The rules for destroying a liberal democracy, revisited
Let's subject the hypothesis that I suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome to an empirical test.
Note: Separately, I’ll be sending a few thoughts about Biden’s long-overdue decision to permit Ukraine to carry out deep strikes in Russia with US missiles. If I have readers who are worried we’re about to perish in a nuclear war, though, don’t sweat it. The risk of nuclear war in the coming decades is intolerably high, but it won’t happen in response to this decision.
Introduction
If you’ve been a subscriber to this newsletter from its inception, you’ll know that I published a longer version of the rules below in the early days of the first Trump Administration. I’d written them even before then: They were the prologue to what I imagined would be a book that I began writing nearly a decade ago. Publishers weren’t particularly interested—they thought Trump was a flash in the pan, I suppose—so when I discovered Substack, I decided to adapt the material and publish it here.
If you’ve read these rules before, refresh your memory. They may strike you differently now. If you’re very new here, you may also find it useful to read the following, which provides more context:
Part I: An introduction to the political trend that defines our age.
Part II: The demos, the ochlos, and the people’s will
Part III: On the downfall of the Roman Republic
Part IV: Caesar’s Internet
Discussion: The New Caesars Podcast
YOUR GOAL
🎯 Amass as much power as much as possible within the formal parameters of a liberal democracy.
The Rules
1. Begin with a voice
You are the providential conduit of the “real people” in their struggle against a nebulous class of “elites.”
2. Rewrite history
If the lessons of history suggest your ideas will lead to disaster, change history, not your ideas.
Remember: The people have been robbed of their greatness by a series of catastrophes and betrayals.
Remember: The authoritarian past wasn’t that bad. Or if it was, it wasn’t our fault.
Nostalgia, nostalgia, nostalgia!
The acknowledgement of responsibility for historic crimes is self-hatred, or a lack of patriotism that is dangerous to the health of the polity.
Examples you can follow:
Don’t worry, no one remembers history well enough to know better.
3. Magnify ethnic, racial, religious, or class divisions
Or all at once, if you can swing it. Just make sure people are hopping mad.
4. Magnify fear of foreigners and outsiders
The Jews are always a good target, but if you don’t have enough, try Muslims.
Whoever they are, they’re demonic in their sexual rapaciousness.
They’re raping our women, taking our jobs, cooking with weird-smelling spices, reproducing like rodents, sucking the welfare state dry, and flushing baby wipes down toilet even though they’ve been warned it will clog the pipes. They’re a fifth column, they’ve infiltrated our government, they won’t learn our language, they’re sponging off welfare, they’re terrorists, and they’re screwing up the whole grade curve by studying so much.
Remember: The hordes are always at the gate.
5. Destroy public confidence in elites and institutions.
Helpful ideas with a proven track record:
These institutions have been involved in a dastardly plot.
They’re corrupt. Corrupt, corrupt, corrupt, corrupt, corrupt, corrupt, corrupt. If you repeat it, people will believe it. (Besides, it’s usually true enough.)
Blame them for everything, even things you did. (No one remembers these details.)
It helps if your institutions and elites discredit themselves. But whether or not they do, there will always be some screw-up you can conflate with the whole. Make it your symbol of elite depravity and institutional corruption.
Remember these time-tested principles:
No abstract ideas. Appeal to the emotions.
Constantly repeat a small number of things, using the same simple phrases.
Criticize your opponents incessantly.
Pick out one special enemy for special vilification.
Label events and people with distinctive phrases or slogans:
These must evoke responses which the audience previously possesses.
They must be capable of being easily learned.
They must be utilized again and again, but only in appropriate situations.
They must be boomerang-proof.
Destroy confidence in the idea of objective truth:
Muddy the waters so thoroughly with lies and counter-accusations that people conclude nothing is true and everything is possible.
Train them to believe they’ll never figure it out anyway, it’s all too complicated, and who knows who’s telling the truth—so they may as well go back to watching the game.
