Election day 😅

I'm more-or-less a single issue voter — severely weaken Trump's movement. The odd thing is that doesn't make me necessarily want the democrats to win big as it's long been my hypothesis that the only way low-information Trump votes would abandon him is if Trump just completely screws up — which he's been doing a wonderful job at in the 2nd term by surrounding himself loyalists.

Josh Marshall gets nicely at this in How Ditching Norms and Guardrails Was Trump’s Undoing

That new level of unpopularity is overwhelmingly due to four things: tariff policy and the impact on inflation; the Iran War and its affect on gas prices and inflation generally; the mass deportation program which has become increasingly unpopular and offends most Americans’ basic sense of decency and American liberties; and the pervasive free-for-all corruption Trump has partaken in and presided over. Judged by affect on public opinion rather than objective importance, the first two seem most important. There are many other depredations that are at least as bad but have been less decisive in shaping public opinion.

Put simply, none of those four things could have happened during his first term because he was surrounded by people who knocked these ideas down, diverted him on to other hobbyhorses or in key cases simply refused to implement them. They all happened since January 2025 because he broke through those guardrails largely by taming the Republican Party and staff his administration strictly with yes people and true believers.

Needless to say, it’s not that Term One went great. And by the end of Term One Trump was finding his way toward assembling the group of toadies and true believers who would characterize Term Two. That’s what made Jan 6th and the larger plot to reverse the 2020 election possible. Still the difference between the two terms is stark. On one level we know this basic difference. Term Two is Trump unleashed. But there’s less attention to how removing them allowed him to become the most unpopular midterm president in at least eighty years. He unleashed himself to do these things by staffing Term Two with people who would faithfully and aggressively implement his most lawless, stupid and fundamentally unpopular policies.

But he is doing real damage so it's probably best he gets actually checked. He'll still do lots of "executive self-soothing" activities (another great Josh Marshall coining) like start stupid wars and build stupid monuments, etc. that'll help drive home the point to low-information voters how badly they've been conned.

Brad Delong's summary of John Ganz's post is also useful. The attempted fascist turn has largely failed to date.

John Ganz distingishes between three things: (1) a fascist movement (which in the Holy Name of the One Who Is Trump certainly leads and stokes); (2) a fascist governmental executive (which Trump wants to lead, and which the corrupt partisan Republican Supreme Court supermajority is eager for him to create via the “unitary executive”); and (3) a fascist state and society (in which “coördination” has been accomplished and we see total bureaucratic and media and substantial cultural submission):

John’s thesis, as I understand it: Right-wing paramilitary street violence has failed to become a sustained political force.

It is largely that failure that has saved us. It is that that has kept us from the roiling boil of martial law and police repression. That roiling boil would have resulted in a régime that turns its punitive power into an effective military and police repressive force. Then that, with sufficient mass mobilization, would have produced the radicalization needed for full-blown fascism proper: