Surely, they’re galvanized already.
But they’re also small and insufficient to re-elect him on their own.
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I really think you’re ascribing more planning and forethought to this than Trump’s lizard-brain self-defense mechanism deserves. He’s a blatant criminal and habitual liar who’s under the microscope for probably the first time in his entire life, and he’s using whatever levers of power he has – or thinks he has – to try and keep himself out of trouble. He hates being on the defensive, he’s terrible at it strategically, and his polling numbers always suffer when he is. There’s really no legitimate mechanism for arguing that impeachment is some partisan witch hunt when even the most cursory of inquiries into his activities would probably yield a charging document as long as your arm if he wasn’t sitting in the oval office screaming at the television right now. The faithful won’t believe it, but they never will anyway, and there aren’t enough of them to keep him in office come 2020.
Honestly, there is no more galvanizing that could possibly be done to his base. These people are 150% zinc-coated at this point and absolutely nothing will dissuade them from supporting him. If the endless cavalcade of awful terrible news over the past 2+ years hasn’t been enough to either a) drive his support below 30% or b) pull it above 50%, then how much higher or lower do you think those numbers could possibly get at this point?
ETA: Nothing worth doing will ever get done if the strategic question is “but will doing it piss off the racist fascist assholes?”
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Um yeah… about that… and I am really sorry to bring these up:
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Oh, totally agreed; understand that when I say “Trump”, I mean his entire lickspittle team. Trump himself can barely string a coherent sentence together, but Barr and Miller and McConnell seem to be nudging them towards impeachment.
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He meant to do that. Sure.
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That’s his MO to avoid looking weak
I’m amazed it fools anyone.
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Donnie drift.
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The only difference at this point is the choreography.
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for the first time it actually makes a bit of sense to me now.
we ( okay, okay, i ) tend to think of cults as something close up and personal. maybe even a group you live with.
but maybe fox news, alex jones, hannity, trump, 4-chan, breitbart… all of it that people tune into everyday… forms a own satellite community that people do effectively live with.
a distributed cult. with all of the lack of self-awareness that a cult necessitates
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–and, surrounded by delusional enablers, fellow grifters, and the powerful complicit–
we find ourselves hanging on hopes that “things will get fixed really soon” by Preet Bharara (who served as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2009 to 2017)
having been warned years ago by Masha Gessen in 2017
Rule No. 3: Institutions will not save you . During the election campaign, one often heard the argument that institutions of American democracy are strong enough to withstand attack by Trump. A year ago, I pointed out that many of these institutions are not enshrined in law—rather, they exist as norms—and even those that are enshrined in law depend for their continued survival on the good faith of all actors. There is no law, for example, guaranteeing daily press briefings at the White House and media access to these briefings. I predicted that the investigative press would be weakened and that reality would grow murkier.
Bingo.
Someone please hand Gessen her shiny prize.
ETA: to add quote-back re revocation of WH press corp passes; and punctuation
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Yet another “qualified” person confirmed to trumpworld /Xs
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Among the flood of “Things that will now be laws that we thought it was ok to have as norms” that Democrats should put forward if their manage to wrestle control of control of the Senate should be some minimum job requirements baked into law. Running government like a business is bad enough, but running government as a business that you are hoping fails? ooof.
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Stern states the obvious
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