So the drama of Donald Trump is effectively at an end.
Oh, he’ll still make plenty of noise and people will still get worked up about him, but he’ll never sit in the Oval Office again. In fact, he’ll never run for president again.
That doesn’t mean the damage he has done to our country and its political system isn’t going to resonate far into the future.
Trump failed in his effort to become more of an authoritarian leader, mostly through his own incompetence, but there were tens of millions of voters hoping he would succeed.
But there are others — two in particular — who have fewer of the weaknesses and liabilities that Trump has, and they bear watching as we head down the road into the future.
The less threatening of the two is in that position because of mistakes he has made. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri hurt himself badly with his gesture to the insurrectionists on January 6th.
But it didn’t hurt him at all with the far right. And it’s important to remember than even Adolf Hitler survived his early mistakes in a better educated country than we are in now.
Those educated Germans never had to deal with television, and that brings us to the second man who will come across as so much slicker than Trump or even Hawley.
If you look at the progression of power in right-wing media, it started with Rush Limbaugh in the ’80s followed by Sean Hannity. Limbaugh was a little too clownish and Hannity too angry.
Of course someone would come along who would not have those problems, someone who would be very slick and create an image that would be something along the lines of a Ronald Reagan for the new millennium.
Hello, Tucker Carlson.
Carlson is 10 years older than Hawley, and he is perhaps the most reasonable-sounding conspiracy theorist out there. His biggest attacks lately have the possibility of causing massive problems. He has been an anti-vaxxer for years, and lately he is claiming with no evidence at all that the Covid-19 vaccines can’t be trusted.
He is also a race baiter extraordinaire, He says the true story behind the riot at the Capitol is nothing like what we are being told. Although he doesn’t come out and say it, it’s pretty obvious he agrees with those on the looney right who say leftists were behind it to embarrass Trump. He also says that George Floyd, the man killed by police in Minneapolis, actually died of a drug overdose.
Of course, his big issues involve telling his viewers liberals and Democrats are trying to censor conservative thought and destroy Fox News.
This is the man who needs to be watched, the man who is the slick successor to Donald Trump.
Watch him.
He is definitely going to be dancing, with or without the stars.