I love running informal scenarios in my mind. All the scenarios I have come up with in regards to impeachment lead to one thing — the America we once knew is over.
I say this because even if we somehow magically rid ourselves of Trump politically — likely because he goes bonkers — we will earn ourselves only a brief respite from an inevitable descent into autocracy. The MAGA base will remain and half a dozen would-be younger, more passionate and organized successors to Trump will be waiting in the wings. And that doesn’t even begin to address all those young hack MAGA judges who will do everything in their power to make sure Trump’s vision of American Carnage is finally a reality.
What’s more, I coming to believe that the Republican Party will embrace impeachment-related violence. Hell, they may even do it themselves. Their partisan devotion to Trump is now absolute that the decision for 20 Republican Senators to vote for acquittal is now a very simple political equation. They feel the MAGA will support them as long as they vote to acquit. Republican Senators will believe time is on their side and independances will have forgotten their vote for acquittal whenever they have to run in a general again.
And, really, the only reason I think Trump has any chance of possibly losing in the Senate is his mental state will explode. He will have a very, very public meltdown as impeachment proceeds and there may come a point where his behavior grows so fucking alarming that Republicans will feel absolutely forced at last to The Pence Pivot. Even then, Moscow Mitch might feel as though he’s finally gotten as many young hack MAGA judges on the Federal bench so, lulz.
In other words, we can delay the inevitable by a few months or years, but when half the electorate is MAGA friendly to such an extent that they don’t really care about facts then, well, I don’t know what to tell you. There’s going to come a point far sooner than any of us realize when leaving the country might be one’s best course of action if you’re center-left.
I love running scenarios in my mind. In fact, I’m kind of obsessed with it. When it comes to impeachment, however, as of right now it’s impossible for me to come up with an endgame. Both possible outcomes have such factual reasons for one to believe they will happen that I’m not going to try to pin down one. Here are both scenarios. You can figure out for yourself which one is more likely at this point.
The Thousand Year Trump
Jan. 20, 2025
Though it was an unusually warm January day, Donald Trump was, as usual, grumpy. Kim Jung Un had walked with him down Pennsylvania Ave in a spirit of world peace. Press Secretary Hugh Hewitt gushed on Fox News that Trump’s friendship with Kim assured “a thousand years” of peace and prosperity across the globe. Trump had finally bested all his opponents — even the Constitution — and was now about to begin his third term. Much of his the mid-part of this second administration had been consumed with a snap Constitutional Convention he had managed to force the convening of under the pretext of a Balanced Budget Amendment.
Of course that was a ruse. The Convention went rouge and radically transformed the Constitution into a Federalist Society wet dream. Among the many “improvements” was his personal ability to run for as many terms as he liked. Trump had weighed not running for a third term because of his age, but his ego, as always, won out. He did decide to name Ivanka his Veep and Don Jr., Sec. of State.
Trump allowed himself a moment of rare introspection. DHS Sec. Stephen Miller was now “disappearing” vocal critics of the House Trump on a regular basis. Miller was building ICE camps so fast it was growing difficult to hide the pictures from the People’s Assembly. The residents of some of the more populous military districts were unhappy, but they were always unhappy. He smirked at the notion of “blue states” and how quaint it seemed now.
Trump had finally crushed The New York Times when Peter Thiel offered Pinch an sum so enormous that he felt forced to sell. Though a lot of the more liberal reporters had left The Times, its new executive editor Maggie Haberman assured that he would get the coverage from the paper that he had so long craved.
The United States was now great. About half the wall had been built to the tune of a $1 trillian. The massive public works had helped ease the nation’s pain during the Second Great Recession. Trump was also pleased that the new Internet PIN was being rolled out. The Kurdish terrorist attacks in LA had helped push that measure through quite nicely.
Trump was at last a man in full. He had absolute power in the United States. He had founded a political dynasty that would last a thousand years. Occasionally Trump would, just to troll FOX News, shoot out a dick pic or tweet the n-word. He needed to do something big soon, Obama’s treason trial was about to be broadcast and he hated the idea of Obama being the center of attention, even it was entertaining to see him in the dock.
