Some political experts doubted that Donald J. Trump would tough it out this long. This, after all, was a very strange man, possibly afflicted by obsessive-compulsive disorder to the point that he even floated the idea of staying in New York.
He moved to Washington. But Trump’s dangerous old compulsions remain: Twitter diarrhea. Impulsiveness. Recklessness. He insults adversaries whose cooperation he needs. He’s allergic to compromise. Will these character defects destroy him politically in 2018?
The odds of Trump remaining president by the end of next year, I said recently, were significantly less than 50%. I still think that’s true. But as noted above, we have a tendency to underestimate this highly inestimable man. The will-Trump-survive question is an equation with many variables.
One thing is clear: “The Resistance,” as the left-center political forces aligned against Trump and the Republicans grandiosely call themselves, is a null force. If Trump is forced out of office, it won’t have much to do with these Hillary Clinton supporters. The Resistance’s street activism peaked out with the Women’s March on January 21, 2017. They are, in Trumpspeak, Losers.
Russiagate, the allegation that Putin’s government “hacked the election” for Trump, still hasn’t risen above the level of a 9/11 Truther conspiracy theory — not one iota of actual evidence has appeared in the media. (Sorry, so-called journalists, “a source in the intelligence community believes that” is not evidence, much less proof.)
But Russiagate led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller’s sweeping powers and authority to pursue any wrongdoing he finds regardless of whether or not it’s related to Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election has already led to the downfall and flipping of ex-Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn.
Mueller’s pet rats may never turn up a smoking-gun connection between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. But they likely know where Trump’s bodies are buried. In addition to obstruction of justice — to which Trump de facto pled guilty in one of his insipid tweets — charges related to sleazy business dealings are a strong possibility. Was/is Trump in deep with Russian oligarchs and corrupt government officials? Perhaps not — but he’s an amoral real estate developer who follows money wherever it leads, including authoritarian regimes where transparency is nonexistent.
Behind every great fortune, Balzac wrote, there is a crime. Trump’s cash hoard probably results from many more than a single illegal act.
Impeachment or resignation? Having researched Trump for my 2016 biography, Trump is more likely to give away his fortune to charity than slink away in a Nixonian resignation. His ego is too big; he’s too pugnacious. He’d rather get dragged out kicking and screaming — unless it’s part of a deal with Mueller or other feds to avoid prosecution.
So impeachment it would need to be.
But no political party in control of both houses of Congress has ever impeached a sitting president of its own party. And there’s another powerful countervailing force protecting Trump from impeachment: Republicans’ self-preservation instinct.
GOP lawmakers suffered devastating losses in the 1974 midterm election following Nixon’s near-impeachment/resignation. Democrats did OK in 1998, after Bill Clinton was impeached — but that was an outlier impacted by the biggest boom economy ever.
In the long term, the Republican Party would probably be better off without Trump. But Congressmen and Senators live in the here and now. Here and now, or more precisely in 2018, Republicans know that many of them would lose their jobs following a Trump impeachment.
Despite those considerations, I think that, in the end, House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other top Republicans are more likely to calculate that pulling the impeachment trigger is worth the likely losses in the fall.
Reason #1 is personal: Paul Ryan’s presidential ambitions. As I speculated in February, I believe Ryan wants to be president in 2020. As Speaker of the House, he’s the one person who can launch impeachment proceedings. I can easily imagine the following quid pro quo: Ryan gets rid of Trump, Pence agrees not to run in 2020, Ryan runs with Pence’s endorsement. Reason #2 is meta: to save the Republican Party as Ryan and McConnell know it. Here’s what I said in February: “Becoming the party of impeachment at a time when impeachment is popular transforms crisis into opportunity, allowing Republicans to cleanse their Trump-era sins (trying to repeal the increasingly well-received Obamacare, paying for the Great Wall of Mexico with deficit spending, etc.) and seize the moral high ground in one swoop. Vice President Mike Pence takes the helm, steadies the ship, promotes their right-wing agenda with more grace than his former boss, and Ryan and his buddies prepare for 2020.”
