There would be dancing in the streets all over the world.
Next week Nethanyahu and Khamenei and Xi Jinping and there would be orgies.
Now imagine we removed the systems that installed them and their successors!
Throw in Xi and Bibi and you’re looking at worldwide peace.
what sucks with the us is we have a large line of aholes in the succession list. Don’t get me wrong it would be great but I kinda feel thiel pushed vance with the idea trump would die and they did not expect him to last this long.
For Kim Jong-Un, I doubt that much would change. The dynasty has been stable for three generations now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Ju_Ae
She made her first public appearance alongside her father at a missile launch in 2022. State media initially referred to her as Kim Jong Un’s “beloved” and “precious” daughter before adopting the adjective “respected”, which is typically reserved for the most honoured members of North Korean society, such as Kim Jong Un himself. After her public debut, analysts of North Korea speculated about the reason for her prominence in state media, with some hypothesising that she was being trained as the heir apparent to lead North Korea. In 2026, the NIS reported to South Korea’s National Assembly that she had finished her training and had become the designated successor of her father.
For Putin, my suspicion is that whoever replaced him would likely be authoritarian. That is, they’ve effectively got a functionally one-party system with a group of people at the top who are invested in that system continuing. It might be the case that some people feel differently about invading Ukraine, say.
Trump would be succeeded by Vance. I would guess that stuff like the “rename various bodies of water” or whatnot things would stop, but Vance is an isolationist, not an internationalist, and I understand has, if anything, been the source of stuff like not wanting to be involved with Ukraine. I don’t know about some of the stuff that I’d call breaking conventions around use of executive power; my guess is that Vance would be better.
EDIT: On Putin, here’s someone writing their analysis; they also say that they think that the most-likely outcome of Putin’s death will be a post-Putin environment that looks similar to the Putin environment:
https://www.fpri.org/article/2026/04/russia-after-putin/
As either president or prime minister, Putin’s 27 years in power are the second-longest period of post-Tsarist rule in Russian history after Joseph Stalin’s. Should Putin remain in office, he will surpass Stalin’s record of being in power for 30 years and 11 months in July 2030. There are no indications that, as long as he lives, Putin will give up power voluntarily.
Exact scenarios are difficult to predict due to the uncertainty of the when and how of Putin’s demise. However, based on patterns of Russian history, the realities of its political system, the correlation of international and economic forces, and social norms including a general consensus of Russia’s national identity, a broad outline can be drawn to suggest which future is more likely than others. This article proposes that there is little hope of change in a post-Putin Russia absent revolutionary change from within the Kremlin or forced on it from without. Those scenarios are unlikely barring a major geopolitical event that transforms both how Russia is governed and how its elites and society identify themselves.
Putin’s successor will have to operate, at least initially, within Russia’s present political system. He will also be influenced by international factors, economic realities, and social norms of Russia’s ruling class and society, which have been heavily affected by almost three decades of Putin’s rule including at least four years of war in Ukraine. This article will examine these factors, analyze the limits they impose on Russia’s next ruler, and describe why they are likely to result in continuity or, at best, change only around the margins in a post-Putin Russia.
Russia’s constitution states that in the event of a president’s death, resignation, or incapacitation, he will be replaced by the prime minister until elections are held in ninety days. In reality, Putin has no designated successor because it is too dangerous for any dictator to name a successor and allow opposition forces to accumulate around him. Instead, Putin balances between the leaders of various elite groups who operate the levers of coercion and oversee the sources of wealth within Russia. This balancing keeps possible successors under control by not allowing them to gain too much power. A culture of corruption adds to this internal balance of power because corruption makes all political players controllable by being compromisable.
Described as a “vertical of power,” this system is maximized to maintain Putin’s control over Russia but not transfer that control. Russia’s constitution gives this system just three months to hold elections after a president’s sudden departure. Since Russia’s electoral system is controlled by the Kremlin and will only produce results predetermined by the Kremlin, there will be little time for Kremlin elites to decide upon a new leader and arrange for the façade of an election intended to signify national approval and legitimacy.
The first challenge for any future leader after Putin will be to control a system that is both centrifugal and fragmented with reins of power emanating from the Kremlin but not touching each other. While all lines of authority center on the Kremlin, none are connected, and each are designed to balance, if not challenge, the other. The strength of each major political figure has been purposefully constrained so they cannot gain power with their resources (military or financial) alone and cannot trust those with whom they would have to coordinate to do so.
