Save our Seas Act which funds $10 million per year to clean tons of plastic & garbage from the ocean.
He signed a bill this year allowing some drug imports from Canada so that prescription prices would go down.
Trump signed an executive order this year that forces all healthcare providers to disclose the cost of their services so that Americans can comparison shop and know how much less providers charge insurance companies. When signing that bill, he said no American should be blindsided by bills for medical services they never agreed to in advance.
Hospitals will now be required to post their standard charges for services, which include the discounted price a hospital is willing to accept.
In the eight years prior to President Trump’s inauguration, prescription drug prices increased by an average of 3.6% per year. Under Trump, drug prices have seen year-over-year declines in nine of the last ten months, with a 1.1% drop as of the most recent month.
He created a White House VA Hotline to help veterans and principally staffed it with veterans and direct family members of veterans. VA employees are being held accountable for poor performance, with more than 4,000 VA employees removed, demoted, and suspended so far.
Issued an executive order requiring the Secretaries of Defense, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs to submit a joint plan to provide veterans access to access to mental health treatment as they transition to civilian life.
Because of a bill signed and championed by Trump, In 2020, most federal employees will see their pay increase by an average of 3.1% — the largest raise in more than 10 years.
Trump signed into a law up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave for millions of federal workers.
Trump administration will provide HIV prevention drugs for free to 200,000 uninsured patients per year for 11 years.
All-time record sales during the 2019 holidays.
Trump signed an order allowing small businesses to group together when buying insurance to get a better price.
President Trump signed the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act that provides funding for states to develop maternal mortality reviews to better understand maternal complications and identify solutions & largely focuses on reducing the higher mortality rates for Black Americans.
In 2018, President Trump signed the groundbreaking First Step Act, a criminal justice bill which enacted reforms that make our justice system fairer and help former inmates successfully return to society.
The First Step Act’s reforms addressed inequities in sentencing laws that disproportionately harmed Black Americans and reformed mandatory minimums that created unfair outcomes.
The First Step Act expanded judicial discretion in sentencing of non-violent crimes.
Over 90% of those benefitting from the retroactive sentencing reductions in the First Step Act are Black Americans.
The First Step Act provides rehabilitative programs to inmates, helping them successfully rejoin society and not return to crime.
Trump increased funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) by more than 14%.
Trump signed legislation forgiving Hurricane Katrina debt that threatened HBCUs.
New single-family home sales are up 31.6% in October 2019 compared to just one year ago.
Made HBCUs a priority by creating the position of executive director of the White House Initiative on HBCUs.
Trump received the Bipartisan Justice Award at a historically black college for his criminal justice reform accomplishments.
The poverty rate fell to a 17-year low of 11.8% under the Trump administration as a result of a jobs-rich environment.
Poverty rates for African Americans and Hispanic-Americans have reached their lowest levels since the U.S. began collecting such data.
President Trump signed a bill that creates five national monuments, expands several national parks, adds 1.3 million acres of wilderness, and permanently reauthorizes the Land and Water Conservation Fund.
Trump’s USDA committed $124 Million to rebuild rural water infrastructure.
Consumer confidence & small business confidence is at an all-time high.
Prior to the COVID shut down more than 7 million jobs created since election.
More Americans are now employed than ever recorded before in our history.
More than 400,000 manufacturing jobs created since his election.
Trump appointed 5 openly gay ambassadors.
Trump ordered Ric Grenell, his openly gay ambassador to Germany, to lead a global initiative to decriminalize homosexuality across the globe.
Through Trump’s Anti-Trafficking Coordination Team (ACTeam) initiative, Federal law enforcement more than doubled convictions of human traffickers and increased the number of defendants charged by 75% in ACTeam districts.
In 2018, the Department of Justice (DOJ) dismantled an organization that was the internet’s leading source of prostitution-related advertisements resulting in sex trafficking.
Trump’s OMB published new anti-trafficking guidance for government procurement officials to combat human trafficking more effectively.
Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations arrested 1,588 criminals associated with Human Trafficking.
Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services provided funding to support the National Human Trafficking Hotline to identify perpetrators and give victims the help they need.
The hotline identified 16,862 potential human trafficking cases.
Trump’s DOJ provided grants to organizations that support human trafficking victims – serving nearly 9,000 cases from July 1, 2017, to June 30, 2018.
The Department of Homeland Security has hired more victim assistance specialists, helping victims get resources and support.
President Trump has called on Congress to pass school choice legislation so that no child is trapped in a failing school because of his or her zip code.
The President signed funding legislation in September 2018 that increased funding for school choice by $42 million.
The tax cuts signed into law by President Trump promote school choice by allowing families to use 529 college savings plans for elementary and secondary education.
Under his leadership ISIS has lost most of their territory and been largely dismantled.
ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi was killed.
Signed the first Perkins CTE reauthorization since 2006, authorizing more than $1 billion for states each year to fund vocational and career education programs.
Executive order expanding apprenticeship opportunities for students and workers.
Trump issued an Executive Order prohibiting the U.S. government from discriminating against Christians or punishing expressions of faith.
Signed an executive order that allows the government to withhold money from college campuses deemed to be anti-Semitic and who fail to combat anti-Semitism.
President Trump ordered a halt to U.S. tax money going to international organizations that fund or perform abortions.
Trump imposed sanctions on the socialists in Venezuela who have killed their citizens.
Finalized new trade agreement with South Korea.
Made a deal with the European Union to increase U.S. energy exports to Europe.
Withdrew the U.S. from the job killing TPP deal.
Secured $250 billion in new trade and investment deals in China and $12 billion in Vietnam.
