As hilarious as a “shadow presidency” or “Great Schism” would be, I just don’t see him doing it.
Trump’s past behavior indicates that he’ll leave his biggest fans high and dry...but then benefit from an ambiguous situation in which they’re still fighting and sacrificing for him (e.g., The Proud Boys and The Birthers).
My guess is that Trump will wait just long enough for many more people and organization to destroy their credibility ... and the myth of a “stolen election” will hang in the air for years ... leading up a possible run in 2024. We’ll see.
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Good background on Esper’s opposition to Trump utilizing the Insurrection Act to suppress BLM and Antifa rioters. nytimes.com/2020/11/09/us/…
In the decisive period last summer, Trump failed to act.
He now recognizes this obvious fact and lashes out at the guy who gave him bad advice and publicly opposed him.
Way too little, too late.
It’s clear that the riots and looting helped Trump politically. Biden did explicitly denounce rioting, but he just couldn’t disassociate himself from BLM. So it becamea a partisan, polarized issue. As frustrating as it is, the “This is Joe Biden’s America” memes sorta worked.
Biden’s isn’t just promising centrism; he declares that polarization is a “choice,” and he can end it through empathy or good ol’ fashioned can-do or something.
This is extremely naïve rhetoric, and from what we know about potential cabinet appointments, Biden seems to mean it.
As I said in my forecast for the election, “back to normalcy” (whatever you think about it as an ideal) will fail. Biden will be attacked by forces within the general Left coalition (if not exactly Democrats).
The "Fake Politics" that Donald Trump embodied is coming to an end . . . the lie, told to average White Americans and dissidents alike, that we held power and were defeating our enemies through the antics of this buffoon is slowly being revealed for what it always was.
Now is the time for both meta-politics and real-politics. By meta-politics I mean what we believe and how we understand the world. This effort was largely squashed during the Trump episode.
Critical inquiry was silenced out of feat that we might be undermining Trump's agenda, the joys of "lib owning," and "the plan," which was taking place in secret.
Your logic doesn’t quite hold. After 2016 and the “Russian collusion” allegations, social media increasingly doesn’t view itself as a “free speech zone,” but as mainstream media and guardians of civic institutions (such as they are).
Not only do social media dislike Trump—and not only do they like dunking on him after he harangued them again and again the past four years—but they see him as the cause of the delegitimization of institutions. Basically, social media is establishment now.
Also, Trump’s allegations are all but baseless. And social media is acting like an editor and publisher—that is, culling content.
After years of relative peace for the American empire, Trump was challenged in the final year of his term with a crisis of Biblical proportions—a plague from the Far East that brought the world to its knees. Politically speaking, it was a gift, if Trump were willing to unwrap it.
rump achieved his highest approval ratings of his term in the first half of May 2020—49 percent—weeks after he had officially declared the Coronavirus a national emergency.
Great stress brings out “animal instincts”; people desperately want to “follow the leader.” At that moment, Trump was, at least potentially, poised to transcend polarization.