It is Year Nine of the Trump era.
Donald Trump is cruising to his third presidential nomination.
In the process, Trump has finally crushed the old Republican establishment and killed off any dreams of a return to the status quo ante. Super Tuesday 2024 will cement his hostile takeover.
“Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced on Wednesday that he will not run for another term as leader, ending a record-setting run atop the GOP conference.
The Kentucky Republican has served as party leader since 2007, the longest stint in Senate history. He indicated that he plans to serve out the rest of his Senate term, which expires in 2026.
“I’m no longer the young man sitting in the back hoping colleagues would remember my name. It’s time for the next generation of leadership,” McConnell said. …”
As I have said many times before, Donald Trump’s historical legacy looks a lot different in 2024. He was essentially in an island in a sea of mainstream conservatives in 2017. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan ruled the House and Senate. Anthony Kennedy was the swing vote on the Supreme Court. Trump’s Cabinet was full of mainstream conservatives – people like Rick Perry or Mick Mulvaney – and his administration was staffed from top to bottom with people who resisted implementing his priorities.
At the time, it was still possible to believe that Trump was a flash in the pan who could be waited out and used as a tool to advance traditional conservative priorities like tax cuts, but after three election cycles (2018, 2020 and 2022) it is clear that Trumpism has become normalized. Reaganite conservatives have been gradually retiring from Congress. Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse are gone. Mitt Romney is leaving the Senate. Mitch McConnell surrendering power in the Senate is the latest domino to fall. Rob Portman, Pat Toomey, John McCain, Roy Blunt, Richard Burr … one by one, they have left the building.
If Trump is elected president in 2024, his second term won’t be anything like his first term. He has steadily remolded his party over the last eight years. He has pushed out people like Liz Cheney, Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney and Mitch McConnell. Trump has been normalized to a generation of younger voters born after 9/11 who cannot even remember how powerful the old conservative establishment used to be.
Moral of the story: in retrospect, revolutions in politics take time to put down roots. I was too hasty in completely writing off Trump after three or four months in office. He isn’t done yet. Trump’s legacy could end up looking very different by the year 2029 than it did in 2017.
“revolutions in politics take time to put down roots. I was too hasty in completely writing off Trump after three or four months in office”:
I do not call it a “revolution,” only populist reformism (at best), and any reform of the system is an illusion, a temporary illusion. Even if the system really was re-formed, it would merely be going back to its original form and would still be essentially the same system.
“Trump’s legacy could end up looking very different by the year 2029 than it did in 2017”:
He is bound to preside over even MORE evil in a second term, unless he has a complete change of heart (which would be a miracle, extremely unlikely) AND if the system becomes so weak that it can’t stop him from doing something good for the exploited masses. Both of these changes (miracles) would need to happen at once.
I still say you can’t vote your way out and populist reform is an illusion. Instead, the working class must be educated thoroughly until they become conscious of the real problem and the only solution, and finally take their power to bring it about by refusing to bow and serve the elites and their bourgeois hands any longer. Otherwise, only an act of God or a stronger outside force (military) will change anything. Absent a proletarian socialist revolution, history shows that oligarchies and empires can endure for thousands of years until a natural disaster (like the Black Death) or a stronger outside force (like Genghis Khan) finally brings them down.
“[T]he working class must be educated thoroughly until they become conscious of the real problem and the only solution, and finally take their power to bring it about by refusing to bow and serve the elites and their bourgeois hands any longer.”
In the meantime, Merthyr, maybe they could learn how to tuck their shirts in.
The Repub Party has probably already chosen which Jewish Somalian Homosexual Transvestite they will have run for McConnell’s seat. The Repubs will go straight from Boomer Conservitards like McConnell to running minority Millenial females as candidates and skip right over White Gen X males.
What’s a Gay Old Pedo to do? It’s good the Kentucky Undertaker is finally going to leave but they Washington Generals have numerous up-and-coming farts with feet for the clown-shoes. An abominable Jewish Somalian Homosexual Transvestite would be just the ticket for the tards and would continue in the great GOP tradition of ratifying every step on the way to utter perversion.
