The problem is they aren’t going to stay in power (at least for a few years).
The tides point to a democratic wave in 2018 that will cost them the house, and possibly the senate in 2018 or 2020 at the latest. So they won’t be staying in power but they still support Trump. I guess they are stuck.
However again, I guess the GOP also realizes that even though they’ll lose badly in 2018 and 2020, they’ll probably win back congress in 2022 the same way that they lost bad in 2006 and 2008, then won congress back in 2010. It’ll probably sadly be a repeat of that and maybe they know that. Worst case scenario, the GOP loses control of congress for 4 years before winning it back.
Presidents both good and bad seem to believe they can always weather the storm, and they’re often right.
For those who likea little history, note that while Richard Nixon’s approval rating was 24% when he resigned, it hadn’t been much higher than that for months before then. But he hung in there until the evidence turned the Senate against him.
Also note that Bill Clinton’s approval rating didn’t drop that much during the impeachment process, and rose after the Senate voted to acquit him. And Reagan’s approval ratings dropped more during the Iran-Contra scandal than Clinton’s during his impeachment, but Reagan recovered to his 1984 re-election levels.
It’s not Trump’s tipping point that will matter. It’s the tipping point of the GOP and when they decide they really can’t let this go on any longer and walk out on him.
No it won’t. The tipping point would only come if Republican primary voters stop supporting Trump. And there’s no sign of that happening. Right now, if you’re a Republican candidate and don’t support Trump, you won’t even make it to November, you’ll lose the primary.
Would someone address this? The Pubs got their tax cut, some regulations eliminated, permission for banks to cease giving a shit about their customers, and one Supreme. If they got one more Supreme, could they give each other permission to dump this turkey?
If they were actually getting what they wanted out of Trump, why would they stop with just that much? Their hope is and always has been that President Trump is a “useful idiot”, but what they’ve got instead is mercurial moron, and even at that McConnell and Ryan are unwilling to stand up to him. So far, the person who has most effectively stood up to him is a small German woman in a beige pantsuit of whom he is now terrified to even shake her hand.
Right, but then you get this dynamic. If you’re a Republican who doesn’t support Trump, you get primaried, and get thrown out office. If you’re a Republican who does support Trump you face off against a Democrat in the general, and lose, and get thrown out of office.
Obviously this dynamic only applies in competitive districts. But as recent events have shown, a lot of formerly non-competitive districts will be competitive in 2018.
So the likely outcome is twofold, a mass purge of anti-Trump Republicans in the primaries, and a mass purge of lukewarm Republicans in the general. That leaves the remaining Republican party an pro-Trump cesspit. How do they recover from that in 2020? The antics of the minority pro-Trumpers is going to render the Republican brand even more toxic in 2020. What does it profit a man to gain the world but lose his soul?
Because he’s a disgusting piece of shit, and even they can see it while pretending they don’t?
That’s why we’re asking about a tipping point. At some point even those opportunists most in denial are sure to see that thump is going to bring about the end of the Republican party, right? They must know somewhere in whatever part of their anatomies that substitutes for the heart that the goodies cannot keep coming indefinitely.
The Republican party circa 1988 was leaning slightly conservative thanks to the influence of Reagan and his Moral Majority buddies but in practice tended toward pragmatism in actual policy. There is a lot to criticize in Reagan-era policies, but at the end of the day the Reagan Administration understood how to make deals and reach across the aisle to get important things done. I can’t say all that much for his immediate successor—in my opinion Bush dropped the ball on a number of things in the post-Cold War environment—but come the election of Clinton (a mediocre executive whose supposed ‘liberalism’ turned out to be just every slightly left of opponent Bob Dole) and the GOP went apeshit trying to distinguish its ‘brand’ and impose its supposed family values that its most ardent advocates ignored in their personal and professional conduct like Boston drivers to traffic laws. That Trump follows no norms whatsoever and the Republican base is not only okay with it but actually is enthused about it is just a result of that entire movement.
When you’re swimming in shit, you don’t bother wiping your ass, and the Republicans have plunged head first into an open septic tank of conservative scare-baiting, “alternative facts”, and conspiranoia formerly only suited to AM radio. Hell, Vice President Mike Pence is a former hyperconservative talk show host, which tells you everything you need to know about how things will go when and if Trump is removed or resigns from office. If Eisenhower were alive today, he would ask, “Why did we fight a war in Europe only to have anti-intellectual fascist demogogues take over the Republican party?”
I don’t think most Republicans ever believed that “the goodies” would “keep coming indefinitely”. Majority status is always temporary. Regardless of Trump, it’s pretty much a certainty that the Republicans will not remain in power indefinitely. That doesn’t mean it’s “the end of the Republican party” though, and frankly I think it’s laughable that you think that’s what the outcome will be.
I think it’s impossible to predict what the impact of a president forced to resign and then convicted of a string of felonies would be. I think it would be huge. The Whigs fell, so too can the Republicans. Let us pop some corn and enjoy the show.
Do you have an autographed copy of a Trump gay sex tape? Cause until you do you you aren’t within a country mile of a “tipping point.” The guy just said he wanted to confiscate guns without due process. That didn’t make a dent. It’s not going to be republicans ousting Trump, it will be democrats. IF they get sufficient power to do so (which I don’t think will happen before 2020).
The Republican party won’t die. They will just get tired of having so many losers, (Roy Moore, Saccone, Arthur Jones, to name a few) that people will just migrate to independents. Rats abandoning a sinking ship.
The republican party doesn’t need to die. It used to stand for something respectable. If the republicans toss out their far and alt-right factions, and marginalize them the way we ignore and marginalize the far left factions, then we can have a couple parties of moderates again, debating ways of compromising on things that we disagree upon, and collaborating on shared goals.
Did you notice the 2016 election? There were the Sanders supporters, who wanted to go much further to the left. They lost in the primaries, went crazy, and are largely ignored by the mainstream of the party these days. I would consider them to be the left equivalent to the tea partiers.
Then there are those who are further left than that, but they are mostly ignorant college students, so we smile and pat them on the head and send them on their way, hoping they grow up a bit an eventually start contributing useful ideas to the party.
I do realize that these are much smaller groups than the tea party and the alt-rights, so they are not as obvious, and they don’t have nearly the sway in the party as the far right has over the republicans, so I understand why you missed them.
But, due to the left not feeding into their fears, as the right has fed into the fears of the tea partiers and alt-right, we’ve kinda kept them under control, even with the actions of russian bots and right wing trolls to try to rile them up.
When they say something stupid on a blog, or have a protest that has bad optics, we try to explain that these are just kids that are trying to find their way in the world, while the right wing tries to point at them as examples of stupid liberals. We agree that they are stupid liberals, and hope to educate them and make them smart liberals, but we don’t listen to them, and we certainly do not elect them.