I Am Not Yet Preparing for a Second Trump Term

And neither should you.

I need one of these mugs. If you do, too, you can order one here. You’re welcome.

Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…

… and one of those ways to climb to a higher altitude to get some perspective.

Hokay, we’ve been living from WTF to WTF nearly nonstop for a few weeks. I’ll provide some futurist perspective(s) on all of it in a minute but first let’s lay out all the WTF that’s happened lately. Wait, nope…

Biden had a catastrophic debate. So did Trump but everyone expected him to do badly — but he did it with vigor and thus appeared to be the stronger man and the stronger candidate. But the polls didn’t move much and by the middle of last week Biden had erased Trump’s two-point lead in the polls. Regardless, after the debate Democrats went into tailspins so hard their asses caught fire and there was a back and forth of maybe-Biden-can-pull-it-out-or-maybe-he-should-pull-his-ripcord and send Vice-President-Former-California-Attorney-General-Will-Kick-Your-Ass Kamala Harris into the breach instead. And Biden started sorta vindicating himself even as the calls for him to step aside mounted to the point that late last week it felt like the dam was about to break.

And then Trump got shot by a Republican white boy who wasn’t courteous enough to leave behind a note explaining his motives and so the country started filling the void with their own conspiracy theories that this 20-year-old kid must have (a) been part of Secret Antifa Ninja Force That Doesn’t Actually Exist or (b) a secret Iranian assassin inside Pennsylvania (state motto: No Iran Assassinate Here and We Love Benjamin Franklin), (c ) an idiot-savant patsy allowed-and/or-maneuvered into position by a cabal of Democratic cops, Secret Service, and the Illuminati to get on that rooftop with a rifle, or (d) that he was motivated to violence by extremist rhetoric by Democrats — which would mark maybe the first time Democratic rhetoric motivated anyone to do anything violent in, really, ever. But somehow snowflake Democrats are so dastardly and devious that they can — with a few metaphors uttered during private deliberations that 20-year-old Pennsylvania Republicans totally listen to for marching orders — motivate this kid to betray his own party and try to kill his own party’s biggest hero via the patterns, skill, and sophistication of a Walmart house brand Ozark Trail garden-variety mass shooter.

Oh, and the Supreme Court ruled that Presidents were kings, king-like, or king-adjacent, thereby supplanting some Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and a crapton of Federalist Papers. And Judge Cannon threw out the Trump-hid-classified-documents-in-the-downstairs-shitter case because she claimed Jack Smith’s authority came from Narnia rather than the Department of Justice by repeatedly citing Clarence Thomas v. Aslan.

And also the country sorta caught onto Project 2025, the Republican National Convention started, we found out J.D. Vance is Trump’s Veep nominee, and Biden caught COVID.

So.

I have a set of thoughts. So just just jist-jist-jist gimme a minute here.

FIRST, PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT PRESIDENTS, FORMER PRESIDENTS, MEMBERS OF YOUR SCHOOL BOARD, OR BAMBI’S MOM NO MATTER HOW INSIDIOUS YOU THINK THEY ARE. An enormous part of the American Experiment was trading violent overthrows and change-through-violence with voting, elections, peaceful transfers of power, and change through legislation and all the rest. If you aspire to violence it means you have given up on America and on your patriotism and it means your politics are bad and you should feel bad.

EXTRA CREDIT: If you are one of those dingbats who — when you heard Trump was shot — pulled out your guns to go kill liberal snowflakes/secret Republican fratricidal assassins in the name of America and Christian nationalism, then PLEASE STOP CALLING YOURSELF CHRISTIAN because you’re harming the cause of Christ. And if you think by fighting for freedom or for country or for Christ, your political violence is what God wants, it ain’t and you’re just a jihadist terrorist and you’ve fallen to the Dark Side of the Force and you do not know it.

Don’t believe me? Then I refer you to Jesus. Jesus taught his followers from the very beginning of his ministry to throw away political violence — even in his name — forevermore. He taught it by example. How? Two of Jesus’ twelve disciples — Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot — were terrorists who Jesus called out of their terrorism.

The Zealots were fundamentalist terrorists and the Iscariots (the sicarii) were religious nationalist terrorists who assassinated Roman officials with daggers that they carried concealed. They thought of themselves as holy patriots — and they were wrong and Jesus said NO. Even in the face of the greatest imperial power on the face of the Earth and the mightiest and most oppressive military force on Earth — and their pet religious conservatives — Jesus said do not defend God’s people through violence; liberate them from the harshnesses and deeper despairs of the world. Because God is made of love; love is made of God, and violence is not of God.

If you choose to become a virtuous violent holy patriot — or already think of yourself as one — then you decide right now whether you are Simon or Judas before they knew Jesus. You’re one or the other. Go on… decide. We’ll wait. (Rant/sermon continues here.)

