How possible is this scenario?

[Burke Bro]

I was thinking about this hypothetical scenario this morning. It's kind of a between two majorities scenario. Basically, Trump gets elected in 2024, beating Biden by a comfortable margin and making gains among working class minority voters. Once in office, he fires top officials at the fed, cuts interest rates to zero, and the economy tanks. He then dies in office, and everything gets blamed on his vice president, who is a more "normal" Republican (Doug Burgum?). With the Republican Party disunited without Trump and inflation at new highs, the incumbent loses in a landslide to a populist Democrat (Fetterman?), who builds a broad working class coalition and pushes elements of both Trump and Biden's domestic policy using newly expanded set of presidential powers to "solve" the economic crisis.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Certainly probable given the nontrivial chances he pulls a Grover Cleveland. I’m guessing the firing and interest rates stuff happens in 2025 and the economy tanks sometime before the midterms?

[Kamala's side hoe]

Would be interesting to see how the GOP would reinvent itself in this Between Two Majorities type timeline.

Yuval Levin on the Coming Realignment
Yascha Mounk and Yuval Levin discuss why neither Democrats nor Republicans have built a durable post-Cold War coalition—and how American politics could be transformed in 2028.

Yuval Levin is an academic and the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Levin is the author of A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream and, most recently, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Yuval Levin discuss the different strands of post-Cold War American conservatism from the George W. Bush administration to the Tea Party and the “Reformicon” movements; why both Democrats and Republicans have failed to “make new friends while keeping the old”; and what conservative post-liberals miss about the value of American institutions.

Levin: Yes. As you say, I come at this from the right and in a way, what I mean when I say I'm a conservative is what Edmund Burke meant when he said that he loves the establishments of society. And there's almost nothing harder now to say than to say that I love the establishments of society. I love the U.S. Congress. I really do. I think it's a wonderful institution that has a profoundly noble public purpose and that is full of public-spirited people, even though it's doing a terrible job. And I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to fix Congress, how to change Congress. I spend a lot of my time criticizing Congress. I do it because I think that it is enormously valuable. And I feel the same way about the other kinds of establishments and institutions that are so easy to criticize now in our society. It's worth our time to criticize them because they are absolutely essential. And I certainly feel that way about the university. But making that case really has to mean starting from the beginning. That book you mentioned is called A Time to Build, published in 2020. And it is really ultimately an argument for why we should value institutions. That is a hard argument to make to a democratic society at any time, and especially at this time. But ultimately, I think that the problem we face, which we describe as a social crisis that looks like loneliness and isolation and polarization and alienation, has to do with the weakening of our core institutions, those ways in which people act together. And that gives each of us a role in relation to other people in pursuit of some common good that we share. Those kinds of institutions are how human beings thrive. They're how we live. We need them from family and community and church and school on up all the way to our national politics. And the crisis we face now is a weakening of our sense of their value.

We don't value them as we should and so we're not committed to them as we should be. We don't spend the time working to strengthen them as we should. And instead we just think they're a menace. They're standing in our way of making choices as individuals or of achieving what we want as a society. And we have to be helped to see why institutions matter and what it would mean to take them seriously again. That is a very, very hard task, but I think it's the essential task now of any defender of the liberal society and I take myself to be a defender of the liberal society. I think this society is an incredible achievement. The fact that we can allow 335 million people who are divided in all kinds of ways to live together not only in peace but as one nation that sees its future as one future—that is an amazing achievement. We risk losing that achievement when we fail to see how extraordinary it is but also when we fail to see that it demands work.

[jojoju1998]

I was thinking about this hypothetical scenario this morning. It's kind of a between two majorities scenario. Basically, Trump gets elected in 2024, beating Biden by a comfortable margin and making gains among working class minority voters. Once in office, he fires top officials at the fed, cuts interest rates to zero, and the economy tanks. He then dies in office, and everything gets blamed on his vice president, who is a more "normal" Republican (Doug Burgum?). With the Republican Party disunited without Trump and inflation at new highs, the incumbent loses in a landslide to a populist Democrat (Fetterman?), who builds a broad working class coalition and pushes elements of both Trump and Biden's domestic policy using newly expanded set of presidential powers to "solve" the economic crisis.

There's probably going to be a strong Ted Kennedy style challenger to Burgum ala 1980, probably Ted Cruz ( as in the two majorities timeline ), or some other movement conservative.




Fetterman might not be the best choice to be the " realigner ". Maybe Walz, or Whitmer.

[ShadowRocket]

I was thinking about this hypothetical scenario this morning. It's kind of a between two majorities scenario. Basically, Trump gets elected in 2024, beating Biden by a comfortable margin and making gains among working class minority voters. Once in office, he fires top officials at the fed, cuts interest rates to zero, and the economy tanks. He then dies in office, and everything gets blamed on his vice president, who is a more "normal" Republican (Doug Burgum?). With the Republican Party disunited without Trump and inflation at new highs, the incumbent loses in a landslide to a populist Democrat (Fetterman?), who builds a broad working class coalition and pushes elements of both Trump and Biden's domestic policy using newly expanded set of presidential powers to "solve" the economic crisis.

There's probably going to be a strong Ted Kennedy style challenger to Burgum ala 1980, probably Ted Cruz ( as in the two majorities timeline ), or some other movement conservative.




Fetterman might not be the best choice to be the " realigner ". Maybe Walz, or Whitmer.

Its interesting as despite having a strong bench, there isn't really a Democratic candidate that immediately screams potential "realigning President" at the moment.

I actually think Fetterman could be a possibility considering the enthusiasm his Senate candidacy generated but I'm not sure if some of his conduct as Senator has soured the base too much on him.

Then again, who would've thought ten years ago that Bernie Sanders would be the one to push the Democratic Party with his 2016 campaign?  It could be someone who isn't obvious but they manage to catch lightning in a bottle when the times comes.

[President Johnson]

John Fetterman will never be president.