“An American ‘Caesarism’ has now become flesh.” I wrote this in March 2016, even before Donald Trump had become the Republican nominee for the presidency.

Today, the transformation of the democratic republic into an autocracy has advanced. By 2024, it might be irreversible. If this does indeed happen, it will change almost everything in the world.

Second, the amateurish “stop the steal” movement of the last election has now morphed into a well-advanced project.

One part of this project is to remove officials who stopped Trump’s effort to reverse the results in 2020. But its main aim is to shift responsibility for deciding electoral outcomes to Republican-controlled legislatures.

Thus, health permitting, Trump will be the next Republican candidate. He will be backed by a party that is now his tool.

Most important, in the words of David Frum, speechwriter for George W Bush, “what the United States did not have before 2020 was a large national movement willing to justify mob violence to claim political power. Now it does.”

It does so because its members believe their opponents are not “real” Americans. A liberal democracy cannot long endure if a major party believes defeat is illegitimate and must be rendered impossible.

Here is a political leader who has ousted anybody who opposes him from positions of influence in his party. He believes himself unjustly persecuted, defines reality for his followers and insists that a legitimate election is one he wins. A constitutional crisis looms.

The 2024 election, warns Kagan, could bring “chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power.”"

On Sunday, October 3, 2021 at 3:46:28 PM UTC-7, ltlee1 wrote:
> “An American ‘Caesarism’ has now become flesh.” I wrote this in March 2016, even before Donald Trump had become the Republican nominee for the presidency.
>
> Today, the transformation of the democratic republic into an autocracy has advanced. By 2024, it might be irreversible. If this does indeed happen, it will change almost everything in the world.
>
> Second, the amateurish “stop the steal” movement of the last election has now morphed into a well-advanced project.
>
> One part of this project is to remove officials who stopped Trump’s effort to reverse the results in 2020. But its main aim is to shift responsibility for deciding electoral outcomes to Republican-controlled legislatures.
>
> Thus, health permitting, Trump will be the next Republican candidate. He will be backed by a party that is now his tool.

No!!! Donald Trump is already finished. In his last political rally, they expected 10,000 to attend, only 300 showed up!!! By 2024, Donald Trump will be 79 years old, too old to run for any office!!!
>
> Most important, in the words of David Frum, speechwriter for George W Bush, “what the United States did not have before 2020 was a large national movement willing to justify mob violence to claim political power. Now it does.”
>
> It does so because its members believe their opponents are not “real” Americans. A liberal democracy cannot long endure if a major party believes defeat is illegitimate and must be rendered impossible.
>
> Here is a political leader who has ousted anybody who opposes him from positions of influence in his party. He believes himself unjustly persecuted, defines reality for his followers and insists that a legitimate election is one he wins. A constitutional crisis looms.
>
> The 2024 election, warns Kagan, could bring “chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power.”"

On Sunday, October 3, 2021 at 10:46:28 PM UTC, ltlee1 wrote:
> “An American ‘Caesarism’ has now become flesh.” I wrote this in March 2016, even before Donald Trump had become the Republican nominee for the presidency.
>
> Today, the transformation of the democratic republic into an autocracy has advanced. By 2024, it might be irreversible. If this does indeed happen, it will change almost everything in the world.
>
> Second, the amateurish “stop the steal” movement of the last election has now morphed into a well-advanced project.
>
> One part of this project is to remove officials who stopped Trump’s effort to reverse the results in 2020. But its main aim is to shift responsibility for deciding electoral outcomes to Republican-controlled legislatures.
>
> Thus, health permitting, Trump will be the next Republican candidate. He will be backed by a party that is now his tool.
>
> Most important, in the words of David Frum, speechwriter for George W Bush, “what the United States did not have before 2020 was a large national movement willing to justify mob violence to claim political power. Now it does.”
>
> It does so because its members believe their opponents are not “real” Americans. A liberal democracy cannot long endure if a major party believes defeat is illegitimate and must be rendered impossible.
>
> Here is a political leader who has ousted anybody who opposes him from positions of influence in his party. He believes himself unjustly persecuted, defines reality for his followers and insists that a legitimate election is one he wins. A constitutional crisis looms.
>
> The 2024 election, warns Kagan, could bring “chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power.”"

Robert Kaga's Sep, 23 article "Our constitutional crisis is already here" is more detailed in tracing out likely future.

"First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024.. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running.

Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.

Meanwhile, the amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020...Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election” by a simple majority vote. Some state legislatures seek to impose criminal penalties on local election officials alleged to have committed “technical infractions,” including obstructing the view of poll watchers.

The stage is thus being set for chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power. Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard?
....Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it.. As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian. ... The fact that he failed to overturn the 2020 election has reassured many that the American system remains secure, though it easily could have gone the other way
....
In fact, the passions that animate the Trump movement are as old as the republic and have found a home in both parties at one time or another.

Suspicion of and hostility toward the federal government; racial hatred and fear; a concern that modern, secular society undermines religion and traditional morality; economic anxiety in an age of rapid technological change; class tensions, with subtle condescension on one side and resentment on the other; distrust of the broader world, especially Europe, and its insidious influence in subverting American freedom — such views and attitudes have been part of the fabric of U.S. politics since the anti-Federalists, the Whiskey Rebellion and Thomas Jefferson."

