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Donald Trump has seemed so larger-than-life to so many Americans for so long that it’s almost impossible to not think of him as a perpetual, ongoing threat.
And, indeed, he has already tried to mount one coup against our nation, which was largely ignored by our attorney general for two long years, setting up the virtual certainty of a second attempt this fall should he lose by a small margin.
That, however, is not what current trends, an innovation in political science (described below), and world history tell us will most likely happen over the next four months. In my opinion, we’re going to see Trump deflate like the Hindenburg if he suffers a major defeat.
Here’s why and how.
Increasingly, it appears that Trump is going to lose the election in a big way. Having already lost in 2016 by 3 million votes and 2020 by 7 million votes nationally, there’s little to indicate he’s expanded his voter base; instead, by doubling down on hate, racism, and calls for violence, he’s managed to offend a large part of the traditional GOP. When Dick Cheney says you’re too much of a fascist, you’re in trouble.
Now comes Northwestern University data scientist Thomas Miller, who’s developed an intriguing way to predict election outcomes. Instead of looking at polling data — which has proved woegeously unreliable over the past decade, probably because of cell phones — Miller looks at betting markets and draws his trends and predictions from them. They’re dynamic, updated instantly, and real money is on the line so there’s no margin for error.
In the 2020 race for president, for example, the polls showed Biden barely squeaking by [in the Electoral College] and, in Georgia’s Senate elections, polls predicted Kelly Loeffler (R) would beat Raphael Warnock (D) and David Perdue (R) would defeat Jon Ossoff (D). Miller, relying on the betting data, not only called all three races accurately, but hit Ossoff’s 1 percent victory on the nose and was only 0.2 percent off on Warnock’s victory.
If current trends continue, Miller’s system is predicting a blowout for Harris, with her getting around 55 percent of the popular vote:
“It would be somewhere between the defeats of Barry Goldwater by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and Bob Dole by Bill Clinton in 1996,” Miller told Fortune magazine. “We’re talking about a blowout where Harris gets over 400 electoral votes and wins Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and every other swing state.”
So, if that happens, what does it mean for Trump?
My prediction is that by one hour after the networks agree that Donald Trump is a blowout nationwide loser, every elected major Republican in the country will abandon him.
It will be swift and certain because, in that moment, every single one of those Republican elected officials is going to realize that Donald Trump no longer has any meaningful political power. In that moment, he’ll simply be an impotent cult leader who’s votaries are elderly, deluded, and constitute much smaller numbers than most people realized.
Their worldview is rooted in racism, conspiracy theory, and several eccentric and outlier forms of fundamentalist Christianity, along with the QAnon cult. Together with low-information voters, that base constitutes enough people to fill rallies and make Trump seem like he has the potential to win an election.
But the reality is that he hasn’t won anything since his freak 2016 Electoral College victory, and that only happened by the intervention of Putin’s Facebook trolls and Jill Stein.
Americans will realize, in the moment that announcement is made, that Trump is really and truly going to prison, that the hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for his crimes will bankrupt him, and that he will no longer have the GOP as a money machine to pay his legal bills.
In other words, that’s the moment the reality sets in that he’s going down.
Doomed.
Condemned.
That he’s lost his mojo. That he’ll never again run for any political office, anywhere.
That he is now both useless and unthreatening.
And Republican politicians, if nothing else, understand power and the lack thereof. They’ll flee from Trump even more rapidly than they did Goldwater in 1964 and George Bush Sr. in 1992.
Or, even more likely, they’ll turn on him like the Cheney family has.
The entire Republican Party will essentially join the Lincoln Project, and suddenly you’ll see Republicans on all the national shows condemning Trump for everything he ever did or said or is continuing to do and say.
Then, of course — after they’ve destroyed Trump and pushed him off the national stage — they’ll all get back to trying to privatize Social Security and shut down Obamacare.
Although it rarely makes the national press, I hear from insiders that some Republicans are already making plans for a post-Trump party, and a struggle for dominance has already erupted among several senators.
This may play a role in the current war between Lauren Boebert, Laura Loomer, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, among other major dysfunctions in today’s GOP. It’s all about bets for or against Trump’s political survival.
This is going to play out like an episode of The Sopranos, and I can hardly wait…
Reprinted from The Hartmann Report with the author’s permission.
Thom Hartmann is a four-time Project Censored-award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of 34 books in print and the #1 progressive talk show host in America for more than a decade.
