Blackcap Blog

Published at 10:10 on 19 June 2024

He Probably Will

Biden has been very consistently underwater in the polls for some time now. I don’t think that can be simply waved off. Trumpers were waving off how Trump had been consistently underwater by this stage in 2020, and we all know how that election ended up.

But He Might Not

I said probably in the above section, and I meant it. Polls are not infallible. The polls were saying that Hillary would probably win in 2016, and again we all know how that one ended up. Probably more pertinently, the Democrats have overperformed compared to polling for every election since and including 2018. This is probably due to several reasons. Speculating on what those reasons probably are is outside the scope of this post, but suffice to say the most likely reasons still all exist.

At any rate, a Trump win in November is likely enough that it is worth speculating on.

There Will Be Chaos

That is the one and only certainty. Trump is an agent of chaos.

It won’t be as much of a global shock as Trump’s 2016 win, because pretty much everyone knows that a Trump win is not just an idle hypothetical but is very much in the realm of possibility. But there will still be chaos nonetheless.

For openers, there is Trump’s (and Trumpers’) ego-driven “own the libs” mentality at work. “Owning” the other side by rubbing their noses in their defeat might feel good, but it is seldom good political strategy. The best strategy is to make the other side feel somewhere on the spectrum from bored to reassured, because that robs them of the motive to oppose you. “Owning the libs” accomplishes exactly the opposite.

So expect the new Trump era to begin with something like the 2016 Womxn’s Marches, i.e. historically big protests. This is particularly likely if Trump once again wins in the electoral vote despite losing the popular vote.

So Many Unknowns

Beyond that, it becomes increasingly hard to say.

On the one hand, he’s a fascist, set on doing fascist things. And this time, unlike in 2016, the fascists are actually expecting to win and have planned for it.

On the other hand, he’s incompetent at most things. The last time Trump was in the White House, he was continually stumbling over his own dick and making one stupid unforced error after another. This started very early on, when he ran his mouth off and earned a Special Counsel investigation for it. Project 2025 is very real and very scary, but it is quite likely that Trump himself would unwittingly sabotage efforts to put it fully into place.

And we then have the opposition, both the so-called “opposition” of the Democratic Party, one of the world’s most politically incompetent major parties, and the latent or potential opposition from the grassroots. And given the inward-looking and subcultural nature of the radical left in the USA, the Democratic Party is hardly the only potential oppositional actor that can be described as likely to be incompetent.

So it’s really a question of which side manages to best triumph over its own internal incompetence. That’s not a question that I (or likely anyone else) can answer right now.

The Big Takeaway

What it does mean, however, that if Trump wins those on the Left should not give up hope and throw in the towel. Real opposition, opposition capable of derailing Trump, will still very much be possible, and the time to start opposing will be the instant the election is called for Trump. And the time to start making contingency plans for such opposition is now.