I know I've gotten excited about the prospect of America's orange nightmare being over sooner rather than later, but frankly it's time for some sober reality on Trump: he's probably not going anywhere, and he's likely to end up being re-elected if my lifetime is any indication.
Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell have all but given the go-ahead for Trump to fire Mueller as Ryan insists that Trump won't do it, and McConnell is now vowing to never allow legislation to protect Mueller to even get a vote, as Trump would just veto it.
There will be no Senate vote on protecting special counsel Robert Mueller, no vote on clawing back billions from a new spending law and probably no vote on a war authorization, the Senate majority leader said on Tuesday.
Even as the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to advance a bill that would shield the special counsel from removal by President Donald Trump's administration, McConnell says it won't ever see the Senate floor.
The Senate majority leader said on Tuesday that the bill is "not necessary" and that Trump would never sign it. And though McConnell doesn't want Trump to fire Mueller, he is making sure that the only viable legislation to offer a backstop for Mueller won't see the Senate floor.
"I'm the one who decides what we take to the floor. That's my responsibility as the majority leader and we'll not be having this on the floor of the Senate," McConnell told Fox News's Neil Cavuto on Tuesday afternoon.
Even in the increasingly unlikely possibility that the Mueller probe is allowed to finish and the results made public, as I've said multiple times, in the end the only way Donald Trump leaves office is his resignation, impeachment and removal, or the voters kick him out in 2020. Slate's Jim Newell reminds us that the first two options are extremely unlikely, and that as voters we've already failed miserably once already at the third.
No one knows whether Trump firing Mueller or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, or revelations from the Russia probe or the investigation of Michael Cohen, will hasten a previously unscheduled closure to Trump’s presidency. Davidson doesn’t argue that by “end stages” he means impeachment, or resignation in the face of certain impeachment, because that would require him to commit to something he’s not sure of.
But if we’re now in the “end stages,” at Month 16 of Trump’s 48-month term, then impeachment and conviction, or some manner of forced resignation, would seem to be the only source of this impending demise. For any of those things to happen, the continuation of Trump’s presidency would have to become an irreparable political liability for rank-and-file Republicans—meaning, his approval ratings among Republicans would have to fall underwater. In the most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is 81 percent. Would a full telling of all of the Trump Organization’s misdeeds and associations over the years, or images of Don Jr. and/or Jared Kushner in handcuffs, be enough to flip the narrative among Republican voters?
The more generous interpretation of “end stages,” or the “beginning of the end,” is a situation in which the remainder of Trump’s four years is so loaded with baggage, legal and otherwise, that nothing gets done and voters choose not to re-elect him. Maybe?
Davidson rejects the assessment that “any new information about [Trump’s] corrupt past has no political salience” or that “[t]hose who hate Trump already think he’s a crook; those who love him don’t care.” It is a reasonable point: Just because something hasn’t done the trick doesn’t mean that it will never happen. But there’s no reason to predict that it will happen that way.
It seems almost equally likely that more dirt about Trump’s business comes out, more confidants go to jail, the economy stays fine, Trump continues yelling at NFL players for kneeling prior to football games, and he wins a second term. Expansive proof of decades of criminality could be the thing that flips Trump supporters. Or Trump supporters would continue to support him, because they like him, which is why they’re Trump supporters, and they know how much a second Trump term would trigger the libs.
Frankly, a scenario where people vote Trump just to piss off the "social justice warriors" is eminently feasible, because we know it's already happened. In the end, the only surefire way to get rid of the guy is to vote in 2018 and 2020 and set up a Democratic party bloc that has the power to right the ship of state.
As I said last week:
I don't know where all this will end up. As with Iraq and the Great Recession, the coda will take years, if not decades, to perform on the world stage. I don't know what will come after, whether it's a Pence presidency, a neutered Trump under a Democratic Congress, or an America plunged into something much worse, but the Trump era as it is now is on its way out.
I still believe it. But that third act and the prologue to this story could take a very long time for us to get through, and probably will. I believe the Trump era s it is now is on its way out, but there's a solid chance that what follows it will be a much worse version of the Trump era.
I do know this: If we blow 2018 and 2020 again at the polling booth, then this country is done, and millions of us will be done along with it.
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