I saw a couple of short clips and ended up watching the whole thing one evening, while trying not to fall asleep. The last question that Tucker asks, is “will there be a civil war”. Trump comments on Jan. 6 and says he’s never seen such an out-pouring of love, but equally, he’s never seen such an out-pouring of hatred.
I know most of you don’t care about these figures all that much, but what Trump said is quite revealing. America is probably screwed now. If Trump doesn’t get elected, his supports might go crazy. Likewise, if he does get elected, it might embolden his supporters anyway. I don’t think that anyone will fix the problems in America. It’s too late now. If they’d hadn’t spent billions of dollars trying to rule the world, they could have paid reparations to blacks and possibly avoided the ugliest parts of the current political environment. They’d need jobs and manufacturing too of course.
There is a risk posed by people who misdirect their anger, like that 21 year old kid who shot random black people, painted swastikas on the wall of a supermarket or something, and then shot himself. Of course he’s 21. If he’d made it to 24 or 25 without deleting himself, he would’ve realised that there’s more to life, even if the economy is in the toilet.
2024 is gonna be a war I reckon. There’s no reconciling the differences with most people. If they can’t get justice and a fair standard of living for all people, then things won’t improve (conflict, division).
There are many possibilities short of actual civil war that are still pretty bad. I think we’ll see a lot more of that before we get to civil war, i.e. more incidents like Jan 6, more civil unrest, more shootings. For an actual civil war, you would need some kind of split among the armed forces in loyalties. That could be possible if there’s a close enough election and Trump can do a better job of convincing people it was somehow stolen. But even that involves a whole lot of contingencies and massive decisions from generals, etc. to side with one presidential claim over the other.
Even if you have pockets of armed militias with access to automatic weapons (which is easy in the US of course!) causing grief, it’s likely to be quite isolated so long as you have a president who has control over the armed forces. Realistically, that is probably the worst case scenario over the next year or so… i.e. very small patches of the US being controlled by groups who don’t recognise the government, and armed forces moving in to take them out. But even that seems quite an unlikely scenario IMO. The people who are actually competent and could pull off something like that know that they would get taken down in 5 mins if the US armed forces flexed their muscle. You need a rare mix of genuine military competence (no, not just guys who know how to show off on YouTube) and complete political delusion. Not saying there aren’t some guys out there like that, just that there are probably not many.
Assuming Trump is nominated (not 100% guaranteed), he could win (fairly or not), lose a close election, or lose badly. Winning is by far the worst case. I think it would be worse than last time, hopefully not a lot worse, but who knows. I think Trump winning is pretty unlikely though, even if he tries to cheat (which he probably will). If he loses a close election (decent chance of happening), that’s when we might see unrest & violence… but as I said, I think it’ll be pretty contained (but still bad). Losing badly, i.e. worse than 2020, could work out quite well. There may still be some violence, but only his most deluded supporters will be able to believe it was stolen. I’m really hoping this is what happens, as I think it’ll be the end of Trump as a political force (even better if he doesn’t win the nomination). It won’t solve all America’s problem’s by any means, but it’ll at least slow down some of the decay of democracy there.