Wednesday, November 06, 2024

Oh, dear....America has just Brexited itself



And the impact of a Trump win on Canada is incalculable -- on tarrifs, cross-border manufacturing, refugees, Ukraine, Gaza, NATO...

Seth Abramson posted this thread:
(🧵) ELECTION THREAD: I’ve been waiting all night to say anything substantive about what’s happened, as I felt—I still do—that I might say something I’d regret.
I hope you’ll consider following along as I try to process this with you all, and try to do it responsibly. Please RT.
The New York Times gives Trump more a 90% chance of winning the election. Barring a miracle—and none is on the horizon at present—he will win.
And if by some miracle Harris won, it would be such a shock that it would almost certainly cause widespread Trumpist violence anyway. He isn’t just winning. At present this is shaping up to be a landslide. This is not Harris doing as Biden did. This is not Harris doing as Clinton did. This is Harris losing Texas by 15, Florida by 13, Iowa by 14, Ohio by 11...
This is Trump *wildly* outperforming all polls.
The scope of this win, if it is a win, has so many consequences for this country that I do not think I could cover it in a 500-tweet thread. Start with the fact that certain states Democrats once hoped to win now seem *many* election cycles away from Blue. TX, FL, IA, OH, MO.
Georgia 2020 and North Carolina 2020 may come to seem like flukes—to be clear, they will remain purple states, but in the same way New Hampshire was seen as a purple state in 2020 and this year...i.e., sort of but not *really*.
(Ironically, New Hampshire is now Purple again.)
Polling is done. A joke. And no, not just the Selzer Poll saying Harris +3 in Iowa when it was really Trump +14. *Everyone* looks like an idiot. Take out Selzer and you still had a poll saying Trump +6 in Iowa and another saying Trump +9.
Both *those* polls were way off, too.
The polling was *so* off that if we Blues were like MAGAs—*we’re not*—we’d be crying foreign election interference (to be clear, there’s *zero* evidence of that). The polls—even the ones by conservative pollsters—were *laughably* off. Hard to even see how polling has a future. All this is the easy stuff. Even the fact that the results tonight make Trump’s *lies* about the polls seem prescient rather than—again—*lies* is easy stuff.
Any Trump win, with or without the popular vote (and he might yet win it) was going to be seen as vindication by him.
Trump will claim the results tonight as *proof* the 2020 election was rigged; his fans will accept that. History will now need decades to extricate itself from a significant Trumpist strain of thinking that claims (preposterously) that the 2024 results proved The Big Lie true. However bad you thought a second Trump administration was going to be *before*, double that.
He will not only *see* this as a mandate—that was always going to happen with a win—but it will *actually have that appearance*, which will increase the size of his fold considerably.
Folks who were planning to avoid a second Trump administration—seemingly normal folks—will now seek to join it, so quote-unquote vindicated will they see Trumpism as being after tonight. But most importantly, Trump’s likely to have all of Congress *and* SCOTUS *and* the Oval. There are not just no guardrails now. The American people have just told the two worst men in the United States—Trump and Musk—that the world is their oyster and they can do whatever they like. And because they are the worst of men, they will take that offer. And *then* some. So let me list some likely consequences of what America did tonight—which should be regarded as one of the most disgraceful nights in the history of the United States.
1 The nation of Ukraine will cease to exist. A genocide there is now likely.
2 NATO will cease to exist.
3 Almost all of the Gazans will be killed. Israel will annex Gaza and the West Bank *at a minimum*—but it may also seize some land in Lebanon and Syria through sheer military force. There will be no war crime trials for Netanyahu or Putin, not now and not ever. In fact...
4 Putin’s plan to reconstitute the Soviet Union as a kleptocratic-oligarchic-autocratic hybrid will be back on track. The chances of war in Georgia and Moldova and incursions in the Baltics have just gone through the roof.
5 The European Union will shrink in size. Why?...
6 A new Axis of Evil is forming that Trump wants America to be part of. No one can stop that now. Russia, North Korea, Hungary, China, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Turkey, Israel, Venezuela, El Salvador—it’ll be a congregation of autocracies that opposes the EU in all things. 7 The number of nuclear powers will rise because Trump wants to give nukes to the Saudis, Emiratis, and Egyptians. The world will be far more dangerous.
8 Our government will be a kleptocracy of billionaires getting rich off the middle/working classes. No one’ll stop them.
9 The Supreme Court will be ultra-conservative for decades—likely the rest of all our natural lives. Our civil rights and civil liberties will be winnowed down to nothing as the Court rather openly works on the project of making America a Christofascist theocratic state.
