I think this perspective is the real copium. Vance’s performance in the VP debate righted the ship for the Trump campaign. Trump’s rock-solid 38% will vote for anyone with an R.

Vance lacks the showmanship, but he makes up for it by either pretending his terrible agenda is not true or actually agreeable to the center-right. Most know Trump is crazy. Even his more adoring fans will give him a pass on at least one insane thing if you press them. Think “I wish he didn’t post on social media so much, but I love that he speaks his mind”

Two years is more than enough time to get incumbency advantage. He can course correct a couple things in July 2028 and ride that through the debates saying “I’m not trump guys, see, I fixed X and Y!” That gives the 38% the okay to say “yea, he’s basically trump still, I didn’t actually want X or Y”

As for winning over the rest of the electorate, who cares? Who on the left didn’t know what trump was? We all knew. We saw through the Project 2025 lies. It didn’t matter. Enough people stayed home because they knew and thought “it won’t be that bad” or “he won’t win with that baggage”

That’s Vance’s strength. He doesn’t need to win anyone over. All he needs to do is flake off a couple factions by pretending to not be that bad.

It never did, RFK just used his position to supercharge the myth and lower share prices long enough for Kimberly-Clark to acquire Kenvue.

https://web.archive.org/web/20251104021100/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/03/business/kimberly-clark-kenvue.html

Why would they? It’s a win-win. They either get significant tax payer money invested on their behalf, or the oil stays off market keeping their prices high.

Toward the end he was blaming future Biden.

Or, easier method. He runs. Democrats sue saying he clearly can’t have a third term. SCOTUS declines to take the case because the constitution says he can run, he just can’t be elected.

States wait for each other to take him off the ballot, since elections are state run and eventually none of them do because they waited too long and they are super-duper sure he won’t win this time.

He wins, Sued again, SCOTUS declines to take the case because he’s a sitting president and who are they to mingle in elections “we can’t set a precedent of stealing elections from the people’s choice” or something of that nature.

Opposition falls in line because, yet again, the majority of Americans decided he and the GOP were the best choice and they’ll lose if they fight back. But really, if he wins a third term, GOP owns Congress and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it anyway.

Boom, third term for Trump

Triple SecDef

“Democrats are being callous” against federal workers, they say, as their King fires a third of them and asks if he can NOT pay them when the shutdown ends.

Plans now include a parade since that coincides with Trump’s 79th birthday.

According to the article, the parade part is specifically for Trump

More like 50% can’t be bothered because they “aren’t political”

23% are GOP single issue voters who with vote their party till the day they die for that one thing (guns, god, babies, etc.)

27% have some assortment of center to left values and with flake easier than Tesla paint if any one of them is not met

Thanks friend

GOP reps “lol, no thanks, I only care to visit you in August -September every 4 years because your votes overwhelmingly prove that is literally all that is required of me”

Unfortunately impeachment is also meaningless. I don’t see a circumstance where 67 senators would ever vote to convict.

The only thing that might work is to be barred from public office and placing the secret service under congressional control to enforce it. But since presidents are untouchable kings now, 2/3rds of Congress and state legislatures are never going to give that up when they could be the king one day themselves.

It’s wild that you’re right given that most of the new EV and battery factories are in red states. Just shooting themselves in the foot as usual.

Maybe a bright side; filling the executive with inept sycophants might slow down project 2025. The reason he struggled to achieve a lot of his bullshit the last time was they didn’t have skilled people to navigate the legal system.

Of course, that legal system also made him a king so…all they have to do is make him say whatever they want to do. But maybe, hopefully, they’ll spend a lot of time fighting amongst themselves.

One more I’ve heard from the MAGAs in my workplace: Trump did not actually get a first term because the Democrats obstructed him so 2024 is actually his first term

It’s the Tragedy of the Commons defense

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

He’s been campaigning for head of the USDOE for years. His time in Oklahoma office has just been bouncing from one GOP hot topic to the next, trying to catch Trump’s eye. This is just another “daddy please” from him. Unfortunately it’ll probably work. But at least the whole US will get to use his brilliance that brought Oklahoma’s education system from 49th all that way to 49.5…

Well, yes, of course this is assuming he is stopped from going full dictator. That could easily happen, but it would be terrible for the economy so…and I never thought I’d say this…but thankfully deep pocketed lobbyists will mostly be trying to keep the current state of democracy intact. If we go full monarchy, it’s not great for business…

But again, coin flip, end times, and we’re all super fucked anyway so the ACA is the least of our concerns.

Yep, it will be up to 5 republicans in the house to save anything, ACA, IRA, Medicaid, etc. Our only hope is that they remember the blue wave rebuke of Trump in 2018 and choose to be moderate. But they can easily flip the coin the other way and know this is the end times and they need to ram through all the terrible shit fast.

It’s not much consolation, but I do take a little solace in the fact that nearly all of the Trump-wannabes have crashed and burned on the ballot. So far, it seems like only Trump can pull of Trimpism. His ego won’t let him name a successor, so when he goes, there will be a MAGA void to fill and it might be difficult for a single person to fill it.

Will Trump’s natural death free us from right wing extremism? Absolutely not. But will one savvy politician gather all the support trump has? Not immediately, that’s for sure. When he’s gone, I bet 40% of his base will believe he’s still alive and the deep state is hiding him somewhere while Desantis-Cruz-Vance, etc are false prophets. I mean, Vance was supposed to be the savvy MAGA guy, and look how well liked he is.