Lincoln Project Distills 2023 Down To 1:20, Take A Sedative Before Viewing

Maybe we should start putting warnings on videos, “If the effects of reading about or viewing MAGA don’t subside within four hours, contact your shrink or begin drinking heavily. If drinking heavily becomes a problem, contact AA.” But in all events, if you’ve got heart or blood pressure meds, take them before you watch this opus.

We’re in the last week of 2023, and oh what a year it has been. But make no mistake: as nutso as this year has been, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. 2024 is going to eclipse this year and most likely the seven before it? Why? Because we are close to getting a resolution on the cultural cancer that infected our body politic seven years ago and which is close to excision. Or, God forbid, it could metastasize and kill us. So look at where we’ve just been the past 360 days and then buckle up for the last five, and then 365 days of 2024.

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— Gence Hervey III (@Genceallen) December 27, 2023

Here’s another clip you need to view. Is the “go to HELL” over the top, which it would be anytime of year but especially at Xmas and in a Xmas greeting. And more importantly, is Trump’s already unhinged rhetoric going to escalate and get even further out of control?

Trump can only go one of two ways at this point: 1. He can stay on message, which means, rude, crude, vulgar and destructive, or 2. He can try to sell the new Churchillian version of himself, and play the elder statesman. As previously stated, I think that way lies certain disaster. And I believe he’ll find that out soon enough himself.

Ergo, he’s got one card to play and one card only: Rageaholic. And he’ll play that card very easily because he is enraged these days. He’s obsessed with Jack Smith, it goes without saying, and he’s afraid of being sentenced to prison, if we are to believe what his former aides say.

Many men, and one woman, have run for president. They all wanted to be elected more than anything. They put their heart and soul into the effort. But not a single one of them ever wanted, needed, to get elected so that they could stay out of prison. This is a case of first impression, like so many things Trumpian.

2016 was a whacky election year. No argument there. But it was a choice between an establishment politician and a populist iconoclast. Never, ever, have we seen a contest between an incumbent president and an adjudicated rapist, currently under 91 felony indictments in four separate jurisdictions. Not to mention that the same candidate is also in potential peril of being bopped off of the ballot altogether in one or more states, depending upon how the Supreme Court rules on the 14th Amendment.

If you were just waking up from a cryogenic sleep that you entered, say in 2014, and didn’t know about any of this, what would you be thinking? I would be thinking that somehow I was living out the plot of a Kurt Vonnegut novel or living in a Twilight Zone episode. And like a character in either of those places, we’re just going to have to hang on for the ride.

Buckle up. Mid-January is when it’s all going to start hitting the fan, bigly. Trump will win in Iowa, I predict. Watching what DeSantis and Haley do next will be noteworthy. Ramaswamy will hang out for a little while and then give a rousing endorsement of Trump because that’s going to lead him to what he truly wants, a sinecure as a contributor on some right-wing media outlet. And similarly, Christie will hang out as long as he can and when he departs the race, it will be with an equally rousing condemnation of Trump.

Stay tuned. America is entering a year that historians will long remember. Either Trump will somehow get elected and America becomes a third world country, with a dictator at the helm, or democracy will prevail. Then watch for the GOP to finally shudder and collapse as its death throes, which began the minute it put Trump atop its ballot, go into their final stages.

Lastly, look for some kind of a new conservative party to arise. What it will look like or how it will come about, I have no idea. This is terra incognita. But what is known is that the GOP got into such a vacuum of leadership that a TV performer, an emotionally unstable shell of a man, convinced himself that he was able to lead a country of 330 million people. And the Republican party, who knew better said, “Fuck it. We’ve got nothing better. Let’s go.” And that’s how they, and we, got to where we are, friends.