What does the future hold for Donald Trump? - threadbans in OP

The Donald v The Ronald as it will surely be Christened...

Seems to me the chickens have come home to roost for the GOP as they now realize you can't put the genie back into the bottle, they're desperate to cut Trump loose but it seems an impossible task now, they're between a rock and a hard place and it's all their own doing, they backed him, enabled him, propped him up and pandered to him knowing full well what it entailed, they knew he was pure toxic.

I don't think they have any hope of getting him to step aside quietly, if they don't endorse him he'll burn the place down and set them back years and they deserve every bit of it for getting into bed with him.

When Obama won the Illinois senate election in 2004 he told reporters "I can unequivocally say I will not be running for national office in four years."

by the way these go in American politics, De Santis saying nothing about a presidential run is taken as absolute confirmation that he is planning one...

As morbid as it sounds, the best thing that could happen to the GOP is Trump dying.

Would galvanise the base in its entirity behind De Santis without Trump hurling from the ditch.

Or they may go for the first one who claims to be literally possessed by Trump's spirit.

True, but then he could be open to criticism for being politically a coward, scared of tfg

I'd be perfectly fine with either, being totally honest.

No dying would make him a martyr. The GOP wouldn’t learn any lessons about supporting trump they’d just say welp he’s dead lol and spend several more cycles trying to really own those libz with nastiness.

Thats why I feel de Santis cannot beat Trump because the problem is how does he attack Trump on anything when his entire base are so far down conspiracy theory rabbit holes and the fake news doctrine. Like in theory it should be easy to attack Trump on his dreadful record on Covid with hundreds of thousands of preventable American deaths, more than in any American war. But the MAGAs believe that Trumps response to Covid was the best in the world ever and that in any case Covid was created by the Democrats in tandem with the Chinese to cripple Trumps beautiful economy and in order for the Democratic Deep State to control them by placing 5G chips in their arm. Thats the kind of nuttiness that Trump has cultivated and his cult are all in on it. They live in a post truth world where Trump and his far right media eco system like Alex Jones and Steve Bannon play his base like puppets on a string.

Like in any normal situation de Santis would be able to just simply stand up in the primary debates and make the perfectly logical argument that he should be the one to face Joe Biden becasue Trump already faced him in an election and he lost. That is a reasonable argument but if de Santis uses it the MAGA set will turn on him viciously at Trumps behest. And then suddenly de Santis is a deep state actor out to ruin Trump and rumour has it he runs a paedophile ring from the basement of a pizza shop and Hillary Clinton manages it and takes codified pizza orders on Hunter Bidens laptop, and so on and on.

So if de Santis takes on Trump in the primaries then battling him using truthful arguments is not an option available to him. He cant even label what Trump did on Jan 6th as an insurrection becasue we all know that the Trump supporters in Washington that day were just tourists having a day out to see the Capitol and anyone involved in violence were engaging in a false flag Antifa operation. Like QAnon told them so thats the truth they believe.

How do you take on a political opponent who has reconstructed the truth and now has millions of people believing his narrative? Id think it is impossible for de Santis to win that battle and if he goes up against Trump he cannot defeat him and simultaneously get the support of his base for a 2024 run. Its one or the other, it cant be both.

Yeah, I'm not seeing any great evidence that the Republican base is about to move on from Trump wholesale. According to Forbes, 48 percent of Republicans would still back Trump in a presidential primary tomorrow.

The best outcome of all may be if both men split the party in two.