[From "Normality bias"]

In the year fifty eight years before Christ in Rome it became obvious that elections were rigged. Courts and due process had ended in the sense that some political violence went unpunished, and attempting to defend oneself against political violence was the gravest of crimes, in the sense that political disagreement was a crime, as Roger Stone and Sheriff Joe recently discovered, while political violence was not, as those who cheerfully had themselves videoed while attempting to murder Kyle in Kenosha demonstrated.

And yet, not until shortly after the assassination of Caesar, fourteen years later did people adjust to the new reality. And Caesar himself did not adjust to the new reality.[…]
Similarly the French and Russian Revolutions, though reality set in faster in those cases. When Napoleon took power, ten years after the revolution, he had to lecture those that his soldiers dismissed that they were appealing to a reality that no longer existed and they themselves had destroyed ten years ago.

I fear that Trump, suffering from incurable optimism, will attempt such a strategy, as Caesar did. It is likely to prove as fatal for him as for Caesar.

That Caesar allowed himself to be in a position where he could be assassinated shows he was still suffering from normality bias, and the immediately following the assassination, the assassins demonstrated massive normality bias, believing that with Caesar dead, the old normality would spontaneously return. When normality failed to return, Romans only then finally realized it was dead and not easily resurrected.
[…]
If Trump thinks he can run again in 2024, he is terribly mistaken. He will be in prison by then, and very likely dead by then.