Rec

and I've followed him for 20 years.

Vance/Thiel/Project 2025 are equally as evil. But they ain't cult leaders.

That fool couldn't order donuts in front of a press crew without sounding and looking like an out of touch dweeb.

I started to say Cockroaches but, seems like a sizable population of America is actually worse..

Before trump and birtherism, it was the tea baggers. The tea baggers were a group of white republicans who had been so hopped up on OxyLimbaugh that the idea of a black president made them hunger for a united front. They looked around and jumped on a small bandwagon of fiscally conservative kooks and eventually took over what became the tea bagger movement. Of course that tea bagger movement had nothing to do with fiscal responsibility and everything to do with what Limbaugh stood for which was hating anything liberals supported like unemployment benefits, consumer protection, renewable energy, ya know, crazy stuff.

An unalived trump will leave a vacuum as there is really no heir apparent in maga, but the ooey-gooey, rich, hatred will remain as it has since the way-too-late death of Rush Limbaugh. The fervor of this ilk may eventually wane somewhat, and before that it may go by several other names beyond maga, but some people thought confederacy fever would eventually die, yet here we are.

It's that Trump was the leader who could actually get them to the polls in droves.

He was definitely a poll driver, but the tea bagger/birther/maga movement will continue under some other name going forward from his death. I was responding particularly to this line in the essay:

Vance got elected to the Senate on Thiles's money and then rode to he White House on Schlump's coattails. He has zero charisma, and even Schlump's devoted followers don't seem to particularly like him. There's no way he'll be able to hold MAGA World together on his own, and Republicans in Congress will never kowtow to him tbe way they do to Schlump. That's why any time someone talks about Schlump dying in office and someone else says, "But then we'd be left with Vance," I'm like, "No worries."

There are a lot of ambitious people being kept under wraps by Trump.
Vance is not going to be able to do that.

These ambitious people have learned from Trump, and know that lawlessness and power grabbing can work. The question is, do any of them have enough charisma to attract a following that would sustain it? The answer is almost anyone other than Vance does.

And I don't agree that almost anyone other than Vance would have enough charisma to replicate his success. I'm not saying it's not possible that someone could step into his shoes and keep MAGA going, but I believe there are very few people who could pull it off.

That said, predicting the future is a dicey business, and I would be the first to admit that I suck at it. I don't think any of us can fully envision what would happen if Trump was suddenly out of the picture. There could (and probably will) be surprises that none of us can anticipate. The point i was trying to make in my previous post is that Vance himself isn't much of a threat, and that is the one thing I feel pretty confident about.

"We need a credible body double for Trump!"
"Quick! Get a walrus and a blond wig!"

FWIW, Jack Hopkins agrees.

MAGA Dies With Trump: The One Thing Pundits Refuse to Admit

when Trump announced his candidacy, he said "Political correctness is the number one problem
facing our country today". I wondered what the hell that meant then later realized that he was saying
I'm going to make racism and bigotry acceptable again.

Republican party was going to have a brokered convention to choose another candidate but they realized that because Trump was so wildly popular among the 80% of their base who are authoritarians they could not win without him. So they put party before country and chose an authoritarian Strong Leader who was not committed to democracy as their candidate. After the tax bill was passed in his first term there was a brief attempt by some Republicans to move away from Trump, but because the support was still there that faded away. After the failed coup attempt there was a drop in support, but when it became apparent that Trump would not face any personal consequences his support rose to what it had been. His supporters didn’t care that he had tried to end democracy in the US, they only cared that he had failed and that he might face consequences.
Now, the Republicans are ramping up their gerrymandering, disenfranchisement, and propaganda to unprecedented levels.

I don't know whether the Republicans and their allied oiligarchs will be able to get their base to drink another flavor of Kool aid once there is no more orange. And it appears that the Republicans are not confident either.

This man's problem is worse than just being the potential successor to a cult figure. He has no ability to hold the room, and no constituency other than some wildly unpopular tech bullshitters.

This makes him Trump's ace in the hole, because (almost) no one is itching for the replacement.