Trump was alone at last in the Oval when the door opened. He smiled broadly — Putin would finally get to sit at the Resolute Desk. Trump loved it when a plan came together.
A Dream….Not Delayed
Election Night, 2020
President Nancy Pelosi sighed deeply. She felt she had finally fulfilled her Constitutional duty. She had just finished a brief congratulatory phone call with President-Elect Warren. The two women giggle like school girls as the magnitude of the event sank in.
But the cost had been incredible.
In the end, had not been politics that fell Trump, but Trump himself. Though his mental condition had shown signs of decline before his official impeachment, his problems accelerated after the House passed the measure. Trump, in short, snapped. His tweeting went from objectionable to transational. He began to rant about the size of his genitals. He repeatedly told MAGA to hunt down and murder The Squad.
Republicans had, at first, simply either ignored the situation or said Trump was “joking.” This grew more difficult when members of the Freedom Caucus staged a putsch of sorts by rioting on the House floor and picking off Democrats they did not like with hand guns they had smuggled into the Capitol. The death toll was too large for her to bear to remember.
Though Republicans had attempted to message this tragedy as a sign that the cost of impeachment was too great and it must be stopped immediately, this is not how the nation viewed it.After the National Memorial service for the fallen House Democrats, the pace of impeachment accelerated rapidly.
In the end, it wasn’t even close. Trump was convicted by the Senate. He then held up in the Oval Office for close to three weeks. He was finally physically dragged from the White House under cover of night. Trump’s mental condition had deteratied by that point that he was hospitalized to an effort to stabilize him. Pence was president briefly until the outrage over the attempted Republican putsch in the House grew to powerful even for him.
But that was almost a year ago. President Pelosi had done her best to heal the nation. Her caretaker administration was a who’s who of people who had found themselves in opposition to House Trump. American politics was in total chaos for much of the presidential cycle with both sides struggling with how to deal with the sudden return of liberal democratic norms.
She sighed again.
The Union was again strong. The Republic safe, for now.
I’m all for dark, gritty movies. They’re great. I love them. But I have a problem with art coming from either the Left or the Right that is so drunk with its efforts to “message the base,” if you will, the producers lose sight of the goal — giving an audience a great story.
It’s because of this that I keep walking out of movies. On the Left I walked out of Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart. On the Right I just walked out of The Joker. I found both of them problematic to such an extent that I bounced. Booksmart was a self-parody of “woke” art. The Joker, meanwhile, was problematic because it seemed like a dog whistle to every incel within shouting distance. It made me very unhappy. So unhappy I couldn’t finish it. I barely got to the inciting incident.
But I will say the preview for Richard Jewell was worth the price of admission to The Joker. The movie looks promising as much for the liberal monkey show Clint Eastwood has assembled for his cast than anything else. I mean, what the what? What is Olivia Wilde doing knowingly playing into the worst stereotypes that people like Eastwood have about people like her. Surreal. I mean, maybe the movie isn’t what I think it is, but it sure does seem to be persecution porn for MAGA mouth breathers.
I think what’s problematic about these films is not even the films themselves — it’s fucking Trump. Trump’s such a divisive figure that he casts a very large, very dark shadow over pop culture. We’re reaching the point where a lot of influential movie producers are greenlighting movies that validate their own political views. This does not bode well for the future of Hollywood.
But who knows. The novel I’m writing fancies itself something of “pox on both your houses” allegorical tale. Yet I am also going way, way, way, WAY out of my way to ensure everyone — regardless of political affiliation — gets to have a good time. Even the MAGA people who I pick on by proxy will at least get to enjoy themselves as they hate read it.
I continue to struggle as to what the endgame for this catastrophic clusterfuck is going to be. All things being equal, it would appear that Trump will be impeached and acquitted in the Senate. He will grow even more brazen in his tyranny afterwards with election meddling and Republicans will finally get the Russian-style managed democracy they so desperately crave.
And yet.
