In the age of Trump, you grow accustomed to getting excited that maybe, at last, political gravity will kick in and Trump will face some sort of consequence for his surreal, criminal and corrupt behavior. House Trump has two ways of combating scandals. One is the Roy Cohen inspired Stormy Daniels Playbook. The other is to slow walk any legal trouble so they can get into their second term so it won’t really matter anymore because we’ll be an authoritarian managed-democracy by that point.
So, right now, Trump is using the mindfuck that brings him such glee — teasing the idea that he’ll release the transcript of the conversation that’s getting him in trouble. This is a multi-layered mindfuck because it conflates what we need — the actual complaint — with the thing that causes people concern about releasing — the transcript.
Therefore, what House Trump believes will happen is they can slow walk releasing the transcript. The tease amps up the hype for the transcript’s political significance. We spend precious months fighting over it and when it comes out, it’s a dud. Trump wins re-election, fuck you.
Meanwhile, the far more damaging thing, the complaint — which legally has to be turned over, natch — goes down the memory hole with Trump’s taxes, fuck you.
For the moment, Trump has the upperhand. He’s too good at this and the press too eager to fall into the same trap over and over again. So, really, I have very low expectations. I see nothing but blue skies for House Trump’s Thousand Year Trump.
I’ve written about this before, but it’s ever more timely. There’s a greater than-zero sum chance that very soon a lot of people are going to The Pence Pivot. This is when at the very point you would otherwise agree with me that maybe Trump was mistake in the first place, you, without missing a beat, say, “It doesn’t matter. Trump’s gone. I support Pence. I didn’t even vote for Trump, really, I voted for Pence.”
This is an outrage on any number of different levels. The chief amongst them being, your previous support of Trump becomes little more than your similar support for the Iraq War based on the lie of WMD. You never have to “own” (as MAGA people are so fond of saying) the fact that you did, at one point, support Trump. And you would still support Trump but for the fact that he’s become so politically toxic that it’s difficult for you to do so. Since you now have a more traditional pol like Pence to support, you have a ready off-ramp for your original insane support of Trump. You don’t have to “own” the political hell you put us all through because you were in a MAGA cult.
Who gets possession of the MAGA cult should the House Trump implode and The Thousand Year Trump doesn’t last…quite…as long is up for debate. A lot it depends on how, exactly, Trump might leave office (By the way, this is impossible. Trump will never resign and he will never be convicted in the Senate.) Really, the only way I could see Trump maybe leaving office is if he could get a full pardon and the right to choose Pence’s successor as veep. If he got that, then either Don Jr. or Ivanka might become veep and be in an ideal position to run for president in their own right to protect Trump’s “legacy.” Ivanka would be a strange one to do that, but you do you daddy’s little girl.
But as of right now, I just don’t see anything coming of TrumpUkraine in the first place. This is probably just another Trump scandal that gets people like me excited, only to fizzle out as the Stormy Daniels Playbook is used ever so effectively.
I predicted this would be among the Right’s talking points a few days ago and it’s come true. First, they say it’s simply “inappropriate” for Trump to extort a foreign power to get dirt on his likely 2020 rival. So, they introduce the idea that Trump’s simply being “naughty.” He didn’t really do anything wrong, you know. He was just “inappropriate.”
Then, once they’ve established a modicum of displeasure with The Dear Leader, they turn around and say, well, you know, Obama did the same thing when it got caught on a hot mic saying he would have “more flexibility” with the Russians after the 2012 elections.
For stupid people let me point out something.
Using your power as president to pressure a foreign power to trump up false charges about your opponent is not just “inappropriate.” That’s a big boy crime.
Simply suggesting that after the election you might have more diplomatic wiggle room on a political level, that’s this thing called diplomacy. I know MAGA hates black people and especially Obama, but if you’re a talking head on FOX News, I thought you were supposed to be “fair and balanced.”
It’s impressive that otherwise well educated and intelligent people would attempt to pull off such a brazen false narrative. As it always the case, MAGA wants to own the moment, damn the consequences. Even when they’re proven wrong by Trump himself’s statements, they’ve moved on to some other way of sucking the little orange weener.
Despite what the esteemed access journalists of The New York Times and The Washington Post may have you believe, Trump is not a diabolical political theorist. He’s not calculating the subtle messaging necessary to convince a housewife just outside of Phillie in a sexless marriage that she should vote for him despite her reservations.
In fact, Trump is simply a very lucky doofus. He’s nothing more than Being There’s Chauncey Gardner if he was on the cusp of losing his mind. There’s no grand strategy other than some basic mindfucks he learned at the feet of Roy Cohen.
A prime example of this is the origins of the TrumpUkraine clusterfuck. If Trump was REALLY such a fucking modern day Machiavelli don’t you think he would have weighed the political pardon the “poor optics” of Bob Mueller’s testimony to Congress gave him? He might have used his SuperMind to lay low and simply coast to an easy re-election. Then, in his second term, he could turn the switch on his sinister second phase.