Kremlin elites live under a surveillance system maintained by the Federal Security Service (FSB) and Federal Protective Service (FSO). The FSB, FSO, and other internal security organs such as the National Guard (Rosgvardia) are the primary guarantors of Putin’s system. They can also serve as a springboard for whoever wishes to gain power after Putin, and will be the new guarantors of power for whoever achieves it. Russia’s political structure is unlikely to evolve differently from the system Putin has created while these forces remain or remain unchanged.
Under these conditions, it will be difficult for a reformist leader to emerge. Since the system is not designed for shared power, the next leader will likely be someone who can move quickly to consolidate power and protect himself from competitors. This will limit his freedom of action since he cannot alienate too many Kremlin factions. As Otto von Bismarck once observed, “politics is the art of the possible, the attainable—the art of the next best.” While facing this internal political reality, Putin’s eventual successor will face other limiting factors.
I think you are correct with NK.
The article on Russia misses out that there will be plenty of power struggle after Putin, unless somebody snags the reins pretty much instantaneously. There is so much money and power and influence to be made immediately after he is gone that the layer he controls today will be frothing mad to secure their shares before any of the others do. As the article points out, the current regime is built upon the most corrupt pitted against each other and controlled only by Putin. I think it will be dog eat dog that sends waves and ripples through Russian society and will weaken Russia as a threat for a long time to come, similar to the fall of the Soviet Union.
Finally Vance has the charm of a dirty hotel towel and would not get away with half of what Trump does. He is a convenient front for the puppet masters though. Actually I doubt very few of the Trump circle today would have what it takes to replace him. Trump is a one in a billion combo of ruthlessness, narcissism and charisma.
All the above is my guesswork from the impressions I’ve gathered, of course. We’ll just have to sit and watch when it eventually happens.
Finally Vance has the charm of a dirty hotel towel and would not get away with half of what Trump does…Actually I doubt very few of the Trump circle today would have what it takes to replace him. Trump is a one in a billion combo of ruthlessness, narcissism and charisma.
Vance definitely doesn’t have the popularity that Trump does, that’s true.
As to Trump and charisma…this isn’t really an area where I’ve read much material on. I have read a number of assertions (both on the right, from think tanks hoping that Republican voters who came out to vote for Trump can be siphoned off to more-generally-vote-Republican even after Trump is gone, and on the left) that Trump in particular is charismatic. I…have a hard time seeing it myself. I don’t really like the guy, and I’m not his target audience, and that might color my position. But I think that it is fair to say that Trump is not personally loved by many. I went through Pew and similar polls back during Trump 1, because I wanted to understand why people would vote for him, and Trump had a lot of quite negative ratings from people who did come out to vote for him—like, there was a not-terribly-high level of trust in him. However, they actively disliked Hillary Clinton, and for many, a Trump that maybe wasn’t very trustworthy was someone that they deeply disliked.
I tend to fall into the “what’s special about Trump is mostly that he’s been willing to really flagrantly lie to a much greater degree than most other candidates”. Like, I don’t think that the political benefits of doing so are sustainable—Trump was able to do what he could do because prior presidents had built up credibility, so when Trump says something, he was able to benefit from that credibility. Trump was willing to state major, bold-faced lies, even statements that were at odds with his own past statements. And there have also been plenty of Republicans who have commented on that as well…like, I remember Ted Cruz saying something about how incredibly dishonest Trump was.
I’m not saying that politicians are, as a group, beacons of honesty and forthrightness, but the US convention was more “you need to look at the fine print on what someone’s saying, which might be misleading”. It wasn’t “politician will just say whatever he happens to think will be useful at the moment, without concern for whether his own statements are even self-consistent”.
Trump himself has approval ratings now that are about as low as US presidents have ever had them. I’m skeptical that even if the US had a three-term limit, that Trump would have been able to win a third term. Some of that is probably because he’s not in a position to try for a third term, so he isn’t bothering to try to position himself for such, but I also don’t think that part of his strategy was long-term sustainable.
