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this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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Part of him coming out of the fascist closet now may be all the court cases that have been brought up against him. His back is essentially up against the wall and getting the presidency is his only real 'Get Out of Jail Free' card he's got left. If he doesn't get elected, he's pretty much done and may spend the rest of his life in prison. There's the state case that could be problematic, but I doubt he has any problem throwing the country into a constitutional crisis if it means saving his own skin. For the Federal case I imagine he just pardons himself, which could be another crisis in and of itself, or it just flies by without issue.
Imagine he gets elected (that this is still even a possibility is ridiculous), Georgia finds him guilty in that case and he's supposed to face jail time there. He will refuse to go and I'm not sure that anybody would enforce it to place him under arrest, or if they do try, then does the Federal govt do anything to protect him? Do we have Secret Service agents getting into firefights with Georgia law enforcement? Does the military step in, especially if Trump starts stacking it with his own people? Or does the whole thing just get ignored and we have a sitting President who should be sitting in jail and he either just never goes to Georgia or nobody goes to arrest him?
Lets suppose he wins and logically the house stays at least narrowly red. Basically nobody arrests him and he doesn't leave office until he dies. People yell about this. People riot about this. He sends federal troops to murder the rioters which leads to greater violence. The decent members of the military top brass step down or are removed. Flunkies are put in their place and violence escalates. Real risk of getting ventilated keeps a lot of people off the streets but isolated individuals plot or carry out violence against government stooges. This leads to further repression. With access to everyone's social media data and email AI makes it tractable to carry out both sophisticated and broad analysis to make a pretty good enemies list.
Trump starts rounding up the millions of illegal immigrants as promised. No due process is given or expected and people who have been opening promoting dissent against Trump are disappeared with the immigrants and placed in the concentration camps he promised to build. Since you can't actually make countries just take back millions of people and it would be a humanitarian nightmare they end up staying in the camps long term. They are no better run than the camps Trump built earlier and desperation makes them inherently more violent which is used to justify the violence by the guards and the deaths. Situated as they are near the southern border in the summer the inhumane heat along with old friends like cholera and new friends like covid start to really thin the herd tens of thousands die. People start to compare it to german death camps but they do so quietly offline.
The worst thing is as this horror story plays out most people can continue to live quite normal lives so almost everyone does just like they did in Nazi Germany. There is a push to make they detainees most of which have little hope to get repatriated or released earn their keep and they become work camps. The deaths rise. There is violence in the camps as people are desperate to escape and there are mass killings and reprisals.
Meanwhile overseas China takes Taiwan and Russia Ukraine and begins eyeing the Baltic states. China and Russia with India as a tacit ally end up in a war with western Europe. This time Paris burns but good along with London. Everyone is terrified of nuclear war but nobody on any side really wants to blow up the planet they want to own it not destroy it and eventually a truce is called with Russia now holding all its former possessions and some new ones along with China. The US Russia China and India are the 4 sided economic engine of the world and money from 3 fascist powers and one collaborator spread their poison promoting "right" thinking smaller powers and governments.
In other times this fascist century would eventually be succeeded by a revolution but no country on earth has ever had the power of the tech we have by the 2060s. It is incredibly trivial to give everyone the pretense of privacy while really scrutinizing them down to the pores on their face and removing anyone "subversive" It's kind of funny that everyone was worried about a super intelligent skynet ending humanity when actual AIs turn out to be mere idiot savants no more sentient than a carburetor but far smarter and sleepless and watchful. Better than us at the art of tyranny in the same fashion as they are better at chess simply able to computer and analyze more more input and correlate it more effectively not sentient.
Robot soldiers are if anything much more diligent and ethical performing objectives skillfully and never hurting anyone by accident. A relatively tiny number of people will supervise construction and design and fewer yet will be given any control of policy. All generals and no grunts to get different ideas and if asked to liquidate some folks that are becoming a threat they wont have any qualms.
I'm not saying that Americans are good people, I don't think so myself, but we do seem to be a massive economic and military engine well situated to be used by either side.
It could be the straw that broke the species back.