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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.
The problem for the Republicans is what does the post-Trump era look like.
I love J.D. Vance. I think he's the smartest politician we've seen for a long time and he is clued in to the real problems we face in a way that the dinosaurs in both parties are not. He is probably one of the few politicians who has read Scott.
But let's be honest. He'd get slaughtered in the general. High IQ white guys like Vance don't win minority and blue collar voters.
Now that the Republicans have gone populist, they will need populism to win. It feels overly dramatic, but I am seriously worried that unless Trump wins we will have uniparty rule for a long time.
The GOP’s 2028 nominee won’t be any Republican that people are talking about today. It won’t be a white man. Given the inexorable demographic trends, it will be an Hispanic populist outsider. Think Nick Fuentes but with greater respectability, and who has ties to the military. America will want a military leader to deal with challenges posed by China or Iran. Someone Trumpian and with a bio that could fill out a webpage like this.
Hispanics don’t particularly want a Hispanic candidate, they want a strong white male leader who gets what he wants and has a sufficient number of Hispanics in his inner circle to prove he’s going to bear their interests in mind.
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