If anything, the GOP is in bigger trouble now.
Trump’s approval ratings hover between 35% and 40%. More worrisome for him and the Republicans, his support is shaky while those who hate him are firmly entrenched in their beliefs.
Approval of the Republican Party has hit 29%, the lowest ever recorded.
After failing to repeal Obamacare, the Republicans finally scored their first legislative victory last week when the Senate passed a sweeping series of tax cuts — but it’s wildly unpopular (52% against, 25% for). Pyrrhic much?
GOP elders were already fretting that Trump was ruining the GOP brand following the alt-right riots in Charlottesville. What they’re about to realize (if they haven’t already) is that the president has also undermined one of the party’s strongest longstanding arguments: “The government should be run like a great American company,” as Jared Kushner said in March. “Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens.”
Voters have watched Trump’s staff churn through one resignation and shakeup after another, the president diss his own sitting cabinet members, with no sign of his campaign’s stated goals being talked about, much less executed. The Trump Administration has been characterized by communication breakdowns, chaos, mismanagement and waste — and has little to show for its efforts.
This is the current face of the Republican Party: corrupt, stupid and inept. Ryan and McConnell know they must disassociate the GOP from Trump.
They have to destroy their party in order to save it.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall) is co-author, with Harmon Leon, of “Meet the Deplorables: Infiltrating Trump America,” an inside look at the American far right, out December 12th. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
30 Comments.
Will Trump last another year? We hope not, but we also expect it to be a wild ride, political circus at its finest. Uncork a beer, sit on the porch & watch the world burn.
re: not one iota of actual evidence has appeared in the media
Uh, Ted? Everyone’s entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. Sit down & read the Wikipedia page I keep posting. If that’s not enough for you, follow the nearly four hundred links which accompany that article. 95% of experts agree and can show mounds of evidence; yet the deniers keep insisting that the the evidence doesn’t exist and the experts are all participating in a hoax. You think it’s silly when the global warming deniers say it, amirite? It’s just as silly when the RussiaGate deniers do so.
(btw “hacking the election” is getting tiresome – you know darn good & well that phrase doesn’t make any sense and even if it did it ignores all the other shenanigans. Hell, we had a gen-you-wine Russian Troll right here on this site.)
But Wait! There’s more! The International Olympic Committee is barring Russia from the games! Given that Russia is incapable of wrongdoing, the *ONLY* possible explanation is that the IOC is very sad that Hillary lost …
The ‘proof’ of a ‘sophisticated spearphishing attack’ on the DNC server was by a private company, Crowdstrike, based on their being paid to say it. That’s not proof (except to those who know St Hillary got 75% of the real vote, and it was only Russian hacking that gave Trump the election). Timing marks show that the data were downloaded to a flash drive (might have been a Russian agent who did the download, but no proof). After the flash drive was given to Wikileaks, Guccifer 2.0 downloaded the same data to another flash drive and added Cyrillic, then posted it. But Wikileaks didn’t use the Guccifer 2.0 data with the Cyrillic. So no proof of anything.
It wasn’t 3 states that said they weren’t hacked, it was 3 states that didn’t say they weren’t. Again, no proof of anything. And there was only one DNC server, not 26, 24 of which were definitely hacked by the Russians. The sources ‘proving’ Russian collusion with Trump to steal the election are all badly flawed. They could all be right, but as of current date, not one has anything a reasonable person would take as ‘proof’.
There were two investigations of Russian doping. Both negative. Then a Russian who worked with the Russian testing agency confessed (for several million dollars) that Russia was guilty, and the final report said this was irrefutable proof.
There was (and is) an excellent reason for demonising Russia: in the ’40s, the depression caused by shutting down all the defence plants and discharging all the soldiers and sailors became known as the ‘primary post-war depression,’ with the understanding that the US would, sooner or later, return to the Great Depression.
