dRumpf may be able to skate on federal crimes and misdemeanors but there are several state AG’s that are gunning for him and his. They can even go after him while he’s in office.
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He’s an opportunistic, amoral scumbag that doesn’t believe in or care about the wall except for what mentioning it does for him politically. I think that covers all the bases.
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Not if Mueller moves fast enough!
You might want to keep an eye on Gamble vs. US then.
I wish I was being ridiculous. The only ridiculous statement I made was that Trump will lose in 2020. The way things are going now, he will win a second term.
I have family that are firmly pro-Trump. And that’s an understatement. To them, he’s being unfairly attacked by a biased liberal media because he’s going to drain that swamp!!1!1! I can’t think of a single thing that would make them change their minds.
Reading their Facebook feeds is a reminder to me that while they are in an echo chamber, so am I.
It’s easy to mock what they are saying, but there are A LOT of them out there.
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Sure. But not as many as they appear, and certainly not nearly enough to win elections with just them. If the Trump fans were as numerous, unified and politically active as you, and others, seem to think, the 2018 congressional elections would have gone rather differently.
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And it’s abundantly clear his supporters aren’t enough to keep him in office all on their own.
The biggest estimates for Trump’s base. People who really believe in the guy, not those supporting him out of partisanship (or spite). Is around 30% of the electorate. Other estimates based on actual voting and more detailed polls put it at 1/4 to 1/3 of GOP voters.
And the win in 2016 was incredibly narrow to begin with. Even a small loss of support for Trump and the GOP at large potentially generates a landslide.
And we just watched a slow motion, limited version of that in the midterms. If you mapped those results to the electoral college it’s a clear loss for Trump. And those definitive gains for the left came in an election where the GOP’s primary tactic was tying themselves to Trump.
GOP leadership are purportedly already spooked, and isolating Trump. And it won’t take much more erosion of support to make him dead electoral weight. If it looks like Trump is a liability other politicians will abandon him rapidly True Believers or not. And the vast majority of voters are not True Believers.
It’s the party of the party, above all else.
I still can’t believe how quickly it floated by when Paul Ryan openly made a statement that the disposition of the party was more important than the well being of the nation. And when a reporter immediately called him out on it he got all offended about gotcha reporters accusing him of heinous things.
Flipped on a dime from “party before country” to “how dare you”.
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Very true. It’s important to remember that Trump, while he may represent the howling Id of the Republican party, is not a Republican in the traditional sense. He has no political history, no history of supporting and working with and for the Republican party, no election machine or money-raising network to offer, no old favors to call upon. He’s an empty suit with nothing but a name as an asset, and a history of showing absolutely no loyalty to anyone.
I guarantee that the moment Mitch McConnell and other Congressional Republican leaders start thinking that supporting Trump is doing more damage to their political brand and re-election chances than pissing off the Trump cultists, they will start turning on him.
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Agreed. The openly fascist wing of the Republican party is in the 20-27% range of eligible voters. The remaining 13-18% of the party is split among single-issue voters/evangelicals and more centrist conservatives who voted for him as a means to an end, but are now stuck riding the tiger or being eaten by it. If the tiger is sedated, they’ll take their chances dismounting.
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Well denial is a hell of a thing. The midterms really were a slow motion kick in the teeth for them. Weeks afterwards DNC gains had basically doubled and what looked like some solid pickups for the GOP in the Senate turned into a single seat gain.
So a month or so later the GOP gets it’s “oh shit” moment. And the thing that happened on the GOP side is they shed a fuck load of people who weren’t lined up behind Trump. So in the short term it seemed very mixed messagey.
But the sleeper issue to come out of the election was voting rights. Supression and gerrymandering lost at the ballot more than they won. There were several nationally visible contested races. One of which is still unraveling, and involves the GOP getting caught actually rigging an election. And that new shiny DNC house is clearly planning to use it’s larger than expected 36 seat majority to push that issue.
But I think you’re right. If GOP brass’ justification for backing Trump is it let’s them push their agenda, they aren’t getting what they want. As much as they’re packing the bench, there’s a backlog of empty seats because Trump won’t nominate fast enough. And a backlog of nominees because he’s crippled things so much it’s slowed down the process. McConnel purportedly pushed really hard to prevent Kavanaugh from being nominated, because of the risks and complications of getting him through. And what it might look like or mean for all these investigations. Key GOP policies have repeatedly failed, and the one major success (the tax bill) has become increasingly unpopular since it’s passage.
He’s now shut down the government for a policy the public doesn’t support, and they don’t want to pay for. And the stock market has been on a consistent down trend due to his trade nonsense they don’t believe in. So they’re starting to get pressure from their rich backers.
Mueller is ramping up, and the house is gonna go supoena crazy. So while I don’t think they’ll turn on him without something major to push them. We’re gonna start seeing them hedge their bets.
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Like any halfway sane person on this planet I wished this was true.
But he is still in the White house. This is not over untill it IS over. Untill then its all just wishfull thinking and whistleing in the woods. I allready brace myself for him to “serve” a full term, possibly even a second one, in which he will cause even more irrepairable damage to the US and its people, the concept of democracy itself and to the rest of the entire damn planet.
