“I think fundamentally the problem with post liberal thinkers is that they seem to assume that vanquishing liberalism results in their enemies being converted or defeated and not becoming radicalized into enemies who no longer extend the mercies they once did.”
‘Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty’ on Bluesky
So I had said, in the wake of Viceroy Trump destroying the White House East Wing, that this only confirms that the American republic is as dead as the structure, because Trump can just do what he wants without involving the protected sites bureaucracy, or Congress, or anyone else, because Congress is perfectly okay with him treating everything as his personal property. There is no rule of law anymore. So that raised two questions, one, how we are to get rid of the criminals and two, what government we are going to replace them with.
It may indeed come to violence, but we can see from the protests in ICE-occupied cities that non-violence is winning more hearts and minds than attacking cops and destroying property. Also, it may not even come to violence.
Consider that Trump, after saying that the coronavirus was a “Democrat hoax” for most of 2020, got it himself, and only survived because he was the president and had the best medical care the government could provide. When he was ex-president, he still had the best medical care the government could provide. He has the best medical care the government can provide now. And you see what he looks like.
Unless he can sign an executive order to make himself immortal, or God hates us that much more than I thought, Trump IS going to die, likely before 2028, maybe even before the end of 2026. And that would mean JD Vance takes over. Now, in the abstract, I could say some good things about JD Vance. Like, he can probably count to 11 without pulling down his pants, which is more than I can say for Trump or half the men in his Cabinet. But Vance doesn’t have Trump’s magic mind control skill for selling unbelievable bullshit, and while he has a highly cultivated sense of snottiness, he hasn’t learned Trump’s trick for insulting an audience to their face and making them love him all the more for it.
Not to say that Vance can’t establish a Trumpnik dynasty – after all, the charismatic dictator of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, was succeeded by the highly uncharismatic Nicolas Maduro, and he’s still got a tight grip on power. But in this country, the fact that the last two Democratic presidents before Biden were Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and the last two Republican presidents were both Trump, serves to confirm that this low-information country would rather vote for a celebrity than a statesman or a bureaucrat. And Vance isn’t much of either. So all of this not only raises the question of what happens when (not if) Trump dies, that implies the question of what happens if (not when) Democrats take over again. Because as with the Biden Administration they run the risk of alienating both Left and Right so much that people will turn back to the Republicans no matter what Mad Max warlord they get to run for president.
There are two justified fears outside the Church of Trump (i.e. In the reality-based community): One, that if this regime is overturned by lawful election, the Democratic hierarchy, whoever is president, will just say, ‘Oh, thank goodness that’s over! We won, so that means Americans just want us to get back to the status quo when people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer were running everything!’ In other words, the Biden Administration, which nobody liked, including leftists.
The other being, if the more radical ‘progressives’ take over – which could be through election or other means – then they’re going to enact leftist measures like ‘antiracism’ which would indeed be radical but not the sort of radical changes the country actually needs. I’d estimate that that is the reason that anybody who isn’t already a leftist and/or Democrat hasn’t switched to that party by now.
Speaking for myself, I’d already said that I’m changing my registration back to independent from Democrat – not because the Democrats are too leftist, but because as an institution, they’re useless. As I put it, I would rather send my money to a Kickstarter campaign than a Democrat candidate’s fundraising campaign, because with Kickstarter I have a better chance of getting what I paid for.
And I would estimate that’s the real issue for a lot of people, including leftists. We can’t trust that the Democratic Party will honor even promises for moderate action, let alone radical action. When Trump sent a mob – complete with zipties, blunt weapons and a hanging scaffold ready to go – to kill anybody who wouldn’t go along with his scheme to replace the Electoral vote in the Capitol, that should have been the end of it right then and there, impeachment or no impeachment.
And this relates to recent news in that this Tuesday they had “off year” elections in those states that have them, like Virginia, and in pretty much every one, Democrats beat Republican candidates and by much larger margins than predicted. In the New York mayoral race, Democrat (and admitted socialist) Zohran Mamdani won by more than 50 percent, meaning that in the unlikely event that Republican Curtis Sliwa dropped out of the race to endorse former Mayor Andrew Cuomo and the even more unlikely event that all of Sliwa’s supporters voted for him, Cuomo still wouldn’t have won. But in neighboring New Jersey, centrist Democrat for Governor Mikie Sherill was almost tied with Republican Jack Chittarelli in polls, and Sherill beat him by double digits. And while JD Vance snarked that the election was only an issue for “a couple of blue states”, the Georgia elections had a couple of Democrats win races for the public service commission. In Pennsylvania, special elections to challenge the three liberals on the state supreme court ended with all three judges keeping their positions. And in Missisippi, which wrote the book on disenfranchising Black voters, Democrats flipped two state Senate seats, ending Republicans’ supermajority in the chamber.
And of course as a result, Trump is reliving the same happy memories he got when Putin bent him over a desk in that closed-door meeting in Helsinki. But this election, along with the No Kings turnout, only confirms that the Democrats now have the momentum leading into the 2026 midterms. The question is what they do with it.
It’s going to be that much more likely that the Trump Party will try to skew state elections in 2026 (especially since California’s Prop 50 also won by ridiculous margins). They are this desperate for the same reason that House Speaker Mousy Mike Johnson is continuing the government shutdown, which should be called the Oh Please, Oh Please, Oh Lawdy PLLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEZE Mike Johnson, Don’t Let Dem Epstein Files Get Out Shutdown. They have used Trump’s victory (a majority of the popular vote but still only a plurality of all voters) as a mandate for absolute power, which they see as license to commit crimes. They are scared to death that if Demonrats take even one part of Congress, they’re not only going to investigate Trump, but all the minions who were just obeying orders (but are not given Supreme Court immunity).
