What's the future for Trumpism?

I really want the Dems to sort out statehoods for DC and PR. That would lock up the Senate for a good few years plus in all likelihood increase the number of minorities represented by 4%.

 

Without Trump is there Trumpism? When he fades away then who grabs the mantle? Will this be like Islam when one group takes the Shia route and the other the Sunni way? Will it splinter when too many false prophets show up? Trump ain't gonna live more than 10 years. Will the majority of his followers become dispirited and wither away? Will a hardcore emerge trying to keep the faith?

 

a good piece on what Pompeo has being doing in the past few weeks as he attempts to polish his turd record as Sec of State ...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/14/mike-pompeo-lashes-out-reign-ends
The last days of Pompeo have been played out in a blizzard of self-congratulatory tweets, at the rate of two dozen a day, as he seeks to write his own first draft of history.
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The political point-scoring and aggrandizement have made the use of the megaphone provided by a government Twitter account, with 3 million followers.
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Some of the tweets have been factually incorrect, for example blaming Barack Obama for an arms control treaty that was signed by Ronald Reagan.
Other claims are contradictory, like his insistence the US has restored deterrence against Iran, alongside his allegation that Tehran is a greater threat than ever. On Tuesday, he called Iran “the new Afghanistan”, alleging – without evidence – that it has become al-Qaida’s hub of operations.
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The portrait Pompeo has painted of Trump’s America has been in dramatic contrast to recent events. Two days after Congress came under an unprecedented violent attack by a mob egged on by Trump, Pompeo blithely tweeted: “Being the greatest country on earth is not just about our incredible economy & our strong military; it’s about the values we project out into the world.”

 

Once the Trump dynasty is felled the white supremacist right will fall under the spell of an extremist, someone with the right- wing appeal of Wayne LaPierre, Ted Nugent or any one of several evangelists. Only the nut jobs will follow.

The center and left of the party will regroup and disown the Trump legacy, hoping to regain the center. Fox News will follow.

My concern is that it may not take long for that to happen and the Republicans will be able to field a credible centrist candidate in 2024.

 

that's what continues to baffle me about Cruz and his ilk who are maneuvering to inherit Trump's base. how in god's name can you expect to control a bunch of people who have never met a whacko conspiracy theory they won't embrace?

unless you're a 100% sociopath like Trump, you'll never be able to keep up with their demands for nonstop lunacy and pretty soon they'll turn on you.

 

Those who achieve high levels in politics are rarely lacking in self confidence.

 

It’s only awesome if she loses the gen.

 

I found it, eot:

 

I sensed hot air leaking out of the Trumpist balloon yesterday. There's this assumption that he'll continue to dominate the party. You now, maybe so. But his 74M followers have already begun to splinter, and some have abandoned him. Unless trump himself - and not another family member - reengages and is granted a national media presence to do so, I just wonder where the hell this so-called movement goes. It's primarily a large number of angry and not terribly bright white folks, confused and pissed off that "the plan" didn't happen, and now devoid of contact from their cult leader, and with no coherent organization structure around which to do much of anything.

Not to mention, Trump's financial and possibly legal woes will haunt him for the foreseeable future. Who's going to fund those rallies? That new social media or TV network?

If he has the energy (a big if) the only way I see Trumpism staying relevant as anything close to a singular entity is if Trump decides to declare his intention to run again and starts raising campaign donations he can then use to fund his political activities. The Trumpist brand was already horribly soiled before Jan. 6, but it's now much more toxic. Acolytes like Cruz, Pompeo et al, thinking they can pick and claim Trump's base of followers, have hitched their political futures to a movement that's now closely associated with sedition.

 

Trumpism as a singular entity may well be dead, the the GOP is metastatic at this point. He’s shifted the conversation enough that there is all sorts of room for a “kinder, gentler” Trumpist to maneuver. A more xeonopnobic, theocratic, “law and order”/in your face version of a Tea Party candidate will seem like a conservative statesman now. That was an opportunity that did not exist before Trump.

And when that candidate proves to be popular and rightfully despised by Dems, Lindsey will go on the air and talk about how this person is “so not Trump” and accuse the Dems of being “hysterical”.

I don’t see a centrist candidate/brand emerging. At this point, the GOP will lose far more right wing zealots moving to the center than they will “centrist principled conservatives” staying out in crazyland. Centrist principled conservatives will issue mild rebukes, but they won’t vote for a radical commie like Joe Biden over a non rapey Roy Moore.

 

This may prove to be a problem with the impeachment process. It will give him a pulpit to preach his message of hate from.

How much is left in the "stop the steal" fund?

Trump raised $200m from false election claims. What happens to the money now?

 

Or for his upcoming legal defenses.

 

In case anyone missed it, here's a good rundown in the NY Times about Trump's looming financial problems:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/us/trump-finances.html

 

And The Bulwark does a deep dive into the now deceased "1776 Project."

Ostensibly a rejoinder to the New York Times’s 1619 Project, the 1776 Report asserts the timeless values of the American founding and the exceptional goodness of the American past. Building on Trump’s professed desire to “clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms, and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country,” the report’s authors say they believe that “a rediscovery of our shared identity rooted in our founding principles is the path to a renewed American unity and a confident American future.”

The world will little note, nor long remember, the 1776 Report. But before it passes entirely from memory, it is worth taking a moment to examine what it is and how it came to be, not because it is intellectually serious—in fact, it is a self-plagiarized mishmash of sanitized history, high school civics, right-wing gripes, and authoritarian gestures—but because of what it reveals about the rise of a certain strain of conservative ideology: fundamentalist “West Coast Straussianism.”​

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https://thebulwark.com/the-origins-of-trumps-slapdash-last-second-1776-report/

All you need to know about "West Coast Straussianism" is that they are the people who brought us the "Flight 93 Election" theory in the run up to November, 2016.

 

It sounds a bit like a Prager twin. Speaking of 1619 though...I’m completely in favor of the project, but they really should have done a better job of cleaning up some of the claims. People are going to complain and whine regardless, but when you can get a credible panel of non batshit historians together and they say, “Here are x problems”, by all means clean it up.

 

Not distinguishing between "batshit crazy ideologues" and "practicing historians with legitimate criticisms" did not serve 1619 well, for sure.

Though from what I can tell, they walked back some things. Like the claim about the Revolutionary War being fought primarily to preserve slavery. Man, if that were the case, Lin-Manuel Miranda needs to seriously revise Hamilton.