At some point, Trump will be gone. The man will vanish from the stage, but the field that made him possible will remain. That’s the real danger—confusing the collapse of a figure with the collapse of the system that sustained them. Without structural change, the vacancy will simply pull another body into the same orbit.
The moment after he’s gone is the rarest kind of political space: unstable, fluid, briefly open to reconfiguration. If that instability is used to redraw the architecture—changing incentives, dismantling the outrage economy, shifting power away from personality cults—democracy could emerge stronger. If it isn’t, the system will lock back into its old path, and the next orbit will look exactly like the last, only with a different name at the centre.
Daedelus Kite 