Like many Americans, Carolina Giuliani was paralyzed over the prospect that Donald Trump — the man she blames for ruining her father and damaging her family — could be close to returning to the White House.
…
“It’s a hard phenomenon to understand. It definitely is,” Carolina Giuliani said. “I view Trump as a disease, and I think it’s really important to remember that with every disease, prevention is a much more effective strategy than treatment. … I thought we had cured ourselves of it the first time, but it doesn’t seem like we have.
“And I think if he becomes the president again, we may have a terminal illness in our country. And that really, really scares me.”
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This is all true, but there’s not clear line of succession after Trump, so they’ll splinter. Redirecting the fervor to some new dear leader will take a long time. The Trump thralls are entirely invested in him alone.
I think part of the danger here lies in ascribing too much power to the presidential office. I can easily name dozens of dominionists in Congress, thousands in state office, and they’ve captured the Supreme Court. They’ve infested government at local levels, too. The president is just icing.
I think people put too much emphasis on the president, and mostly ignore the real threat. Trump is absolutely replaceable. People make fun of trump’s ‘3D chess’ phrase as though he meant it as a metaphor for thinking ahead – but he got that phrase from Bannon, and Bannon wasn’t talking metaphorically. Bannon meant it literally, as they were moving ‘tens of thousands of operatives’ (his words) like chess pieces into local and state office over the past couple of decades, ready to move and checkmate the government from within. And they’ve done that.
You may be right, but it seems to me that sleeper cells need direction. Otherwise, they’ll interpret their ideology divergently. They may block progress pretty effectively, but it’ll be hard for them to make gains in a shared direction.