WOULD THERE BE VIOLENCE IF TRUMP LEFT OFFICE EARLY?

Generally speaking, I'm a gloomy guy, but I'm not as pessimistic as Athenae, who expects nothing but the worst if President Trump is forced out of office before his term ends.

We have him for two more years, and we just have to handle that. You know why?

Because any other scenario leads to a truly horrifying amount of violence for the marginalized communities already under attack....

Trump resigns....

Trump gets impeached and tried in the Senate....

EITHER of those come true, and the current culture war dunks itself in lighter fluid and runs through a fireworks tent. Democrats are already DEMONCRAPS and a threat to our democracy, liberals are for threatening and doxxing and attempting to rape, people are screaming about brown-people voter fraud in elections the Republicans WIN.

Trump gets kicked out and/or convinced to quit because of scandal, and remember that whackjob who showed up at the pizza joint? His mini-mes will be in every post office by the following weekend....

Trump dying in office is actually worse than either of those scenarios....

The theories about poison and secret garrotings and who the White House doctors REALLY ARE, those are what will make it onto Fox News. On 4chan and the MRA subreddits there won’t be theories, just conspiracies, about how someone killed THEIR LORD. His embodiment of their resentment is all that’s keeping them from swatting every girl who was mean to them in high school. Remove that, and there’s just no damn telling.

If God forbid he is assassinated all fucking hell breaks loose. This is actually our worst nightmare. There are people in this country who think they are fighting a race war and they’re not on the fringes anymore. All it would take was one whisper on the wind that a black or brown or Muslim person killed Trump (no matter WHO it actually was) and nobody would be safe.

I don't believe the finding of impeachable offenses is in any way inevitable, and I don't think impeachment is guaranteed even if clear-cut crimes are unearthed. Conviction in the Senate seems next to impossible, given the fact that more than a dozen Republicans would have to vote to convict. I'm 100% certain Trump will never resign, because he derives so much ego gratification from the worship of his fans, who'll remain loyal no matter what's revealed. And I don't believe his mental health is deteriorating -- he's not suffering dementia, he's just incurious and ignorant. He lives a physically unhealthy life, but he takes so much nourishment from all those boosts to his ego. They literally seem to be keeping him alive.

So my pessimism focuses on the likelihood that Trump will survive in office until the next presidential election (at least). But what if he doesn't?

I agree that there are a lot of Americans who'd like to engage in violence in Trump's defense. I think some will.

But I don't think the violence will be widespread.

It's true that Trump voters, and Republicans generally, are rage-disordered and well armed. They've been conditioned to hate us for many years. On the other hand, they've been conditioned to expect the system to do their work for them.

Much as they grumble about "RINOs," they're used to relying on Republicans to thwart the best efforts of Democrats. (Mitch McConnell did a pretty good job of it in the Obama years, didn't he?) They're accustomed to watching the right-wing media put Democrats on the defensive -- often with the help of the mainstream press. And Democrats frequently just sabotage themselves.

So I'm not convinced that the folks in the GOP base will rise up to defend Trump with violence, because they haven't really needed to do anything like that in the past -- someone has always come to the rescue, whether it's the Koch brothers and Fox News hyping the Tea Party enough to seize Congress in Barack Obama's second year or The New York Times acting as Steve Bannon's useful idiot in order to sabotage Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. It's made the angry right lazy.

So we might be able to hold Trump accountable before 2020. But it's also quite possible that we'll never manage that. Republicans have a lot of weapons at their disposal. So far they haven't needed popular insurrection.