But with the USSR as an implacable enemy that wanted to conquer the US, close all our churches, and make us queue for meat, Truman got the Marshall Plan and massive defence spending that prevented another depression and got him elected in ’48 to everyone’s shock and amazement.
So no one in his right mind is going to let the USSR/Russian threat go away and plunge the world into another Great Depression.
eh-Hem.
IT’S NOT ABOUT HILLARY.
Hillary is over. She’s done. Her story arc has ended. She lost. She came in second. She is no longer relevant. She was not elected. She is not a player. She is not President of the Untied States of ‘murika. She is not pinin’! She’s passed on! This candidate is no more! She has ceased to be! She’s expired and gone to meet ‘er maker!
She’s a stiff! Bereft of life, she rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘er to the perch ‘she’d be pushing up the daisies! ‘er metabolic processes are now ‘istory! She’s off the twig! She’s kicked the bucket, she’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!!
If at any point you should wish to discuss current events, I stand ready.
Oh Look! Here’s a pro-quo:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/06/politics/whistleblower-flynn-told-colleague-removing-russia-sanctions-priority/index.html
I wonder what the quid might have been. Certainly not that The Dastardly Russians’ [TM] would aid in electing a POTUS who would help them achieve their ends. That’s absurd! The *ONLY* possible explanation is that The Dastardly Russians (c) are very sad that Hillary lost …
Interesting analysis, Ted, but what I suggest you ignore is how useful the Trump circus is to those who run the country (not merely the Republican branch) ; while all the eyeballs are watching his antics and those of the «Russia hacked the election» posse (cf William Blum’s recent blog) a deeply regressive reversion of an already deeply regressive tax code, the gutting of EPA, etc, etc, ad nauseam proceeds apace. Steely-eyed Michael Richard Pence, whatever his virtues (i e, terrifying the DPRK leadership by gazing over the so-called Demilitarised Zone), is hardly capable of providing so useful a diversion….
Henri
Good one, Henri.
For instance, an unnamed former CIA officer told The Intercept last month, “You’ve got all these intelligence agencies saying the Russians did the hack. To deny that is like coming out with the theory that the Japanese didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor.”
That the supposedly dissident Intercept would use this quote is instructive about how imbalanced the media’s reporting on Russia-gate has been. We have actual film of Japanese planes attacking Pearl Harbor and American ships burning – and we have the eyewitness accounts of thousands of U.S. soldiers and sailors. Yet, on Russia-gate, we only have the opinions of some “hand-picked” intelligence officials who themselves say that they are not claiming that their opinions are fact. No serious editor would allow a self-interested and unnamed source to equate the two in print.
@Glenn – if I understand you correctly, global warming is a false flag operation. Just because a few “hand picked professionals*” think that it’s real is no reason for anyone to buy into such an absurd proposition.
* “hand picked professionals” in this case is semantically equivalent to “95% of experts in the field…”
… who are all playing along with this absurd hoax ‘cuz they’re very sad Hillary lost.
Oh look! California is on fire! It’s obviously Hillary’s fault!
@CH
Don’t be an asshole.
Okay, I’m an asshole. What does that have to do with our debate? Is everyone who disagrees with you an asshole? Do they disagree because they’re assholes or do they have some other motivation besides their sphincterosity? Is it even remotely possible that assholes are like broken clocks and therefore right twice a day?
Let’s look at the other side of the coin. If Bernie had taken the dem nomination and everything otherwise played out the same way would you still be calling people assholes for connecting the dots? Or would you be demanding that we nuke Moscow?
Before you evade answering, consider the fact that you already admitted it’s all about Hillary.
@CH, AKA Bagdad Bob
https://theintercept.com/2017/12/09/the-u-s-media-yesterday-suffered-its-most-humiliating-debacle-in-ages-now-refuses-all-transparency-over-what-happened/
Oh, look! It’s an evasion! You should know by now that I consider evasions to be proof that I’m right.
