And I think that giving businessmen insider information was enough to send Martha Stewart to jail, and that was without any national security implications nor the Vice President calling you a liar three weeks into your job.
This one has the potential to go somewhere. This is a failure exactly where they pretend to have strength, and exactly where most conservatives need you to be strong.
Authoritarians tend to stop supporting those who choose incompetent lieutenants, and it’s turtles all the way down in this admin - and that’s becoming obvious.
Again, it only takes two senators on any given vote.
I think that one of the motivations for the GOP impeaching Trump would be to have Pence step in. While Trump may be too much of a wildcard for the GOP (and a major source of embarrassment to the party), Pence would tow the party line.
USA 2019: Scraps of garbage and scorched bone blow through the shattered ruins of cities blasted by nuclear fire. As one final mushroom cloud rises above the baking toxic wastelands that were once America, an emaciated figure in Mad Max mutant garb turns to his companion and whispers “This must be the start of the end for Trump.”
“It has patterned itself after every dictator who’s ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom, but, like every one of the super-states that preceded it, it has one iron rule: LOGIC IS AN ENEMY, AND TRUTH IS A MENACE.”
(SOURCE: The Twilight Zone (original series, 1961); episode “The Obsolete Man”)
It’s interesting to see what “money” has to say about it, what details it focuses on (the bottom line).
Whatever happened, Trump’s team was unable to defend the National Security Adviser on February 12. This surrender was revealed even when many officials in the White House blamed the fiasco on the culture in Washington. The capital looks out for someone to blame- and in this case, Flynn makes the perfect target.
Saw shades of that on the news. Even stepdad went 'yea that guy is gonna get shitcanned. Whether you believe anyone else was involved or anything illegal happened, that guy is gonna have to clear his desk before the day’s over.
Trump trusts him more than most of his cabinet. He was leaning on him during the campaign, and trusts him enough that he called Flynn, the National Security Advisor, at 3 AM to ask about fiscal policy. Also given the Russian connections run far deeper than just Flynn, and some implicate Trump directly, he may not want to alienate him for fear of the blowback.
Despite him playing a tough guy on TV, he never had the cojones to directly fire anyone in the Trump org. He only dumped Manafort/Lewandowski when things were absolutely grim (the Manafort episode pointing to even more Russian connections) and then kept them on the payroll in other positions.
Predictable, and welcome. The more the admin claims “nothing wrong here” the more the entire pile stinks.
Instead of shedding ablative underlings to protect himself, Trump’s compulsion to only be right no matter the truth will ultimately be the baggage that drags him down.
He’s stupid and has a flea’s attention span, so there’s a chance he’s so mindless he didn’t know, though that would be the only reason he didn’t.
Since Trump’s floated recognizing Crimea, has rambled about crippling NATO (which serves Russian interests over US interests), he had a campaign manager who was on the Kremlin’s payroll and kept him around after replacing him, Russia hacked the DCCC/DNC/Podesta/etc. and used the exfiltrated data to assist Trump’s election (and the GOP House races), he’s still got the Russia-connected Carter Page on staff as an advisor, he chose the Russia-connected Rex Tillerson as Sec. State, his web of business connections to Russia and Russian oligarchs are so vast as to be hard to even graph, and parts of the Russian Dossier put together by the former MI6 guy are starting to be verified as valid, and it looks like Russia probably has Kompromat on not only him but a large swath of the GOP’s machinery. Trump’s massively compromised all over the place and he knows it. Flynn making a call to Russia to discuss sanctions is penny ante material. The only thing he’s going to do to reinforce the appearance of being compromised are things that further Russia’s agenda.
And that’s why this isn’t going to be the scandal that sinks Trump. If anything, to his supporters, this was a smart, clever end-run around a “lame duck”, showing how “proactive” Trump is, etc, etc.