(The rules above may be followed sequentially or simultaneously. But do not skip this essential work of rewriting the past, inculcating the populace with hyper-nationalism and irredentism, and discrediting the elites, who are not “political opponents whose ideas you criticize,” but “idiots and traitors.” These steps are essential.)
6. Win the election.
However narrow your victory, it was an overwhelming mandate for every one of your policies.
The people who didn’t vote for you are traitors. Screw them.
Your party would be nothing without you. Don’t tolerate any backtalk.
7. Secure the executive.
Target numero uno: The Interior Ministry. Neutralize the watchdogs. Get rid of the inspectors. Office of ‘Ethics?’ What is this, a philosophy class? What a waste of taxpayer money. (Did you remember to destroy public confidence in the institutions?)
Get control of the statistical agency. You have no need for unpleasant news.
Does it regulate industry? You need to control it. Loyalists only.
Does it decide who gets audited? Staff it with your boys.
Neutralize the intelligence agencies. You don’t need their advice, and you sure don’t need their questions about your friends.
8. Fill the judiciary with your loyalists.
Smear and discredit any judge who seems too independent.
Change the rules for judicial appointments. Call it “cleansing the Communist holdovers in the judiciary.” (If you were never ruled by communists, pretend you were and call them “radical leftists.”)
When judges issue rulings you don’t like, it’s “a judicial coup,” a “judicial autocracy,” “against the will of the people,” and cause for sweeping legal reform.
9. Empower a loyal oligarchic class.
Loyalists get juicy government contracts and tenders. The more loyal, the better the rewards.
Create sweet little tax loopholes for them, too. Don’t worry, no one’s going to look at the fine print.
Ensure the regulatory environment is favorable to their interests. (Did you remember Rule 7?)
Focus on the oligarchs who own the media!
Remember: Stay positive! The punishment for crossing you should be awful, but the rewards for being your crony should exceed anything these mooks could ever dream of achieving on their own. Spread it around! Investors will always prefer profits to political fights.
10. Neutralize your enemies.
Punish the unsubmissive with punitive taxes and spurious lawsuits. Use charges of tax evasion. Or something else! Whether they’ve done it or not, the legal fees and the stress will be punishment enough.
No government contracts for them, obviously. Use your power over the regulatory agencies to ruin them, too. (Might they be … polluters? Is their product harmful to the nation’s youth?)
Don’t hold a grudge. If they come around to your way of thinking, their problems go away.
It should be easy and rewarding to support you and really unpleasant to oppose you.
11. Cultivate some thugs.
You need some lowlifes with a taste for wet work.
Remember: plausible deniability.
They should be smart enough to take the initiative when they hear about an unpatriotic judge or a lying journalist, but dumb enough not to demand a cut of the action.
12. Turn parliament into a rubber stamp.
Never forget your friends. Make sure everyone who supports you gets rich. Make sure everyone who opposes you worries about your thugs.
13. Get the military under your thumb.
Never take your eye off of them. These are the guys with the guns and one day, they’ll be the only ones who can stop you. Get rid of anyone who might be tempted to “save democracy.”
Now is the time—don’t wait.
Do not allow yourself to be swayed by sissy considerations like “military readiness” or “morale.” What good is a ready military that topples you?
Replace the top brass with people who don’t know which end of the gun to shoot from. The more unqualified, the better. If you promote total losers, they’ll insert burning embers in their orifices for you: You’re the only reason they’d ever get this chance to lord it over all the people who told them they’d never amount to anything. (This will give them an especially keen nose for anyone who needs humiliating or firing.)
Note: If the military is popular, this can look all wrong. Did you remember to destroy confidence in this institution? It helps if they’ve staged a coup before, or lost a few battles or even a war (even if this was actually the fault of the politicians). Blame them for that. If they’re heroes, though, be sure to thoroughly tarnish their records before you purge them.
If you’re really worried, accuse them of plotting a coup. Make sure the accusations are lurid. Follow this up with show trials. (Did you remember to fill the judiciary with your loyalists? No one will bother to read the indictments carefully to see if they even make sense.)
