A very dark piece from Andrew Sullivan, totally worth reading.
He gives voice to the fears we have about what will result from Trump's presidency.
I only have a couple of comments for now, one trivial and the other not.
1. Sullivan says we won't be able to deprive Trump of Congress for four years, but technically that's not true. There will be midterm elections in 2018, and 1/3 of the Senate and all of the House will be up.
The House is gerrymandered so that the Repubs own it, and many of the Senators up for reelection in 2018 are Democrats in red states.
But between then and now the Republican Party will be re-made. It's conceivable that some part of what's left will be opposed to Trump.
2. Sullivan says that Trump has to deliver on his promises, build a wall, repeal ObamaCare and replace it with something better, bring millions of jobs back, etc.
He says it's a long list, and not easily achievable.
But come on, we saw how deft Trump is at moving on from from controversy.
He can repeal ObamaCare by getting rid of the worst parts (so he will say) and replace it with TrumpCare which contains just the good parts. He'll present it as something all new. What he'll care about is putting his name on it (and in a very weird pun Obama won't care).
He'll fess up that no one really thought he would actually build a wall. It'll never be an issue. His supporters don't care about the actual wall. It was something to focus on during the campaign.
People don't know that Obama is deporting illegals. Trump won't tell them. He'll just provide the numbers that he's deporting and say they're the worst ones, real rapists and murderers, and call it progress, and that "issue" will fade away too.
Bush II was very good at this, coming up with slogans like "don't micro-manage" or talking about the "surge" in Iraq. And that would lead to the next slogan and the one after that. Trump is way better at being slippery than Bush ever was.
I agree with the scenario that Sullivan describes. There will be a terror attack. A Black Lives Matter protest will turn violent. Order will need to be restored. This is predictable. And he's right that the only hope is to protect the courts, and hope the police and military stand up for the Constitution. Like Sullivan I am worried about this, esp because there was a lot of support for Trump in the police and military.
He will probably want to impeach Ruth Bader Ginsburg, he even mentioned her in a debate.
The thing I really worry about is what Trump wants to do now, not what he told the voters he wanted to do. And we won't have much visibility into that. We'll just get the results and the blowback.
During the election I had a theory that Trump was like the Joker chasing cars. I still think it's pretty likely that his goal was to win the election, not to do anything with the job.