Something surreal is going on with Republicans. I can only suspect it has something to do with Trump freaking out at the prospect of getting impeached at all. This is yet another indication that Trump is not, in fact, the political genius that New York Times Trump Whisperer Maggie Haberman would have haysee rubes in flyover states like me believe. That he would grow so completely rabid at the idea of even being impeached does not bode well for anyone involved.
So I might suggest that you pause to consider that what may bring down House Trump — and Pence for that matter — may not be impeachment but Trump’s reaction to it. Or, more specifically, it won’t even be Trump’s reaction to it, it will be the violence associated with it. To put it another way, we are racing at an alarming rate towards people dying in a Republican Gotterdammerung strategy. Their thinking is that if they can inflict enough pain on the opposition in guise of people dying that that will cause the whole impeachment process to come to an end. They will make the case that we can’t even impeach Trump because people are dying. This is, of course, a completely fucked up, bonkers line of reasoning that comes more from House Trump believing its own FOX News coverage than anything else.
I find it dubious that if there was some sort of co-ordinated, violent and bloody attack on the part of MAGA truebelivers that average Americans would throw up their hands and give up on impeachment. What’s more likely to happen is the 60% of the population that isn’t MAGA would flip the fuck out. The political ground under the entire House Trump would buckle.
It would not happen right away. Republicans would for about 24 hours tell us all that they can’t be blamed for the actions of “mentally ill” people. The moment, however, that they started to say, “Of course we can’t impeach Trump if people are dying” is the moment they may, for once, face serious political consquences.
Remember there may come a point where the absolute fear of Republican Senators of being primaried from someone on the MAGA Right will equal their absolute fear that they won’t win a general election. It’s that type of high stakes conundrum that leaves me scratching my head. They have no shame and only care about power for power’s sake. So there’s a least a small chance that their high stakes gotterdammerung strategy might not QUITE work out the way they hope.
Who knows. I know I don’t.
The key point is the nation can’t sustain this state of crisis for any long duration of time. The fever is going to break one way or another. Either with people getting hurt or Trump finally be forced out of off, or maybe both. All I know is I hope no one gets hurt. But I’m not going to let insane Republicans cower me into submission either.
Republicans are just about at the tipping point where they see what’s going on with Trump as an existential threat. Almost. They haven’t quite gotten to the point where they are willing to cane people on the Senate floor, but they’re getting there.
So, in a sense, the flop sweat is about to kick in with Republicans who realize they have a very weak hand at this point. They are going to do everything in their power to gummy up the work of the impeachment process. They will lie. They will cheat. They will intimidate. I would be prepared to suggest that these tactics will work in the end but for one thing — Donald Trump.
Though Trump is finally beginning to realize the existential nature of what’s going on, he’s still reasonable cogent. And he hasn’t gone transactional with his abuses on Twitter. I used to think Trump would implode on a cognitive level and some sort of Regency might be established in private. Now, I think he will EXPLODE in a very public manner and Republicans will continue to kowtow to Trump’s every whim.
Trump will suggest MAGA take up arms against “the enemy of the people” Press or House Democrats, or whomever. He might even dangle pardons to people willing to use their precious AR-15s to make it clear they don’t want Trump to go anywhere. We’ve gotten to the point where there’s a real chance that while the MAGA base of about 35% will feel quite content with all of this the rest of the electorate — and I mean EVERYONE ELSE — will be so full of rage over actual physical harm being inflicted because of a defense of Trump that we may see some rather surreal things begin to happen. More so than we already have.
There may come a point where Republican talking heads defend murder in the name of Trump. They won’t say that, of course. What they’ll say is obviously the “optics” of hundreds of people being slain by a crazed MAGA person with a AR-15 are so bad that we should stop impeachment and “let the people decide” in 2020. Meanwhile, Trump will have finally snapped to such an extent that a lot of people will begin thinking about his continued possession of the nuclear codes.
This is a different type of crisis from the 2000 post-election debacle. This is a hot crisis. You can feel the tension in the country building to something. Something big. What that might be, I don’t know. But I do believe something spectacular is going to happen in the guise of MAGA’s final attempt to save Trump’s presidency. Something jaw-dropping that it will equal 9/11 in its historical significance. I hope what I fear will happen won’t happen.
