This is the only thing I’m hanging my hat on. Strongly doubt we take the house but it’s not gonna be a rubber-stamp majority for the GOP either (not to mention there’s only so much the Senate can do if they don’t ditch the filibuster). The really unhinged shit like eliminating income tax in exchange for tariffs/sales tax isn’t gonna see the light of day, Obamacare may be difficult to nuke, etc.
There’s plenty of shitty stuff that can be done at the executive level of course, so things will suck, but maybe it could be worse.
Collins and Murkowski still exist, and I will be rooting for them the way Trumpers rooted for Sinema and Manchin the last 4 years. As the party pushes more extreme it’s also possible others step up to moderate as well.
There’s a decent chance they get stuck in the mire of whatever heinous thing they decide to do first. Like if they go for a nationwide abortion ban, it will be a horrible exhausting thing to enact and totally fire up a blue wave in 2026.
The much smarter thing is to go for a bunch of esoteric, silent evil shit that wont have much debate. Throw the base one piece of red meat in 2026 that’s more fluff than content–something about protecting sports from trans athletes or whatever. If they do that, we’re in trouble.
Ironically, I think it’s worse for us if they resist the urge to rock the boat.
Yeah, and the thing is if they can’t help themselves, you know Trump will be more than happy to sign whatever comes across his desk. It wouldn’t bother him in the slightest to sign a nationwide abortion ban a week into his term, even after promising not to. He’d make a huge deal of it and have a dozen smiling white women holding babies in the Oval Office surrounding him as he mugs for the camera and proudly signs it.
There won’t be a blue wave with this iteration of the Dem party. They have been wholly rejected and need to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. No one on either side is buying their bullshit at this point. They lost like 10 million voters from 2020 to 2024.
It’s debatable, but there would be major protest movements, greater than the women’s march in 2017 by orders of magnitude. This would create fear of a blue wave and uncertainty among sitting senators and reps, and make there be a lot of debate about the specifics. It would NOT be an easy thing to pass.
I dunno man I’m not seeing the same thing as 2016 in my social media circles. People are resigned to Trumpism at this point. Where is the will to fight back going to come from? We already did this song and dance and when we elected the Dems in 2020 they didn’t do what we asked of them. At a bare minimum prosecute Donald Trump for Jan 6.
But he wasn’t “pro-vax,” he was pro-Trump. He wanted to push a vaccine through as quickly as possible so it could come before the election and he could be hailed as the provider of the Trump Vaccine. IIRC, he basically wanted everyone to trust him that it was safe without worrying about proper testing and all that, which is why Democrats initially balked at it. And why wouldn’t they/we? Take Trump’s word for it that the vaccine was all cool? Fuck that.
Once the CDC, scientists, and whoever assured the public that the vaccine was cool, that’s when Dems got on board and the sides completely flipped. Dems were all aboard the COVID vaccine train because the experts and health officials gave it their blessing. Trump and Republicans didn’t like it because it came after the election.
I don’t think anything from Trump’s first term hit people 10% as hard as a nationwide abortion ban would. I would think women would call a general strike, which would stop industries like commercial aviation in their tracks. A huge deal.
But, it’s hard to think of any other issue people would be that passionate about. So Republicans really just have to resist the temptation to go with a nationwide abortion ban as their first issue. They’ll probably do some dumb tax cut that doesn’t even include the shit they’ve promised.
Unfortunately I think this might be the same wishcasting about women being a monolithic pro-choice entity that made many of us think we had this thing in the bag yesterday.