re: #390 Anymouse

I have friends in Germany, Poland, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom that have shared similar concerns during the election cycle (though they are not people who are positioned to know government policies or security arrangements).

That said, I fired an E-mail at my friends in Switzerland and Germany noting that despite the insanity pouring out of the White House, there is resistance to this here. Moreover, it would appear that those inside the government here aren’t taking this lying down. The place already is leaking like a sieve, and there are those even in the GOP who are opposed to this nonsense.

Sooner or later the extremely wealthy are going to come out, and many aren’t going to be happy with the GOP continuing this nonsense (your money is worthless if the country is a smoking hole in the ocean).

What we don’t know is what sort of political arm-twisting is going on behind the scenes, in backrooms and boardrooms. Conservatives like Steve Forbes or liberals like Warren Buffett aren’t going to sit around and let a bunch of nihilists screw up their lives.

And it really isn’t wise to piss off your intelligence services or security force (in this case the Secret Service).

I don’t wish harm on anyone, but an awful lot of awful dictators have been taken out by individuals in the palace guard.

The flip side to that? A lot of awful dictators were removed from power through coups orchestrated by their underlings, only for the people to find out that the underlings were every bit as horrible but smart enough to fix things so that there would be no similar uprising to remove them from power. Whether he’s removed through impeachment, invocation of the XXV amendment, dies in office, or simply decides he liked it better being a TV star, the end result is we’re stuck with Mike Pence. And Pence is a much cagier politician, he’s unlikely to make much of the same mistakes that Trump is and he’s almost LBJ-like in his ability to work the levers of power. He could actually capitalize on the negative views towards Trump to work over Democrats to his way of thinking.