It pains me to no end to have to talk about this. But we have to prepare ourselves for impeachment-related violence. This is a classic desperate move of extremists — they think that if they raise the stakes high enough that the general public will cower in fear and stop the impeachment process altogether.
The only problem with this strategy is it’s a high risk – high reward one. And violence of the sort Trump supporters want is almost totally alien to the American political experience. While substantial impeachment-related violence might dominate a news cycle or two, there would come a point when a lot of people who have previously tuned out would suddenly sit up and take notice. And not in a way that Trump would like.
This is yet ANOTHER example of how Trump is NOT a political genius as The New York Times‘ Trump Whisperer Maggie Haberman would have us believe. Trump is so stupid — and rapidly cracking under the strain of impeachment — that he sees violence in his defence as a quick fix that will make all his troubles go away. He is so stupid that he doesn’t realize that his firebreak is the average person’s general political indifference. As long as the economy is going well they generally don’t care. If people start dying as part of some crazed gotterdammerung strategy on the part of House Trump, there’s a real chance of radicalizing — at least momentarily — a huge swath of the moderates who otherwise would give Mad King Trump a pass at least until election day 2020.
In other words — when politics involves death and destruction, Americans generally don’t appreciate it. Violence that can be directly pinned on the overheated rhetoric of the Right will initially give us as nation pause for thought, yes, but the moment the Right goes from, “Can’t blame us, it’s just crazy people!” to “Well, guess we can’t have stop the impeachment process now…” they’re likely to get considerable pushback.
But the key issue is — it’s only going to get worse as we grow closer and closer to Trump actually being impeached. In fact, that’s pretty much Trump’s last trick — to go transactional in his crazypants tweets. While I’m reluctant to count Trump out, when he is directing MAGA to kill people in his defense via his Twitter feed that would, well, take things to the next level.
Who knows what happens next. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
While we’re in the worst Constitutional since late 1860 there’s no discernable endgame at this point. I just don’t know how it’s going to endup. It could end up either way. Either way, we’re not prepared for the new era. Either we convict Trump and hopefully put him prison after due process or he escapes and things get very dark, very quickly. Here are a series of reasons why I simply have no idea what is going to happen next.
Bill Barr Barr has been very quiet. It’s very possible he’s going to strike at what he feels is the best time to cause the impeachment process to come to a grinding halt. I could see him thinking that if he dropped the smoke bomb of a wide-ranging list of criminal referrals connected to the Infowars-level bullshit theory that it was actually Ukraine and the Democrats who were the origin of the Mueller probe that all of Trump’s problems would go away. He might think this because similar bullshit messaging worked before with The Mueller Report so lulz. There’s a huge risk associated with this, however. The risk is that after about 24 hours of The New York Times buying into this bullshit ploy completely, other people might come to the conclusion that it’s a staggering abuse of power. So it would be used as yet another Article of Impeachment.
Asymmetrical Radicalization One thing we all underestimate is how completely fucking insane the Republican Party became in the latter years of the Obama Administration. The Republican Party only sees liberal democracy as a means to an end — and that end is as much power as possible. So, while the Democrat Party sees itself as bound by the normals of a democracy, the Republicans just lulz that. So Republicans will crucify Democrats for the slightest infraction while they lie and cheat as much as humanly possible to keep Trump in power. This is a very real problem. Do not underestimate it going forward in the impeachment process.
Republican Senators — Mission: Impossible There may come a point where 20 Republican Senators face an impossible political decision — the likelihood they will be primaried if they vote for conviction will be equal to the probability they will lose their general if they don’t vote for conviction. I honestly have no way of predicting how they would solve this problem. It’s simply impossible. None of them have any honor or courage — or at least have shown none to date — so, I don’t know. It could go either way.
Brexit If No Deal Brexit does, in fact, finally happen on Oct. 31, then there’s a chance that will slow the global economy in such a way as to harm Trump’s political fortunes in a very unexpected manner. Trump’s got a base of about 35%. It’s rock solid. If the economy tanks that might change just a little bit.