14. Gain control of the media and turn it into a non-stop propaganda machine.
Bang on and on about the left-wing bias and treasonous instincts of the journalists. Repeat this until no one believes a word they say.
Transform state media into a partisan cheering section (obviously).
Harass and fine private media into a shadow of itself and let regime loyalist oligarchs purchase the carcass.
Demonize journalists to the point that no one much minds if they disappear under mysterious circumstances. (Let your thugs handle this.)
Arrest a few pour encourager les autres. Soon, you won’t need to censor them—they’ll do it themselves.
Make sure the tech bros understand which side of the bread is buttered: You’ll need them to make sure ugly stories just disappear.
14. Harass civil society.
Who needs these lunatics whining about “civil rights?” Audit their taxes. Say they’re funded by foreigners. Or controlled by George Soros. Whatever they are, they’re enemies of the people.
They’re probably backed by some oligarch whose life you can make miserable. Dry up their funding.
Note: Do not be too heavy-handed with this. Persecute elites, not ordinary people. You want ordinary people to check out completely and watch sports. If you persecute people like them, they’ll start paying attention. (If you’ve smeared and delegitimized the elites properly, ordinary people won’t care if you persecute them. They’ll love it, in fact.)
15. Reorient your foreign policy toward Russia.
Russia’s a special friend who will do your dirty work for you so you can keep your hands clean. They’ll spy on your opponents and leak the emails. They’ll help you get your message out on social media. They’ll harass your critics. If some up-and-coming politician is giving you a pain in the ass, they can give him a hideously disfiguring skin disease. No one will ever be able to pin it on you. (Did you remember to neutralize your intelligence agencies?)
No need for a paper trail or a phone call. Just wash their back and they’ll wash yours. It will drive your enemies nuts that they can’t find the smoking gun.
If anyone wonders what’s up, call them a conspiracy theorist.
Send them a little thank-you note by surrounding yourself with people who understand Russia’s point of view. Everyone likes to be understood. (Don’t overdo it, though.)
16. Create chaos, confusion, and a sense of permanent emergency.
Keep your enemies off balance, exhausted, demoralized, and baffled. Make sure no one knows what’s really happening.
A million conspiracy theories must be swirling at all times so the real conspiracies just blend into the noise.
The more you lie, the more column inches will be devoted to debunking the lies and the fewer journalist-hours will be spent on figuring out where all the money’s going.
The wilder the lie, the more it will drive your enemies out of their minds when all of your followers repeat it like bleating sheep. The more contempt your enemies feel for your followers, the more likely they are to slip up and reveal that contempt.
17. Humiliate or destroy people who are better fit to be leaders.
Call it “taking on the oligarchs” or “draining the swamp.”
Associate the opposition with foreigners, associate foreigners who keep banging about “human rights” with spies, associate spies with George Soros, associate George Soros with Jews, etc.
Remember: Foreigners are meddling in your “internal affairs” and the opposition are traitors.
Don’t forget: Your country is always under attack, from without and within.
Entertain, entertain, entertain!
Bread and circuses! Your opponents are humorless. Bunga Bunga!
Remember: The more attention is focused on you, the less your opponents can get their message out.
Special tip: Bad economic news? Something else you don’t want people to notice? Say something wildly offensive. Journalists are dumb and easily manipulated and they will fall for this over and over. You can do this for years and they’ll never cotton on. Announce that you think women are good for nothing but cooking and hanging curtains. Watch the bad news disappear in a cloud of indignant editorials about your sexism.
18. Be on the safe side when it comes to elections
If you’re doing this right, you don’t need to rig the vote. You’ll be legitimately popular. (Or popular enough. Remember: If you win an election by just .000003 percent, it means you can do anything.)
But just to be safe, change the voting rules in a way that disqualifies just enough of your opponent’s base that you’re taking no chances.
Remember: It’s not who votes. It’s who counts the vote.