Why should we disappoint them?
Some people would give us that “when they go low, we go high” attitude and say that if/when Democrats take over, they shouldn’t be fixated on revenge. FUCK. THAT. SHIT. We already had a Democrat Administration that refused to take revenge on the Trump Party and Trump repaid them on January 6, 2021 before Joe Biden was even sworn in. At that point they weren’t just disagreeable, they had declared war on the whole system of law. And now thanks to Trump, that law no longer really exists. Obeying its terms is worse than self-defeating. We do not need revenge, we need justice.
If Democrats really want to follow through with their victory this November and sweep Congress, they need to get the message that was given by “progressives” in New York City, by centrists in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and by red-state voters in Georgia and Mississippi: FUCK. YOU. TRUMP. FUCK.YOU. UP. THE. ASS. Fuck you, you Russky traitor bitch. Fuck you, you walking septic tank of a humanoid. Actually, the septic tank would be a better president, because it would be smarter and less racist. The whole premise of Russell Vought and his ‘Project 2025’ people was to create not just a revenge policy but a policy for permanent Republican majority.
We need a Project 2029.
We need not just ‘oh when we come back, we’ll just put everything back the way it was.’ These fuckers let Trump destroy the East Wing. They are not politicians, they are accomplices. As I have said too many times to count, the Republican Party collective is the real problem. It was the Trump Party before 2015. He just finally showed up. And again, we need justice, not revenge. Mind you, revenge will be needed, in the short term. Not just for petty emotional reasons. The Biden Administration thought they could just put everything back the way it was because Republicans had learned their lesson. These brother-fuckers are too stubborn and stupid to learn anything that isn’t beaten into them. It needs to be made clear that if they continue to identify with racists and fascists and traitors, that the Republicans will go the way of the Whig Party, only with more archaic beliefs and a smaller Anti-Slavery wing. And that means criminal prosecution of the Trumpniks who have actually committed crimes.
But if all you do with power is enrich your cronies and punish people you hate, you’re just the Mirror Universe version of the Trump regime that voters rejected this week. What people want is to get the republic back. And they’re not gonna get it, because Trump destroyed all the checks and balances that made it work, including the implied premise that politics should be a private concern between two political parties that could trust each other. So what we need is to actively build the republic we thought we had. Not just go back to the way it was, but to look at the system and correct the flaws that destroyed it and brought us to this place.
I have already stated my ideas on how to do that (starting here). In the long term, we are going to need a full-scale constitutional project to put term limits, and age limits, on all our politicians, including justices. (Anybody who doesn’t think a Supreme Court Justice is a politician angling for votes has never seen a Senate confirmation hearing.) In the medium term, Congress needs to do what it can do, and it can add new seats to the Supreme Court, and yank the funding from ICE. But to do that, in the short term, you need to win elections, and unfortunately that requires voting for the Democrats as our legally-designated NotTrump Party. And that means that to be worth the effort, the Democrats need a Goddamn attitude adjustment. But I think some of them are already there. One of the less publicized stories from Tuesday’s Virginia elections was the victory of Jay Jones in the attorney general race against incumbent Republican Jason Miyares. Jones was leading the race before October, when old text messages from 2022 came up with Jones where he said he would “piss on graves” of Republicans and asked about a hypothetical where he had a gun with two bullets and was in a room with Hitler, Pol Pot and Virginia Republican Todd Gilbert. His choice: “Spoiler: put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people you know and he receives both bullets every time.” This was controversial enough to cast doubt on not only Jones’ campaign but the campaign of Abigail Spanberger for Governor. Well, not only did Spanberger win by double digits, Jones won his race by almost 6 points.
Why, it’s almost as if after January 6, not to mention ‘King Trump’ dumping AI shit on No Kings protestors, the mainstream media should quit being shocked that a politician would advocate violence against his opponent, and act like the voters should consider that disqualifying. Cause it’s not like Republican voters care.
I said it before, I’ll say it again, and I’m gonna keep saying it: FUCK. THEM. ALL.
The day after the 2025 election, Mike Johnson said, “President Trump is on the ballot next fall,” Johnson said in his first comments of the off-year election results, delivered at a news conference outside the Capitol on Wednesday. That, he explained, is because Democrats will work to unwind Trump’s agenda and “move to impeach him.”
Find that clip and run it as an election ad every Goddamn day of the 2026 campaign. Democrats might take the Senate.
But if that happens, we may have all these Tea Party-style ambitions but we have to figure out where things proceed with what we have. The Tea Party and more successful Trump Cult could not proceed until established Party leadership either got out of the way or got with the program. So too with the Democrats. Chuck Schumer of course is completely useless. Hakeem Jeffries is slightly better than useless, if only because he’s not old enough to collect Social Security. But either one of them is ripe for challenge to their position. And once the current Congress ceases to be in session, Mike Johnson will no longer have standing to hold it up. And then anyone can run for speakership. And whether it’s next year or 2028, the Democratic leadership ought to be taken up by somebody who’s actually popular and in tune with where this country is going. Somebody like… Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
I mean, you know how Nancy Pelosi behaved when Trump was holding his State of the Union speeches. If AOC was up there, he’d need a Secret Service detail just for the podium.