James Risen writes that there are many signs that Trump’s influences is waning. One of those is the fact that the US military is proceeding with the renaming of military bases that had been named after leaders of the Confederacy. Trump had vigorously opposed such changes, pandering to the racists in his party who view the Confederacy sympathetically. But now there are hardly any protests at the changes.
THE U.S. ARMY began to strip its bases of their old Confederate names last week, as Donald Trump faced a possible criminal indictment. The timing was hardly a coincidence.
Neither reckoning would have been possible if Trump were still president. Both have been winding their way through the government bureaucracy for the past two years since Trump left office and are now happening at the same time as part of a growing repudiation of Trump and Trumpism.
…After Trump was defeated in 2020, he vetoed legislation creating a commission to rename the bases, but Congress was finally able to override it. If Trump had been reelected, he almost certainly would have continued trying to obstruct the renaming efforts.
…THE RENAMING OF Fort Pickett last week prompted no protests and hardly a murmur of criticism, apart from a few nasty comments on the Facebook page of the Virginia National Guard, which uses the base. Indeed, the lack of outrage seems to be one more small sign that Trump’s power, and his ability to generate anger outside of his devoted base, are waning.
Trump’s mounting legal problems pose a more direct threat to his power and are a more personal form of reckoning. Although some Republican pundits and political figures have claimed that Trump will regain political strength by being indicted, the ex-president’s own fury at the prospect, which was on full display in Waco, reveals the truth: Trump is deeply afraid of ending up in prison.
He has spent his life exploiting legal loopholes and has often succeeded by outlasting his opponents. But his victories have mostly come in civil lawsuits when he was in business or while he was president and controlled the Justice Department. He has never faced the kind of legal peril that he does now.
The threat seems to be driving him even further around the bend than ever before. He now openly engages in full-throated conspiracy theories while inciting violence against his opponents; he held his rally in Waco knowing that it was scheduled in the middle of the 30th anniversary of the federal siege of the Branch Davidian compound there, which ended with a deadly government raid and fire that has taken on deep symbolism among violent, far-right extremists.
It is hard to be confident about predictions of Trump’s demise since he consumes so much media space. But he gets that attention by resorting to more and more extreme claims and rhetoric. Someone who is more assured of his position would not feel the need to be so inflammatory.
All this sounds very much like whistling in the dark, and it’s the kind of infuriatingly self-congratulatory complacent “everything’s going to be OK” nonsense that put Trump in the White House in the first place.
Yeah, he’s got no chance of being the Republican candidate for President in the next election. Oh, no, hang on, that’s BULLSHIT because he was trailing DeSantis until he was indicted, and now he’s far, far ahead in the polls. And none of the other runners, declared or otherwise, are even close.
The fallacy here is thinking Trump ever gave a shit about this one way or the other. It was a useful dog-whistle, but taking it away from him ignores the suitcase full of other dogwhistles he totes around wherever he goes.
That at least is true… but remind me: his sole outstanding indictment, for the hush money payments to sex workers -- when is the next court date for that? Is there ANY realistic chance he’ll face ANY trial for ANYTHING before the next election? (Hint: I’m not a lawyer, but most legal experts say no.) He’ll run out the clock, and maximise the “it’s a witch-hunt” rhetoric. Bet me it won’t win him votes?
… and also because the non-wingnut media have been confidently predicting his demise since the minute he glided down that stupid gold escalator in Trump Tower and announced his candidacy. He had NO chance again Bush -- who had the name recognition, family connections, experience and power to simply… oh, he’s gone. He had NO chance against the charismatic Rubio, who… oh, nope, he’s gone. He had NO chance against the ruthless and experienced Cruz, who… oh, he’s BACKING Trump now? OK. Well don’t worry, it’s her TURN dammit, she’s bound to win, nothing to worry about, she’ll… oh, she’s writing a book about how it wasn’t her fault she lost? BUT SHE WON THE POPULAR VOTE!!!!1!!!!!!1!!
I’ll be confident about Trump’s demise when I see him walking into Rikers in an orange suit, and not a minute before. To do anything other than assume he’ll win is to be criminally irresponsibly complacent.
Have you ever seen Trump?? He feels the need to be inflammatory about everything, all the time, and has for AT LEAST the last eight years. Are memories so short? FFS he was ludicrously inflammatory the whole time he was fucking President, and how assured do you think he was of his position then? Being inflammatory is like breathing for him -- you can’t draw any conclusion from it other than the fact that yeah, dude’s still alive.
I find every new “Trump’s losing his influence” article to be absolutely infuriating, because it feeds into the narrative that he is not something anyone needs to worry about. That’s how you ended up with him as President in the first place you fuckwits, did you learn nothing from 2015 and 2016??? Doesn’t anyone remember???