Violence Trump could very well up the ante and start transactional crimes with his Twitter feed. In other words, instead of dog whistling this or that thing, he might actually say: Do this. It could be anything from killing members of Congress to killing the whistleblower. You would think this would be bad for Trump — and it would be — but there’s also a chance that it will slow impeachment down just enough for Republicans to say, “Lulz, let the people decide in Nov. 2020.”
Trump Going Bonkers This is a such a big known unknown that I simply don’t know how to gauge it. If Trump finally snaps in a very, very public manner, things could get very, very messy. But the gears of government are so fucking slow Trump could still make it until January.
Government Shutdown It’s possible the government will shut down long enough that impeachment momentum ends. Trump survives and he rigs the 2020 election in his favor. Lulz!
Moscow Mitch May Feel Sated It’s also possible that just as Moscow Mitch fills the last possible open position on the Federal bench with a young hack MAGA judge, he will find Trump having his trial in the Senate. Moscow Mitch will feel he has gotten the last ounce of blood from Trump and he’ll abruptly do the Pence Pivot. Lulz!
You can’t make this shit up. It definitely seems as though just like Nixon’s obsession with Daniel Ellsberg sowed the seeds of his self-destruction that Trump’s personal vendetta against John Brennan may very well do the same damn thing to him.
I would not be at all surprised if it wasn’t Brennan who Barr was to bring a criminal referral against in his quest to give Trump the fig leaf necessary to pardon Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn. Yes, Trump will definitely win at least one news cycle by doing this, but long term it may be a bit more dicey. Things are just about far enough in the impeachment proceedings that Trump may feel he has to wait until after he’s acquitted in the Senate to go full Putin on us. Or, given that he’s bonkers and not the political genius everyone thinks he is, he may just say fuck it and do it between now and whenever he’s formally impeached.
Who knows. The key thing is there’s no discernable endgame right now, which is why, by definition, this is a crisis. A big one. It could go either way. What’re more, we’re not really prepared for either eventuality. We’re going to be in a new era, no matter what.
I’m a nobody. I’m a failure. A loser. A rube who lives in a flyover state. But I would like to note the obvious — something’s amiss in the House That Ochs Built. The reason why it’s so dangerous to our apparently dying democracy is it’s systemic.
It’s not any one person — even though Maggie Haberman is a notable Trump suck up — but the very institution itself. It’s even more difficult to assess because The New York Times continues to be the premiere news organization in the world. It’s just that consistently since the dawn of Trumplandia the paper has gotten its overall coverage of our mad king wrong.
The reason why this is so dangerous is The Old Gray Lady pretty much sets the daily news agenda for most of the media ecosystem. So when they wilfully engage in the tried-and-true 2016 playbook of acting as though Trump and his minions are acting in good faith — when they clearly are not — that’s a serious, serious problem for the Republic.
If I’m so smart, what would I do differently? Well, I would have a townhall meeting of the entire newsroom and tell them to think of themselves as patriots first and reporters second. If that means burning some bridges so be it. If that means being extra-skeptical of whatever fucked up messaging House Trump is pushing then so be it. One notable example of this recently was when The Times cooed about how much money The Thousand Year Trump was spending on digital buys. That whole thing is political FUD meant to cower House Trump political opponents into thinking all is fucking lost.
Another issue is people like Maggie Haberman idly muse about how it is that Trump does demonstrably stupid things as if there was some other answer than, well, Trump is, in fact, stupid. At this point the only reason why I mention Ms. Haberman is she’s a fun to pick on. Anyone who sucks at the teet of House Trump that much and takes her self so fucking seriously deserves whatever snarky fate she may meet. You know who Maggie Haberman reminds me of? The guy who gave David Letterman the “GE Handshake” when he went to his new bosses with a gift basket.
I don’t know. It’s times like these when I wish Gawker was still around. It would be nice if Nick Denton had his old crew rant against what I’m talking about on a daily basis. It’s all very silly and yet extremely important given the stakes involved.
I love The Times. I just wish they would do better.
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