We're Hurtling Toward Another Trump Presidency in 2024

The way things are going, I'll be shell-shocked if Democrats are able to hold their majorities in either the House or the Senate in the upcoming midterm elections, and it looks as though 2024 is going to be a Republican coronation ceremony rather than an election. This becomes more likely the worse Democrats do in the midterms, in a cyclical bit of self-fulfilling political destiny.

At the point Trump is taking his oath, I'll be moving into a padded cell in an underground bunker with my French bulldog. I can't take another Trump presidency, and neither can this country.

Joe Manchin, coal executive extraordinaire, just blocked Joe Biden's entire Build Back Better legislative package. It had provisions to mitigate climate change that would've threatened the fossil fuel industry's iron grip on West Virginia's broken economy, and more importantly, Joe Manchin's fat bank accounts.

He owns a multimillion-dollar coal brokerage, now controlled by his son, Joe Manchin IV. It's like nepotism had a baby with late-stage capitalism and produced this lovely outcome for America, in which a coal executive is dictating American policy to fight climate change, or not.

He's doing such fine work obstructing the Democrats that Mitch McConnell just went public with his purring come hither offer that he should join the Republican Party, post haste.

You're putting Mitch McConnell in a seductive mood. That's hard to do unless you're a dying SCOTUS justice.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump's merry band of neanderthal fascists are laughing in the faces of the House's January 6 Committee that's attempting to get to the bottom of the insurrection, wiping their asses with their subpoenas live on Newsmax while raising millions of dollars fundraising on the Big endless Lie.

The central figures who enabled Trump's insurrection are utterly unafraid of these weak congressional attempts to hold them accountable for their violent campaign of sedition. It's pathetic. They should be in cuffs, like the people they conned into attacking the Capitol.

Unfortunately, Trump's loyal lieutenants are finding they possess impunity rather than legal culpability, because instead of steely determination to exact justice, Merrick Garland's DOJ has butterflies in their stomach about making a political mess.

A bigger mess than Donald Trump retaking the American presidency after launching a prolonged and violent attack on our democracy? I cannot for the life of me understand why he's still the Attorney General. This is the one thing Joe Biden has some power to control, it seems, and he's doing nothing.

Please, put someone with more backbone and a bit less paralyzing fear in as AG. Democracy will thank you for that move in the long run.

The big steal

It was never going to be easy or simple to right the sinking ship of American democracy in four short years, but these days it feels like an almost foregone conclusion that we're all doomed to a neofascist dictatorship run by President Jim Jordan and Vice President Matt Gaetz by 2028, at the latest.

That will come only after Republicans steal the next election, however, what with the fact that they'll have control of the House, Senate, and the Supreme Court by then. As far as the Supreme Court goes, this next time around, Republicans won't be caught flatfooted. They're busy laying the legal groundwork to ensure their next coup is carried out flawlessly and to the exact letter of the law.

They learned lessons from the last one. No more Brad Raffensperger or Mike Pence protecting democracy. By 2024 they'll have installed a million little Steve Bannon acolytes spread finely across local precincts deep inside battleground states to run the election, and ensure increased election integrity.

Election integrity is a euphemistic way to say that they'll ensure that only Republican candidates actually win, when they win, whereas Democrats will lose when they win. It's pretty simple.

If somehow it's not won, though, Republicans always have SCOTUS to cover their left flank.

We all saw how willing SCOTUS is to hand elections off to Republican presidents in the hanging chad debacle of 2000, when they gifted the presidency to George W. Bush, despite him losing both the popular vote and the electoral college in Florida if they'd actually been allowed to finish counting the votes. Now it's worse, with a hard-right conservative faction dominating the highest court in the land by a healthy margin.

The only reason they didn't just give Trump the presidency last time is that his "lawyers" were utterly incompetent buffoons, sloppy drunk and loudly flatulent on live television. Rudy Giuliani could barely speak cogent English, much less draft a convincing motion to steal an election.

Remember when his face melted at Four Seasons Landscaping? Me too.

SCOTUS craves the appearance of legitimacy in these solemn matters. At the very least, they ask that when you steal national elections you do it based on lawyering that appears mostly sober, and that it comes out of the mouth of a bona fide attorney that looks and sounds somewhat respectable, rather than a drunk conspiracist blathering on YouTube about Chinese bamboo injections.

That's all SCOTUS requires for Republicans to steal an election; a convincing motion should suffice nicely in 2024. With the kind of insane legislation Republicans are passing all across the nation, and with literally nothing to protect voters against these infringements coming from Senate Democrats anytime soon, it appears as though we're going to see a far more conspicuous and straightforward version of 2000 in 2024.

Who says history doesn't repeat itself?

The bad ticket

The other glaring problem is that the 2024 ticket is already an unmitigated disaster, no matter how you slice it. Kamala Harris is a terrible politician, full stop. Joe Biden is ancient, and also not the brightest bulb politically.

Who's going to take up the mantle of Democracy for the Democrats? Who can win the brutal national race that's coming straight at us? I'm not confident there is such a candidate in the center-left political ecosystem. Pete Buttigieg? As talented as he is, in an America that opted for an avowedly racist and misogynistic Donald Trump, I have a difficult time believing they'll ever vote for someone who's openly gay. I hope I'm wrong.

I hope they find some credible candidates fast, because this feels more and more like a looming disaster that is just waiting to actually happen.

I wasn't shocked like everyone else when Donald Trump won the first time, and I won't be shocked if and when he retakes the reins of power.

You can see these slowly unfolding catastrophes coming for miles, but America has such a limited attention span that it seems incapable of comprehending these conundrums, much less coming up with viable solutions to avert them.

We'd better start trying though, because the dice are loaded and the deck is stacked. Republicans are going to try to steal the presidency in 2024, and we'd better have some kind of game plan, or America is in serious trouble. The worst kind of trouble, which is violent right-wing dictatorship trouble.