What does the future hold for Donald Trump? - threadbans in OP

Another fraud...

SCOTUS declines to respond to Smith's request to determine whether TFG is immune to prosecution; pushes it back to the appeals court that Smith had bypassed.

No dissents listed, so this one's pretty interesting and it still may get back to the SCOTUS soon enough. If the case is still going during the campaign, well, so be it.

A little more thinking about it. The SCOTUS might decide that the Constitution says nothing about how candidates for President are chosen, so that's up to the States. There's no mention of political parties or primaries or any of that. Just the electoral college stuff.

Talk about a can of worms. Perhaps, however, that's why they're waiting on the appeals court decision to understand how they can tapdance around the scope of their ruling.

Lithwick @ Slate tears strips from the SCOTUS in this year-end summary, slightly out of date because SCOTUS punted on Smith's gambit:

Is the allocation of electors for presidential elections not already in the purview of the states?

Saw an analysis online that because the SCOTUS has taken an originalist stance on issues such as abortion rights by saying it's the choice of the individual states, making them rule on Trump and the 14th Amendment forces them to either go against Trump and stick to their originalist stance by leaving it up to the states, or side with Trump which would open them back up to cases being brought to try enforce abortion rights.

In which case, bringing Trump and the 14th amendment to the SCOTUS is less about Trump and more about protection of existing rights (or gaining back previously hard-won rights which this SCOTUS has overturned).

Crowd in Virginia tried it but the case was dismissed

Light years more capable than any potential Republican rival judging by the debates and the wheezing old man who's too afraid to participate.

Biden is old, Trump is old and mentally incompetent judging by the rants. The rest of the GOP candidates all seem to be more useless than the last, they need a big loss to turn the party into something more sane and credible, they must be very difficult to support.

There is always that call back with him.

Trump the man who said...

Proving he really isn't that smart especially with his mis-reading and making all those gaffs while reading his teleprompter

I presume Stephen Miller is the scriptwriter. Trump just reads the lines.

You're right, but it really speaks to how deranged the GOP has gotten that all of the rest are a trump lite, the dems really don't need to change anything until 2028 (I'd imagine you'll see Michelle Obama attempt a run then, driving the dribbling misogynists crazy, don't think she'd end up getting the nomination.

However, one of them is able to stand up straight without enhancements at the very least (again, making a mockery of the both sides arguments), though it's more of a storm in a teacup than anything major (unless trump starts denying or explaining it stupidly):

Trump’s ‘toe pads’ spark social media firestorm (msn.com)

Without enhancements:

with enhancements:

Both.. both.. both..

False equivalency yet again.

One is a despot, racist, rapist fraud fascist.

The other is a benevolent ould fella who should have retired.

Hardly the same ****ing thing, but then again, you know that.

It's interesting because at some point, the Republican base turned on the neo-con philosophy which had been central to the party platform since Reagan at least. I'm not sure when that changed - it was probably a gradual change of mood among voters - but it really crystallised in Trump's 2015 campaign launch speech when he announced that the American Dream was dead. Several key things which had been talking points left of centre for a couple of decades before that suddenly became the purview of the new right, like the loss of manufacturing bases, the cost of healthcare, and general distrust of big business. It strikes me that the right and left in the US missed each other by just a few years in terms of finding agreement on several things, and that would really have had the fat cats of the country worried.

Not to sound conspiratorial when I say there are greater forces than mere politics at work in the world - I just mean businesspeople who are interested in making as big a profit as possible and don't want that interfered with, and will use the considerable capital available to them to achieve that, principally through political lobbying. I think the division currently found in the United States is gold to the business class because it really paralyses the political system from making any large changes at a national scale in broad benefit of the public. The suspicion between the two main parties means that they'll tend to vote against what the other one is cooking up even if it's basically in the public interest, but big business can always make donations to enough legislators of each hue, if they want to make something happen. And on top of that, there's also business that profits directly off of the division in terms of social media companies and news networks. American news media really is something else - nightly sermons delivered to the faithful is what it amounts to. It's wall to wall editorial comment, broken up with ads for pills and fast food.

And this comes back to the reason why Trump is a terrible candidate - he directly feeds off this division. He utterly fúcking revels in it. I don't believe Biden does, but the division of the country is such that his very presence is offensive to the Republican base at this point. But Biden doesn't really have any great hopeful ideas - his platform in 2020 was pretty much, "Hey, remember when things used to be normal?", and that was definitely more attractive at that point than the flailing of Trump, who really failed on his big opportunity to lead the US through the crisis of COVID, but it's not a thing to really go forward with. Yes, the Republican platform is a lot of rage, but the Democrat platform is just kind of vanilla, 'more of the same' (in the main) and it's that inert, kind of tepid 'vision' is what contributed to the frustration that led to Trump in the first place. Round and round the U.S. goes, and right down the plughole.

America needs a unifier. Someone who can tell the ordinary people that their issues are largely the same, whatever side of the spectrum they lean to. Easier said than done, I know, but something has to happen to take America out of the whirly-go-round it's currently on. Don't go so hard on the identity politics, which may be well-meaning, but is just contributing to division as well at this point. It's going to take someone coming along with a new kind of thinking, but it won't be the two old men currently heading up their respective parties. That's for sure.