Trumpism’s Three Part Arc (A prediction)

As a political science major, I viewed the rise of Trump as the inevitable outcome of a rapidly changing society and the Great Financial Crisis. It opened the door for someone to say that the Elites had betrayed the People and Trump crashed right through that door with the far right on his heels. I was able to predict Trump’s win and the rise of the far right by tracking their social media followers, using alexa.com to monitor domain names like the “Daily Stormer,” and tracking the media amplification of their message. I say this not in a braggadocios way, but because I have additional predictions I want to share and wanted to state my track record.

My Facebook Post

My prediction is that Trumpism is a three part play. They are:

Part 1 — Rise of Trump and the Far Right (2015–2016)

Part 2 — Breakdown of Rule of Law, Normalization of Far Right in GOP, Failure of Elections to Stop Trump (2017–2018) ← WE ARE HERE.

Part 3 — Government becomes so illegitimate that it no longer has support of the people and is brought down by mass protests. (2019–2020)

If you were awake from 2015–2016, you’re very familiar with Part 1.

Right now, in Part 2, we are seeing Trump destroy the rule of law by:

undermining the role of law enforcement and the intelligence community

pardoning obviously crooked loyalists (Dinesh D’Souza, Joe Arpaio and most importantly, maybe himself)

undermining the Special Council by claiming it is unconstitutional

and many more items that other people have already captured.

The normalization of the Far Right is being done through the media, especially Fox News and social media. Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson are the biggest distributors of Far Right talking points in America. What we used to see only on the craziest corners of the internet is now front and center on Fox News. Examples include “the Deep State”, the time Fox news published Seth Rich conspiracies, and of course Trump retweeting Far Right accounts on his Twitter feed. Fox News was bad before, but it wasn’t this bad.

Part 2 ends with the midterm elections not giving the Democrats enough power to impeach Trump and remove him from office. Impeachment, which is the equivalent of being indicted, requires a simple majority vote in the House; for a president to be removed from office, two-thirds of the Senate has to vote to do so after holding a trial. As such, the Democrats are going to need to win both the House and two thirds of the Senate in order to secure enough votes to remove Trump from office.

I don’t think the Democrats can win enough in the midterms to oust Trump. The Democrats do not have a positive message to run on, they are organizationally incompetent, and there are deep divisions in the party over Bernie Sanders and the 2016 election that will reduce activist enthusiasm. Furthermore, I predict that there will be heavy cyber interference in the midterms against Democratic candidates. There is even the possibility the voting machines themselves could be tampered with.

So in any other scenario other than the Democrats winning the House and two thirds of the Senate, or winning close to that and securing GOP defectors to vote Trump out of office, Trump will survive the midterm elections without the threat of being removed from office.

This brings us to Phase 3, in which Trumpism ends. Someone will eventually point out the obvious — Trump has destroyed the former American Republic through criminal and tyrannical acts and there no longer exists a legitimate government. When someone articulates this concept in a concise, viral way it will trigger mass protests. The police and the army will not fire on American citizens, and mass protests will empower leaders to renegotiate the status quo.

These are my predictions and I could be wrong. If you liked this, please share on Facebook.

-George