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Shower thought: conditional on a Harris win in 2024, what are the odds that Trump runs again in 2028? I want a return to the dynamics of pre-Trump elections, where at least the candidates had the decency to act embarrassed at being shown to be corrupt, so the fewer times he gets at bat the better.
He'll have the existing huge demand for populist wrecker policies and style that most politicians can't supply, so the crowd will want him back. The crowd wants him back, so it seems like his narcissism would pull him back in, but his age might preclude it, and a loss might drive him away from Presidential elections via sour grapes.
I don't know much of his psychology, and of course there's four years of unknown unknown developments until then. What other factors can you all identify? How do we beat them all against each other to get a spread of probabilities?
There is no going back to pre-Trump, any more than there's going back to pre-FDR. The milk is spilled, the eggs are broken, the die is cast. Trump is not the driver of this sentiment, he is just the only one willing to harness the latent desires of the electorate.
If you care about corruption, Nancy Pelosi's career of insider trading is right there. What you want has nothing to do with corruption, or you'd mention the net worth of politicians on a congressional salary. You'd mention book deals that are explicitly excluded from bribery and ethics policies. What you want is something else.
I think what you want is to return to the migration consensus, because that's what I think is the only true difference between politicians and parties these days. You know this is true because of what happened in France, where, when push comes to shove, there's the remigration party and there's everybody else. This explains the Never-Trumpers and the likes of the Cheneys and Mitt Romney. This explains the hysteria over Trump, and the uniparty. Maybe I'm wrong, but I this isn't about corruption, and Trump is not particularly corrupt when compared to other politicians.
But who else can? J.D. Vance? Seems kinda unlikely. Desantis? Tried once, failed... maybe he could succeed without Trump as opposition, but it seems doubtful. What the Democrats hope is not that the GOP goes back to pre-Trump, but that their base basically dries up and blows away, becoming an unaffiliated and impotently dissatisfied group who can be ignored electorally. The GOP keeps the neocon remnants that haven't gone over to the Democrats, plus a few paleocons and business republicans who aren't neocons, and as a result is so small that it never is able to mount a serious challenge again.
Vance, DeSantis, Abbott, and Scott are the obvious candidates that spring to mind, and I wouldn't rule out Kushner or Don Jr. either. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans also have a reasonably deep bench of young-ish state level officials of which i expect at least a couple to ready for promotion to the national stage within the next 4 years.
Recall that no one outside of Florida had even heard of DeSantis prior to 2016. (Sure he'd been a state rep. since 2012 but how many people know who thier own state rep. is much less who anyone else's is?)
Which Scott?
Alexander, of course. By 2028, his time in California will have tipped him over the edge.
He would never go into politics, lol. I'd eat my hat!
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