Opinion by Hal Brown
Update: Feb. 9, 2021
Trump plans a reemergence and some retribution after impeachment
The former president is confident both of his acquittal and that he’ll come out of the trial with an iron grip on the GOP. Politico
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As I write this on Morning Joe the discussion is about how the Republican Party has become cultlike. This fits with the idea I had for a story which came from reading a totally unrelated (but interesting to me) article about what would happen to a person who was sucked into a black hole. The article introduced me to a new word and concept:
Unless Donald Trump, for whatever reason, cannot run again I think there is at least a 50/50 chance he will be the candidate. I doubt if he will win if he does run. This depends on how successful President Biden is in the next four years in keeping the keeping the voters that won him the election and gaining enough former Trump voters to offset successful GOP efforts to disenfranchise Democratic voters.
If Trump announces his intention to run, or even that he is considering it, it will shore up his position as the dominant force in the Republican Party. Even if he doesn't he will be seen as the king, or queen, maker because he has an iron grip on so many voters.
If Joe Biden doesn’t run again and the candidate is Vice President Kamala Harris, who would be the likely candidate, her winning would depend on how well she has positioned herself over the next three years. I expect that if Biden decides to be a one term president he will do whatever he can to make sure the 2024 winner is a Democrat whether it is Harris or someone else.
If Trump doesn’t run he is likely to try to ordain his successor. It remains to be seen whether he’d decide to risk it being Princess Ivanka or the smarmy Donald Jr. (if one or both aren’t in prison where they belong) or take a chance on Marjorie Taylor Greene. She certainly has been sucking up to him.
I don’t see him throwing his considerable weight behind the other unabashed contender Sen. Josh Hawley but it certainly is possible. Look for Hawley and Greene, who is likely to win her send term in the House, to be fighting for the spotlight over the next four years. If you missed my story “Rep. Greene's press conference shows she can be a far right star with eyes on the biggest prize” you can read it here.
The end result of the battle for dominance in the Republican Party has been addressed in many other articles and by pundits on TV. It will be a splitting off of the representatives who voted for impeachment and the senators who voted that the Senate trial is legal from the majority who for a variety of reasons will go with the extreme wing.
This will result in a the GOP experiencing spaghettification and it would not survive being stretched into a long, thin noodlelike shape, the vast difference in pull between the rational moderate head and larger but batshit Qwazy toes would eventually rip the party irrevocably apart.
If the Democrats succeed in achieving their goals for the majority of the country this will help them to become the winning party for the foreseeable future. However, they must also play the political game better than the Republicans both nationally and locally.
It’s often been said that the “Republicans play hardball while the Democrats play softball.” (A Daily Kos diary for that sentence tops this internet search.) Not only do the Democrats have to play hardball, they have to play smart hardball.