I think at this point, everyone is well aware that you can't take anything Trump says as "joking". Particularly when they claim it is. "It was just a joke" is a standard refuge of scoundrels.

He’s not.

Since there are no "red lines", the most important 25-30% of the voting population wouldn't mind, and oligarch owned media isn't going to show any outrage about this, I'm not optimistic about mid-terms even happening. I'm alson not optimistic about the dynastic succession. None of the princelings look to be wise rulers.

Who are the audience(s)? Who wants to hear which? They have been playing it both ways and will probably continue to. The moment to watch for will be if they start playing it only one way.

I think it's fair to say that the White House is just continually lying at this point.

Trump throws a lot of stuff against the wall to see what will stick. Hopefully the response to this was bad enough to make him abandon any ideas he may have had.

> He’s quoted as arguing “we shouldn’t even have an election,” on account of how much the Trump Administration has accomplished.

Well I wanted to make up my own mind, but Time thinks it's appropriate to quote one fragment of a sentence, cutting off the start and end to leave only the middle (starts with a lowercase letter, ends with a comma). I don't want to appear greedy and ask for something as extravagant as multi-sentence context, so I guess I'll just think what Time wants me to think.

Trump "backed away" from Project 2025, too, or at least that's what got earnestly reported. Reporters, at least in oligarch owned media, seem easily convinced by certain factions of politicians.

Midterms will happen. They may or may not be ""secured"" by ICE. The midterms don't matter because the Senate cannot flip hard enough to actually remove Trump, and otherwise I don't think he cares at all what the legislative branch does. For now he is just floating it to move the Overton window. I don't think he would attempt to full on cancel until the following election. If he has a brain left though the next presidential election will just feature some ICE agents to "prevent illegals from voting" or whatever who can find him the 11,780 votes he failed to get from Georgia last time.

You can find so many parallels to Trump's presidency and the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. I wish there were some in depth political analysis of the similarities because just as a layman, there are many.

- Both used Cambridge Analytica heavily in their elections and terms.

- Both appealed to very macho/misogynistic bases.

- Both made wildly inappropriate jokes and threats, leaving their Press Secretaries to explain it away. "Locker room" talk for Trump, and "Bisaya humor" for Duterte.

- Both did basically anything they wanted, basically with impunity (although Duterte is captured by ICC now iirc)

- Both accused of being a foreign asset. Trump->Russia, Duterte->China.

- Both want to rewrite/dispose of their constitutions.

- Both wanted to end elections or remove term limits.

- Duterte declared martial law, Trump wants to.

- Duterte did door to door searches (under guise of War on Drugs), Trump doing it under guise of Immigration enforcement.

There's probably more, but those are off the top of my head. If I had a tinfoil hat to wear, I would almost believe this is all still Cambridge or other big data backed planned behavior. I admitted don't know much about Project 2025, but just knowing a) they worked with big data in Cambridge, and b) there is actually goals planned that accommodate expected responses from congress etc make things highly suspicious.

I wish a political scientist/independent researcher would do the leg work and investigate the two presidencies, because all of it is just really scary and prophetic.