I haven’t written much about object-level politics since Playing Both Sides—an essay penned immediately after the 2024 election in which I urged Faustian White Boys to see themselves as a free constituency open to courtship from both parties a la Jews.
My primary rationale for this was that nothing interesting can happen in Republican politics whilst Blumpkin remains in power, as far too much is overdetermined by his (and to a lesser extent Elon’s) immediate whims and caprice for fag shit like “ideas” and “principles” to especially matter, and so the primary goal right now should be to opportunistically break Naranjan Sclerosis by any means possible while waiting out the clock by e.g. writing about pussy all day.
See, the problem with Trump has never been that he’s a secret libtard or Kike Shill or corrupt kleptocratic pedophile or w/e—it’s that he’s all those things and more but not in any sort of consistent or intelligible way you can strategically game around. And so on some days he’ll do something genuinely amazing like secure the border or kidnap Maduro or threaten to take away Rosie O’Donnell’s girlfriend, and on other days he’ll impose tariffs calculated on the back of a Burger King napkin or take us to war with Iran because Bibi asked politely. Like King Andrew and Teddy before him, the man is pure instinct and id—which in a lot of ways was necessary to break a dysfunctional Washington Consensus that a decade ago would Lindsay Clancy any idea to emerge from outside a narrowly prescribed Overton Window, but these days has begun to congeal into its own species of metapolitical fatberg that makes talking policy feel like a huge waste of time because in practice everything boils down to how retarded Trump feels like being that day.
The good news is that this week was the beginning of the end of that malarky.
Come January Trump will be a lame duck, and is sure to spend the last two years of his administration issuing a bunch of increasingly cartoonish executive orders that are immediately overruled by nondescript Mexican Obama appointees while enduring progressively spurious impeachment attempts by grandstanding Demon Rat congress critters and attempting to squeeze the last few drops of relevance from public life by pitting Vance and Rubio against each other in the ultimate season of The Apprentice over who’ll receive his support in 2028—a dynamic that will probably soak up all the oxygen and make it impossible for e.g. Christie or DeSantis to have a fighting chance.
And very little of this, sadly, will be any fun to write about.
Now optimistically the Orangeman might scarf down one quarter-pounder too many and expire halfway through his third year in office, in which case Vance would likely scare everyone but Christie out of the primary and the convention would immediately become a referendum on Trumpism that I see Vance winning only narrowly, such that the GOP looks sickeningly divided going into 2028.
As for the Dems?
AOC and Buttigieg will run to sell a book and go precisely nowhere. Shapiro will dominate early on and seem like a sure thing, with Greasy Gavin occupying a distant second and running an aggressive and extremely online campaign that plays up his Patrick Bateman masculinity and proves absurdly popular with young men, inheriting a lot of the more online, upscale, and non-ideological elements of residual MAGA energy while Vance is busy trying to perform statesmanship with either the neocon beano yapping at him or Krisp Krispie wagging a sausage in his face. Meanwhile, by subtly deploying his online warriors with plausible deniability to hit Shapiro on Israel and artfully mobilize brownoid antisemitism Gavin will come from behind to claw the nomination from the Pennsylvanian’s shekelgrabbers after a protracted fight a la 08.
Then during the general Gavin will make a bunch of comments at the debates subtly inviting the camera to pan to their wives so the audience at home can compare them, and then later call Vance an incel.
The final election map is a 2008-style blowout—though Indian-Americans end up voting about 10% less Democrat than everyone predicts.
And that’s when something interesting can happen again.
Would Gavin pack the court?
Clearly—that and abolish the filibuster and overtly retaliate against his enemies in all sorts of nasty Orwellian ways; the man would almost certainly be an unconstitutional nightmare for the country, which he’ll probs do a splendid job aestheticizing at first.
But he’d burn hot and get punished for it in 2030, while creating a picture-perfect opening for Ron DeSantis to come back and punish him in 2032 like the dour and meanspirited vice principal he was always meant to be
And DeSantis, I believe, has the executive chops to seriously reorganize the country around a coherent administrative vision—note that aside from that shitty six-week abortion ban the man’s performance in Florida has been exemplary, while his standoff contra Biden over vaxx mandates demonstrates that he has more than enough cojones to serve as a firm and effective pole against libtard overreach—and instantiate a more principled kind of populist-nationalism ackshully committed to serious governance.
But 2028 just isn’t DeSantis’s year—and I think he knows that. He’ll run if he sees a genuinely good opening, but that’s not likely to happen at the present moment when both Vance and Rubio have better claims to leading the post-Paulite and post-neocon wings of MAGA while Christie is the obvious anti-MAGA faction leader. Far better to enjoy his civilian life, develop a personality, fuck his pretty wife before she gets ugly, and stack cash as a consultant or something while tearing Newsom’s guts out on CNN every night for half a decade. The man deserves a break for running Florida so well.
So what do we do between now and then?
IMO it still isn’t the time for proper ideological seriousness—Trumpism itself might be dead, but you can bet your keister the funeral’s gonna last fucking forever.
So whip out that Gameboy and enjoy yourself, anon.
The GOP Trifecta being smashed means two more years of gridlock and increasingly hysterical 2015-style politics over symbolic capital qua itself, which in most respects is very fake and gay, but also where all the most important metapolitical shifts take place—including, if you’ll recall, the birth of both Obamaism and Trumpism. Whatever the Millennial and Zoomer intelligentsia shaping The Discourse come up with over these next few years is therefore what DeSantis (or whichever other next GOP President who doesn’t have Down Syndrome) will by necessity build his presidency around.
What should that look like?