Donald Trump [what will it take to force him to resign?]

[Johnny_L.A]

@andros

It honestly never even occurred to me that I might see the GOP piss on him in public in my lifetime.

My Trump-supporting uncle posted a meme about the wall. I replied to it:

@Johnny L.A.

Rather than talking about putting up a fence, why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems and make it possible for them to come here legally, with a work permit, and then while they are working and earning here, they pay taxes here?

He replied to my comment:

@Unk

come on John. These people (99.9%) have no intention of ever doing or being constructive.

My comment was a quote by Saint Ronnie. :rolleyes:

[VinylTurnip]

@RickJay

Mueller is vastly too professional to demand a political act in return for a plea deal. That would be a horrifying overreach of the role of law enforcement and of his job as a special prosecutor. There is no chance whatsoever Mueller would entertain such a thing.

This is how I’ve felt about all of these “just walk away” scenarios with Mueller as Lord Humungus. Not to mention, even a hint in that direction would immediately substantiate every Trumpist crank and Russian trollbot who’s been squawking all along that the whole thing is a massive conspiracy to unseat a president for political reasons. (Not really, of course— but it would appear to validate the conspiracy theory, and nowadays that’s all that matters.)

[Shodan]

@Johnny L.A.

Rather than talking about putting up a fence, why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems and make it possible for them to come here legally, with a work permit, and then while they are working and earning here, they pay taxes here?

We already have such a process. The fence is to keep those out who don’t come here legally, or who we don’t want to grant asylum to.

Regards,
Shodan

[Jonathan_Chance]

Um, Shodan. You realize that’s a quote from Ronald Reagan, right?

[Ashtura]

nm

[enipla]

@Shodan

We already have such a process. The fence is to keep those out who don’t come here legally, or who we don’t want to grant asylum to.

Regards,
Shodan

1. The wall won’t do shit except screw up the environment and give something for Trump to put his name on.

2. The majority of illegals come here on airlines and overstay their visa’s. Your gonna need a really tall wall.

[Johnny_L.A]

@enipla

1. The wall won’t do shit except screw up the environment and give something for Trump to put his name on.

Be fair. The government will also seize land from Trump voters to build the wall on, and cut them off from their property. So that’s something.

[jasg]

@enipla

1. The wall won’t do shit except screw up the environment and give something for Trump to put his name on.

2. The majority of illegals come here on airlines and overstay their visa’s. Your gonna need a really tall wall.

Yep.

Government studies show that illegal entries (as opposed to legal entry overstays) have declined 91% from 1.8 million in 2000 to 170,000 in 2016. (Data from Fig. 10 in this DSHS PDF report and this WaPo article)

Another report on overstays from DHS shows almost four times as many overstays.

The report specifies that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) processed 50,437,278 in-scope nonimmigrant admissions at U.S. air and sea POEs who were expected to depart in FY16—of which 739,478 overstayed their admission, resulting in a total overstay rate of 1.47 percent. Of the more than 739,000 overstays, DHS determined 628,799 were suspected “in-country” overstays, resulting in a suspected in-country overstay rate of 1.25 percent. An individual who is a suspected in-country overstay has no recorded departure, while an out-of-country overstay has a recorded departure that occurred after their lawful admission period expired.

Seems to me that we could get more bang for the $billions by attacking the overstay problem but I guess the optics of ‘better enforcement’ isn’t as good at rallies.

[ElvisL1ves]

@Johnny_L.A

Be fair. The government will also seize land from Trump voters to build the wall on, and cut them off from their property. So that’s something.

I wonder how much border land his company has bought so it can be taken by the government, at a price he would set?

[Sherrerd]

@andros

Amazingly enough, this came not even a day after Individual 1 discounted and undermined what has been one of the GOP’s primary pro-Reagan narratives: that the Gipper orchestrated the fall of the USSR. I’ve never truly bought into the idea that we “outspent” and bankrupted the Soviets in the last years of the Cold War…but I’ve also never heard a Republican argue that the Soviets “were right to be” in Afghanistan because of Afghan terrorists (the ones the US funded and supported), or that it was the Afghan war that bankrupted the USSR into “being called Russia again.”

It sincerely boggles my mind. When Nancy Pelosi is more in tune with Ronnie than the nominal leader of the GOP…what is this i cant even.

Maddow’s analysis of this odd comment by Trump is worth a listen:

Trump parrots Russian revisionism on Soviet Afghanistan invasion

Her point was that this view is found NOWHERE in American right-wing thinking–not in any branch. Almost always, what Trump says can be traced to something said on Fox, or something posted on Breitbart, etc. But not this time.

The remaining possibility: Trump got it straight from Putin (or one of his ministers).

[JB99]

FWIW, we have already seen what happens to people who suffer cruel hardships, imprisonment, and even torture at the hands of authoritarian dictators. It very rarely results in them suddenly deciding to abandon the object of their worship. Instead, they blame their misfortune on their enemies (real or imagined), and says, “If Papa Josef only knew, he would save us…” or “The Dear Leader is surrounded by incompetent administrators…”

In this case, they are already halfway there because the conspiracy already includes the “deep state” and other Republicans. They don’t see a contradiction, there. Anything that goes wrong just gets blamed on the rest of the government who either resist Trump or incorrectly implement his brilliant ideas. Half the point of voting for Trump in the first place is that the want and expect the government to fail.

