To pretend Trump is changing the game, you need to ignore how its historically been played.
Right, he’s just reviving older parts of the playbook. Very few of the things he’s done are actually new, they’re just things the US isn’t used to anymore or things that haven’t been done on a massive scale.
But it wasn’t voting that made those older practices fall out of favor, it was more direct actions: labor militancy, mass protests, and radical organizing. What your examples demonstrate is that Trump is defeatable even if he revives every authoritarian trick in the US playbook, but none of that proves voting specifically still matters.
I’ll be watching the 2026 elections to see if we can still vote our way out of this, or if we simply need to do something else.
Right, he’s just reviving older parts of the playbook. Very few of the things he’s done are actually new, they’re just things the US isn’t used to anymore or things that haven’t been done on a massive scale.
But it wasn’t voting that made those older practices fall out of favor, it was more direct actions: labor militancy, mass protests, and radical organizing. What your examples demonstrate is that Trump is defeatable even if he revives every authoritarian trick in the US playbook, but none of that proves voting specifically still matters.
I’ll be watching the 2026 elections to see if we can still vote our way out of this, or if we simply need to do something else.