Andrea Pitzer examines our prospects — what is likely to happen when Trump drops dead (the sooner the better), and how we’ll have to struggle to overcome his legacy.
I don’t know — it’s a depressing story, but somehow it ends on a note of optimism. Yes, let’s forget Trump and move on with rebuilding the American dream.
Robert Reich’s latest post says something similar.
The title says it all.
I’m not going to say that I necessarily agree with him here.
Optimism has been a losing strategy for the last 25 years.
Then again, Robert Reich is always worth reading and Trump and the GOP aren’t doing all that well either.
He makes some good points.
I liked this one.
Trump doesn’t have anyone around him whatsoever to tell the truth about anything. He’s fired them all.
Don’t like the jobs numbers, fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The CIA and Pentagon have bad news. Fire the analysts.
If the USA runs into trouble with the economy or the military or a pandemic or anything, no one in the government is going to know or tell the president about it.
Reality doesn’t care about their lies.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/sunday-thought-263
What I am worried about is that Trump’s policies will outlive him, and the politics of the next 20 years will be a dispiriting and only semi-successful struggle against Trumpists. We don’t just need to replace politicians, we need to replace the “narrative,” to show that Trump really was bad for everyone except billionaires.
It woudl be so nice, so very very nice to eb able to forget Trump.. One day. Sigh.
The Democrats and the Blue states have a lot of power if they find it and use it.
The Blue states have most of the population and 70% of the economy.
A few Democratic party politicans have found their ovaries and a few vertebrae and are pushing back. Trump’s next invasion target is Chicago. The governor of Illinois, Pritzker, and the mayor of Chicago are resisting.
Chicago and Illinois aren’t going to cooperate with the National Guard and the US army troops.
That means when the military gets to Chicago, they aren’t going to have anything to do. They will just stand around their armored personnel carriers, MRAP vehicles, and Humvees and look bored.
Or they can do what they did in Washington DC and pick up trash and start mowing lawns in the parks.
If Chicago and Illinois resist, the Trump regime isn’t going to be intimidating anybody. They are just going to look dumb.
@ Ted Lawry : Exactly. Truth.
Although arguably Trump’s policies where what his puppetteers & manipulators incl esp Putin & Heritage Foundation made them already even before this current Weekend at
BerniesTrumpies era.Saw this on Bluesky.
I hope she brings a date to his funeral.
No one needs to ask who she is or whose funeral this will be.
Many political analysts are cautiously predicting that the GOP will suffer loses of Senate and House in the coming off year election. And if so, no more Mr. Nice Democrats. The latest Happiness Index surveys demonstrate the U.S. Happiness ranking has dropped from 15th to 24th. Not good news preceding the off year election. Trump will start to be reigned in if the Democrats take over House and Senate. His ego and fee fees will be hurt. Some GOP politicians are already dropping out of re-election efforts. Joni Ernst is going back to the piggy farm. Attacks on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and ACA are not going over well. By election day, 2026 we can say we did try it the MAGA way and that sucked. Trump, if he is still alive by then, will be seen as a failure at best, which will crush his soul.
de Gaulle: Après moi, le déluge.
Fact, Trump is a personality to be reckoned with – over the top, bombastic, loud, rude, vulgar, boorish and on and on. But, he is writ large.
The rest of the GOPQ is Lindsey Graham milquetoast. The vacuum will be powerful. There is nobody to fill it. Some will try starting with JD Vance who will soil himself if someone says “Boo!” You think world leaders are laughing at us now, just wait. The GOPQ has no plan, no talent and no intellectual foundation. All they have is bombast and Jeebus, but that doesn’t make the trains run on time.
As the collagen lady belted out, The WORST is yet to come!”
The average life expectancy for American men is 75.8 years. Trump is 79.2, about 3.5 years past that. Ticktock.
Death is too good for him. That’s the easy way out.
He seems to be exhibiting signs of cognitive decline, so like his father he may slip into dementia. Father Fred was first diagnosed with some form of dementia in 1991 when he was 86 and lived another 8 years. So, if Taco follows him, he’ll finish out his term but be even more bath shit crazy.
The other possibility is some kind of stress related breakdown. When I see him in clips on TeeVee he seems desperate. All that stress can’t be good for him. So maybe a stroke or heart attack that disables him enough that he can’t fulfill his duties and has to be replaced a la the 25th amendment. Then he’s confined to his bed or wheelchair, incontinent, deranged and babbling nonsense the rest of his days.
That seems fitting.
@ ^ robro : Trump dying of covid would be most fitting.
Him dying alone In a jail cell would be the most fitting & deserved of all but ain’t happening now.
FWIW, it has now been 5 days since Trump has been seen in public except at a long distance.
The questions are now coming from everyone.
And the staff at the White House don’t have any answers.
Or at least answers than anyone believes.
Trump could end this with a 5 minute appearance and that isn’t happening either.
raven — This is a picture of him heading off to golf: Daily Beast . I guess that’s him. He has the hat pulled down so low I can’t see his face. He’s looking portly. And he appears to carrying something with a coat hanger. That seems unusual.
That seems too optimistic. Trump is not the cause of U.S problems, he’s the malign tumour which grows from them, but when he’s excised the cancer will remain.
“Trump is not the cause of U.S problems”
Um. Have you seen his 2nd term so far?
The appointment of anti-X ideologues to lead agencies dealing with X?
The tariffs? The, um, diplomacy?
None of that happened before Trump; if nothing else, he’s just shown how hollow norms and character and honesty are in terms of holding petulant blowhards back.