Is that what he did? Nope. Smarty pants saw his pardon not as an opportunity to lay the groundwork for the much heralded Thousand Year Trump, but as permission to actively pressure a foreign power to collude with him to hurt his likely political rival in 2020. What’s more, doofus did it on a veritable party line. If that’s not insight into numbnut’s true political savvy, I don’t know what is.
And, as such, that’s why he has to be impeached now, damn the political consequences. He’s proven that he’s not only a barely functioning man-child, he’s a willful one at that.
The only reason why Trump’s been so successful to date is a combination of a strong economy, the idiotic disorganization of his opponents and abject lack of shame on the part of Republicans. He owes everything to outside forces beyond his control. Yes, in a sense, one could say he has a native ability to vocalize the rage of the white disenfranchised volk. But even that is grading on a curve. Why else are people hyping Tucker Carlson in 2024? He’s just another hapless racist doofus who’s been on TV.
The Trump threat is existential. If we don’t go down fighting, then Trump is only going to see this as a sign of weakness and up the ante. Trump is so stupid in real terms, that if he felt like he might actually be not only impeached, but convicted, he might be willing to call up Little Rocket Man and ask him to start a war in an effort to wag the dog.
I wish I was joking, but I’m Not.
That such a suggestion isn’t on the face of it too outrageous to even consider is enough to demand impeachment immediately.
As of Monday, Sept. 23, 2019, TrumpUkraine is following the usual Trump scandal playbook. It might be happening a little faster because of the severity and brazenness of the alleged crime, but we’re definitely cruising towards this wrapping up as a net plus for House Trump.
The press will willfully give House Trump the cover to appoint a Special Prosecutor to “look into” the Bidens “just to be sure” as a matter of “transparency.” While high information voters will be angry, the average person who doesn’t follow politics will not know who to believe. Besides, the economy is doing well. Lulz.
No one is showing any political courage at this point. There will come a point very soon when we’re so close to the beginning of the 2020 election cycle that Nancy Pelosi will put out a statement saying while Trump should be impeached, for the good of the nation, it’s best if we just “let the people decide” in November 2020.
It’s definitely not looking like absolutely nothing is going to happen to House Trump because of TrumpUkraine. Or, to put it in political terms, while the general consensus will be Trump should be impeached, he won’t be because the 2020 campaign will have begun. Surely he won’t be re-elected, will he?
Without any sense of there being consequences, Trump will grow more brazen. Lulz.
Occasionally, I have brief flashes in my mind of a post-Trump Era that doesn’t involve America devolving into Trumplandia. For a brief second, I see America in which House Trump is no longer ascendant. Maybe Tucker Carlson or Tom Cotton may be waiting in the wings to fuck everything up again, but for a moment, at least, America isn’t run by a lawless tyrant.
I doubt this situation would last very long, but for a few months, at least, maybe America might right its ship of state. The thing is, if this were to actually happen, we would look back on the Trump Era in awe. The whole thing is such a catrastrophic culsterfuck that it’s difficult to comprehend that it really did, in fact happen.
There are reasons why this repsite would likely be counted in days or weeks, not even months. The shock of House Trump losing power in some spectator fashion would strike the country totally unprepared. If the mythical Pence Pivot actually did happen the tectonic forces that would be unleashed would be awe inspiring. What’s a personality cult without its personality ? Trump is likely to push positions on both sides as he goes down to some really astonishing extremes. So much so that a lot of pretty prominent MAGA talking heads might have overnight conversions to politics a little less crackpot. If it happened, it would be probably the most astonishing political event of my lifetime. You don’t live a political lie so publically for so long without there being consequences with the normal world snaps back into place.
If you really wanted to drop acid, if somehow even Pence left office abruptly for political reasons, President Nancy Pelosi would have her hands full. Though it would probably make everyone pop a gasket, ideally she would pardon Trump and Pence and vow not to run for the nomination in 2020.
But the idea that not only both Trump and Pence would be pushed out before the 2020 election is, at this point, so completely ridiculous given available datapoints that it’s comical. The Republican field would probably be as big as the Democrat field is right now. Of course the biggest fascist would win and we’d have to fight tooth and nail to prevent Trump from happening all over again in 2020.
In all honesty, I refuse to get my hopes up. The DNI will testify on Thursday, we’ll have a repeat of Mueller’s testimony and darkness will gradually fall on the nation I love so much.
No one listens to me. No one. Absolutely no one. But one thing I am good at, at least I like to think I’m good at, is strategic thinking. I’ve mentioned the concept of Radical Resistance before and it was promptly ignored. But I have a bit of time on my hands and so here we go. Here is how I would push Donald J. Trump out of office sooner rather than later.
Pick A Leader I propose Jon Stewart. He’s the perfect guy to serve as the pointman for what happens over the next few days. And this plan would have to take place ASAP. If you wait until the politics are right, Trump will be comfortably in the middle of his second term. Anyway, someone ring Jon Stewart up and ask him to save the Republic. The hardest part might be getting him on Twitter.
