re: #113 Big Beautiful Door

I think that is way too pessimistic a take. First, we are only four months into the Trump Administration, and its getting real hard to imagine Trump lasting another four years. Second, his election was something of a fluke, and even if his popularity wasn’t plummeting, its unlikely he could pull off another electoral victory with only 46% of the vote again. And that was when he ran against one of the most unpopular presidential nominees ever. Now imagine Trump having to run against someone the media hasn’t demonized for thirty years. I’m pretty confident Trump is a one term President a best, and the indictments haven’t even started yet.

If he doesn’t last the full four years, it will be because he himself throws a giant tantrum and walks out. While that is definitely possible, because he’s a child, I don’t think it’s especially likely, because that’s not been his previous MO, and because ultimately he would get less attention if he did.

I also disagree that he wouldn’t win in 2020. I think he’ll win easily, and with a larger margin than before. He will have lost no voters from 2016, and only gained some, as the corruption of cult media spreads to new victims. While the entirety of the US media had a good headstart on demonising Hillary Clinton, the mechanism of the right wing echo chamber is pretty efficient at this point, and it won’t take long to establish a narrative of hate against whoever the Democrat is, similar to how Kerry, an otherwise milquetoast career politician, somehow became widely understood as a crazy leftie military traitor. Imagine, if you will, CNN and the NYT publishing daily headlines for months about Elizabeth Warren’s college application and endless parsing of Native American-ness. Easy to see, isn’t it? Those apathetic and otherwise apolitical voters who usually don’t vote will either continue to not vote or vote for the incumbent, because that’s what generally happens in US elections. Add to that the possibility of a couple of small wars to increase general popularity, and four years of unfettered voter suppression disenfranchising large swaths of typical Democratic voters, and I don’t think there’s any question that it would be an easy Trump win in 2020.

I do have one caveat to that, in that if there was another non-political public figure with significant media presence and pull that hijacked the Democratic nomination in a similar fashion to how he did, that person could win against him in 2020. That’s possible.