When Trump Croaks

What happens next?

Trump is disintegrating quickly and won’t be around much longer — that seems clear. He is suffering from serious cognitive decline and either liver disease or congestive heart failure or both. This should not be surprising considering his horrible diet. I doubt he will last another year. He hasn’t really been seen since last Tuesday, and many of the photos circulated last weekend seem to be either outright fakes or intentionally misdated.

About Trump’s diet: Probably we are more governed by our gut biome than we care to imagine. Even decisions we think we make consciously may actually be the result of bacteria, yeast, and parasites that steer us in certain ways. Trump drinks gallons of Diet Coke per day and avidly consumes Big Macs, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Doritos, and so on. His diet is heavy on meat and processed foods — in fact, this is also the case with his MAGA cult victims, many of whom live in “food deserts” with no access to organic product. This may be why they find Trump so attractive.

Michael Pollan writes about the ways that plants may cultivate humans rather than the other way around. For instance, wheat cunningly uses us to propagate itself as does marijuana. Could the same be the case for microorganisms such as Candida? And since the typical diet of both Trump and his base almost inevitably lead to massive overproduction of Candida, is it possible that his bizarre, evil, and irrational policies are actually being steered by gut bacteria? From the Candida perspective, you want as many fat, brainless, useless people eating as much processed foods, sugars, genetically modified cheeses — and so on — as possible, to maximally increase the amount of Candida they produce, like a giant yeast farm. If they die young, it doesn’t matter as long as they produce more children — hence a pronatalist policy combined with cutting healthcare would be the Candida program.

Candida overgrowth in the gut has been linked, through the immune and gut–brain axis, to a cluster of cognitive and emotional disturbances often described as brain fog. People report loss of mental clarity, short-term memory lapses, and difficulty concentrating, alongside heightened anxiety and irritability. Candida albicans produces inflammatory responses and neuroactive byproducts such as acetaldehyde, which interfere with neurotransmitter systems and stress hormones. In animal as well as human studies, the dysregulation shows up as worsening anxiety, impulsivity, and mood instability, along with fatigue and impaired focus. Interestingly, these symptoms all match the psychological profile of Trump and his base, who act impulsively, having lost their moorings in a stable really.

Anyway, to get back to the subject at hand: Trump is clearly a dying man. Nobody can say the exact timing — and we know contemporary medicine is good at keeping “walking cadavers” such as Trump going for a while past their sell-by date. But the time is coming soon when he buys the farm or bites the dust, or whatever metaphor you prefer, or becomes incapacitated. In fact, we don’t know what kind of shape he is in right now, as this Meidastouch video covers well:

So what happens in the near term — or even immediately — when Trump dies or is unable to “serve?”

I think we must acknowledge that Fascist power has been effectively, speedily consolidated in the first six months of Trump’s regime. The Democratic safeguards have given away, proving they were already rotten and fragile. I am still amazed by the abject failure of the liberal progressive establishment in the U.S. to respond with any creativity. The best responses so far have come from Bernie Sanders and AOC, with their “barnstorming" tour of Red States, and from Gavin Newsom, who has gained popular appeal by satirizing Trump and imitating his style:

While I appreciate Newsome for these efforts, it also seems obvious that the Democrats still lack imaginative new ideas, if the most effective way to attack Trump is to copy him slavishly.

In “The Little Discussed Secret to Trump's Ruination of America”, Neal Gabler, author of Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, explores how Donald Trump’s central impact on American politics has been to transform government into entertainment, exploiting the public’s boredom with conventional politics and their craving for spectacle. “Trump arose – was allowed to arise – because the American people got bored with their politics, and they hungered for something more entertaining, something with more juice, something that kept pace with the speed of the culture, something that gave them the impression of action.”

Unlike Reagan, who used entertainment for political goals, Trump has collapsed politics entirely into a reality-TV format. His presidency is a nonstop performance of stunts, cruelty, and chaos, designed for the truncated attention span of the populace. He has turned politics into a Reality TV show. Gabler writes:

Trump isn’t just performing; he is staging stunts non-stop. Every single thing in his administration is designed with the show in mind. His immigration policy is a stunt. (Why else have Dr. Phil, of all people, accompany the ICE agents?) His meetings with foreign leaders are stunts. (Why else have his February hi-jacking of Zelensky in the Oval Office in front of cameras?) His so-called “negotiations” on tariffs are stunts. His loosing DOGE on the so-called “deep state” is a stunt. His unleashing the Justice Department on his political opponents is a stunt. His gerrymandering demands are stunts. Each and every episode of the “show” is designed for maximum effect in capturing attention – government by photo-op.