A United Message Right now, Democratic candidates for president are in different universe. There’s a brief window of opportunity. If just a few days all the Democrat candidates for president united against the common foe of Trump in a demonstrative fashion, then there’s a chance they might be able to break through the white noise of modern life to get people to sit up and take notice. We’re in extraordinary times and extraordinary measures are needed. Rallying around someone like Jon Stewart would be a good way to put aside the native intercen conflict of the upcoming primary season. The key point of this share message would be: as a matter of principle, Trump has to go. Full stop. Screw the six dimensional chess. It’s time to act.
The point of Radical Resistance would be to focus the obvious public outrage over TrumpUkraine to a very specific point — building public support to impeach Trump even if he tries to slow walk release of the complaint against him. The law is clear — the DNI has to turn over the complaint. The administration is trying a bullshit interpretation of the law to weasel out of ever releasing the complaint. If Democrats could impress upon the public how urgent this crisis is, maybe we might get one of those moments like we had during the kids-in-cages crisis. For a day or so, the entire country stood still as everyone freaked out about that situation. Now, to be clear, Trump is never going to release the complaint, just like he will never release his taxes. But if you could rile people up enough, then that refusal to release the complaint would, in itself, be an impeachable offence. (The slow walk of its release is all part of the Stormy Daniels playbook that TrumpWorld is so fond of.)
Weaponise The Inteligenta While generally getting writers to do anything collectively is like herding cats, if you could kind of gently point the in the same direction with their columns, you might have a fighting chance to bend the arc of history towards justice.
It’s clear that we’ve reached a crucial moment in our nation’s history. This is an existential moment. It’s a moment when the ultimate judge of our success or failure will be history. Do we want to be remembered as not being willing to defend an attack on the Constitution by a TV Game Show host elected president with the aid and comfort of a foreign power, or do we want to stand our ground, damn the consequences?
I honestly don’t think this will happen, though. The DNI hearing on Thursday will be a dud, the energy for impeachment will fade and MAGA will crow about yet another “lie” on the part of the “lamestream media” has been exposed.
Anyway, I guess it was worth a shot to articulate a vision.
We all know that you’re enjoying the quiet life petting rescue goats, but your nation needs you. You are uniquely qualified to slice the boil of political paralysis the country is currently suffering as a result of the TrumpUkraine scandal.
When you get angry, things happen, things change. You are passionate and articulate and if you were to step forward to lead the Resistance in a final push to impeach Trump, then maybe it might happen. The only reason for this plea is right now we’re a would-be revolution without a leader. All the elements are there. We just need someone to strike the match.
You would have to step forward as a political figure, however. You would have to maybe even join Twitter. As it stands, no one is prepared to actually act against Trump in any meaningful way. Maybe if you spoke up clearly and forcefully, the now locked gears of the House might finally begin to move.
This is probably the most severe political crisis in the United States since the latter stages of Watergate. Unfortunately, this is not 1974 and Trump’s not Nixon. You definitely would have to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Only you, I believe, would be able to coordinate the type of attack needed on House Trump. For the time being, Democrats running for president would need to unite in one common call — Trump has got to go. The political energy is now there for that to happen, but there’s no one to direct it.
Anyway, maybe you’re not interested. But I would like to note that Will Rodgers was active in Depression Era Democratic politics before his untimely death. But whatever decision you made, you’d have to make it soon, like now. We have a limited amount of time before this becomes just another Trump scandal in the eyes of the public and the 2020 presidential silly season kicks in in full force.
First, let me say for the record that I’m almost always wrong. I speculate a lot, but that’s more a matter of me liking to daydream than any sort of special insight. So, in a sense, it’s likely I’m wrong again.
And, yet, because of the brazen nature of Trump’s criminal behavior with Ukraine, it seems to me that anyone who continues to talk about how we’re just going to beat Trump in 2020 like we beat him in 2018 is missing the forest for the trees.
So far, the only thing that makes this particular scandal different is the intensity of the outrage associated with it has lasted just a little bit longer than normal. And, in a sense, that might be more a function of the media needing to hype the DNI’s testimony on Thursday. I would suggest everyone hold off on 2020 horse race hot takes until at least the hearing takes place.
In all likelihood, the hearing’s going to be a dud, just like Mueller’s. Trump and MAGA get to crow about all the lies of the “lamestream media” and that will be that. In that case, I just don’t see how there’s going to be a free and fair election. I’ve gotten some pushback on my belief that autocratic populists always win. My reponse is the Electoral College is a uniquely American feature of our election process. Democrats could easily win the popular vote, only to lose the Electoral College because of any number of different skullduggery techniques by House Trump.
There’s a tiny chance that the entire march to the Iowa Caucuses could be thrown for a loop. There’s at least a greater-than-zero chance that some pretty speculator political events could take place between now and early 2020. I have my doubts because, well, Trump has a cult of personality. And, yet, for the time being, I have a nagging, lingering feeling that it’s a least possible all these people telling us that this or that person will benefit from not impeaching Trump…may….have…their plans scrambled.
But, in all likelihood, Trump is fine. This will all fizzle out like it always does and darkness will fall.
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