Never forget that Trump is the political equivalent of a wrench in the gears. His explicit purpose is to disrupt the function of government.

[elucidator]

“The Czar has bad advisers, if we bundle up and go to the Winter Palace, he will hear our pleas directly…” The tradition of blaming the vizier is ancient, it goes as far back as Oguuruk who was summarily dismissed.

[DesertDog]

@HMS_Irruncible

They are completely deranged. The ship has sailed regarding ‘Surely [insert hypothetical awful deed] will turn Trump’s supporters against him’. Nothing can turn them because they don’t want to be turned.

I pretty much gave up on that meme when “Grab 'em by the pussy” and trashing a gold-star family failed to move the needle much nor for more than a couple days.

@RickJay

Trump will not resign, and he cannot be convicted in the Senate. Odds are good the world is stuck with him until January 2021.

See above.

@Johnny_L.A

My comment was a quote by Saint Ronnie. :rolleyes:

Once I would have suggested you point that out to him just to watch his head explode. No longer.

@Through the Looking-Glass

“I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.”
“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

[RickJay]

@ElvisL1ves

You’re certain he cannot be removed, but you’ll only say “the odds are good” that he won’t?

Perhaps you did not read very carefully? I said the odds are the world’s stuck with him. He will not be successfully impeached and convicted, nor will he be removed via the 25th amendment, but he could die - he is approximately as heavy as a Honda Odyssey, and is sudden-heart-attack years old - and it is rather unclear if he can be just flat out arrested.

[enipla]

@RickJay

Perhaps you did not read very carefully? I said the odds are the world’s stuck with him. He will not be successfully impeached and convicted, nor will he be removed via the 25th amendment, but he could die - he is approximately as heavy as a Honda Odyssey, and is sudden-heart-attack years old - and it is rather unclear if he can be just flat out arrested.

Bolding mine. If he attacked and killed Melania or someone on live TV with many witnesses, he could be arrested. Correct?

My point is that there should not be different degrees of law for different people. The Founding Fathers may have missed that, but as far as I know, there is nothing in the Constitution that says a president can’t be arrested. If there is, we need an amendment post-haste.

I wonder if the House of Representatives could start working on something to make it perfectly clear.

[ElvisL1ves]

There is no Constitutional or legal restriction against a President being arrested, or indicted or tried. Claims of immunity are based on tradition only - well, partisan alignment, too. It is not “rather unclear”.

[Sherrerd]

@ElvisL1ves

There is no Constitutional or legal restriction against a President being arrested, or indicted or tried. Claims of immunity are based on tradition only - well, partisan alignment, too. It is not “rather unclear”.

Quite right. If the framers of the Constitution wanted Presidents to be protected from indictment, all they had to do was include in the document the phrase ‘A President may not be indicted.’ They didn’t do that.

Seth Abramson laid out an argument that he believes Trump’s enablers plan to deploy to protect Trump from being impeached. (I mention it because I believe the only way to counter the plan is to pile up indictments for Trump’s crimes, as quickly as possible.) Here are the first tweets in the thread:

Trump juxtaposing the shutdown and impeachment is no accident. True or not, it is likely he thinks that the longer the government isn’t functioning properly, the longer it takes Democrat-led House committees to do the Trump-Russia investigative work the Republicans refused to do.

Make no mistake: Trump’s ambition is to forestall the impeachment question just long enough to have the Republican and Democratic primary processes start in earnest. At that point, he and his lawyers will say that voters should be allowed to decide Trump’s fate—not Congress.

Trump will only have to convince 34 Senate Republicans to vote against his conviction, so developing a rhetorical argument that says impeachment must not interfere with the right of voters to choose their leaders is incredibly important for Trump. And this argument could work.

Seth Abramson

I think Abramson is right—the Trumpites would be fools not to go for this tactic.

The way to counter it is to make it crystal clear that what Trump would be impeached for are not trivial violations of obscure rules, but actual—and numerous—violations of US law. And that means indictments.

(my bolding)

[elucidator]

I’m a Nixon survivor. Anyone else here read Jimmy Breslin’s book about Nixongate, How The Good Guys Finally Won? He talks about a kind of inevitability when the legal machinery starts to turn. The stuff Trump doesn’t bother to try and hide stinks to high Heaven. And his magic subpoena shield is gone. Sooner or later, he looks up and sees flocks of lawyer, circling overhead…

[Siam_Sam]

Chump is way out of shape and old. Maybe if each one of his detractors sent him a Big Mac a day until he had a coronary?

[RickJay]

@Sherrerd

The way to counter it is to make it crystal clear that what Trump would be impeached for are not trivial violations of obscure rules, but actual—and numerous—violations of US law. And that means indictments.

I don’t see why this would dissuade Republicans from standing by him.

No indictment will convince the Trumpist voter to turn away from Trump. It doesn’t matter if the crimes are serious.