I agree with your last point - we’re at a point where we have nothing but bad options. And by “we”, I mean people who aren’t directly involved in the Trump administration or the current Congress.
And that’s what annoys me the most about this guy’s op-ed piece. He’s trying to position himself as the Good Guy who’s keeping Trump in check, but by and large, it’s people just like him who have forced the rest of us to be in this “bad or worse” situation. Regular everyday people have very little they can do about Trump, but this guy isn’t a regular everyday guy. He’s in a position to at least try to use the 25th amendment to get rid of Trump. He’s in a position to at least try to get Congress to impeach Trump. In fact, those things are explicitly part of his damn job, according the the US Constitution.
We’re in this mess of relying on a Shadow Cabal to keep Trump in check because the people in that cabal won’t do their fricken’ jobs and use the remedies available to get rid of Trump. He’s not the hero, he’s the mayor who won’t close the beach even though there’s a shark out there, because he doesn’t want to lose all that tourist money.
Blaming any one person for not invoking the 25th Amendment makes no sense, because no one person has the power to do it. So even if that guy is completely in favor of invoking it, he might be constrained by the knowledge that there are enough others who oppose it that it would fail.
More broadly, the general attitude of blaming Trump on the establishment and portraying the regular everyday people as victims is backwards. Trump was opposed by the establishment, and was elected due to his populist appeal to the unwashed masses.
I’m not just blaming him; from all reports there are a lot of people just like him in positions of power, and yet none of them have apparently tried to do anything.
Ultimately, nothing will happen until these people take an actual stand, and try to convince the others with access to the 25th amendment or impeachment to stand with them. Blowing that off to usurp power behind the scenes does nothing but promote the destruction of the US system of government.
But part of what got him elected is the belief of a lot of people that he’d “Act Presidential” once he won. Stupid belief, but there you go.
And it’s mistakes like that that were contemplated when the US Constitution was being written - they knew they needed checks and balances, but those only work when the people entrusted to use the checks and balances do their damn jobs.
There is nothing in the US Constitution about political parties. There’s your problem right there. Some people put power and political party above the constitution. And there isn’t any higher authority existing to say “stop that!”
I think this helps answer the question. It seems to me that the letter was not written out of cowardice, but desperation.
It seems likely that there have been secret discussions about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Maybe not all fifteen executive heads have gotten together in the same room, but someone’s gone around and taken a straw poll. There hasn’t been a majority in favor (for whatever reason), but this person either
[ul]
[li]Wants the impeachments proceeding to start[/li][li]Does not want the impeachment proceedings to start[/li][/ul]
And the op-ed was written to convince his peers. Private conversation hasn’t worked, so he’s elected to go to a public forum to see which way the wind blows. Either way, it will probably influence the next vote among the fifteen (sixteen including Pence, actually), and may even go the way the writer intended.
If the writer is in the latter camp (likely, considering the surface message and tone), and the vote goes his way, then we’ll never know. A lot of people will ask why the Twenty-Fifth hasn’t been exercised, and those sixteen people will just nod and smile.
I get the impression you think impeachment and the 25th ammendment are the same thing. They aren’t. Impeachment is to remove the president for “high crimes and misdemeanors”. The 25th ammendment is (at leasts its relevant part here) to remove a mentally incapable president. If I take everything at face value, I would say: they realize there isn’t any wrongdoing to impeach Trump on, so now they want to try the “mentally incapable” avenue. The thing is, he has actually shown he is a genius: so everyone who sees through the mainstream media BS thinks this is ridiculous. Or they want to throw enough poop at the wall to see what sticks, and hope they have the sheeple afraid and bamboozled enough to feel nothing but relief when he is removed through any means, when really it is a coup against a duly elected president.
Dude, please stop pretending that you think the President is a genius. It’s not funny.
And please get the “Deep State” straight. The Deep State are the bureaucrats and career civil servants who do their job day in and day out, and see the political appointees come and go. This letter was not written by a member of the “Deep State”.
This was written by one of the Republican establishment folks that Trump brought in to the White House, and those guys are “The Swamp”.
I really do think Trump is a genius. I didn’t. In the days of the Apprentice I thought: “If he is such a great businessman, why is he wasting his time with a TV show?”. And during primaries for the 2016 election, when Trump was mopping the floor with the other Republican candidates, I though “Like the recently retired jon Stewart kept telling me on TV, the Republicans are so out of touch they can’t win an election.” But after seeing Trump in action since, I realize he is a genius.
You make a good point about Deep State vs. Swamp. If the op-ed isn’t fake news, we don’t know if the author has a career in the beauracracy or not (or enough connections to it) to qualify as Deep State.
Here, we’re agreed. The writer demonstrated that the powers of the president have been successfully moved a (couple of?) rung(s) down the ladder. In which case, the current president is no more than a figurehead, so he can be moved out with little to no fuss or interruption to the functions of the government.
