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Notes -
I made a prediction that Iran might step up attacks before the midterms. Looks like that may be happening and the rates of attacks are up:
Two ships sink near Hormuz after being hit by projectiles amid surge in attacks
Container ship hit by projectile sinks in Strait of Hormuz, Singapore says
The decision to pause the war by Trump remains puzzling to me, and it suggests a lack of conviction in the war effort. A side confident of success would act immediately rather than grant Iran weeks to strengthen its defenses, plan retaliation, consult its allies, and position its assets. One thing it certainly isn't doing is helping with inflation:
Consumer prices rose 3.7% annually in September as gas prices skyrocket
Trump seems to have a plan though, although it is not popular even among Republicans:
Bipartisan group of senators call on Trump to rescind Russian diesel deal
Polling numbers and prediction markets also paint a pretty bleak forecast for the Republicans.
From Nate Silver:
If things go as they seem, we are about to witness the end of the age of Trump. If we get a Blue Tsunami -- and I believe we will -- Republicans are going to turn on him. Why wouldn't they? What can he offer them at this point but big fat L's. The only question now is what comes next on the Right, because it's certainly not Trumpism.
You've been sounding like a broken record repeating this talking point over and over. Trump got impeached twice and started a laughably incompetent coup, and he's still here. Surely this time he's going down.
Trump's influence will likely wane quickly after his term is over, as he's old as af and doesn't have any prospect of running for any other office. But you'd better get used to him being in the house because you have another 2 years of it.
Trump will remain the most powerful politician in America likely until the day he dies. You don’t literally need to be the one whose signature goes on an Executive Order to be the person where power resides. George Martin got this right. Joffrey sat on the thrown but the true power was Tywin. Whether it’s Little Rubio or Vance there power will be dwarfed by Trump and if it’s a Dem all eyes will still be on Trump though he will be less powerful in that scenario.
Why else would Dems still be talking about prosecuting Trump if his political power disappears when he’s not in the WH?
Not really. The decision tobehead Ned Stark was his, not Tywin's, and it had some wider geopolitical implications, to put it mildly. I really do not think the dynamic between Rubio or Vance and Trump would be like the one between Joffrey and Tywin. For one thing, Tywin was a brilliant schemer with decades of administrative experience, someone capable of keeping the kingdom running smoothly. Trump II feels more like "Joffrey has banished Tywin and made Littlefinger the leader of the privy council".
Sure, all the GOP positions are selected for loyalty to Trump personally, but there is no Blood Bond binding Senators to Trump, nor do House candidates have a tadpole inserted into their brain upon winning the primary (to my knowledge).
Unlike an absolutist kingdom, the US has a constitution and it gives the president a lot of formal powers. The default assumption is that the president is the most important politician in the US. At the end of the day, he or she decides who gets investigated by the DoJ, which bills get vetoed, what the policies of federal agencies are.
Trump's cronies might be Trump's, but they are also cronies. Some might be willing to lay down their live for him until the moment he dies, but most are probably loyal to him because at present, it pays to be loyal to him. When Trump leaves office, it will be common knowledge that he will never again hold public office, nor be in the position to repay favors much longer. That is not a great position to be in if you want to be the power behind the throne.
Basically, my assumption will be that he will go back to just being some guy with a twitter account full of bullshit.
Though a bit also depends on how he leaves office. If in two years he gets Vance or Rubio elected by a landslide, that will net him some informal influence -- a lot of congress candidates will owe him for endorsing them. On the other hand, if he manages to lose (as I imagine he will), future generations of Republicans are unlikely to cling to the MAGA platform.
The fact that he was elected twice is already weird enough. But a huge part of him winning a second term was due to unforced errors of his opponents. In six years, even the Democrats will be hard-pressed to find someone more senile than Trump to run against him
This seems grossly unfair to Susie Wiles, whom I read as the straight man in this particular clown troupe.
Though if this is the game we are playing, the far more interesting question is "Which of the younger Trumps is Tyrion?"
