There will be a line of people willing to write his ‘books’. That’s true.
Putin may also call in his loans/favors. If he resigns, I think he may be fucked financially and criminally. Pence can’t pardon state crimes.
It was a little worse “at the start.” He was mostly getting a quarter to a third of votes at in the first primaries. He jumped up to mid 40s to finish a touch over the 40% he locked up the nomination with only after the field narrowed quite a bit. It made sense as a system to try and marginalize cranks early when only a handful of candidates make it through Feb.
Democrats potentially face their own version with proportional allocation this year. The race is much more frontloaded that it has been in recent cycles. There’s double digits of potential candidates being floated and making the appropriate noises. Both CA and Texas moved their primaries to Super Tuesday, March 3rd. That makes what was already a big delegate haul an even bigger share of the total. CA’s early voting period starts within a few days of the Iowa caucus and before NH’s primary so there’s less chance of a winnowing before those decisions are made.
A plurality frontrunner coming out of Super Tuesday could face a difficult time getting to a majority of total delegates out of what’s left if enough people stay in. There’s extra motivation for those trailing to stay in the race. The nomination takes a majority of delegates. You never know what’s going to come out of a contested convention. I’m sure there’d be much wailing and gnashing of teeth if a decent chunk of the electorate finds out that superdelegates still exist and get a vote in later ballots.
Now think about Russian/Chinese troll farms getting in the act with messages tailored to the internal party fault lines. Trump’s motivation to resign might go way down. An opponent who has to survive the DNC version of the Donner Party to get the nomination is likely to be easier to beat.
Sometimes the rules look better in principle than in practice.
Go back further, to the very first announcement of his candidacy. Trump had to pay people to be there.
But then he made a “shocking” announcement and the media took the bait and amplified him. They fed the troll. Now look where we are.
I don’t see any way he resigns. As long as he’s in office, I only see more and more motive to increase and expand his power.
Trump is in legal jeopardy and now that his finances are increasingly exposed by legal authorities in multiple countries, the farce of his brand is about to be exposed as well. Unlike 2015, when nobody gave a shit about his criminal activity and he could continue pretending to have oligarchs prop him up as some kind of business genius, there’s no going back now. Mueller, the Feds, State AGs, and even possibly investigators in other countries, now have the Trump family in their cross hairs. Once he’s out of power, it’s over. He loses everything. Trump literally fighting for his life, and for the lives of his children.
The only way he resigns is if Pence signs a pardon agreement at the exact same moment that Trump resigns and works out some sort of exile with a country that agrees not to extradite him. But even then, his brand is getting trashed, so it’s not quite clear what his lifestyle would be like. Trump is now using tax dollars to prop himself up financially. He draws salaries, puts his family on the US tax dollar payroll, and uses his businesses to siphon more tax dollars from Americans. Once he’s out of power, he’ll have to rely on the strength of his businesses, which probably have a combined value of sub-zero.
The longer he’s in office, the more I think his side is dug in to protect him. This means that Republicans in the Senate will not likely vote to convict him if he’s impeached by the House. So, I think he stays in office. I don’t think any Mueller report will have the desired effect (desired by Democrats, for instance).
Given the above, I think the most likely way to remove him from office is the old-fashioned way in November 2020. I think that’s our best shot to get him out.
That’s probably true - yes, his approvals are consistently only around 40%, but that is likely his floor as well as his ceiling. There are just too many people with a strong resistance to admitting they got easily fooled for it to be otherwise.
Perhaps he has invented a russo-french portmanteau of dacha and chateau? What I don’t get is: why on the Danube?
::sigh:: Look, forget about Castle Dacha in Dachau, and philatelists collecting Russian stamps with Donny on them. We don’t have time for the Picking of Nits…
We have a Commander-in-Chief to get rid of!
Should this occur, it will also mark the exact same moment that historians agree on as when it became clear how colossally fucked-up the decision Gerald Ford made in 1974 was…
Chump is so old and out of shape, it would not surprise me his plan is to have a heart attack before he is scheduled to leave.
You should read about the Hillary Clinton camp’s “Pied Piper” strategy for elevating and promoting Donald Trump.