I win again.
re: “CH, AKA Bagdad Bob”
Don’t be an asshole.
@CH
To your credit, you are taking your loss with good humor.
Glenn, it’s not the propensity to claim as «facts» allegations which are time and again demonstrated to have been false that renders a certain poster to these threads an «arsehole» ; that simply renders the person in question deluded and willing to believe anything that supports his or her favourite narrative – a not uncommon human failing. What does, however, confirm the arsehole status of this particular poster is his or her fantasies – and posts – about rolling off another posters mother, in the belief that that is a relevant response to a disagreement….
Arsehole was the word….
Henri
@Henri
What I find amusing, and alternatively disturbing, is that the misstatement of the September 14 date referred to in today’s Greenwald post as September 4, was fed to the Democratic Party’s media bubble factory and they took the bait—hook, line, and sinker—without verifying the evidence.
The Republican practice of feeding to the media altered information worked very well to discredit Dan Rather when he brought information to the public that was verifiably true about George W Bush, but because the letter in question was typed (retyped) on technology unavailable at the time W was avoiding his military service, Dan Rather was fired.
Last week a woman tried to make a false claim against Moore (I believe at the Washington Post) but because of due diligence the fraud attempt failed.
@Glenn –
“To your credit, you are taking your loss with good humor.”
I wish I could say the same for you.
“because of due diligence the fraud attempt failed.”
And yet a far, far larger fraud attempt – comprising the NSA, CIA, FBI, Interpol, the Mossad, UNCLE, MI6, Facebook, Twitter, the Senate, the Girl Scouts. POTUSJR, and multiple independent cybersecurity agencies is alive and kicking.
Interesting, no?
Groupthink.
“Groupthink is a phenomenon when a group of people get together and start to think collectively with one mind. The group is more concerned with maintaining unity than with objectively evaluating their situation, alternatives and options. The group, as a whole, tends to take irrational actions or overestimate their positions or moral rightness.”
re: groupthink
I couldn’t agree more.
It’s absolutely amazing the way a group of people can reassure each other that 95% of the experts in a field are wrong while they alone know the unvarnished truth. Symptoms often include paranoid fantasies involving impossibly vast conspiracies; denial of obvious facts; and vicious attacks leveled against any who question their dogma.
Sometimes they serve koolaid.
“Regardless of your views on Russia, Trump and the rest, nobody can possibly regard this climate as healthy. Just look at how many major, incredibly inflammatory stories, from major media outlets, have collapsed. Is it not clear that there is something very wrong with how we are discussing and reporting on relations between these two nuclear-armed powers?”
https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/yet-another-major-russia-story-falls-apart-is-skepticism-permissible-yet/
In this connexion, Glenn, consider Joe Lauria’s recent article at Consortiumnews. Despite being supported by some people who call themselves «liberals» and «Democrats», McCarthyism 2.0 is no better – and may have still more dire consequences – than the original version….
Henri
Agreed.
@CH
Your position on this issue is very clear, consistent with your previous statements, and therefore entirely unsurprising.
I won’t give either the Democrats or the Republicans a pass, no matter who they choose to blame in order to escape responsibility for the resultant wretched governance that has become only background noise to the great spectacle each party now predictably presents in order to promote their own advantage in the coming elections.
What they’re selling I’m not buying.
I will continue to maintain my skepticism with respect to the reasons for the 2016 election result despite your (I assume) honest certainty derived from what I consider to be the sparse facts from which your deeply held convictions arise.
“I will continue to maintain my skepticism with respect to the reasons for the 2016 election result ”
Please see section #3.
http://rall.com/comic/russiagate-explained#comment-42885
:: Forehead slap :: It’s hard to maintain an aura of detached intellectualism when one can’t get one’s references straight.
eh-hem
“Please see the third titled section whose title contains #1.”
We now return you to your regularly scheduled bickering.
