President Donald Trump concluded his Republican midterm convention on Thursday by leading the audience in a pledge … to himself.
Trump asked the crowd to raise their right hands and begin: “I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States.”
The crowd dutifully repeated the line, calling Trump “the greatest president in the history of the United States.”
Trump added: “that loves us so much he can’t even breathe.”
The crowd again repeated the line, but then it got a little harder to follow.
“That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it anyway, I don’t care if I’m registered or not. I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do,” he said. “There’s never been bigger cheaters, they don’t care. I am going to go out and I am going to get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on November 3rd or we are going to vote before that.”
Unable to repeat all of that, the crowd cheered.
Trump realized he lost them and reset.
“Are you ready?” he asked. “Here’s the way you ― “
But he wasn’t ready himself as he got sidetracked by people in the audience. He tried once more to finish, with the crowd repeating after him, but left them behind as he went off on another tangent.
“So help me God,” he concluded.
The crowd repeated that part heartily.
“You know what happens if you don’t vote?” Trump asked. “You go to hell!”
So much blasphemy that he’s telling his supporters they’re going to hell!
I agree with everything you said except:
Because I support the Balkanization of U.S. Nothing good comes from the continued existence of the this country. Trump’s rise to power isn’t a fluke, it is merely the natural consequence of courting authoritarianism for the better part of a century.
Such an outcome would lead to a strong man consolidating power, but first would lead to warlords, oligarchs with their own bastions of power, security services left derelict after the collapse of government would turn to highway robbery, aforementioned warlordism, and organized crime.
Then you have what is left over of the military, and whomever consolidates that, is the new supreme leader.
We could talk all day about how it would play out under different scenarios, but the collapse of governments in the US would be a very very bad thing if we weren’t organized to institute a better system. That system could even be broken up into several, countries.
Otherwise the new boss is at best the same as the old, and in all probability much worse, with a lot of pain and suffering before that happens. And when that strongman takes power as an autocrat, future autocrats only get worse.
Plato noticed every single republic follows the same formula from representative government through stages of oligarchic repression to “democracy,” as defined by the ancient greeks up until like the 19th century when it became a positive buzzword rather than a strong man rallying the population to seize absolute power. Then the autocracy degrades in time through successive leaders and is overthrown and a republic re-instituted.
No republics have since broken with the formula even if they haven’t run through the stages yet.
Yeah, an uncontrolled collapse could be catastrophic. That’s an argument for building decentralized institutions capable of surviving a federal crisis, not necessarily an argument for preserving the existing federal state indefinitely.
I recomend you look up the setting for the Shadowrun TTRPG. The federal government fracturing would result in megacorps taking control of various regions of the country very similar to the game, minus all the magic stuff
Well, what I really support is the Balkanization of the U.S. PLUS the complete and utter collapse of capitalism as a system. But that gets into a lot more of a nuanced discussion than I was prepared for.
But that game sounds sick, though.
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