SECOND, I do not believe in a single one of these dumbass Trump shooter conspiracy theories. All evidence so far taken together, it looks to me like that kid wasn’t ideologically or politically motivated; it looks to me like he was depressed and insecure and suicidal and decided that he’d become great by killing someone great. And if he was a Republican — and all signs seem to point to that — then he wasn’t someone who hated Trump, he was someone who thought Trump was great — and great enough that killing him would render the shooter someone who mattered. And that’s an idea so simple and insidious you wouldn’t write it down in a manifesto for MSNBC or Fox News or the cops to find later.

And the Secret Service and local police? They simply screwed up — because even the best cops and the Secret Service screw up sometimes. So the whole Trump assassination attempt wasn’t some mastermind sophisticated conspiracy to shoot Trump or allow Trump to be shot; it was just a clusterfuck resulting in omnishambles.

• And Trump shouted Fight, which in time will be interpreted as him standing defiant against the threat from the armed depressed.

And I should point this out because a futurist should: While everyone was stunned and shocked the attempt happened, that attack wasn’t a trend and it wasn’t a sign that Americans are turning toward political violence. Unless thousands of Americans in thousands of places with thousands of guns are going Full Reciprocal Dumbass in the streets then Americans are not choosing political violence over nonviolent voting. This ain’t a trend. The country didn’t choose violence; a single solitary kid with a gun did. That’s it.

THIRD, the polls are going to change — maybe sharply — over the next week or two. A candidate usually gets a solid bump in the polls immediately following their convention and a candidate getting shot tends to provide a sympathy bump and then a few weeks later the polls settle back down to where they’d naturally be. And the election ain’t tomorrow.

• The public may already be immune to bad debate performance and to assassination attempts. Biden’s numbers inched up following the debate — erasing Trump’s maybe two-point lead at the time — though the enthusiasm among Democrats to vote for him cratered (though they’d still vote for the Democratic ticket even if the Democrats have a ham sandwich on the ballot). Trump’s numbers may or may not improve (for long) following the shooting but his base — but probably still only his already-existing base — now reeeeeeeeally wants to vote for him.

Beyond that, while Democrats are busy trying to decide what to do about Biden — and vice versa — Trump is effectively running unopposed. Biden has been campaigning conventionally and behaving presidentially while Trump has been campaigning subversively to show his base that he can still fight and that nobody should pay attention to what he would do in office again. Which brings us to Project 2025.

• A main reason why the Democrats can capitalize on Project 2025 is that Trump has left a giant hole where his agenda should be and Democrats filled that void with Project 2025. On the flipside, though, the Heritage Foundation knew Trump would leave a void where his agenda should be so they plonked down a 900+ plan into that void for him. So even if Project 2025-as-Trump’s-agenda isn’t literally true, it’s spiritually true.

FOURTH, as soon as the Republican National Convention ends tonight — and barring another WTF event happening between now and the end of Trump’s speech — we’ll enter a two-week epic roar of Democrats trying to get Biden to step aside before the Democratic convention.

And if he does — especially if he releases his delegates and asks them to back Harris instead — I don’t think the Democrats will collapse into chaos because I’m not sure a single other Democrat will allow themselves to be stood up as an alternative to her and they’ll immediately endorse her instead. But that’s just a guess based on what most of those other Democratic possibles have already said.

So. OK. Some final perspective.

I do not think this election has been decided for Trump despite all his wins and all of the nonstop WTF-ness of the past few weeks because if you fly up a thousand feet and look back down I am not sure much in the election has actually changed. The WTFs are just the white caps on a river that we already know pretty well.

• Trump is still Trump. For good or for ill.

• Biden is still Biden. For good or for ill.

• I’m not sure whether the polls will ultimately change or by how much. I’m not even sure how much they can change at this point. (I may be very wrong on this.) For what it’s worth, at the time of this writing (nearly 7am) 538 has Biden winning the election 54 out of 100 simulations according to their model.

• The Republicans have no options other than Trump and now — having chosen Vance rather than a moderate — the GOP may have no real future without or beyond Trump. If Trump wins in November, then the GOP going forward will only be about him and his direction. The GOP of old is probably dead and the GOP of today is now finally and completely and only hitched to Trump’s star.

• Democrats do have options beyond Biden, now and for decades to come — if Biden will allow it. And Biden might allow it.

• If Trump runs effectively unopposed like he has been the past few weeks, he’ll probably win.

• If Trump gets rhetorically punched in the electoral nose repeatedly by Biden or Harris along with Project 2025 or the fall of Roe or Epstein evidence or democracy and/or Punch-ers To Be Named Later, he’ll probably lose.

So, again, the river hasn’t changed. But there will still be a lot of near-daily white-cap WTFs along the way between now and November so matter who you support.

So go find the Tylenol. It’s behind the vitamins. And keep going. We’re in the middle of this still; we’re not at the end.