@Glenn – from the story itself “None of this means that every Russia claim is false, nor does it disprove the accusation that Putin ordered the hacking”
I note that the story states (without one iota of evidence) that two of the twenty-one states supposedly targeted were not, in fact, targeted. Okay, that’s a margin of error of < 10%. Shall we apply the same margin to the twenty-eight states which weren't notified? Is it possible that three states were targeted which we *didn't* notice? (i.e. the hackers got away with it) I can, of course, offer no more evidence than the author – but I can apply the same logic to false negatives as he applies to false positives.
As an analogy: proving that nobody stole a candy bar from Piggly Wiggly in no way proves that nobody stole a candy bar from Walmart. However, noting that someone stole candy bars from Kroger and Safeway makes it statistically more probable that someone did steal a candy bar from Albertsons which went unnoticed.
As for the rest: please see paragraph labelled 2:
http://rall.com/comic/russiagate-explained#comment-42885
I think the reason Trump won’t last much longer is that the GOP will decide he’s worth more to them dead than alive. Look for a “crazed lone gunman” to pop up, probably just in time to give the GOP a big sympathy boost for the 2018 elections….
only posting again because I may not have checked the “notify me” box on the last one….
On second thought, they’re not going to feed the anti-gun folks any irony. He’ll “die peacefully in his sleep” or “be struck by a sudden illness.”
A Donald Trump protester on Inauguration Day. (Fibonacci Blue / Wikimedia)
The archplutocratic tax cut Washington politicians are working on this holiday season ought to be a call to arms for the United States’ populace. The nation’s economy is already so savagely unequal that the top 10th of its upper 1 percent owns as much wealth as its bottom 90 percent. Its corporations are raking in record profits. Half of its citizens have no savings. Half its population lives in or near poverty. Twenty-one percent of its children are growing up at less than the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level, and 41 million Americans—12.3 percent of the population—are “food insecure.”
It is against the backdrop of this shocking disparity and related want that one should try to comprehend the regressive and malignant sociopathology of a Republican tax “reform” that:
● Drastically slashes the corporate tax rate without closing loopholes and deductions that allow the nation’s already cash-flush corporations to register their profits overseas.
● Does nothing to switch corporations’ focus from maximizing short-term returns to investing in the creation of more jobs and higher wages.
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● Encourages corporations to invest in automation without offering any assistance to displaced workers.
● All but eliminates the estate tax for the nation’s richest families.
● Adds $1.5 trillion to the nation’s debt over the next decade, setting the stage for major slashes to the nation’s three biggest social insurance programs—Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare (they will be cut back in the name of “scaling back” so-called entitlement programs to “reduce the deficit”).
● Gives a major tax cut on profits multinational companies have stashed in offshore tax havens.
● Cuts taxes on “pass-through” businesses—a benefit that will be disproportionately enjoyed by the rich.
● Makes it easier for rich people to classify themselves as businesses to get a tax break.
● Increases the complexity of the tax code.
● Tightens deductions for lower- and middle-income wage-earners.
● Subsidizes private and religious schools, a boon to corporate school privatizers and the religious right.
● Repeals Obamacare’s individual mandate, which will leave millions without health insurance and raise the cost of health insurance.
The GOP tax “reform” rewards the already rich and punishes the poor at a time, The Atlantic notes, “when post-tax corporate profits have hovered at a record-level high for the last seven years, and the 1 percent’s share of total income is higher than at any time in the second half of the 20th century.” The just-passed Senate bill, likely to be “reconciled” with the right-wing House version and signed by Donald Trump before Christmas, grants what New York magazine calls “a huge windfall for the wealthiest Americans.” It is “certain to exacerbate income [and wealth] inequality at a time when the playing field is already heavily tilted towards the rich.” The New Gilded Age is slated to become yet more grotesquely unequal.
As some GOP congressmen have acknowledged, Republican legislators are acting at the command of their billionaire and millionaire “donor class.” “My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again,’ ” Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., candidly told The Hill.