18. Take control of the central bank.
Make foreign banks absorb the losses for your bad policy decisions. Everyone will appreciate this. Everyone hates the bankers.
An election coming up? Juice that economy, baby! Let the future take care of itself.
19. Dissent is okay. But not too much.
If an opponent gets too popular, you need to cut him off at the knees, but by this point, your options are limitless.
Buy him: Every man has his price.
Arrest him on charges of kiddy-fiddling: No matter what he says, he’ll never get that stink off of him.
Whack him.
Protests? Let them blow of steam, unless it looks like it’s really getting serious, in which case, use non-lethal weapons but aim them at their eyes. It will die down once you blind their leaders.
20. Rewrite the constitution
Seems like things are going well! Alas, the constitution says you can’t stay. So you still have work to do:
Jigger the constitution so that opponents have no hope of coming to power through democratic means. Call it “vastly overdue constitutional reform.”
Snap referenda, by the way, are superb for this. It’s the will of the people.
And voilà: You’re done. Elections still happen, but they’re denuded of everything that makes elections meaningful.
Hail Caesar!
The Test
I think any fair person would concede that in the years since I wrote that, Trump has indeed followed some of these rules, and therefore, my fears that he would do so were not entirely misplaced.
But perhaps you think he means to stop now. Therefore, you’ve concluded, when I say there’s cause to worry he means to go to the bitter end, it can only mean I’m suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.
So here’s the test. I’d like you to write down two things.
First, write down where you reckon he’ll stop. You can share it or you can keep it to yourself. I don’t need to know. Just make your prediction, and be sure to write it down. This will be a useful reminder that you once thought any outcome beyond this point was improbable and, presumably, undesirable.
Next, write down the number at which you think it would it be fair for me to say, “I told you so.”
Because here’s my promise: If in the next four years he goes no further than he already has, I will say, “You were right, and I was mistaken. I will enter therapy to resolve my condition.”
Fair?
You’re on the honor system. For the duration, then, let’s just put this matter to the side, watch, and learn.
It occurs to me that this experiment has a flaw. Perhaps my critics actually agree with me that yes, there’s a solid chance Trump whips through the whole list. But they just don’t see why this is a problem. If this is the case, perhaps you’d abstain from charging me with derangement?
Let’s break this up with a little game. You’re the Senate. You get to throw one of them out. Only one. The rest have to be confirmed:
Are you queasy yet?
Speaking of those nominees, I’m wondering whether some of my Trump-voting readers are already beginning to feel a bit queasy.
Bear with me for a moment. Among the people who voted for Donald Trump, I believe there are three groups, roughly:
1. The indifferent. Some portion of the electorate doesn’t know who those nominees are, nor do they know much about the agencies they’ve been nominated to lead, and thus they don’t know enough to grasp that by naming them, Trump has declared his intent to burn our intelligence services, our military, our justice system, and our medical-scientific establishment to the ground. It’s entirely possible they’ve paid so little attention to the news since the election that they haven’t even heard about his picks, or if they have, none of these names ring a bell, of if they ring a bell, it’s only dimly. If they did happen to glance at the news and see the hysteria, they think, “the Left is always hysterical,” and they go back to whatever they were doing.
This group voted for Trump for normal electoral reasons. Maybe they wanted lower prices and less immigration. Maybe they had fun at one of his rallies. Maybe Kamala Harris reminded them of some Torquemada from HR who made their lives a misery.
They wanted a course correction, not a revolution.
They range in the degree to which they’re informed. Some of them are the people whom life has destined to flunk tests like these:
Poll shows 41 percent of Americans can’t name US vice president.
Poll shows 53 percent of Americans can’t name three branches of government.
Some are a bit more informed, but they’re busy. They don’t keep up with the news day-to-day. Whatever the case, they don’t yet realize that they’re getting a revolution, not a course correction.
