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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   27860 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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Lots of people have reasons to kill DJT and a damn good amount of them are state actors or equivalent with the means to pull off sophisticated assassinations.

Ukraine, Iran, radical left groups, parts of USG afraid of retaliation, now even hardcore Zionists.

And that's the obvious ones, let's not count the parties that would lose from his economic policy enough to consider direct action. Or those accelerationists that know the chaos that the world would be plunged into if he was gunned down now.

I'm sure the Secret Service is tied into knots right now. But what this atmosphere of siege will mean politically, if anything, I don't know. Lots of people want to kill even a normal POTUS.

Uh, you kill Trump, you get president Vance(and while it’s an interesting legal question who technically assumes the presidency if you knock him off too, in practice the principle of party rule is too strong to be overcome, so it would be a Republican with a tough-as-nails reputation). I’m not sure the people who have an interest in averting a Trump presidency would find that preferable.

If Trump is somehow assassinated during his inaugural address, IMO that has a very good chance of kicking off a civil war.

Probably, yes. Particularly if the popular legitimacy answer(a hardline member of the same party succeeds) conflicts with the technical legal line of succession(which has never even gotten to Secretary of State).

A wave of terrorism, maybe. You need high-ranking officers to kick-off a proper civil war.

This is why there's a VPOTUS of course, but Vance may be more malleable to certain business and geopolitical interests without his boss, and the MAGA movement could dissolve without it's figurehead.

I agree it's unlikely to change that much, but if your back is against the wall and you can get a mulligan, you might want to take the risk.

Speaker of the House becomes president after Vance if both were taken out at once. If Vance gets assassinated a few days/weeks/months after Trump then it would just be whoever Vance's VP is

I'm sure the Secret Service is tied into knots right now. But what this atmosphere of siege will mean politically, if anything, I don't know.

I'm willing to predict "not much". Maybe public events will be smaller or more selective, but that doesn't matter much until 2026 anyway.

A pity that we're not making this public event "smaller" and "more selective" on the grounds that when your country is 36 trillion dollars in the hole, it's frankly obscene to be spending anything on a glorified public party. All that's needed for the inauguration is the President, the VP, and the Chief Justice to administer the oath, and maybe a BBC camera crew to show the rest of the world that the inauguration actually happened, plus the usual Secret Service security that'd be there anyway. Anything beyond that is frivolity.

How much of the budget is being footed by the taxpayer? Corporations, as we know, have pitched in millions for this particular party.

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