This is not a particularly great article. I'm just posting it to show *who* is willing to come out and publicly say #Trump is a lame duck.

I am once again nominating the leopards for the Nobel Peace Prize.

https://fortune.com/2025/11/17/trump-lame-duck-epstein-affordability-thomas-massie/

‘In 2030, he’s not going to be the president’: Even Republicans are warning of Trump’s lame duck status as affordability, Epstein threaten to derail tenure

"You will have voted to protect pedophiles if you don’t vote to release these files, and the president can’t protect you then," Rep. Thomas Massie told ABC.

Fortune
@MaryAustinBooks I've been saying since Trump was elected in 2024 that he would not finish his 2nd term. Although I'm not 100% convinced that #CommanderVance will be an improvement.
@dedicto
Oh, Vance is absolutely just as evil, but we have less to fear from him. Nobody has cult leader status for Trump-- the donor class looked for years for somebody just as magnetically cruel and evil but with a functioning brain. It didn't work and it's not going to work. It's *really* not going to work with the guy who can't even order donuts like a normal person.

@MaryAustinBooks You're absolutely right about all of that. #Vance has all the charisma of a wet dishrag. I'm still worried, because I think he may be considerably MORE evil than Trump. I don't call him #CommanderVance for nothing. His hatred of women goes far deeper than Trump's. Vance isn't just seeking to take advantage, he wants systematic silencing and dehumanization. There's not a thing in "The Handmaid's Tale" that would be beyond him.

Yes, like you, I'm counting on his lack of charisma to frustrate all his diabolical schemes. I just wish I were more certain of it!

@dedicto
He's the tech bro faction. The MAGA chuds loathe the tech bros. Remember, he won his senate seat only because of Trump's endorsement, massive amounts of money from Trump's PAC, and Ohio being red at the time. That was 2022, an actual geological era ago. Anybody who takes the poison chalice of all this wreckage is going down, and Vance was not even a viable senate candidate in better times without advantages he'll no longer have.

The regime's fall will be rough, but it will happen.✊🏼

@MaryAustinBooks I believe all of that too. I've never bought into the point of view that taking down Trump once he attained #dictator status would necessarily require WW2-level bloodshed, or that the failure of Americans to respond with an immediate revolutionary uprising meant that we would have to endure #dictatorship indefinitely. (I follow some people who saw it that way, but I never agreed.) The stakes are high enough to create a wish for unattainable certainty — but absolutely the most LIKELY scenario is that the whole fascist movement is going down hard.

@dedicto
Oh yes. The media blackout and the tech bro suppression slowed us down but could not stop us. We're also fighting historically stupid people. Putin and Orban have to be banging their heads on their desks, and that's not to make them out to be geniuses.

This house of cards is coming down. Heh, if and when it comes down on Couchfuck McGee, that's just going to be that much funnier.

@MaryAustinBooks Totally. I don't see a diabolical genius of the caliber of Reinhard #Heydrich among the current American fash. And I've remarked on how the timescale was all wrong. It was really, really stupid for Trump and Musk to attempt in months, things that Hitler and Heydrich took years to prepare.
@dedicto
Haaa, yes, exactly. These people have zero impulse control, and thank God for that. As painful as this all is, it'd be much worse if we were dealing with an Orban or Putin who consolidated power *before* crashing the economy and trying to institute martial law. Again, not to make those guys out to be brilliant, but this is just preposterous. Fortunately.