2. The Revolutionaries: Some part of the Trump-voting electorate knows exactly who these people are. They’re thrilled by these announcements. These are the people who sincerely believe we need a second American Revolution—the people who believe I’m deranged not because I fear Trump will destroy everything, but because I’m against this. It isn’t clear to me what kind of government they would prefer. Some species of libertarian monarchy? A theocracy? A very different interpretation of the US Constitution, one in which we pretend the past two and a half centuries never happened? Far more haven’t really considered the question: They just want this system of governance razed to the ground.
This group grasps full well that three of these appointments amount to a gun aimed at the power ministries—and they say, “Good.” (HHS is not a standard play at this stage and I don’t have the faintest idea what Trump’s thinking with this.)
Group 2 sincerely believe the entire edifice is so rotten and corrupt, so worthless and illegitimate, as to warrant wholesale destruction. They either believe their preferred system of governance will spontaneously emerge from the rubble, that anything that emerges in place of this system would be better, or they just don’t think about it. Some are theoreticians of the Revolution—they’re on Flight 93, they know what time it is, and they think Curtis Yarvin is the ne plus ultra. Others just feel it: a deep, grunting rage.
This group may be subdivided into cynics and dupes. The cynics know full well that every word out of Trump’s mouth is a lie, and they don’t care, so long as he destroys everything. The most ambitious among them mean to ride this rollercoaster to the point of total chaos, throw Trump overboard, hijack the revolution, and appoint themselves Emperor (of the Solar System, in Musk’s case.) Some have no idea where all of this is going, but they damned well mean to make buck out of it (where is it written that revolutionaries have to take vows of poverty?) They see Trump’s base and the federal government as a pair of spurting cash cows.
The poor dupes, on the other hand, are flatly delusional:
The more the media screams that these nominees are unfit and dangerous—the more articles they publish listing the many ways their appointment would destroy the agencies they head—the more excited Group 2 gets. This is exactly why they voted for Trump. They want these agencies destroyed. They want it all destroyed.
If you belong to this group, you may abstain from placing a bet. We’ve already figured out where we disagree. The empirical evidence won’t change a thing, because our difference is philosophical. I’ve explained why I don’t believe we need a revolution before, and if that didn’t convince you, let’s agree to disagree. Maybe you’ll come to see things my way in due course. (Have you ever read Darkness at Noon, by the way? One of the great books of the twentieth century.)
3. The Rationalizers: These are the reasonably well-informed people who have convinced themselves that despite his rhetoric, Trump will govern in the manner of a traditional Republican, and to the extent he doesn’t, he will be contained by the guardrails of custom, the Constitution, and his cabinet. Ben Shapiro is the archetype. They often point to Trump’s first term, which they think was a success, and aver that “None of the disastrous things [people like me] predicted came true,” even though in fact, they did. They liked the tax cuts, the deregulation, the Supreme Court picks, their stock portfolios, and the Abraham Accords.
They concede Trump’s a wrecking ball, but they think he’ll only wreck things they want him to wreck, like DEI and Drag Queen Story Hour. They figure he won’t do much damage to anything important. People in this group are apt to dismiss the things Trump says as “mean tweets,” tell people like me that we’re just hung up on “aesthetics,” and dismiss January 6 as “just a riot.” Often, they sincerely believe that because Trump frightens Democrats, he must also frighten America’s adversaries.
They tend to hold that nothing Trump has done or might do rivals a list of Democratic failures that include, inter alia, indulging rioters in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, coming up with the slogan “defund the police,”1 inciting a crime wave by means of that slogan, foisting transgenderism on schoolchildren, misgoverning American cities to the point that humans have taken to crapping in the streets, funding the research that sparked the Covid pandemic, lying about it under oath, pumping Iran full of cash, handing Afghanistan to the Taliban, opening the southern border, turning the Ivy League into a hotbed of terrorist apologetics, everything that falls under the heading “DEI,” concealing the extent of Biden’s infirmity, indulging campus antisemites, then having the chutzpah to insist you vote for a candidate who insists everything is hunky-dory—someone so polled, focus-grouped, and strained through a sieve by a boardroom of Jen Psaki clones that only her occasional lapses into gibberish distinguished her utterances from those of ChatGPT.
