Economist Eric Weinstein: I Don't Know If Trump 'Will Be Allowed' To Become President Again

Posted • September 5, 2024: ‘You cannot afford to have candidates who are not acceptable to the international order and have these alliances’ — Weinstein: “So what the two parties would do is they would run primaries, you'd have populist candidates and you’d pre-commit the populist candidates to support the candidates who won the primaries. As long as that took place and you had two candidates that were both acceptable to the international order — that is that they’re not going to rethink NAFTA or NATO or what have you — we called that democracy. And so democracy was the illusion of choice, what’s called magician's choice, where the choice is not actually — you know, you pick a card, any card, but somehow magician makes sure that the card that you pick is the one that he knows. In that situation, you have magician's choice in the primaries, and then you’d have the duopoly field, two candidates, either of which was acceptable.

You could actually afford to hold an election and the populace would vote. And that way the international order wasn’t put at risk every four years, because you can’t have alliances that are subject to the whim of the people in plebiscites. So, under that structure, everything was going fine until 2016, and then the first candidate ever to not hold any position in the military, nor position in government in the history of the republic or the Oval Office. Donald Trump, broke through the primary structure, so then there was a full-court press, 'Okay, we only have one candidate that’s acceptable to the international order. Donald Trump will be under constant pressure that he’s a loser, he's a wild man, he's an idiot, and he’s under the control of the Russians,' and then he was going to be a, you know, a 20-1 underdog. And then he wins. And there was no precedent for this. They learned their lesson.

You cannot afford to have candidates who are not acceptable to the international order and continue to have these alliances. This is an unsolved problem."