Approved up to $12 billion in aid for farmers affected by unfair trade retaliation.
Has had over a dozen US hostages freed, including those Obama could not get freed.
Trump signed the Music Modernization Act, the biggest change to copyright law in decades.
Trump secured Billions that will fund the building of a wall at our southern border.
The Trump Administration is promoting second chance hiring to give former inmates the opportunity to live crime-free lives and find meaningful employment.
Trump’s DOJ and the Board Of Prisons launched a new “Ready to Work Initiative” to help connect employers directly with former prisoners.
President Trump’s historic tax cut legislation included new Opportunity Zone Incentives to promote investment in low-income communities across the country.
8,764 communities across the country have been designated as Opportunity Zones.
Opportunity Zones are expected to spur $100 billion in long-term private capital investment in economically distressed communities across the country.
Trump directed the Education Secretary to end Common Core.
Trump signed the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund into law.
Trump signed measure funding prevention programs for Veteran suicide.
Companies have brought back over a TRILLION dollars from overseas because of the TCJA bill that Trump signed.
Manufacturing jobs are growing at the fastest rate in more than 30 years.
Stock Market has reached record highs.
Median household income has hit highest level ever recorded.
African American unemployment is at an all-time low.
Hispanic-American unemployment is at an all-time low.
Asian-American unemployment is at an all-time low.
Women’s unemployment rate is at a 65-year low.
Youth unemployment is at a 50-year low.
Prior to the COVID shutdown we have the lowest unemployment rate ever recorded.
The Pledge to America’s Workers has resulted in employers committing to train more than 4 million Americans.
95 percent of U.S. manufacturers are optimistic about the future— the highest ever.
As a result of the Republican tax bill, small businesses will have the lowest top marginal tax rate in more than 80 years.
Record number of regulations eliminated that hurt small businesses.
Signed welfare reform requiring able-bodied adults who don’t have children to work or look for work if they’re on welfare.
Under Trump, the FDA approved more affordable generic drugs than ever before in history.
Reformed Medicare program to stop hospitals from overcharging low-income seniors on their drugs—saving seniors 100’s of millions of $$$ this year alone.
Signed Right-To-Try legislation allowing terminally ill patients to try experimental treatment that wasn’t allowed before.
Secured $6 billion in new funding to fight the opioid epidemic.
Signed VA Choice Act and VA Accountability Act, expanded VA telehealth services, walk-in-clinics, and same-day urgent primary and mental health care.
S. oil production recently reached all-time high so we are less dependent on oil from the Middle East.
The U.S. is a net natural gas exporter for the first time since 1957.
NATO allies increased their defense spending because of his pressure campaign.
Withdrew the United States from the job-killing Paris Climate Accord in 2017 and that same year the U.S. still led the world by having the largest reduction in Carbon emissions.
Has his circuit court judge nominees being confirmed faster than any other new administration.
Had his Supreme Court Justice’s Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh confirmed.
Moved U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
Agreed to a new trade deal with Mexico & Canada that will increase jobs here and $$$ coming in.
Reached a breakthrough agreement with the E.U. to increase U.S. exports.
Imposed tariffs on China in response to China’s forced technology transfer, intellectual property theft, and their chronically abusive trade practices, has agreed to a Part One trade deal with China.
Signed legislation to improve the National Suicide Hotline.
Signed the most comprehensive childhood cancer legislation ever into law, which will advance childhood cancer research and improve treatments.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed into law by Trump doubled the maximum amount of the child tax credit available to parents and lifted the income limits so more people could claim it.
It also created a new tax credit for other dependents.
In 2018, President Trump signed into law a $2.4 billion funding increase for the Child Care and Development Fund, providing a total of $8.1 billion to States to fund childcare for low-income families.
The Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC) signed into law by Trump provides a tax credit equal to 20-35% of child care expenses, $3,000 per child & $6,000 per family + Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) allow you to set aside up to $5,000 in pre-tax $ to use for child care.
In 2019 President Donald Trump signed the Autism Collaboration, Accountability, Research, Education and Support Act (CARES) into law which allocates $1.8 billion in funding over the next five years to help people with autism spectrum disorder and to help their families.
In 2019 President Trump signed into law two funding packages providing nearly $19 million in new funding for Lupus specific research and education programs, as well an additional $41.7 billion in funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the most Lupus funding EVER.
Another upcoming accomplishment to add: Trump signed the first major anti-robocall law in decades called the TRACED Act (Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence.) TRACED Act will extend the period of time the FCC has to catch & punish those who intentionally break telemarketing restrictions. The bill also requires voice service providers to develop a framework to verify calls are legitimate before they reach your phone.
US stock market continually hits record highs.

*Trump did all of this while fighting flagrant abuse and impeachment charges and a 97% negativity reporting by major media.
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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Wed Oct 12, 2022 12:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Do you think that isobars would rush to dig up the same kind of fluff and BS to highlight Obama's and Biden's accomplishments?
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Wed Oct 12, 2022 1:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I did. They appear below.
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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Wed Oct 12, 2022 2:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

A Fox News junkie's view of things. It's no big surprise that there's nothing there.
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cgoudie1



Joined: 10 Apr 2006
Posts: 2597
Location: Killer Sturgeon Cove

PostPosted: Wed Oct 12, 2022 4:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

bwahahahaha

-Craig

Hey Steve, it appears he did rush to dig those up ;*)

isobars wrote:
I did. They appear below.


p.s. for me it's good to have a "sense of humor" about politics and that
made me laugh out loud.
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