Sadly, you are probably right. The GOP has a long history of picking liberal Republicans to run in deep red districts. As long as they stick to the prefab talking points that have been market researched to the nth degree, they often get elected. Now that there are less and less White liberal-moderate Republicans dipshits willing to humiliate themselves, the power elite behind the GOP will be forced to find such recruits among the non-Whites. But, Kentucky is still not likely to pick an open Troon or other Soddomite, so expect to see a Marco Rubio type appear in Kentucky with a slight accent and claim he jumped out of airplanes to destroy jihadis, protect democracy around the world, and lower taxes.
Mitch has been possibly the most unpopular politician in American history. Yet he always won re-election easily, because it does not matter who votes, what matters is who counts the votes.
The Republican Senators are no better or no worse than in 2017. They are still just there to get rich. Some of them got the visit (from intelligence), so they are retiring.
Mitch surely got the visit. He is too senile to be a good wartime leader. Maybe the bald guy from Florida will be chosen. He isn’t bad on immigration. But in Washington the imminent war with Russia and China looms over everything.
There is no Trumpism or MAGA. The whole thing is a personality cult. There is no content, no real principles or program, only loyalty or disloyalty to the cult leader.
As to the man, he was good friends with Epstein for many years. He married one of Epstein’s whores, for crying out loud. Mossad has enough video of him to fill a whole film festival. Nothing is different. They still own him.
Some of us are hopeful that Trump has been taught a lesson by his tormentors. We hope that he has dropped his denial that The Deep State exists and is a huge problem. Maybe insurmountable. But maybe Trump now understands what Americans are up against and what he is up against. The fact that he didnt retire after the 2020 election was stolen from him via obvious blatant fraud shows he is ready to fight for us. Trump was unaware of the extent of the Deep State because he was not a career politician. Romney and McCain knew all about The Deep State because they were part of it. Maybe our enemies have molded Trump into a man who is ready and willing to take them on. That’s our hope and why we support him. He has proven his willingness to suffer and fight for us. Who else has? I cant think of anyone.
If Cheetohead picks Lady G’s lawn-jockey Mr. Tim as his running mate to get that all-important 10% of the Platinum-Murikan vote, it might be a suitable tea-leaf to get an idea of what the grift is all about.
I plan on voting for Trump and I hope he wins.
I don’t think you’re wrong about how people react to Trump and how it exposes them as insiders invested in the system. I still think you’re wrong to think Trump is sincere is his desire to drain the swamp and secure the border. He was a grifter in his first term and he’s still a grifter now. He’s not Pat Buchanan.
> He was a grifter in his first term and he’s still a grifter now.
Best one to come along since the legendary Charles Ponzi. Have to give credit where credit is due. As for the Murikan electorate (not that their votes mean anything), Phineas T. Barnum noted some time ago that a there’s a sucker born every minute and not long after Mencken noticed that nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the Murikan people (who were 90% white in Mencken’s day). Today may well be the Golden Age of Grifting. They seem to be everywhere! It’s like the dot-com bubble, except even more obnoxious. Given the very low IQs of some of the bloodsuckers being imported, I could see scamming and grifting being a way white folks could survive in the big favela.
“scamming and grifting being a way white folks could survive in the big favela.”
Many ppl are of that opinion, but they don’t take into consideration that the favela is too poor and violent to make a profit in, unless you’re the most violent drug dealer, the only one making money.
When an area goes favela, violence becomes the law.
McConnell’s sister in law got whacked.
https://discernreport.com/what-did-she-know-death-of-mitch-mcconnells-sister-in-law-being-investigated-as-a-crime/
Curious things happen when a longtime swamp dweller suddenly decides to call it quits. I read that the War-Sow is also stepping down today. Strange times indeed.
I’m hoping that Trump learned his lesson from his first administration, and all of the crap he’s taken since, he doesn’t hire any more people like Bill Barr, John Bolton, General Miley, Christopher Wray. These ‘woke’ DAs that have turned or tried to turn political differences into felonies, need to be replaced too. Saying that they’ve abused their authority doesn’t do it justice. I felt that the first time Trump was there, he spent too much of his time bad mouthing people on twitter, or whatever they call it now. He needs to spend much of his time going after his enemies, and use every legal means available to bust them, that’s what they’ve tried to do to him.
I wondered when he was first elected if he had any real sense of how crazy and how stupid his main enemies were, or the lengths that they would go to keep things the way they were. He ought to know by know if he ever will.