opposition party will win. unless democracy in this US is totally subverted (Unfortunately a real possibility). The real question is whether or not this Democrats have learned their lesson from last time, and be swift and bold.

True, true. I don't think many other Republicans who could win an election would have been willing to pardon the Jan. 6ers, but simply not taking action? Yeah, they'd do that easily.

Most of them weren't caught doing anything more than breaking into the capitol building. The ones who actually attacked cops or did something violent got standard prison sentences for those kinds of crimes. Sure, I would have liked longer sentences. But, these were mostly first-time offenders who didn't do a violent crime, so they got sentences that go with that. The aim of the justice department wasn't to try to put them in prison for as long as possible, but to treat them the same as any other criminal. Maybe the idea was that that was going to make the cases harder to overturn on appeal because there wasn't any hint of political bias in the sentencing.

I think it would have had a pretty solid deterrent effect if Trump hadn't come back and commuted their sentences / pardoned them. But, pardoning them is yet another way he's completely throwing away the rule book.

Trump is a one in a million manipulator. There's a reason this hasn't happened since Hitler and Mussolini. Various others like Marco Rubio, Ron DeSantis, etc. have all tried to use the same playbook and failed completely. If you think MAGA is going to fall in line behind couchfucker JD Vance, you're deluded. A big reason that Trump picked him as VP is that he knew Vance was no threat to him.