Adding authoritarian insult to plutocratic injury, the Senate tax bill was rammed through the upper chamber with brutal speed and barely a speck of public input. As John Cassidy notes in The New Yorker, “the process … [has] … been a travesty of the legislative process. … [T]here have been no public hearings, and the measure is being rushed through in a few weeks, with virtually no transparency.”
The speed-up and smash-through reflects Republicans’ awareness that a significant majority of the populace rejects the tax “reform” (it’s curious how commonly regressive measures are sold as “reforms”). A Nov. 15 Quinnipac poll found that just 25 percent of U.S. voters approve of the Republican tax plan. More than half (52 percent) disapprove. By a 59 to 33 percent margin, voters said that the plan “favors the rich at the expense of the middle class,” and 61 percent believe “the wealthy would mainly benefit.” Just 36 percent believe the plan will lead to an increase in jobs and economic growth.
This makes the Trump-GOP House and Senate tax bills “among the least popular pieces of major legislation in modern history, with the public rejecting it by a two-to-one margin,” Derek Thompson wrote.
So why don’t we see millions of Americans in the streets protesting the brazenly oligarchic tax heist being perpetrated in the name of “fairness,” “simplicity” and even “democracy”? I can’t answer that question in full here. The forces and factors that have turned tens of millions of Americans into an inert mass are numerous and complex. They deserve book-length treatment and have received it: See, for starters, Alex Carey’s “Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty”; Sheldon Wolin’s “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism”; Chris Hedges’ “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle”; Henry Giroux’s “Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy”; and my own “They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy.”
Part of the answer lies in the pervasively disseminated belief that we the people get meaningful say on the making of U.S. policy by participating in the “competitive” biennial major-party and candidate-centered elections that are sold to us as “politics”—the only politics that matter. Showing how and why that’s a false belief was the mission of my last Truthdig essay, titled “U.S. Elections: A Poor Substitute for Democracy.”
A second populace-demobilizing form of n thinking that is keeping people quiescent in the face of abject racist, sexist, ecocidal and classist-plutocratic outrage is the belief or dream that Russiagate special prosecutor Robert Mueller will save us and our supposed democracy by putting together a slam-dunk case for impeachment and removal on grounds of collusion with Russia and/or obstruction of justice.
A remarkable 47 percent of the electorate already supports impeachment less than a year into Trump’s first year. But so what? There is an outside chance that the malignant quasi-fascist tumor that is Donald Trump can be cut out this way. As liberal commentator Peter Beinart notes in The Atlantic, however, the odds of impeachment are poor. This is because “impeachment is less a legal process than a political one,” and the partisan alignment in Congress favors Trump in ways that appear unbreakable, given Republicans’ control of Congress and the dogged determination with which Trump’s white nationalist base is deplorably determined to stand by its man, no matter how low he sinks. As Beinart explains:
Passing articles of impeachment requires a majority of the House. Were such a vote held today—even if every Democrat voted yes—it would still require 22 Republicans. If Democrats take the House next fall, they could then pass articles of impeachment on their own. But ratifying those articles would require two-thirds of the Senate, which would probably require at least 15 Republican votes. …That kind of mass Republican defection has grown harder, not easier, to imagine. It’s grown harder because the last six months have demonstrated that GOP voters will stick with Trump despite his lunacy, and punish those Republican politicians who do not. … Among Republicans, Trump’s approval rating has held remarkably steady. Trump’s approval rating among Republicans has not dipped below 79 percent since he took office. None of the revelations from Mueller’s investigation—nor any of the other outrageous things Trump has done—has significantly undermined his support among the GOP rank and file.
Meanwhile, Arizona’s Jeff Flake and Tennessee’s Bob Corker, the two Republican senators who have had the decency to openly challenge Trump, have lost much of their support from GOP voters in their states.