That being said, I do think that there are things that Trump did that subsequent politicians might pick up. Like, US politicians haven’t tried to really do hard plays to nativism for quite a while. But…they have happened in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing
The American Party, known as the Native American Party before 1855[a] and colloquially referred to as the Know Nothing, Know-Nothings, or the Know Nothing Party, was an Old Stock nativist political movement in the United States from the 1840s through the 1850s. Members of the movement were required to say “I know nothing” whenever they were asked about its specifics by outsiders, providing the group with its colloquial name.[4]
Supporters of the Know Nothing movement believed that an alleged “Romanist” conspiracy to subvert civil and religious liberty in the U.S. was being hatched by Catholics. Therefore, they sought to politically organize native-born Protestants in defense of their traditional religious and political values. The Know Nothing movement is remembered for this theme because Protestants feared that Catholic priests and bishops would control a large bloc of voters. In most places, the ideology and influence of the Know Nothing movement lasted only one or two years before it disintegrated due to weak and inexperienced local leaders, a lack of publicly proclaimed national leaders, and a deep split over the issue of slavery. In parts of the South, the party did not emphasize anti-Catholicism as frequently as it emphasized it in the North and it stressed a neutral position on slavery,[5] but it became the main alternative to the dominant Democratic Party.[4]
The Know Nothings supplemented their xenophobic nativist views with populist appeals. At the state level, the party was, in some cases, progressive in its stances on “issues of labor rights and the need for more government spending”[6] and furnished “support for an expansion of the rights of women, the regulation of industry, and support of measures which were designed to improve the status of working people”.[7][attribution needed] It was a forerunner of the temperance movement in the U.S.[4]
I could very much believe that post-Trump Republican politicians are going to be playing more to anti-immigrant voters in the future, for example. I don’t think that Trump is unique there.
We haven’t heard much about it recently, but Trump’s own major thing during Trump 1 was “The Wall”, where he gave the impression that there was going to be a wall built spanning the southern border and which would end illegal immigration to the US. That itself is just a rehashed “The Fence”, from Bush Jr. (where Bush did build some fencing around crossings, but certainly nothing like what was envisioned by the anti-immigrant crowd that was supporting him). Bush was a lot less outrageous about it, but the story there ain’t new.
I’m really skeptical that Big Lie-type stuff is going to persist. I don’t think that it’s so much that Donald Trump can uniquely do it, but that it relies on expending accrued credibility, and Trump is going to have eaten up a lot of that. Like, I think that if you had a new politician who was very, very much like Trump in all ways running for President in 2030, that it would be difficult for him to repeat Trump’s path.
Trump managed to sell himself as something new, an agent of change, because he sounded so different from prior politicians. If the guy broke with social norms, maybe he’d implement changes that a bunch of people wanted. I don’t think that it’s possible for him or someone else to get “credibility as an agent of change” from doing a repeat of that.
The article on Russia misses out that there will be plenty of power struggle after Putin, unless somebody snags the reins pretty much instantaneously. There is so much money and power and influence to be made immediately after he is gone that the layer he controls today will be frothing mad to secure their shares before any of the others do.
I dunno, man. I think that many people surrounding Putin don’t want to be President of Russia so much as they want to stay exactly where they are. That is, they’ve got an interest in the structure that lets them retain their position stay the same. Dropping some new guy in that does more-or-less the same thing lets them do that, regardless of the specifics of who that is. Conflict risks that going away. There may very well be multiple people who would like to be New Putin, but I think that the problem is that the people who control the existing structures of power have an interest in there not being conflict over the matter. Like, they might prefer Person A or Person B, but none of them want things to radically change.
If someone who wants to run Russia doesn’t have that backing, then they won’t be subject to those incentives. But without that backing, I think that it’d be hard for them to be able to come to power (and that’s basically what the FPRI article is saying). Like, the people who are most-likely to be viable candidates are going to rely on the support of people who may have different preferences as to New Putin, but have a lot at stake in there not being a conflict, in having the status quo maintained. Like, I don’t think that any of those people want, say, a Navalny to come to power.
I think Trump is charismatic as the conman for an audience that wants to believe him. That’s partly why he has succeeded in so many cons throughout his life, even though he makes bad choices due to his stupidity and incompetence and psychological issues in multiplying his wealth in any other way. This is why his stupid supporters follow him. And he is fronting the operation, letting others run their grifts as long he gets a share. This is why both party and his astute supporters are still backing him up despite knowing what he is.
I think you are correct in your thoughts regarding rationality of the circle, or rather the star, of power in Russia. But even if all of them want to just keep trucking, they are all terrified to lose out. When Putin is no longer in control of everybody else they’ll all be sitting on eggshells. If only one of them starts making moves to take over, it will be enough to make everybody else nervous and start acting out to secure themselves. A super high stake prisoner’s dilemma if you will.
Vance would just be terrible in different ways, not better, because he is also deep throating the project 2025 playbook. Less random bullshit distractions, but the institution destroying stuff would still be on track.
To dream the impossible dream…
Keep talking that way and I’m gonna have to change my pants
As opposed to wtf was going on this week.
If it happens closer enough, they’ll be thinking twice, like they’re a death note or something.
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