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I completely disagree with all of this. First Tywin is the one putting Joff on the throne. Killing Ned was a very short term impulse of formal powers. After that incident Tywin gave Tyrion power over Joffrey and charged with preventing Joffrey decision making.
Trump would have no formal powers. But he can still primary any Senator or House Rep. He can tank any Presidency approval with only a tweet.
You are doing dumb Dem shit saying it’s cronyism and loyalty. I back Trump because he’s fought for me. He’s the only one fighting to deport millions even if it’s too slow.
I will abandon Trump the day he’s no longer fighting for my best interests. That day is not today.
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No he won't. Neither did a guy you may have heard about for whom there were such expectations - he was called Ofama or Osama or something. Now pushed into complete irrelevance.
Trump is on the verge of going senile, can't really connect with his disgruntled base anymore and well - doesn't have many years in front of him anyway.
Presidents can't become gray cardinals. The nature of their job forces them to step on too many toes, to grate on too many nerves, to cultivate too much dislikes.
Lefty dreams that the long nightmare of Trump will vanish with term limits and senility. On Obama he largely followed the tradition of standing in the background after he was out of office. Trump is not going to do that. He will be in the White House weekly on giving speeches under a GOP administration.
We aren’t leaving. And honestly now we can’t leave.
The easiest way to lose a (culture) war is to lose touch with reality. Seems now it is my side's turn to learn it.
Trump is in the age in which decline is geometric not linear. His zingers in 2016 were hilarious, in 2020 meh and in 2024 degraded to what could only be classified as street brawl insults. In two years he will be even older. In his first term his rating was bad but stable, now is on stable declining trajectory.
He had only 4 tasks for his second administration - improve the standard of living of the working class, mass depurations, make legal hispanics feel at home, no new wars. This would have cemented 2026, 2028 and eventually 2030.
This war is existential. Win or die. That’s the reality.
I never agreed to making legal Hispanics feel at home. I believe in denaturalization for many. I never agreed to no wars but trust Trumps decision making. You are literally just making up your goals. My goals of course aren’t the entire movements goals so some compromise is ok.
Democracy is just a nice to have thing. Figuring out how to get rid of it if we need to has to be on the table.
It takes some real effort to create worse plan for winning existential war than Zelensky but you seem to have managed it.
A huge country taken by coup that will lack absolute legitimacy in the big cities, led by 80 year old with waning charisma, record low approval, no clear successor, or a figure that people like in that movement aside from said 80 year old, a military that is by no way sure will even follow orders or obey. On top of that you seem to really want to turn it into whites vs everyone else, when the police forces and the military itself is quite integrated. And unfortunately for you the US military is not made out of 2 million Animal Mothers that will do it for fun. In the country in which there are more legal guns than people and ammo is sold like pez dispensers.
Doctor Strange: (panting) I went forward in time... to view alternate futures. To see all the possible outcomes of the coming conflict. Peter Quill: How many did you see? Doctor Strange: Fourteen million, six hundred and five. Tony Stark: How many did we win? (Doctor Strange pauses for a long, heavy moment and looks intently at Tony) Doctor Strange: ...One.
In the current situation to move towards authoritarianism that exclude the latinos (people with european ancestry and culture) - you need total support from all the whites and blacks. Yes even the ones suffering from TDS. Unlike
Don't get me wrong - there is probably a way to pull it off. If you completely automate the nuclear arsenal, take control of it and SV really have AGI and said it is on your side and hacks and disrupts organizing ability and you hold the country hostage with domestic nuclear strikes and demonstrate you are not bluffing. But then what would prevent Dario or Sam to just take control of the nukes and remake USA in their image? And who are the competent people in Trump's administration that could organize it?
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This is what you say when you have nothing else. Trump clearly isn’t senile, he’s on TV every day giving rallies or answering questions. So he’s “on the verge”.
Agree, even if you don't like trump, there is no evidence to suggest mental decline. he's the same now as he was in 2015: the same bombast , rhetoric, and rambling speech and wall-of-text posts . Someone with actual dementia would not be able to write those long, mostly grammatically correct posts so frequently.
Let's not get carried away. He's obviously not demented, but he clearly had more energy and was quicker on his feet back then.
