Trump's Finale

Note: This post and the predictions contained herein appear to have aged very poorly!

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I definitely didn't expect it, but I think the post-election events have seriously deflated Trump's branding. I think he backed himself into a corner by not conceding the election, because necessarily his supporters had to craft up increasingly elaborate explanations for why their God Emperor is powerless against election fraud so obvious that even Spyder69's YouTube channel could expose it. The only way forward was for Q Anon type lunacy to get promoted to the forefront, and Sidney Powell and Lin Wood are prime exhibits of this. Q followers have had years of breathlessly repeating the "trust the plan" and "calm before the storm" mantra and...nothing happens. The less time there is left, the more Q followers are going to have their minds broken.

The establishment Republicans hated Trump from the beginning, but they're self-aware and transactional enough (not necessarily a bad thing for a politician) to realize early on that they could tap into his devotees and translate that into election victory. That worked well for a while. But then it got buried under concrete when both Republican incumbents in Georgia lost their seats. Georgia! Once you dove deep into "elections are rigged" narrative, Trump burned up the primary plank he could offer for the GOP.

Then came January 6th, where he riled up the most gullible of his followers angry about the blatant stolen election into "storming" the Capitol. A few of them died and he put out an utterly incoherent message by simultaneously repeating his claim that the election was stolen and telling his people "Go Home. We love you." When the lives of Representatives and Senators was legitimately threatened, he burned up any remaining cachet he had with the institutional powers that be. His follow-up message where he denounced the attack as "heinous" was probably the most coherent of his messages, but it also threw his people (again, that he himself directed) under the bus and he also sort-of-maybe finally conceded the election.

He obsoleted himself as an election rallying cry with his election fraud nonsense. He soured his relationship with the GOP elite by not only threatening their electoral viability but also their lives. He conned his most fervent followers into a humiliating and "low-class" display where a few of them died, and hundreds more are facing the full brunt of the United States criminal justice system. January 6th has been near universally condemned, with about 10-20% of Republicans approving what happened. The politicians currently throwing them under the bus, including Mitch McConnell supposedly, are cold and calculating people who don't blink without an army of focus group publicists measuring every ramification. Everyone else cutting ties with him are doing so akin to vultures circling a corpse. They know he's helpless now.

Those hoping that Trump's kids would take up the patriarch's mantle always seemed like wishcasting. Don Jr doesn't have any comparable charisma to his father. When he's not geeking out at Vanilla Ice playing at his birthday, he looks plausibly hopped up on cocaine on more than a few public occasions. I can't conceive of a world where he manages to conjure up an ounce of the adoration that his father has.

I don't see a repeat of 2016 in 2024. Republicans had their experiment with Trump and the ramifications of where things ended up are blatantly obvious. You're not going to see a repeat because the people in power won't allow it. Impeachment, if only to disqualify him from power, would be a way to really send that message home. C-SPAN doesn't screen or verify calls, but if this Trump supporters' reaction is indicative of a broader shift, then I'm not sure who he's going to have left. I have a hard time understand his support maintaining any semblance of consistency when he so blatantly dumped his people for convenience.

I have a very low opinion of Trump as an individual, but I at least had to give him credit for carrying himself with savviness when it comes to branding and crowd adoration. The guy is legitimately funny and his followers genuinely adore him. But I could not have conceived of a more colossal fuck up to end his term with.