by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
Let’s look at the state of the “Phony War” now going on between Trump and Mueller. As I keep saying, given that if the House simply does its job Trump will be impeached in early 2019, it makes a lot of sense for Trump to strike first. Add to this there is a real possibility that the American economy — and that of the globe, for that matter — may face a real shock in the guise of a bungled Brexit in Great Britain and it definitely seems like Trump should leverage the power he has now to do a sneak attack on Mueller.
If I was Trump, I would fire Mueller immediately, pardon about a dozen people and hunker down for an extended fight. If you think about it, Trump has about 2 months to brainwash his base into believing the “which hunt” is over and that the House is totally wasting its time in investigating him at all. At this point, I have to note that anyone who thinks the House shouldn’t investigate Trump because it will only “help” him politically is really living in political la-la land. The dead hand of history has decided Trump’s fate and that fate is he is going to be impeached by the House in early 2019. There’s no going back at this point. It’s nearly a done deal.
As such, it makes pretty obvious sense to me that Trump should go on the offensive now while he has the time. It doesn’t make any sense to wait until the House officially flips to do anything about Mueller. Every moment Trump doesn’t fire Mueller and pardon people is a wasted opportunity for him in the long run. Again, in my view, there’s a real chance that Brexit is going to be completely bungled and as such it would deprive Trump of the one thing he has going for him at this point — a “humming economy.” So it makes even more sense for Trump to be as proactive as possible. Trump has until January to continue to rule as an absolute tyrant and once the new House is sworn in, the jig is up, as they say and he has an completely new political reality to deal with.
The issue for me about Mueller is he has a real weak hand in the short term and a decent hand long term. I say this because if Mueller indicts someone big like Don Jr., he’s bound to be fired one way or another. But once the new House is sworn in, they can demand he — and everyone on his team — tell them everything they know. That, in turn, will get Trump impeached as he will anyway for a whole host of things ranging from abuse of power to “light treason.”
Speaking of “light treason,” it seems going forward that the only thing the Senate would get anywhere near convicted Trump for is whatever it is he talk to Putin about in their hour long secret meeting. If the House talked to the American translator of that meeting and found out Trump really did conspire against the United States, while it wouldn’t meet the Constitutional definition of treason, it would definitely would get pretty damn close from a political standpoint.
Having said all that, it definitely seems as though the first quarter of 2019 is going to be damn bumpy. And if the economic consequences of Brexit turned out to be Trump’s ultimate undoing that would be a fitting end to this political nightmare that we find ourselves in.