On Tuesday, October 5, 2021 at 11:37:24 AM UTC, ltlee1 wrote:
> On Sunday, October 3, 2021 at 10:46:28 PM UTC, ltlee1 wrote:
> > “An American ‘Caesarism’ has now become flesh.” I wrote this in March 2016, even before Donald Trump had become the Republican nominee for the presidency.
> >
> > Today, the transformation of the democratic republic into an autocracy has advanced. By 2024, it might be irreversible. If this does indeed happen, it will change almost everything in the world.
> >
> > Second, the amateurish “stop the steal” movement of the last election has now morphed into a well-advanced project.
> >
> > One part of this project is to remove officials who stopped Trump’s effort to reverse the results in 2020. But its main aim is to shift responsibility for deciding electoral outcomes to Republican-controlled legislatures.
> >
> > Thus, health permitting, Trump will be the next Republican candidate. He will be backed by a party that is now his tool.
> >
> > Most important, in the words of David Frum, speechwriter for George W Bush, “what the United States did not have before 2020 was a large national movement willing to justify mob violence to claim political power. Now it does.”
> >
> > It does so because its members believe their opponents are not “real” Americans. A liberal democracy cannot long endure if a major party believes defeat is illegitimate and must be rendered impossible.
> >
> > Here is a political leader who has ousted anybody who opposes him from positions of influence in his party. He believes himself unjustly persecuted, defines reality for his followers and insists that a legitimate election is one he wins. A constitutional crisis looms.
> >
> > The 2024 election, warns Kagan, could bring “chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power.”"
> Robert Kaga's Sep, 23 article "Our constitutional crisis is already here" is more detailed in tracing out likely future.
>
> "First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running.
>
> Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.
>
> Meanwhile, the amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020...Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election” by a simple majority vote. Some state legislatures seek to impose criminal penalties on local election officials alleged to have committed “technical infractions,” including obstructing the view of poll watchers.
>
> The stage is thus being set for chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power. Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard?
> ...Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it. As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian. ... The fact that he failed to overturn the 2020 election has reassured many that the American system remains secure, though it easily could have gone the other way
> ...
> In fact, the passions that animate the Trump movement are as old as the republic and have found a home in both parties at one time or another.
>
> Suspicion of and hostility toward the federal government; racial hatred and fear; a concern that modern, secular society undermines religion and traditional morality; economic anxiety in an age of rapid technological change; class tensions, with subtle condescension on one side and resentment on the other; distrust of the broader world, especially Europe, and its insidious influence in subverting American freedom — such views and attitudes have been part of the fabric of U.S. politics since the anti-Federalists, the Whiskey Rebellion and Thomas Jefferson."

If one wants to dig deeper on the WHY, one could find the 9.9 percent or something like it.
Trumpism is a bottom up revolution against what 9.9 percent of Americans have been striving
hard to uphold.

The following from a book review of "The 9.9 percent."
https://newrepublic.com/article/163818/99-percent-upholds-inequality-book-review

"Part of the sick genius of the American social consensus is how it instantly naturalizes the logic
of economic predation, making a long series of accommodations to money and power seem like
immovable fixtures in the natural order of things. This maneuver lies behind many of the signature
ills of our age, from the breakdown of basic conceptions of public health and workplace solidarity
to the elevation of Donald Trump into the vanguard of an oft-caricatured, incoherent version of
American populism. These and scores of other crimes against the public weal are carelessly grouped
under this or that vague heading—libertarian prerogative, consumer sovereignty, anti-wokism, what
have you—and enshrined as yet another instance of the way things have to be.

And as Stewart emphasizes, he’s less interested in supplying a collective portrait of these high-octane
strivers than building out a record of the havoc they’ve wreaked. “I use ‘the 9.9 percent’ to describe a
form of life rather than a set of people identified by their supposed net worth,” he explains at the outset:

It is a way of thinking and a system of values that characterizes many people who are not and have
no realistic prospect of joining the top decile of the wealth distribution. Indeed, it matters most precisely
insofar as it is shared by those who are not “paid-up” members of the 9.9 percent, as it were. The culture
of the 9.9 percent … is a fundamental consequence of rising inequality and it has transformed American
life in profound, intimate, and often unacknowledged ways.

Stewart is describing, in short, what Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci described as the power of cultural
hegemony—the means by which a ruling class upholds and defends its rule via cultural practices and
beliefs that extend beyond the formal strictures of economic power.

Stewart finds this dynamic at work throughout America’s relentlessly upward-skewing political economy,
from the social Darwinian scrum for admission to elite universities to vast disparities in health care
provision and housing and racial advantage, to the ongoing assault on reason and evidence-based discourse.

It’s a far-reaching indictment of a conceptually indefensible but institutionally rigid status quo, and it’s to
Stewart’s credit that he resists portraying the 9.9 percent as some sort of fallen patrician elite. For the social
consensus depends on making the obscene accumulation of privilege appear as an outlying deviation from a
basically just and equal mean, which can be remedied more or less on the fly via reformist measures. This
circular reasoning produces what Stewart terms “the Iron Law of Merit”—the compulsive worship of individual
achievement amid conditions of ever-accelerating social ruin. Or as Stewart elegantly sums up this key article
of our social mythology, “the more that merit seems to matter, the less it actually explains.”

This brute logic, Stewart argues, lies behind one of the key paradoxes of our political moment: “why meritocracy—
born of the highest ideals of liberal democracy—so often turns into the handmaiden of autocracy.” There’s nothing
especially foreordained or apocalyptic about this transformation, he contends; it is, rather, the same process of top-
down cultural deference that produced the 9.9 percent as key arbiters of officially sanctioned reward and punishment
in the first place: “From the Iron Law of Merit, it follows not just that the wealthy and powerful will be perceived as
having merit, but that whatever the people at the top happen to desire will take on the character of merit. Thus, the
greater the inequality, the more that merit becomes synonymous with ‘whatever the boss wants.’”