Vote. Don’t think you don’t need to, and never, ever suggest to anyone that it’s anything other than vitally important that they do too. Trump has NOT gone away, the nutjobs who support him have NOT gone away.
NEVER forget that Trump’s vote went UP in 2020 from what he got in 2016, to the second highest popular vote for a candidate in the history of US elections, beaten only by Biden’s the same year. Even after the four years of nonsense and chaos, he INCREASED HIS VOTE. That fact should be terrifying, and should stop people from writing articles like Mr. Risen’s. He won once. He CAN win again, don’t doubt it and don’t overestimate the intelligence of the US>
@No. 1
Just remember how much time Adolf Hitler spent in prison after the Beer Hall Putsch.
I fear that sonofrojblake @1 is right about this one.
The good thing is that the voters outside the cult are seeing through him.
The bad thing is that gerrymandering is making a mockery of democracy.
But as he is whackier than ever he is turning off any independent voters, probably more than in 2020. And he does not have the presidency as a platform this time.
If DeSantis or some other Trump wannabe gets nominated, undecided voters might be tricked into thinking he is more responsible or honest than Trump.
Non-MAGA voters will know exactly who and what Trump is if he is the Republican candidate for the third time.
It seems unlikely the gerrymandering will be enough to get him over the bar.
So run, Trump, and get the nomination!
Our best hope is that some disullusioned Qanon nut shoots the son of a bitch.
Marcus @#5,
Apart from my general opposition to killing, I think Trump alive poses a greater danger to the Republican brand and the causes he and they espouse than if he is dead.
Before I had finished the first sentence of the OP, I thought “incoming sonof rant”. And oh boy, what a rant.
Please point to even a single sentence that states or implies Trump is no longer a presidential threat.
Orange only got more votes in 2020 due to the record breaking voter turnout. He barely won in 2016 with 29% , as the third candidates like Jill Stein siphoned off just enough to make tfg the winner. Putins plan worked.
70% of the American voters chose Biden in 2020, including Republicans.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/2020-presidential-election-voting-and-registration-tables-now-available.html
Apart from my general opposition to killing, I think Trump alive poses a greater danger to the Republican brand and the causes he and they espouse than if he is dead.
Many people said the same about Hitler. In the end there were active efforts to render him dead, and philosophics of time-travel often ask whether going back and killing him would be good or not. Trump, alive, will always be a greater threat than he would be if someone did us all a favor and inhumed him.
I do remember an interesting dinner party at my parents around 1978, with a discussion of whether things would have been better had Von Stauffenberg’s bomb killed its target. The problem being that the people who would have taken over would have been competent. (The dinner guest being Axel Von Dem Bussche) if something happened to Trump, his political heirs are also bomb-throwing idiots and it would take years for the republicans to coalesce behind a Stalin2.0 if such a person even exists in the party. Absent competent heirs (e.g: the German general staff) we’d only get a massive clusterfuck that even the democrats would have difficulty losing to. But they might manage.
@Tethys,8:
Let me repeat that, omitting just two words:
“Trump got more votes in 2020 due to the record breaking voter turnout. He won in 2016”
Funny how that now sounds less like an excuse to ignore the threat, and more like a warning not to write him off. All yourself why you want people to think it’s ok not to worry -- Trump fan?
In 2016, Trump saw the presidency as the ultimate grift, and he wanted it. Today, he sees it as the ultimate revenge platform, and he really wants it. Anyone who brushes him aside today is a fool. He knows he has power over the GOP base and he will use it to further his personal aims no matter the cost to any individual, the country, or the planet, for that matter. If we know one thing about him after his time in the WH, it’s that he’s a self-seeking, small-minded, ignoramus with all the viciousness of a rabid junkyard dog. Given his past, it should be no great surprise that anything he can do, he will do. This man must face consequences for his actions or he will continue to be the festering boil on the face of the country.
“Every time you build something that’s idiot-proof, Nature builds a better idiot”.
When Trump lost in 2020, J6 had not yet happened. Roe v Wade had not yet happened. GOP attacks on LGBTQ+ were quietly on the back burner. All of these tend to energize the younger voter who tend left and have also tended to not vote.
Every day that Trump rules the GOP, there are more people becoming aware of the authoritarianism, more people becoming aware of the dangers of kowtowing to the wealthy, more people becoming aware of the inequities and harms of capitalism.
It is still possible for Trump to win again. For one thing, Biden might be egotistical enough to run again, which will turn off many Dem supporters. Or, he might step down, and an unappealing (to the electorate) candidate replace him. I note that the Dem establishment liked Hillary even if the voters didn’t. The battle is seriously not over.
The authoritarian right still has way too much support to be ignored.