Right, I've said it before but I think the follow-on to Trump, whether immediately or after some chaotic intermediate period, will be a cynical "radical centrist" strongman who also promises the restoration of the United States, but on different terms than Trump and to a broader constituency.
I think you likely end up with a reactionary Democrat (or possibly, a moderate Republican) who affirms the imperial pivot to a "western hemisphere" sphere of influence, throws a diplomatic bone to the United States' disappointed geopolitical allies around the globe but continues to disappoint them, and rolls back Trump's initiatives such as the tariff war or the ICE deportation campaign, but preserves their arbitrary expansion of Presidential authority.
I don't know who this might be, but I think Newsom has the look and feel (he's a white man) more than, say, AOC.
I think "woke" candidates are going to continue to struggle. Not because their values are wrong, but because they forecast the possible enforcement of these values by a blatantly rigged and unjust system. No one gives that any credit at this stage. Woke discourse is now, broadly speaking, establishment discourse. But in the very same sense mainstream wokeness has become the de facto discourse of the crushing bad faith of the establishment. It's a kaleidoscope of variations of Kendall Jenner handing a Black cop a Pepsi Max, forever.
(Yes, there are still expressions of woke critique that are outside whatever this complex is, but they're the ones that aren't taken up by corporations and political parties, and their distinctions from mainstream wokeness are too subtle or illegible for anyone but experts with niche authority.)
The perverse consequence is that figures such as Trump, the kind who perform extraordinary gestures such as kidnapping Nicolas Maduro while public declaring this is done to take control of Venezuelan oil … instead of calling it a "liberation mission" or relying on a "right to protect" as Clinton or Bush Jr would have … these "clowns" seem like rare more honest representatives of a system that's correctly perceived as cynical from the ground up.