If this guy was a career civil servant in the state department, the NY times wouldn’t have called him a senior White House official. Career civil servants aren’t senior, that’s the point. They are always subordinate to the appointed officials, who are always subordinate to the President, and the President’s supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
The point about the Deep State is that the guys who are career civil servants keep their jobs for years, they know the political appointees are here today and gone tomorrow. The career employees make everything happen and make all the real decisions and manage their so-called bosses, because they know how things actually work. If you hire a landscaping service, you can yell at the guys running the hedge trimmers and leaf blowers using your high-school Spanish all you want, and they’ll pretend to listen. You’re paying the bills. But they’re the ones who are actually doing the work, and when you’re not around they do the work their way.
The guy who wrote this letter was a Trump crony, not a part of the Deep State. Anybody who has to be confirmed by the Senate is not part of the Deep State, they’re part of the Shallow State. That’s the point of the concept of “Deep State”.
I don’t get the point in speculating whether NY Times has fabricated this person or whether the person is actually nobody rather than a high-ranking senior official. There’s no evidence to support such speculation, and no way a Joe Schmoe can even attempt to investigate either theory.
So that leaves one of two options: either dismiss the letter out of hand because of a non-zero chance its a lie or take it at face value.
If you dismiss the letter, then that might mean you can go on thinking the same thing you’ve always thought about the WH and the people occupying it. Perhaps not the end of the world if you do that, but it’s probably not the wisest. It’s like hearing someone outside your window screaming for help and ignoring them because they might be joking.
Taking the letter at face value means you’re at least confronting evidence that has been presented. It means you’re thinking about how chaotic it really and truly must be in the WH, if the people closest to Trump have no qualms in publically characterizing him as amoral, mercurial, and impulsive. And it means you also are able to ponder the author’s ulterior motives in coming out with this letter. Is this one more indication that Republicans are losing their senses? Inquiring minds want to know.
But that’s a false choice; you can say “it’s probably true,” and act accordingly, even while following up with a quick “but I’m not ruling out the other possibility.”
If we were talking about a single, isolated line of evidence of a White House in chaos, then it would be reasonable to “not rule out other possibilities”.
But how many testimonies and accounts have we been subjected to? And what about the evidence that Trump himself lays at our feet every time he tweets or open his mouth? The op-ed merely corroborates everything most people have already suspected. At this point, it really does not make sense to keep looking for other possibilities.
Sure, just like I get in my car and drive down the freeway and it’s possible that a mafia hitman has cut my brakes and I’m going to crash into an embankment.
It could happen. But I’m not spending any time worrying about it.
The truth is that the Times did not fabricate this letter, the same way it’s the truth that no mafia hit man cut my brakes this morning.
That doesn’t mean that “Senior White House Official” means a guy you’ve heard of. It’s probably not a guy whose name gets in the papers every day, because there are only a dozen of those guys. But it’s not a janitor either. I’d never even heard the name “Mark Felt” until he was revealed as Deep Throat. But Deputy Director of the FBI ain’t the White House janitor either.
Well, to go analogy-for-analogy: if you give me an opportunity where I think I’ll get more than a dollar back for each dollar I gamble, it’d be pretty dumb of me to play contrarian and gamble no dollars; but I wouldn’t gamble all of my dollars, either. When I’ve been in that scenario, I’ve thought “I’ll probably come out ahead on this,” and I’ve proceeded to gamble — some of my money.
Because, at the same time, I’ve also thought, “I can’t rule out the alternative.”
This is a quote from a Letter from Washington in the New Yorker I just got a link to. It refers to Woodward’s book, a section the media has not covered a lot:
Link.
I have to think that you’ve never come within spitting range of an actual genius, if you think Trump is one. A genius can get through a one page intelligence briefing (dumbed down already) without losing focus.
What Trump is is a master con man, because he believes the lies he is spitting out, and seems incapable of understanding that one thing he says contradicts another. And he has no shame about lying.
Like the people who kept sending money to Nigerian princes, the rubes in this country who voted for him and got taken by him would rather ignore his lies than admit they got taken.
What actions has he taken that have convinced you he’s a genius?
Personally, his actions have convinced me he’s a pretty dim bulb. And I’mnot the only one:
The late William T. Kelley, who taught Trump at the University of Pennsylvania, said, “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.” Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of “The Art of the Deal,” says Trump had “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.”
Remember, Trump didn’t have the brains to get into Wharton. His brother called in a favor from a former frat brother in admissions at Wharton, and that’s how he got in.
The stuff he doesn’t know and understand is frightening. Since Trump loves to brag, if his transcript was even mildly impressive, he’d be waving it nonstop. He doesn’t. My theory is he paid someone to write his papers. Even if he flunked the tests, he could have scraped by with D’s. Even Trump doesn’t brag about D’s.
You obviously have a different take, so I’d like to learn what convinced you he’s a genius.