10 With RFK Jr. running DHHS, the next pandemic will kill *tens* of millions. There’ll be midterm elections but likely no more presidential elections. The Guard will begin policing domestically. Brown people rounded up by the millions. And concentration camps for migrants.
This isn’t America now. Or a democracy. We’re now a failed democracy in which everything is contingent. Future elections? Unclear. A president who—aided by SCOTUS—starts shutting down media outlets and arresting journalists? Very possible. Soldiers shooting protesters? Yes.
Police will have immunity; abuse of vulnerable minorities will skyrocket. Musk will cut Social Security and Medicare to meet his aim of cutting at least 33% of the federal government. He’s already admitted his plans will tank the economy. Expect a recession, maybe depression.
There will be no rules in politics. Bomb threats, false flags orchestrated by the president himself—as he did tonight in MI and PA—all normalized. All Trump’s criminal cases are gone now. Musk will be co-running the government, and will do so *only* to aid his own businesses.
Do not expect the right to assemble, right to petition your government, or freedom of speech to look the same in 2025 as it did in 2024 or for the first 250 years of our nation. Large crowds protesting Trump should expect to be met with deadly force. Martial law seems likely.
This is the worst day in America since Pearl Harbor. Not because of what has happened *tonight*—nothing *happened*, in the literal sense, tonight—but because of what our country will now become in the short and medium term.
I cannot tell you how different your life is, now.
Deaths from police brutality will skyrocket. Some non-white Americans will be deported because of who their parents are. Infant mortality will skyrocket. Many women will die in pregnancy. School prayer will enter public schools. Posse comitatus is now grave imperiled.
My expectation is a stock market crash once Musk gets going—and people realize he’s a ketamine-addled incompetent who cares for no one but himself.
This will be the most corrupt, radical, self-dealing, lawless, literally deranged and scary government since the Confederacy.
To be clear, there’s no evidence of voter fraud or election fraud. To be clear, all Blues should act peacefully and lawfully, as it appears Trump was elected legally—just like Hitler was. But you should start planning out your future the way you would in Germany in the 1930s.
The worst part is we brought the horror we’re about to experience on ourselves. We did this. And we did this because our culture is frivolous, selfish, self-interested, ignorant, venal, petty, and provincial.
We’re getting the government America *in this iteration* deserves.
Many of you will reject this formulation. What did I do? you may well say. I voted Blue! And to you I say, this is the *hardest* thing to accept about tonight: that *none* of us demanded our country, on a daily basis, live up to the best moments in our history. We bickered...
...when we should’ve worked together, we shamed one another for the wrong things, we failed to get involved in the ways and to the degree we might’ve, we let superficial divisions override common values, we danced on TikTok and watched sports as America was *burning down*.
Our media worked for its own profit and the career advancement of those working in it. We *never* treated Trump like an emergency. *Ever*. Anyone who spoke the truth about Trump was treated as a deranged pariah. We assumed it would all work out because, hey, we’re *America*! Cowards in media, entertainment, law enforcement, the legal system... everyone looked after their own interest when we should have been preserving this country as something *imperfect* but *precious*. I really don’t want to hear anyone say we did all we could.
No, we didn’t.
Trump will come for poor nonwhites and immigrants first. Poor whites will quietly get screwed in subtle ways the whole way through—as always. Eventually he’ll come for the Catholics and the Jews, because that’s what history tells us men like him and “movements” like his do.
The whole way through, ardent Trump critics—people like me who started writing articles telling people to take Trump seriously *the day he announced his campaign in June 2015*—will be treated unseriously. No matter how bad it gets, anyone who has it right will be hounded.
I can’t honestly tell you I see a way back for us right now. Certainly not in the short term and not in the medium term. Trump will come out tonight/tomorrow and seem vaguely gracious(ish)—and when January comes, a f*cking nightmare will descend on all of us. Bannon and Musk. Expect January 6 insurrectionists to be freed. Expect massive inflation. Expect a market crash. Expect unemployment to rise dramatically. Expect camps. Expect protesters getting shot. Expect bribes, corruption, chaos abroad—an end to the America you knew.
God help us. /end
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