Part of this unrelenting barrage of spectacle and stunt is the destructive attacks on “high culture,” intellectuals, science, and so on. “Beyond the pleasure of the show itself, then, the joy and triumph of Trump and his supporters in making government a tawdry reality show is that in doing so they are also destroying the conventions and values that had seemed to constitute good taste, good conduct, and good government — the very things the MAGA movement abhorred.” In the face of Trump’s degradation of all of our institutions, our sense of shared common decency, and any culture more sophisticated than a UFC cage match, Gabler proposes that we desperately need “to restore morality to the nation.”

Will J.D. Vance — or any potential tyrant successor to Trump — be able to keep the show going as Trump has done? It seems very unlikely. So what happens then?

Trump had fifty years of fame, becoming a staple in the American Psyche. Nobody who might replace him has this pedigree, nor his grasp of the attentional economy, nor his humor. As much as I utterly detest Trump, even I admit that sometimes I find him funny and his lines memorable. For instance, recently, he said about Jeffrey Epstein: “He's been dead for a long time. He was never a big factor in terms of life.” Trump possesses a kind of crude, canny madness — which makes him able to hold the popular attention.

Without Trump, his movement will quickly harden into something more traditionally authoritarian and bureaucratic — still very dangerous, but neither magnetic nor entertaining. That transformation will create openings: When the spectacle falters, genuine opposition may be possible again. But only if the opposition understands the dynamics of a culture that responds to moment-by-moment memes, based on their stunt value. Could we seek to “instrumentalize” love, generosity, and collective care, as the Right Wing has weaponized hatred, prejudice, and cruelty? It might be worth a shot!

A lot of Fascistic and totalitarian movement crumble once the leader is gone — or they enter into prolonged power struggles.

Spain offers one interesting model: Fascism could not survive Franco’s death in 1975. Spain managed to “democratize” peacefully through a managed transition orchestrated from within the regime. Franco designated King Juan Carlos as his heir, to continue authoritarianism. But the new king chose democracy instead. He appointed a Franco-ist insider to spearhead reforms. The anti-Fascists made a deal that they would not prosecute Franco-era crimes, while regime elites preserved their economic and institutional power. As the economy modernized in the 1960s, the middle class rose up, while the Catholic Church liberalized. This created conditions more favorable to democracy, though tensions remained. The Spanish case provides a model for a peaceful shift back to some kind of Democracy, at a cost. Authoritarian legacies remain embedded in Spanish institutions, historical memory is unresolved, and victims of the dictatorship failed to receive justice.

The U.S. situation is unique on many levels, and very unpredictable. One problem is that the Fascistic consolidation is not a fait accompli, but still very much under way. Fascist control of the U.S. faces serious challenges in a nation as big and as populous as this one. There is, apparently, a “Soft Secession” movement underway, where Blue State Governors and Mayors meet in secret to discuss withdrawing their funding from the Federal Government.

At this point, either a hard or soft secession seems like a sensible idea to me. The divergence of ideology between Red and Blue sectors has become extreme. Perhaps we should just go our separate ways? However, it is difficult to imagine that White Christian Nationalists and tech oligarchs would tolerate this peacefully. 71% of the nation’s GDP comes from Blue States, who subsidize Red States — not to mention paying for the military-surveillance-prison-industrial complex.

Anyway, I do not have firm answers about what will happen, but I do find it interesting and perhaps useful to start thinking about the different ways the dice may roll when Trump kicks the bucket. If Vance becomes President, it could be time to focus relentlessly on the ideology of Peter Thiel, who basically created him as a political operative. Thiel, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk have developed a fanatic technologically determinist ideology that is deeply destructive and anti-human, centered on their personal desires for physical immortality and their belief that nothing should impede their “freedom.”

Thiel and Andreessen are both on the record for naming a bizarre libertarian screed, The Sovereign Individual, as their biggest influence. I will dive back into this soon, but The Sovereign Individual proposes a near-future where nation-states are dissolved, centralized currencies are gone, and the world devolves into a kind of techno-feudalist anarchy which they call “commercialized sovereignty.” This has absolutely nothing to do with “making American great again,” but more about carving up the country’s resources for the short-term benefit of the tech oligarchs. That may be a “bridge too far” even for the MAGA faithful.