Interesting times…
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If 19 Republican Senators were known to be willing to impeach that ingrown pube, he’d be done. And lack of proof is obviously not the sticking point. (In fact, if they were going to impeach him, the stuff that’s already in the open is more damning, and clearer, and harder to defend than any of the insidery stuff Mueller might have).
It seems like there are three theories for why those assholes are ignoring his criminality:
- they’re just plain Evil
- they’re worried about losing their next election (in 2020 or 2022 for most of them)
- nominally having a Republican president is more important than having a real president.
I don’t think (3) is that relevant; they’ve got either Turmp or Pence until 2021, and after that, it’s not clear that keeping Turmp would help them more than impeaching him. And (2) is similar – Turmp does at least as much harm as good for other GOP candidates. It hurts Republicans to oppose him now, but if he’s already out by November 2020, then he’s no longer a factor, and that could make a lot of Republicans’ lives a lot easier.
(1) is an important X factor, but there are probably at least 19 GOP Senators who are more self-interested than ideologically Evil.
So it might be that the wall of intransigence is not as solid as it looks. It might be that there are enough votes to impeach, and they’re all just waiting to see who jumps first. If so, then a well-orchestrated series of genuinely juicy business-crime revelations, followed by a House impeachment vote, and then a trial, could be enough to suddenly change the outlook. Like, there’s a 20% chance maybe.
'Course, if it came to that, someone could just refuse to even schedule the hearings.
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You can count on the good stuff finally being leaked by Republicans with a grudge after the 20th so Pence’s chances of being able to legally run for a second term won’t be kneecapped if Trump decides to make a run for it before the 20th of this month. The same with the good stuff being released officially and leaked by the Democrats before the 20th to tempt Trump to leave early with the added benefit of Pence not being to run for a second term hahaha
This January 20th could end up being a very miserable day for Donald.
Please, he’ll just blame it on the house and the democrats…
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Crushed during a photo op when a portion of his wall fell on him. That would do it (but limited to his army of birdbrains; they see signs everywhere).
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I expect he would at that.
McConnell is an odious, partisan hack, but he’s not an idiot. He carries water for Trump when it suits him, and it suits him when doing so helps to reinforce the Republican hold on power. If McConnell’s members start to take heat for the cooling economy, I think he will step out of the way and the Democrats will have a clear line of sight on the President.
It’s going to take more than volatility in the Dow and a partial inversion in the bond market to move him; it would need to be another sector wide meltdown like 2007, which seems to me like kind of a pyrrhic victory. If the cost of impeachment in both houses is flushing the economy, I’d rather wait until 2020 to get rid of Trump.
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I have yet to see him NOT carry water for Trump… As long as they can blame it on someone else, they will. It’s going to take a hell of a lot more than the economy tanking for those who us who aren’t rich and entitled to get McConnell to go against Trump. I honestly don’t believe that anything short of something that lost trump his base would get McConnell to oppose trump and I honestly don’t know what that actually is.
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I am still fairly convinced Pence would be implicated in anything big enough to take Trump down. For one he lied so freely, so smoothly, and so obviously during the VP debate that “gas-lighting the nation” was the only way a lot of people could describe it. The man is quite obviously without scruples. I’m convinced his only hold up in participating in whatever the fuck would be insulating himself from consequences. For another he was directly supervising Trump’s transition team. And thus a surprising number of people who have been indicted, charged, and convicted thus far. The transition team is a known subject of multiple investigations to boot. And 2 of the biggest fish thus fried (Flynn and Manafort) both had pretty fucking close interactions on the regular with the VP.
That may be part of the GOP fear here, its unclear that getting rid of Trump gets them Pence. Who they’d be more than happy with.
That wasn’t terribly clear until really recently. e
Early December when tight races were mostly squared away. And like I said earlier they’re currently in a catch 22. In part due to all those “retirements”, and in part due to the way the midterms went. Their congressional caucus is now a lot more Trump heavy than it was. Where they did succeed in key races in November it was by being Trump as fuck. But as an overall strategy nation wide it lead to a big loss for them.
So the situation is still deniable. Those prone to confirmation bias (and lord knows the GOP with their “different polls” are) can still describe the midterms as a loss because the party didn’t Trump hard enough. Even as the makeup of the party is now more friendly to Trump to begin with. With higher ups and State level parties from many states now (maybe) convinced he’s a liability, there’s serious potential for infighting there.
INTERESTING. I think all this hand wringing about what excuses evangelicals are making is ignoring a few things.
First they aren’t so much making excuses as finding theological reasons to bedelighted.
And the rise of Prosperity Gospel. Essentially the belief that if God loves you, you will be made filthy rich and gaudy as fuck. And you should be a Good Christian, and give me all that money, so that we can all be filthy fucking rich and gold plated together.
Joel Osteen is currently the most popular televangelist nationwide. And one of the wealthiest preachers. His church one of the most attended. And most other guys (always guys) sitting in his position are Prosperity Preachers. Prosperity is increasingly the theological approach in the Evangelical movement.
Trump is rich, which means god loves him. And he is down to the buttons exactly what the Prosperity community views a rich person as. A fair bit of it is about showing off wealth, conspicuous consumption. And its often fixated on very specific markers of wealth. Like how all those preachers keep getting called out for buying, or fund raising for planes.Or this mother fucker.
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