If Donald Trump is Re-Elected He Won't Be the Same as Before: He'll Be Much Worse
As you may or may not remember, the Trump years were a goddamn nightmare. Good lord were they ever terrible! I thought that Trump’s administration would be a surreal, dispiriting shit show. I underestimated just how terrible it would prove to be and just how much damage Trump’s presidency would wreak.
Trump promised to be a disrupter. He proved an agent of chaos who didn’t care about anything or anyone but himself. We’ve never had a president of such low moral character before and Warren G. Harding was famously a real piece of shit.
Being an even bigger piece of shit than that worthless mouth-breather Warren G. Harding, Donald Trump began angrily denying a 2020 loss in the presidential race before it was even over.
Trump just knew that those dastardly Democrats were going to try to steal what he saw even then as his sacred landslide victory that he started angrily complaining well before the election happened.
That’s got to be a good thing, right?
The disgraced, twice-impeached ex-president broke with tradition and decency by never conceding that he lost the election.
Trump was angry when he inspired a failed coup at the Capitol. He’s much angrier now. If Donald Trump is re-elected, which is a terrifyingly likely possibility, he won’t be the same as before. He will be much worse.
With his trademark breathless hyperbole, Trump claimed that Obama’s non-existent wiretapping of his phone represented the greatest crime and scandal in American history.
Since then Trump has been impeached twice, once when he wasn’t even in office. He currently faces 91 felony counts in four criminal cases in four separate states. He is the first, and I hope also the last, president to have a mugshot.
In Trump’s mind these are not the consequences of playing fast and loose with the truth over decades of criminal behavior; they’re grievous personal insults directed at him and his family that must be avenged.
Trump’s only real motivation, beyond a desire to stay out of prison, is revenge. When he ran for president in 2016 he was running against Hillary Clinton but also a treasonous Deep State establishment and establishment politicians of both parties.
Before Trump’s grudges were more abstract. They were with the elites, and the “Woke” and the politically correct. Now Trump has a long list of people he feels have betrayed him, and by extension, the country, that dwarfs Nixon’s enemies list.
Trump isn’t just going to speak ill of former allies who turned on him on social media or at rallies; he’s going to use the government and the legal system to go after his enemies.
Trump has said that he will be a dictator but only on his first day in office. In Trump’s mind that’s all of the time that he will need to realize a huge percentage of his campaign goals—most notably building that wall between us and Mexico that somehow never got built during the 1460 days of Trump’s first term but will take no longer than 24 hours to become a reality the second time around—and drilling as widely and intensely as possible, the environment be damned.
If someone tells you that they will be a dictator, believe them. That’s doubly true if the person in question is Donald Trump. If someone tells you that they will stop being a dictator do not believe them. Dictators don’t stop. Dictators don’t listen. Dictators think they’re above laws and rules and other minor concerns. That’s Trump.
Trump won’t have to worry about getting re-elected if he wins in 2024. And he won’t make the mistake of hiring people because of their qualifications and experience rather than because they showed him unstinting loyalty.
The former and possibly future president is only going to appoint people who would feel honored to overturn the will of the people and anoint Trump president, the way Mike Pence shamefully failed to do in 2020.
We’ll get the worst and most sycophantic cabinet in the history of American presidential politics. It’ll be even worse than the screwballs Warren G. Harding hired to help him run the country.
Trump saw his victory in 2016 as the greatest upset in American presidential history. He wasn’t entirely wrong. No one thought an ignorant reality television bozo would secure a major party nomination for president, let alone win.
Yet Trump won all the same because our country is way shittier than we originally imagined.
He similarly sees a potential 2024 presidential victory as the greatest comeback in presidential history. He’s unfortunately not wrong there, either.
Trump was impeached. Then he was impeached again. Nearly 100 felony charges were brought against him. He staged an unsuccessful coup and tried to bully officials into giving him a presidential victory he seemed to think was his birthright. Trump’s old allies have turned on him with great vitriol and vigor, just as Trump has turned on his old allies with blinding rage.
Yet in spite of it all there is a very good chance that we will be faced with the waking nightmare of a second Trump term in office all the same.
That’s not because Trump is a great candidate. He’s a uniquely awful, unqualified candidate. No, Trump has a more than decent chance of winning due to the sorry state of Republican politics and the country in general.
The Orange man is bad. If he is elected to a second term he’s only going to get worse.
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