Also rightly skeptical about prospects for Trumpeachment is Newsweek’s liberal political editor Dalia Lithwick. She finds it distinctly possible now that the purported “rule of law” has become “a relic” in “our ongoing nightmare of creeping authoritarianism.” She says we may have to shed the “magical thinking” that tells us that the U.S. “is a nation of laws, not men” as we behold “the shocking norm-and-truth defiance of the GOP tax bill, the refusal of the GOP leadership to criticize or even comprehend the enormous violence done by Trump’s anti-Muslim tweets, the president’s staggering support for the candidacy of Roy Moore, the silent Republican collusion to the seating of demonstrably unfit judges, and the virulence of the White House’s attacks on the press.” As one Trump outrage has piled up on top of another this year, Lithwick reflects, “it’s become clear that absolutely nothing will persuade Trump supporters and Republicans in Congress that it’s time to disavow the president. Given that reality, it often feels like it wouldn’t be enough for Mueller to hand us a smoking gun and an indictment. What if they threw a conviction and nobody came?”
The Mueller investigation, Lithwick writes, has helped “numb us, and leads to a declining sense of agency. … So long as Mueller is working, filing documents, and convening grand juries,” we are lulled into believing that “nobody has to take to the streets.”
The chances of Mueller or some journalists coming up with blockbuster revelations powerful enough to shake Trump’s hold on the GOP and his white-nationalist base are low. Most Alabama Republicans still back alleged child molester Roy Moore. The great majority of conservatives get their news from the pro-Trump, right-wing media ecosystem, led by Fox News, talk radio and Breitbart. As Beinart notes, that media can be counted on to “downplay or distort virtually anything Mueller or the mainstream press discovers” and to depict any push for Trump’s removal as a provocative “ ‘left-wing coup.’ ”
It seems more likely that Trump will be removed from the White House by his insane, cardiology-defying McDonald’s diet than through constitutional defenestration.
Forget for a moment the fact that establishment liberals like Beinart and Lithwick likely exaggerate the significance and degree of Russian intervention in the 2016 election (a drop in the bucket compared with the influence of U.S. corporate and financial money). Forget also that impeachment would place the right-wing Christian Mike Pence in the Oval Office; that the tax bill is slated for Trump’s signing long before he could be gotten rid of through impeachment or—another fantasy—ejection on the grounds of the 25th Amendment; and that U.S. plutocracy reigns with corporate Democrats in office, too (review the neoliberal records of the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama presidencies). Those key points aside, Beinart and Lithwick offer wise and informed counsel on how impeachment is a pipe dream that helps keep citizens passive and, as Lithwick notes, off “the streets.”
Here I might add that the nightly roster of talk-show hosts and comedians making endless fun of the ridiculous bad grandpa in the White House (Trump is a truly a gift that keeps on giving for late-night comedy) may help feed the fantasy that Trump is just a passing dream and not a clear and present danger to democracy and life on earth.
“In an important commentary in The New York Review of Books in March, Russian dissident Masha Gessen tried to warn U.S. liberals and progressives against putting their anti-Trump eggs in the Russia basket. Gessen felt that the Russiagate gambit would flop, given a lack of smoking-gun evidence and sufficient public interest, particularly among Republicans. Gessen also worried that the Russia obsession was a deadly diversion from issues that ought to matter more to those claiming to oppose Trump in the name of democracy and the common good: racism, voter suppression (which may well have elected Trump, by the way), health care, plutocracy, police- and prison-state-ism, immigrant rights, economic exploitation and inequality, sexism and environmental ruination—you know, stuff like that.”
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/magical-thinking-keeping-people-off-streets/
55% of Americans disapprove of this tax bill, while a mere 25% approve. (we can safely assume that the 1% are firmly in favor.)
Our only hope is that so many men-in-the-street will be outraged that it will inspire real change. (I didn’t say it was a large hope, but it does appear to be the only one we’ve got.)
The one bright side is that the Trump Chumps will be feeling the pain right along with the rest of us. Will they realize they did it to themselves? They never have before …