What if Trump's campaign is cover for a slow-motion coup? | Jan-Werner Müller

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

60% : It is already half forgotten that Trump held his first major rally this election cycle in Waco, Texas.
47% : Trumpists know from the US supreme court's decisions about ballot access and immunity earlier that some parts of the judiciary have given up on any conventional legal logic; they are likely simply to deliver whatever benefits Trump.
46% : The unchecked racism fits into a logic of far-right populism more generally: far-right populists claim that they, and they alone, represent what they call "the silent majority" or "the real people" (the very expression Trump used on January 6 to address his supporters).
45% : But since Trump has everything to lose (including his freedom, given the charges still pending), there's every reason to think that he'll try everything.
43% : After all, there is an overwhelming number of reasons why, should Trump lose, he will once more try to take power anyway.
36% : In theory, Republicans could seize the chance at last to break with Trump, who, after all, has only delivered defeats to the party.
32% : Trump and his allies - including the world's richest man, who just happens to be a rightwing extremist - have framed the election as an apocalyptic battle.
30% : Even if Trump can't really mobilize large numbers of people to the streets, just prolonging a sense of chaos might be enough Whatever happens next, one day historians will have to explain why a candidate who earlier this year had been presented as disciplined started to veer off into unrestrained racist rhetoric and dancing for 40 minutes to his own playlist.
30% : Who knows whether Trump can really mobilize large numbers of people on the streets; it might be enough to prolong a sense of chaos.
26% : As in 2020 and early 2021, Trump is likely to make sharing his lies a test of loyalty.
21% : Yet there were already plenty of incentives to get rid of Trump in early 2021, and still Republicans did not disown, let alone impeach, him.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.