What If Trump Dies?
Or has to leave office prematurely for other health reasons?
Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world.
And one of those ways is to game out demise.
Look, he’s 78 years old. The actuarial tables are not in his favor. He sounds to me like he’s cognitively deteriorating but maybe I’m wrong. But we have to look at his future because our future is wrapped up in his. And as futurists we’d have to consider the near future of any President who’s 78. We’d be doing this right now even if Biden had won.
So let’s look at scenarios for the future of the man himself and ways he might leave office prematurely because that chance is real. And what it would mean for the country in each case.
But before we get started I want to shout this deep into you and into everyone and into any nervous United States Secret Service agents who are reading this now: DO NOT TRY TO ASSASSINATE ANY PRESIDENT. I WILL FIND YOU AND I WILL STOP YOU EVEN BEFORE ANY SECRET SERVICE AGENT CAN. WE ALL ELECTED HIM AND WE MUST BEAR THOSE COSTS. THAT IS DEMOCRACY.
Hear me? See me? Do not fuck with me.
So.
Ready?
This forecasting might be an easy thing to do if we preset a few pieces on the board.
(1) Adam Kinzinger over the weekend posited that it’s possible that Trump has largely fallen apart and is now a puppet in a Weekend at Bernie’s sort of situation. Maybe. It’s also possible that his reelection gave him everything he actually wanted — a Get Out of Jail Free card and an opportunity to exact unconstrained revenge, a chance to enact tariffs (a solution he’s believed in for 40+ years), a chance to be as anti-brown people and anti-immigrant as he wants on a national and global scale, and a great, at-long-last chance to become a Great Man for the Ages — and he doesn’t care about the rest. It doesn’t actually matter which is true because both mean that Project 2025 and Stephen Miller run most of the policy show now. Trump’s gotten what he wants and he’s outsourced the rest to his loyalists. But if this is a distinction without a difference, then why does this matter? Because this means Trump’s and Project 2025’s futures are separate but linked.
(2) Project 2025 was made for Trump but not for Vance. Even though the Heritage Foundation wrote it ostensibly for any Republican president in reality — on this current political stage and with these players — only Trump has the popularity and ability to provide the political and legal cloud cover to enact it. Project 2025’s fulfillment is only possible as long as Trump is alive to support it and protect it and to distract his supporters from what’s actually in it long enough to fulfill it.
Remember: when Americans — Left and Right — find out what’s in it, they tend to balk and then search the bushes for the assholes who wrote it.
Remember: if Geraldine the hairdresser who has the fourth chair at Fantastic Sam’s hears some Project 2025 bro even breathe that American women should be paid less than men and that women should go home and just make babies and be Mrs. Suzie Homemaker to Cleetus, Geraldine is gonna murder that Project 2025 bro and bury him under the Walmart. And that’s why America is great. (Oh, and why I don’t think we’ll ever turn into The Handmaid’s Tale is here.)
(2) Trump has no successor. There’s no one on the GOP political scene and probably no one in the Right’s media sphere or in the manosphere who’s as charismatic, media-savvy, and mean as Trump. And a significant chunk of Trump’s voters only show up to vote for him and if his name isn’t on the ballot they stay home. That small margin of GOP voters won’t show up for any other GOP figure who’s currently on the scene. (My Futures for the GOP after Trump scenarios are here.)
(3) J.D. Vance may be smarter than Trump or any equivalent insane goat but he can’t command a room nor anything larger than a book club. Vance is not his own man. He’ll be run by uber-rich and powerful men who dazzle him — just like Trump is — but Vance has too little sense of self or principle to resist bedazzlement by The Uber-Glorious. Think about it: Every other President you’ve ever seen — of either party — has had their own sense of self and the confidence and resolve to stand fast for principle of one sort or another. Well, except for Trump. Trump can be dazzled by power because he wants it and he envies others’. No other President was because they couldn’t be. Trump can be dazzled and outwitted and led around by the nose. So can Vance. A Vance presidency would be a Musk-and-Thiel presidency rather than a continuation of a Trump presidency. It would be a different animal. (Sorry for all the badmouthing but I’m an American citizen and I get to have an opinion. A low opinion.)
And the GOP in Congress does not fear Vance. The GOP in Congress follows Trump because they fear he will mobilize his voice and supporters and attendant money to primary them if they displease him. No one fears Vance. The GOP in Congress will defy Vance rather than follow him. And Washington can handle Vance. A middle manager at the Shreveport/Cleetus-Tombstone Walmart can handle Vance. Hell, a well-rested Waffle House night crew can intimidate Vance and disarm his Secret Service detail and tell them all to sit down, shut up, and order and they can have their guns back after the pay the check. (This is why you’ve never seen a President go to a Waffle House.) My point is Vance is Vance.
