These past few months have been chaotic sure. And no doubt trump will do horrendous damage through his 4 years. It’s also extremely unstable right now and as a result it’s hard to make long term predictions.
What I can say is that trump is an old ass man at this point. Much of the GOP is basically a cult around the guy now. And the thing is, that everyone who seemingly tries to replicate him doesn’t seem to have “it”. Like Meatball Ron famously flamed out, as have many many others.
Trump is going to croak at some point. I doubt he makes it another decade or so. So…. what happens then? I don’t really see a clear successor? Maybe Vance? But does Vance have the same sort of devotion amongst the base? Don Jr seems pretty popular in maga world, but trump himself doesn’t really trust jr from what I’ve read. So who replaces him? Or there’s no clear successor, what happens to the party? Does it balkanize? Or what?
What would you predict?
Edit:
Yeah ik this is another post here asking about conservatives. I tried poster in r/AskConservatives but my “site wide contribution score” was too low so I couldn’t. Hence this one is up and the other isn’t
Comments
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
These past few months have been chaotic sure. And no doubt trump will do horrendous damage through his 4 years. It’s also extremely unstable right now and as a result it’s hard to make long term predictions.
What I can say is that trump is an old ass man at this point. Much of the GOP is basically a cult around the guy now. And the thing is, that everyone who seemingly tries to replicate him doesn’t seem to have “it”. Like Meatball Ron famously flamed out, as have many many others.
Trump is going to croak at some point. I doubt he makes it another decade or so. So…. what happens then? I don’t really see a clear successor? Maybe Vance? But does Vance have the same sort of devotion amongst the base? Don Jr seems pretty popular in maga world, but trump himself doesn’t really trust jr from what I’ve read. So who replaces him? Or there’s no clear successor, what happens to the party? Does it balkanize? Or what?
What would you predict?
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
As long as Vance doesn’t actively choose to break with Trump and remains with Trump’s approval, I think that a Vance/DeSantis, Vance/Youngkin, or some other Vance ticket could maintain most of Trump’s support while doing a “Trumpism without Trump” appeal that can also win over some of the moderates/conservative NeverTrumpers who are bothered by Trump in particular but could be potentially won over by a Republican who engages in respectability politics/aesthetics more than Trump
I don’t think MAGA is going away after Trump,or that the GOP will stop being electable and dangerous
They keep on being the party of bold-faced white supremacy and elitism like they have been the past 30-50 years. Perhaps the mask of decency comes back up a bit, perhaps not. On a policy level, though, it will remain the same, maybe minus the economic destabilizing tariffs.
Hopefully it will go back to being a normal party. Maybe even a conservative one.
Either they all go to prison or they rule for the rest of our lives.
And option B is looking a lot more likely than option A.
I think they all immediately pretend they were never really that into fascism, and that they always opposed anything illegal and will tell everyone that there’s no point in rehashing old news.
Honestly without Trump they’re not going to get out the low propensity voters they’ve relied upon since 2016. I’m not saying they won’t win in the future but they have been doing poorly in off year elections since 2016 when Trump hasn’t been on the ballot.
After Trump, the GOP will find someone else who is just as bad as they are but who gets way more attention than most of them do.
Just like Trump.
The GOP is a cult, but they worship themselves. They’ve poured all of their love for themselves into a man who loves himself more than anything else and thinks way too highly of himself. Because that’s them. Except lots of people pay attention to Trump.
Maybe after Trump, their next closest approximation of themselves with attention will be better than Trump. But maybe he will be worse.
During Trump’s first term, people seemed to frequently make the mistake that we had reached the bottom. They were always wrong. They will continue to be wrong.
I hold out hope that MAGA will flame out–or at least splinter into a million pieces–post-Trump. I’m not sure anyone knows the actual numbers, but my guess is a pretty significant portion of Trump’s support comes from people who are not typically engaged in the political process. These people mostly appreciate Trump because he’s an asshole and he ‘owns the libs’ with his very existence. Are those people really going to be excited about JD Vance or Ron DeSantis…or even Don, Jr? Sure, they’re all assholes too, but not in the way that Trump is uniquely that way. And they certainly don’t have the same “charms” as Trump. Maybe some of these low propensity voters will transfer their affections over to Trump’s successor but it seems unlikely they will get all of it, and that could be bad news for the Republicans.
Moreover, after what will certainly be a dumpster fire these next four years, Trump may very well lose a lot of his shine even among his supporters. How are voters going to feel in 2028? Who knows…but I’d imagine that a lot of normies are going to be pretty damn tired of Trump, even if they support him. And whoever his successor is is going to exist in that wake.
As an aside, assuming Trump doesn’t actually try to run for a third term, can you imagine him actually endorsing anyone else for president? It will be a struggle for him at best. I can imagine him campaigning for Vance and spending the whole time talking about himself and how Vance would be nothing without him. It’s not an ideal role for a malignant narcissist.
Same thing that happened 2020-2024. Trump is still going to call the shots. If he’s not around, it’s going to be his words. Until all of his lunatic supporters are gone.
They’ll get more extreme. That confederate flag ain’t gonna stop waving.
I see three likely paths.
The first is that the success of the Republican party is really just that Trump is incredibly skillful at appealing to low propensity voters, but the Republican party’s attempt to capture some of that juice while maintaining their slavish devotion to plutocracy is creating an incredibly unpopular party that’s going to get decimated as soon as he is no longer on the ballot. The evidence for this is that most of the Republican party severely under performs Trump, especially when he is not actually on the ballot.
The second possibility is that Republicans have stumbled onto a successful scapegoat in immigrants and trans people that’s going to allow them to continue to win elections even once Trump has gone and Democrats are going to moderate on those issues to remain competitive.
The third possibility is that Republicans degrade democracy to the point that elections don’t matter between now and Trump leaving and we turn in to something like Hungary.
After the 2022 elections, I might’ve thought they would have become more like they were when Romney was the nominee. After 2024, I’m convinced they’ll be like Trump in the longterm and go for guys like Vance.