They voted less for Trump than against the Democrats—and more broadly, against the Establishment, which they also charge with starting and losing two wars, the financial crisis, the destruction of the American middle class, and just being incredibly annoying.
The difference between this group and the second group is that this group did not sign on for a revolution. They neither wanted nor expected one. But they so badly wanted to punish the Democrats and the Establishment that they talked themselves out of seeing the evidence they were getting one.
Normalcy bias is a well-studied cognitive phenomenon. (It’s also contagious: If people around you are saying, “Hell no, I’m not going to evacuate, we’ve been through plenty of tornados, we’ll be fine,” you’re far less likely to save your own life.) America has never seen anything like Trump before. To make it make sense, Group 3 put everything he said and did through a translator. By “seek vengeance,” he meant “succeed.” By “withdraw from NATO,” he meant, “get our allies to spend more on defense.” By “appoint RFK Jr. to lead HHS” he meant “I don’t know, but he wouldn’t do that.”2
But to square this circle, they had to discount the quite abundant evidence that Trump is malignant, sociopathic, utterly insane, deeply authoritarian, extraordinarily dangerous, determined to destroy our entire system of governance, unconstrained (and unconstrainable) by custom or Congress, surrounded by a cohort of vile toadies—each pursuing their own deranged psychological, ideological, or economic agenda, most if not all of them tied to Russia in a profoundly sinister way—and equipped, this time, with a plan. This takes up a lot of psychological energy, I’m sure.3
If you’re in this group, I’m curious: Have you perhaps felt a twinge of cognitive dissonance since Trump announced these picks? Have you managed to rationalize it away already? “They’re just trial balloons,” “The Senate will never confirm them,” “The bureaucracies will probably just ignore them?” If so, that’s fine. It’s not like I won’t have a million more occasions to say, “I told you so.”
I’m just curious to know how you reacted.
To everyone who’s not engaged in highly motivated reasoning, it should be obvious that what Trump’s doing isn’t random. Authoritarian capture in the 21st century is nothing if not predictable. Many a goon has trudged up the steps of this ladder before.
Yet I still see people who aren’t quite getting it. Some think Trump has selected these people just to flip the bird at the world, or subject the Senate to a loyalty test. Yes, that’s part of it, but not the whole thing or even the main thing. The main thing is that this is Step 7: He needs these places under his control so they don’t get in his way when he starts robbing us blind and ensuring he never, ever, loses his grip on power.
We’ll soon see if he’s already turned Congress into a rubber stamp. I figure the day Trump is inaugurated, he will, first, pardon himself, then he’ll pardon everyone who attacked the Capitol on January 6. If some uppity senator gets it into his head to vote against Trump’s nominees, Trump will send out the bat signal on Truth Social: “This RINO is LETTING US DOWN. He is very VERY BAD for our country. I have a TOTAL MANDATE for my nominees.” The death threats begin, and the Senators cave. (It’s exactly why they didn’t impeach him, after all.) Besides, Elon Musk says he’ll fund a primary against anyone in Congress who utters a peep against Trump’s agenda.
Speaking of whom, let me call your attention to this paper by Timothy Graham of the the Queensland University of Technology and Mark Andrejevic of Monash University: A computational analysis of potential algorithmic bias on platform X during the 2024 US election. If you still use Twitter, you won’t be surprised to learn that on the day Musk announced his support for Trump, engagement with the tweets from MAGA accounts suddenly soared, and those with Democrat-leaning accounts collapsed.4
The implicit threat of violence, coupled with Elon Musk’s money and propaganda machine, could well be sufficient to persuade the once-dignified and noble United States Senate to put RFK Jr. in charge of HHS. We all know if it were a secret vote, they wouldn’t approve even one of those nutjobs, no less all four of them. But Trump has them so cowed that Mike Johnson is open to letting him put them in via recess appointment (sans FBI background check, because none of them could pass one.)
