Dude. From someone else with too many acronyms, you have got to stop borrowing trouble. We have enough.

The Democrats seem like captured opposition because their center of power is a faction of the wealthy elite. Like the Republicans they pass quite a few things meant to help their large scale donors. But there's a pretty big gap between Biden's status quo neglect of the working class and Trump's active attempts to screw us. There's also conservative Democrats, because as much as the parties use rhetoric to look like a united front, they are not. They have factions inside them. Their only motivation is to raise money, for which they must be seen to be worth the money. So they mostly worry about getting enough people elected to control parts of the government. This means that if they need to make deals with a conservative guy in Kansas to have him be a Democrat then that's what they'll do.

The good news about factions is that means there's also socialist (ish) democrats in the party pushing to move everything to the left. But it's important to understand the incentives of a political party. They need to deliver on enough promises to retain voters and donors. And those promises are absolutely at odds at times. Donors however tend to be better educated and positioned to keep an eye on politicians. While the voters can be deflected with headlines and empty executive orders that do nothing but give the president a briefing in 30 days. (Trump is using this trick too, many of his orders say "do x within legal limits and give me a report in 30 days".)

I can understand why that seems like it's a captured opposition but in reality we would hear about that. The Democrats are nowhere near unified enough to keep that kind of cooperation secret.

The election was not stolen. There are 50 different state election offices, 7 of which really mattered, 4 of which were run by Democrats, and 2 of which are somewhat fanatic about securing their elections after 2020. If there was any evidence that systems were hacked during the election we'd have large white papers flying around the Internet. Not hand waivey claims of possible interference because someone doesn't like the numbers. We'd know the exact method of entry, and what they touched. To be clear this requires multiple states to completely fail to secure their systems, not just one state. And it requires their on staff security experts to remain quiet when their entire code of ethics is opposite to that. And it requires these separate groups to all keep a secret without even necessarily knowing each other. As we used to say in the Army, "I can't even keep my soldiers from telling their Chinese AI girlfriend when and where our next mission is. There's no way there's a black helicopter organization out there." The same principle applies here. It's too many people with no ties to each other, in an industry built on outing organizations that have breaches or fail to patch vulnerabilities.

Unfortunately, consumerism is a huge deal. We elected Trump largely because of grocery prices. And keeping those prices low is the only thing many people care about. The best thing we can do is try to educate people so we're ready in 2026 and 2028. Because Trump can't stop the states from having elections without crossing the Rubicon and either fully taking power or causing massive civil unrest.