The beginning of the end arunwithaview.wordpress.com/2018/08/25/the… @ArunInParis is right: "It is not possible for an incumbent to win a free and fair election with [Trump's] level of unpopularity." We have at most two years to go, maybe fewer depending which of Arun's two scenarios plays out.
What I'd like to see from politicians in both parties now, and from the media, is serious thought about post-Trump. How do we put the country back together again? This requires as much care and thought as the post-civil war Reconstruction, and in some senses, that's what this is.
Among the many things we've learned from Trump's election is that the wounds of the Civil War were never fully healed. It would be worth it to start thinking about the Reconstruction era. We're soon going to see similar debates. It's not exactly the same conflict, of course--
--not least because little blood has been shed so far. But we'll have some variant on the reconciliationists, we'll have unreconstructed Trumpists, we'll have emancipationists. Lincoln and Johnson were reconciliationists. The (so-called) radical Republicans were emancipationists.
We have no idea what Lincoln would have become, but we know that until his death he prioritized reconciliation, among other reasons because he feared that if the radical Republicans overplayed their hands and vigorously enforced the Emancipation Proclamation--
--Republicans would be defeated in 1864. Then Democrats would just overturn the Proclamation. We don't know whether Lincoln would have changed his views. We do know the radical Republicans won Congress in 1866. They passed the 14th Amendment, barred Confederates from power,
enfranchised the freedmen, overruled Johnson's veto of the Freedmen's Bureau and Civil Rights Bills--and they impeached Johnson. They passed the Enforcement Acts. Grant used them to wipe out the Klan. We should think a lot about Reconstruction as we think about what to do now.
We will have to put the country back together after Trump, and that may be quite soon. There's near-unanimity among historians that Reconstruction was a failure. Its hard to argue with that, given that in 2018, we're still in some ways fighting the same goddamned Civil War.
But it could have been far worse. (This point is made well by Mark Summers: rhttps://www.amazon.com/dp/1469617579/ref=rdr_ext_tmb) Historians disagree wildly about *why* Reconstruction was a failure. Perhaps we should start asking that question of ourselves now. 
It would be much more useful to think about that more and obsess less about Trump's every Tweet. We don't need to fixate on when, exactly, he'll leave office. He'll leave. And that's when our *real* problems start: We'll need to put a post-Trump America back together again.
From anyone who wants my vote in 2020, I'd like to know how he or she plans to reconcile the country--and how he or she plans to balance that imperative against that of ensuring Trumpism ceases to exist as a political force.
No, the issues are not exactly the same, but the analogy with Reconstruction makes sense in some important ways. We have to find some way to reconcile Trump's devotees with other Americans. A house divided against itself cannot stand.
We can't endure, permanently, as a people so bitterly divided into two warring tribes that we just *hate* each other even more than we even want to govern ourselves. And that's just what we are right now. (We can't legislate our way out of a paper bag, you've probably noticed.)
This level of antagonism makes it impossible to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. And it will probably get us nuked, sooner or later.
We're paying attention to nothing else because we're all too busy owning the libs or breathlessly cheering as everything Trump touches dies. But how do we reconcile? How do we get over this? We need to do it fast, because after Trump, there will be a massive mess to clean up.
Unless we can begin living in reasonable comity, Trump's departure won't be the end. It will be the beginning. We can't keep doing whatever we were doing that resulted in Trump's election. What's more, soon we'll suffer the effects of Trump's policies: The Trump Shock.
I don't know what form it will take, but you can't run a superpower this haphazardly for so long without ensuring one. It will doubtless be very unpleasant. It may well hit while we're completely consumed by the drama of impeaching him--with no one paying attention to governing,
and none of us paying the least attention to the rest of the world. (But like a tree falling in the forest, it exists whether or not we pay attention to it.) The shock may be economic, it may be something else, but for sure there's a nasty surprise coming.
This is why we need to give Reconstruction and national reconciliation our thought now, not later. If we don't have a plan for that, and a good one, we'll be in even more trouble than we are now. We'll be even more vulnerable to a demagogic lunatic who promises to fix the mess.
He--or she, but probably he--could come from the far-left or the far-right. We're vulnerable to both. (Any polity that's vulnerable to one is vulnerable to the other. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe… We're obviously vulnerable to one, so we're also at risk of the other.)
And my biggest fear is that unlike Trump, the next demagogic lunatic may be intelligent.
Then we're toast, for sure.
Then we're toast, for sure.
I just noticed, to my surprise, that most of the people who liked this comment seem to be from Nigeria. That can't be a coincidence. Has there been relevantly similar situation in Nigeria from which we should learn? Can you tell me more about it?
Actually, of course there has been, now that I think about it. The 3Rs, “No Victor No Vanquished.” That would actually be a useful thing for me to think about.