Get used to hearing these words; you’ll be hearing them lot:
“Remember, they just delivered a mandate to the president, an overwhelming popular vote victory, and of course Electoral College victory, and they have sent the message that ‘America First’ policies are—should be the rule of the day.”
An overwhelming popular vote victory? As of this writing, Trump took 49.94 percent of the vote and Harris took 48.26. To say the people overwhelmingly voted to put Matt Gaetz in charge of the Justice Department might be a stretch, much though I’m sure we all cherish the thought of our new Attorney General triumphantly entering the building with a bump of Friskie Powder and an ice bucket full of Viagra-Red Bull jello shots, en route to violate a conga line of teenagers on the pool table.
What do you think: Are these our profiles in courage? Do these look like the rock-solid institutions that will contain Trump’s injudicious instincts?
We’ll see.
So how many of those nominees, you think, will be confirmed? I think they’re maybe going to fight off Gaetz, but I figure then they’ll sigh with satisfaction at at at a good day’s work—and promptly confirm the other three.
The hour, I fear, is later than even I thought.
Update: I’ve corrected the typos. There’s no way to fix the one in the poll, though. If I do that, it sets all the votes back to zero.
They don’t care who came up with it or whether it was truly embraced by a significant number of Democrats. Apparently, 49 percent of independent voters believed it was part of Kamala Harris’s platform.
Don’t misunderstand me: I’m with them on the desire to punish the Democrats and the Establishment. The United States has been badly governed in this century. The people responsible should lose power. The yearning to throw the bums out is the most American instinct in the world. If only both sides could have lost: I’d be enjoying the spectacle of the great Democratic reproachment more than anyone. (“Don’t even start on that, Pocahontas. I told you not to call them ‘Latinx.’”)
I assume no one from Group One reads this newsletter, but if you’re here, welcome. We have three branches of government, if you’re wondering—the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary—and technically, our vice-president is still, believe it or not, Kamala Harris.
Recently, I’ve noticed that a huge number of these MAGA accounts are AI-powered bots. This one, for example. The weird thing is that if you dig into the replies, they seem to be AI as well. The more I look, the more it looks as if the majority of discussion on the site is just bots chatting with one another. I assume most of them are Elon’s. So the people who still use Twitter are living in an AI-generated world that purports to be real, but is, in fact, designed by Elon Musk and Russia (possibly in coordination) to manipulate their political sentiments. The remaining humans don’t seem to realize it. They think they’re talking to real people. It’s truly creepy and dystopian.
Anyway, I think he overshot. The so-called Xodus to BlueSky is being driven less by a desire for ideological cocooning than by simple frustration: Twitter just no longer works unless you post or want to read endless MAGA drivel, Russian propaganda, ads for really weird products like electric kiwi peelers, and porn.
The wildcard now is the extent of Trump’s dementia. Orban, Erdogan, Putin, Berlusconi were all still energetic younger men when they started dismantling democratic structures. Trump is not. It’s not even clear that there is a lot of strategy in most of his cabinet appointments vs simply a bunch of faces Trump knows from Fox News.
One reason the PiS takeover eventually failed in Poland is that Kasczynski was also already an old man and unable to keep his team disciplined and under control.
I am fairly confident that Trump himself will be done as a viable political figure fairly soon. The question is whether MAGA dissolves due to in-fighting or whether someone like Vance can become the Stalin to Trump’s Lenin.
The US also has a major advantage that Turkey or Hungary did not. It is still a federal republic where a lot of power remains at the state level. Americans generally don’t like federal overreach. It is darkly ironic to see the same people who will tell you the Civil War was an honorable attempt by Southern states to preserve their constitutional rights now turn around and claim ICE has powers that supersede state laws, but I don’t think that will go over well in practice.
“Which side tried assasination twice.”
What a fucking bullshit response. Let’s just take all the most outlandish conspiracy theories and pretend they’re self evident. You fucking moron. You’re part of the problem.