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this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2026
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politics
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American politics is so fucking whack, but I'm still gonna say he has no chance and if I get egg on my face I get egg on my face.
Big part of how Trump one was playing both sides with the tough guy act but also lying that he'd stay out of foreign entanglements. Hegseth is pure tough guy act, and also started and lost a war with Iran, so he has absolutely no ability to court the libertarian/isolationist-minded people on the right who felt burned by Bush. It seems like he's just delusional and has bought into his own propaganda.
Hegseth can easily be painted as a weirdo diva little bitch. Talks a lot of shit about manliness but had his very own makeup room installed in the Pentagon, he looks like an uncoordinated wimp when he exercises, he brags about realism and "lethality" but performed like an inept weakling against Iran.
He's also a known wife beater and former alcoholic which makes him look like even more of a pansy. Dude can beat on women but not our enemies.
He's extremely unpopular in the military and isn't taken seriously there either. It took him 20 years to reach major, that's beyond pathetic, and he was never more than a platoon leader.
A competent Dem would portrait him as a loser manlet and it would work.
Right but imagine you are a hardcore MAGA supporter and found that Trump won't be running for a 3ed term, where can you find someone shittier than Pete to elect?
You can't win with just that one type of guy, is what I'm saying. There's the macho nationalist type of guy on the right, absolutely, but there's also the libertarian type that's generally "anti-war" on the basis that war is the government doing stuff and the government doing stuff is always bad.
In 2000, Bush ran as being more isolationist than Gore and staying out of foreign conflicts (after the failure in Vietnam, nobody wanted to be associated with that), then as soon as he got ahold of power started and lost pointless wars of aggression. So then Bush became unpopular on the right and Trump ran as an "anti-establishment" type (after the failure in Afghanistan, nobody wanted to be associated with that) claiming to be a "peace" candidate, and he won, and as soon as he got access to the levers of power he started bombing Syria but nobody really noticed or cared for some reason so then he just repeated the same lies and got into power again and immediately went and bombed Iran, and going forward nobody's gonna want to be associated with that.
There's plenty of figures that are positioning themselves to step into that role next, like MTG, Tucker Carlson, and Tulsi Gabbard. The sorts of people who bought into Trump being a peace candidate are dumb as rocks and lack basic pattern recognition so they will absolutely just keep falling for the same trick over and over again. But they do need to be tricked and lied to for the right to have a winning coalition.
It is kinda exciting on some level, like, say Tucker Carlson got his hands on the levers of power, he'd obviously start another war of aggression somewhere, but who really knows where it'd be? And when that war proves to be a hopeless debacle, who will be the one on the right to say that, unlike Tucker who just loves getting into pointless destructive conflicts (who could've predicted it?), they actually... you know what, I can't do this, it's not exciting, it's literally just rebooting the same plotline over and over, and I'm gonna be forced to watch it until I'm dead in the ground.
Point being, my prediction is that the Republican nominee will either be someone who has some pretense of being able to distance themself from the Iran War, or they will lose.
Thanks for taking the time. It's a good read and very informative.
I think you're right but will have more confidence when I see the result of the midterm.
I want to see how many Trump endorsed republicans will win vs Regular republicans.
You're words make lot of sense but the world we're living in right now doesn't so I guess will wait and see.
A perfect example of an oxymoron. Core libertarian ideology espouses completely open borders and international trade without government interference.
They’re not libertarians, they’re just another version of big government neoconservatives that sympathize with fascists.
Yes and no. Open borders and international trade are consistent with libertarianism, but fighting a bunch of expensive foreign wars isn't. Libertarians are in a position of having to make compromises for a lesser evil, and no Democratic presidential nominee has ever made an attempt to appeal to them at all. Like, Harris never met a war she didn't like and the way she tried to appeal to the right was campaigning with Dick Cheney, who everyone outside of diehard neocons hates.
Having said that, yes, libertarian-minded people tend to have mixed up priorities and often have major blind spots regarding the GOP. They are blinded by principles and idealism, while ignoring the actual facts on the ground and being horrible judges of character. At the same time, if there is any faction on the right that's actually worth trying to appeal to, it's probably them, because they have some reasons to have tension with the GOP. It's certainly not worth trying to appeal to the bloodthirsty neocons and fascists who are perfectly satisfied and getting exactly what they want.