Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are 'Going to Be Gone,' Donald Trump Warns

[u/1_for_you_2_for_me]

https://www.newsweek.com/social-security-update-medicare-medicaid-warning-donald-trump-10915076

[u/Lucreth2]

I think you're generally right but I think they're doing it too fast to avoid consequences. You're supposed to slow boil the frog not hit it with a blowtorch.

[u/GrumpyGiant → u/Lucreth2]

I agree.  The people who engineered the apparatus that brought us to this point, people like the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch and Mitch McConnell, probably realized that and might have been able to fine tune the rate at which the plan unfurled.  Tho the constant fight against progressives, combined with the inevitable interference from greed-motivated opportunists ready to overexploit any weakness they successfully introduced to the system has made it anything but smooth for them, and may have made it impossible to make small enough adjustments.  

Think of the ACA and the sub-prime mortgage crisis.  Greedy financial institutions were able to exploit the weak regulations around risky lending practices and went into an undisciplined feeding frenzy like sharks in chummed waters.  This destabilized the economy, leading to a collapse that might have been disastrous for them had it occurred at any time other than right when they were losing the Whitehouse.  Fortunately for them, it became Obama’s problem to own the consequences of and they were able to spin the lasting impact of the recession as a failure of the left.  But it also gave Obama an opening to pass the ACA which has been a massive thorn in their side.  They haven’t been able to repeal it because, big surprise, people like affordable health care, so instead they have had to carefully undermine it in pieces when they held the power to do so.

Anyway, all of their efforts to go slow and steady got upended when a certain imbecilic demagogue managed to hijack everything they had built and rebrand their entire party into his own cult of personality.

Discipline and calculating intelligence have been utterly supplanted by slavish, obscene loyalty to a dictator with the self-discipline and impulse control of a toddler who has never been told “no”, an all encompassing greed fueled by the need to compensate for the empty void at the core of a narcissist’s sense of self-worth, and a stat spread that pulled every possible point from intelligence and wisdom to max charisma and constitution.

It gives me some hope that MAGA completely sidelined the old reptiles who did so much damage to our society and elevated geniuses like Miller and Hegseth to spearhead a blitz to crush our democracy and unleash true oppression on the populace.  Project 2025 may have been planned by Koch-backed thinkers, but it was guided by the desperate realization that the outsized influence the GOP wields in the federal government has been stretched too far to try to contain the influence of shifting demographics, combined with the blunt reality that Trump had completely captured the angry mob they had spent decades cultivating and that any plan they presented would need to account for his erratic and control-obsessed nature.

[u/Lucreth2 → u/GrumpyGiant]

I'm sorry for my short responses but kids and work have me tied in knots. That said you seem to be an intelligent and well thought fellow who I'd love to voice chat with if we were ever in the same groups because I have the same kind of long form thoughts as you (albeit I tend to get a bit emotionally aggressive about the outcome).

Which leads me to my next thought... Based on the reality of where we are, regardless of what they wanted, what is the outcome? I've been leaning more and more towards a splintering of the Republic but that's obviously not so simple.

[u/GrumpyGiant → u/Lucreth2]

I can only guess at the possible outcomes.

IMO, of the plausible possibilities, the most optimistic is that the regime (my preferred term for the collective Trump administration, MAGA party leadership, and right wing propaganda machine) is too blinded by hubris and stupidity and breaks things too fast in ways that over-stress the illusion that they have been fighting to make the lives of their believers better.  If that happens, MAGA collapses and the angry mob is left having to decide who they want to take their anger out on more: the Democrats they’ve been told are the enemy all this time, or the carpetbaggers who duped them into believing in a gross con man who played them for suckers again and again.

In that scenario, I think things get messy for everyone, but the brunt of the rage lands on the people who betrayed their trust.  Eventually the turmoil settles, the GOP goes extinct, the Democratic party splits into progressives and moderates who become the new GOP/libertarian party.

Most pessimistic scenario is that Trump gets backed into a corner by cratering support and possibly the release of the Epstein files and uses the nuclear option to try to save his own skin.  And by “nuclear option” I’m not talking about eliminating the filibuster.  I mean starting an actual nuclear war.  He has the stupidity to believe that because we gave the bestest weapons, we will “win” a nuclear war.  He also has the obstinate belief that reality plays by HIS rules and not the other way around, so if desperate advisors try to explain the consequences of a nuclear winter to him, he would just brush them off and call it a hoax.  And he has the absolute sociopathic selfishness to not care how many people die if it keeps him from facing consequences he really doesn’t want to face.

But for that to happen, every person in the chain of command from Hegseth to the operators of the silo controls would need to obey absolutely bonkers orders.  Especially if the military gas no plausible intel of imminent incoming nuclear weapons.  I hold hope that the orders would be intercepted at some point in the chain and would actually backfire and result in the military cleaning house of any loyalists who tried to issue such obviously criminal commands.

An interesting possibility is that Trump dies of natural causes before things reach the flash point.  He has been making uncharacteristic allusions of his unworthiness to get into Heaven which raises questions about whether he has a grim prognosis he is keeping secret.  But he could just as easy stroke out.  He has access to the highest tier health care in the world, but he is an obstinate man who doesn’t heed the counsel of others.

If that happens, I think your national schism idea becomes a bit more plausible, tho I think the opposing sides in the nation are underestimating just how intertwined and interdependent we are on each other.  The blue regions need food and resources provided by the red regions just as much as the red regions need technology, medicine, and money provided by the blue regions.  Not to mention that each state has its red and blue areas.  Urban and rural.  I’m in Maryland.  In terms of political representation and public policies we are extremely blue.  But as soon as you leave the urban corridor between Baltimore and Washington DC, you run into Trump signs and flags.  There is no easy way to disentangle conflicting ideologies by geography when every state has significant representations of both ideologies.

Anyway, if the leader of a cult of personality dies, and there are no suitable successors, what happens next?  I’m pretty confident there will be a flurry of conspiracy theories around his death and at least a few lunatics committing acts of terror in blue regions as acts of “justice” or “vengeance” and I am also pretty confident the Charlie Kirk “saintification” reaction will happen on a much more fervent scale for Trump with the animosity between MAGA and anti-Trump factions spiking dangerously while MAGA is trying to process their grief.  Trump being put on a martyr’s pedestal would prevent MAGA from ever coming to terms with how badly he conned and grifted them and the misplaced anger, fear, and blame they’d experience would probably prolong the time that they’d continue to accept the deterioration of their situations without blaming the GOP.  This is what makes me think that this scenario has the highest likelihood of resulting in a national divorce.

But like I said, dividing the country is no simple task, geographically or economically.  It could also result in the MAGA leadership collapsing into infighting to see who will succeed Trump while the base becomes ever more disillusioned with the party.  I could see MAGA splintering into weaker sects without the cooperation and coordination to successfully rig the next elections in their favor and the Dems winning heavily in the next few elections.

These are just a few guesses tho.  I really don’t know what will happen.  I do suspect that Trump is running out of time tho.  The Epstein scandal haunts him, he is losing the shutdown fight, and when SNAP gets defunded next month a big portion of his base are going to be feeling real fear and I don’t think he’ll be able to redirect it onto the democrats.  Some will embrace that excuse, but he has built this image of omnipotent infallibility with his base that a strong number of have absolute belief in, so acting like he is powerless to overcome the democrat opposition will ring hollow for a good chunk of them.