“We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.”
Congratulations Hillary, you played yourself.
Who’s to say comrade? IIRC, the election was 2 years ago. Time for trumpy to actually take the mantle and fight the next war instead of the last one. HIs loyal lapdogs should do the same.
In all fairness though, it was a good strategy at the time. Politicians who were known for shooting their mouths off generally fell into obscurity and/or Fox News pundit-land (hello Sarah Palin!) where they would continue to say outrageous things and no one would really care at the end of the day. Trump was the first one to say things that would END a politician’s career and when outrage was felt he just doubled down. The media and the public were hooked. What’s he going to say next? And that still goes on today. We breathlessly log on every morning to see what wreckage the latest tweet-storm has blown onto our shores. Will it be another attack on transgendered people? Will it be another loving embrace of Nazis? Will it be foreign policy by attention deficit disorder? Will today be the day he insults another military hero or will it be a day he picks a fight with a celebrity over some minor criticism? Will he praise the dictator in charge of North Korea while simultaneously taking a dump on the Prime Minister of Canada? As far as entertainment goes, you couldn’t pay for this kind of thing. If Trump’s political career to date was a manuscript sent to publishing houses it would be dismissed as laughably impossible by all of them. As Tom Clancy once said, the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense. Too bad politics isn’t supposed to be entertaining.
Dnieper works. In Brit-speak (unlike Yank-speak) the D is pronounced.
In the ‘Merry Christmas’ Guardian article GreenWyvern linked to above they mention the Trump Burger includes a brownie à la mode. Am I petty in wondering whether it’s one or two scoops?
Naw.
How about this as a twist on the game? However Trump leaves office, resignation, impeachment with conviction, voted out, end of a second term (NOOOOO!), what will his average approval rating be over the previous month?
I’m going with 32%, about 5 points lower than he’s ever hit before. That would be consistent with his not only having continued to have the high disapproval among Democrats and most Independents, but also losing some within his hard core that has stayed true to him no matter what so far.
Trump is part of the new wave of fascism that has been spreading globally. He’s only a part of the problem. As such, he’s already inspired his base to accept fascism as not just normal, but desirable. Getting rid of him would be a good start, but it won’t fix everything. I have a feeling that many republicans realize that they made a deal with the devil when they supported him, and unfortunately, it changed the republican party for years to come, even if they do manage to oust him.
Yes. As bad as he is, Trump is the symptom, not the cause. Like a high fever, you gotta get it down fast before irreparable damage is done but you can’t then say, “That went well,” without attending to the infection that caused it.
You’d think committing treason would be enough. If anyone else tweeted classified information such as the deployment location and photographs of Special Operation Forces, which is information valuable to our enemies, people would be calling for a lynching.
Or…
Conspiring with a hostile foreign country to influence a presidential (or any) election.
And it’s just because this fucker is so stupid, but has an ego the size of Jupiter.
Trump represents the decline of faith in the post-1930s and post-WWII institutions that enabled a generation or two to bring the US out of poverty and into a quality of life that we hadn’t seen before, and haven’t seen since its (our) gradual decline, beginning in the 1970s.
But there are also other factors at play, such as the American tradition of anti-intellectualism and not wanting to be bothered with "all them experts trying to use big words and pretending to be smarter than us common folk." It’s not a uniquely American phenomenon of course, but we seem to be more susceptible to 6-pack politics than other modern democracies.
The Great Recession and the disastrous foreign policy of the 2000s caused many middle class Americans to check out of our democracy for good, which is why some, despite some hesitation, either pushed the button for Trump or at minimum didn’t feel compelled to speak out against him.
What I’d submit is that we should look beyond those who voted for Trump and also consider many of those who didn’t, and in particular, those who supported Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, or simply stayed home. Because they, too, in some ways have given up on democracy in America. And I think that as unpopular as Trump is, I would be careful about writing him off just yet, because as long as he can maintain a solid 35-40% of his base and just add to it, he can win yet another electoral college vote while simultaneously losing the popular vote nationally. This might be how conservatives win elections from now on.