(4) The assassination attempt on Trump last summer lionized Trump by playing into Trump’s self-crafted image as a Strong, Strong Strongman. Strongmens’ images require constant bolstering and constant reinforcement because strongmens’ images and power are mighty and sharp but fragile.
(5) The GOP was ideologically and politically dead a decade ago — which is why Trump was able to take it over and create MAGA. And MAGA is a cult of personality. When that personality is gone, the cult collapses. And the GOP implodes. Even though MAGA anger may nonetheless remain. (Again, my Futures for the GOP scenarios are here.)
(6) If — or as long as — Trump’s current policy trajectory holds the more Americans (even and especially of his own stripe) he will hurt. And the longer this goes on, the more the United States will end its polarization via the side door. Because the longer his policy trajectory goes, the less we’ll be Us Versus Them and the more we’ll become All of Us Versus Him.
Which is the delicate and extremely dangerous math: To leave him in play long enough to hang himself and hang the GOP electorally balanced against him destroying everything in the meantime.
My point with all these preset pieces is that how he leaves office prematurely — if he does and when he does — provides us with different futures.
If he dies an undeniably cheeseburger-related natural death, his — and their — vision of a better, cruel America probably dies with him because he has no successor popular enough to continue that vision. Vance and the Project 2025 bros won’t be able to continue it on their own for long.
If he suffers an undeniable debilitating health event like a stroke such that his Cabinet must 25th-Amendment him out of office, then their better, crueler America wisps itself out of existence by 10am the next morning. And by 11am Trump loyalists will be standing around stunned and blinking at each other and not knowing what to do and they won’t be able to find Stephen Miller because he’ll be on a plane to Argentina to join the rest of the Uber Alles.
If he suffers age-related mental collapse and gets so close to the nuclear button that his Cabinet has to 25th-Amendment him though his supporters don’t understand what’s really going on — or he exits under circumstances the MAGA faithful find debatable and suspicious and conspiracy-ish — the MAGA faithful might turn on Trump’s own Cabinet, and then on everyone else.
If he is assassinated by a liberal before the country shifts enough to All of Us Versus Him then Us Versus Them comes roaring back and we risk some Second American Civil War kind of shit. (But even then I don’t think we’d get anything more than reciprocal domestic terrorism between the Left and Right. My series on why I don’t think we’ll have another Civil War is here, here, here, here, here and here.)
If he is assassinated by a Republican like he almost was last July then all Republicans will stomp around for a bit and then sit down to reckon with the cognitive dissonance and we’ll all hold really still until they put away their guns.
If he suffers an assassination attempt from anyone — imagine last July again — but instead of being too surprised and too bodily-heavily to react quickly he had instead dived behind the women and children behind him and used them as human shields or had simply run away he would make himself look like a weak coward rather than a brave strong man who fights for his people. His image and reputation would be destroyed forever, Project 2025’s protection would die instantly, and everyone in the country of every political stripe would then quietly sit back in the diner booth and try to figure out how to get someone they can’t respect out of office. (And honestly, it wouldn’t take an incident as serious as an assassination attempt for that to happen. If Trump were nut-kicked by an irate goat named Harold at the state fair and Trump screamed like a little girl on camera, his image would be similarly deflated — as would his policy agenda and momentum. And don’t think that can’t happen because the Secret Service does not scan for goats.)
What I’m saying with all this is that Project 2025, totalitarian dystopia, and national ruin aren’t our only options ahead. There’s nonviolent resistance, the courts, cheeseburgers, the 25th Amendment, and goats as viable future avenues as well. So let’s all take a deep breath and consider what each of us wants to do.
I’m gonna Zoom-call Harold.
My only quibble with your scenarios is that I think asking this cabinet (honestly, did you see those people at the cabinet meeting last week?) to 25A Trump is, as we say in the futures biz, implausible.
They are where they are because they're the stupidest, most batshit-crazy loyalists Trump could find anywhere in the USA (and he spent four lonely years festering down in the swamps of Florida doing nothing but hunting for them). Seriously: I don't think most of these people have the mental capacity to recognize when Daddy's gone nuts. They are where they are because they've already accepted world-changing levels of nuts as perfectly normal. They're totally inured to nuts. So a little actual brain-death seems unlikely to register with them, unless the sudden influx of things being less-nuts creates an actual shock to their systems.
And the Weekend At Bernie's scenario will become even more painfully accurate, and Stephen Miller's pointy ass will be the one filling the big chair behind the Resolute Desk for the duration. Nobody's going to upset the apple cart. They're just going to pump the guy full of embalming fluid, get some animatronic folks from Disney to wire his hands to do that accordion thing, and keep toting him around and propping him up for public appearances. The only way we'll know this has happened is that the makeup job may actually start to look better once an actual pro is doing it, so that's one key signal to look out for.
I worked in a psychiatric hospital for several years after college, with alot of geriatric patients. Dementia Don has been pretty far gone for a while. He looks like they are pumping him full of drugs for his public appearances. Haldolperidol probably.