I recommend that everyone read Omar Akkad’s latest book “One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This”.
He’s an extraordinary writer, and deserves to be more widely read.
@15 John Morales
I think the theory is that Trump only is a problem due to wider problems with contemporary US population. If not Trump then someone eller, eventually. To paraphrase Carlin: the public sucks. Feck hope.
erik333, I do get you. You think he was inevitable, a living symptom.
I disagree, obs. I do get he was elected, proper and all.
Thing is, that another might/would have arisen had he not is, well, psychohistorical and speculative; fact is that he actually is there, doing his stuff, and the checks and balances that supposedly should have prevented that have evidently failed hitherto.
I even remember how in his first term he put paid to the theory that the Electoral College system would prevent a populist from gaining power. Hah. O happy, naive days, eh?
(The Mule, remember? Not part of the pattern)
Don’t celebrate.
Trump is just the useful idiot of those pulling his strings (Peter Thiel and his right wing billionaire pals, by way of the Heritage Foundation, Steven Miller, and other right wing movers and shakers).
JD Vance is Thiel’s loyal footsoldier who will wholeheartedly pursue his patron’s goals. And those goals are the elimination of democracy and the giving of power over to a dictatorship of billionaires.
Trump dying is actually good for their agenda, since a lot of anti-administration activism, especially on the right and centre, will whither away once there isn’t a blowhard bully acting as a target for discontent.
See Siderea’s latest blog post on dreamwidth for a long explication of why it is way too early to celebrate.
It is my profound hope (though I recognize it is unrealistic) that the Dems sweep the 2026 elections to such an extent that they get supermajorities in both the House and Senate. They elect their Speaker of the House, and then impeach and remove both Trump and Vance, making the Speaker the President (and then electing a new Speaker).
Then, in addition to correcting the CDC and DOJ and DOD, etc., they go and propose a huge number of corrective constitutional amendments, e.g., repeal Citizen’s United, presidential immunity, rescission, use of troops internally, the 100-mile border zone, corporations only responsibility is to their shareholders instead of society as a whole. But fix every loophole that Trump and the Techbros are trying to drive through.
This is Trump’s latest tweet on his website.
He didn’t write this.
It is in complete sentences, grammatically correct, and coherent.
Guy is a meat puppet by now.
It is though, all lies strung together.
The CDC isn’t being ripped apart by the controversy over the vaccines. There is no controversy among scientists. It is being killed by antivaxxer kooks.
The complete results of the vaccine clinical trials have been publicly available since they were approved many years ago. That was how and why they were approved.
The vaccines were a tremendous success.
They saved the lives of around 3.2 million Americans.
400,000 antivaxxers did manage to kill themselves by getting the Covid-19 virus and dying from it. Dumb way to die but people can do what they want.
When the magat in chief is dead, the obscene rtwingnut xtian terrorists who have grabbed massive wealth from the carcass of this country will continue his hatred, evil and destruction without controls to stop them completing their pushing us all down the DEATH SPIRAL if we don’t find a way to restore some decency.
As I posted A headline many would like to see:
‘Newly Inaugurated President Vance Dies of Self-administered Toxic Overdose of Eyeliner’
(Borowitz eat your heart out)
They wheeled out his granddaughter in a miniskirt Saturday so noone would look at the blurry face with the baseball cap deep in his face without makeup who might or might not have been Trump.
Even if he’s not dead, at least we learned about the Pentagon Pizza Index and had a lot of fun.
@shermanj #22
I think his eyeliner has been tattooed. It’ll have to be a surfeit of something else, like polyfill.
So… Unfortunately Trump isn’t the whole problem. If he were up there trying to do all of this alone, not only would the plan be much, much simpler but it would also not work at all.
He needs others to think up ideas. And figure out how to make them happen. And resist efforts to curb his actions. And protect all his works in progress. And keep the justice system from chewing him up and spitting him out. And get him money.
That’s a lot of stuff other people are doing for him. They’re not going to stop just because Trump kicked the bucket. If anything they might start doing less performative skits for the demented old man and focus their efforts more directly on ripping the rest of us off. At least in the immediate aftermath of his demise.
Personally I hope he lives at least through the end of this year. I want as many of the people who voted for him as possible to have that moment where they’re realizing they’ve got less money to spend on more expensive gifts than last year. And if anyone but Trump is in charge they can pretend it’s all the new person’s fault. Yes, I know, many will blame anything or anyone but him regardless but I’m quite certain they’ll find that easier to do if he’s dead.
Don’t forget Trump.
Don’t forget Project 2025.
Learn. Fix the weaknesses they exploited. Move some critical behaviours from conventions to constitution. Create a massive improvement in civics education.
As another view, admittedly a “fiction”, there is this from John Quiggin:
https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/the-crash-of-2026
The problem with this is that ‘The American Dream’, as it is usually stated, is in fact part of the problem. The whole idea that ‘anybody can be anything they want’ is a good chunk of why RFKjr’s style of victim blaming works so well. It’s a good chunk of the ‘you can’t tell me what to do!’ attitude that leads to resentment and poisons the U.S. politics. It’s part of the excuse for slashing welfare and other social services because obviously if they worked hard enough they wouldn’t need such services. It’s a way to point the blame anywhere other than where it belongs, at the super-rich that have sucked the rest of the country dry.
The U.S. is a highly class-stratified society that has spent generations convincing itself that it isn’t, and thus has no way to actually think about or deal with the problems caused by class distinctions.