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Is that going to matter? Trump cares primarily about himself, and maybe to an extent his family members. Does he give a shit about his various hangers-on, the Republican party, or even the US in general?
I would be very surprised if he even bothered to offer support for a Vance campaign, let alone anyone else. Maybe if it came with some form of bribe, but candidates can't offer much until they're elected. Perhaps one of his sons running would bring him out, but Trump loyalty wouldn't be enough to prevent them getting destroyed.
And that's putting aside the question of his increasing senility.
Trump took a bullet for this country. If he only cared about himself he would have enjoyed retirement at the top of his field with billions of dollars in his bank account.
This seems like the easiest bet in the world. Trump campaigns for other people all the time. He is obviously going to support Vance, even if you believe in a selfish Trump, Vance is trivially his legacy, Vance is in Trump’s best interests.
He has made more billions as a maximally corrupt second-term President than he did as a failed real estate developer or a successful reality TV star.
Up until 2024 it was an extremely negative investment. It was just as likely that Trump was going to go to jail. He used to say during rallies and debates that he could have stayed at home and not run for office, it’s what all his rich friends were doing. And that we need those powerful people to serve the country and they don’t want to because the political fallout is too great.
I don’t think a self-interested Trump theory hangs together. Especially after his 2012 foray into presidential politics it was obvious that running for office would vastly complicate Trump’s life. He did it, like him or not, out of a sense that he had a duty to run. And going through his interviews and statements since the 80s it’s clear he’d been thinking about it for a long, long time.
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maybe he took a bullet because he also saw an opportunity to profit more by being president? These are not necesailty mutually exclusive.
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Being in the public spotlight for Trump is like alcohol to me. He’s addicted to it. So in his self-interest he could never retire because he would hate that life.
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This is good for Trump. It is questionable how good it is for Republicans.
Even if we grant that the GOP would not have won the elections that Trump did, a lot of the political capital and momentum of the movement post-2024 win has been bled off on Trump-specific nonsense like his potential connections to Epstein and now this massively unpopular war.
Because they believe he tried to subvert democracy, and voters cannot be trusted to punish that.
I see the GOP as continuing Trumpism, as clearly it is winning formula as shown in 2024 and 2016.
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There are no “potential” Trump connections to Epstein. Trump and Epstein traveled in the same Miami party circuit until Epstein hit on a Trump employee and Trump had him banned from Mar-a-Lago. A few years later Trump provided evidence to the investigation that put Epstein in jail the first time. The current Trump administration has released a lot of records and there is no basis for assuming anything else. This is just a lazy smear campaign.
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I like Trump. Mostly like the war. The I think it’s a good thing. This basically comes down to whether you are maga or your a I don’t like the Dems GOP. He retains power because a lot of people like him.
I own a Tesla. What do I care about fuel prices. And honestly don’t understand why any other car company exists at this point because they are inferior products.
Fuel prices make everything more expensive. You pay your share at the grocery store.
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yeah his approval ratting is 33%, which is higher than zero. Nominally, there are a lot of people who do like him. It also helps that the dems run the worst possible candidates.
33% is basically as high as you can get now in American politics. We don’t have a uniform culture anymore but a fractured culture so the days of high approval rating are over. Early in a new term people get like 50%, but it seems apparent now that everyone’s going to go down to 30’s once people have things to blame on them.
We aren’t an 85% white Christian nation anymore that you can maintain high favorability doing what that uniculture wants.
Are you saying America was a different country the day before Trump launched the latest installment of ZOG vs Iran Nth: the oil-fired Boogaloo? Because his approval rating was higher back then.
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It's actually going to get worse because about a month from now, for the first time since 2015, Trump's time in the spotlight will begin to wane. Come spring, when presidential hopefuls start throwing their hats in the ring, that's where all the media focus will be. By 2000, 2008, and 2016 respectively, everyone pretty much forgot that Clinton, Bush, and Obama were still president, and everything they did was framed in terms of how the candidates would respond. Trump is not cut out to be in this position, and he'll do everything he can to demonstrate that he is still relevant.
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