I don’t know. I try not to think about politics these days.
But I can’t help wondering. Has Trump through speech or twitter or action or even inaction made himself so over the top outrageous that we the public have lost the necessary will to goad our elected officials into impeachment proceedings?
Is there an outrage saturation level that has been crossed into general apathy? I can’t believe that there isn’t a greater push to dig into the shenanigans of this guy to force him to resign. For chrissake, all Nixon did was cover-up a burglary, and swear a lot on tape.
Where is this “Well, here he is, and we’re stuck with him” attitude coming from? There’s no digging into the whole Russian influence thing? There’s no examination of finances?
i think he lost a lot of credibility to the point that people fail to believe what he says. In that he may benefit from that in the context you state, if no one believes him and everyone knows that, how can Trump say anything that is taken seriously? If it is not taken seriously then no one cares about it enough to impeach him.
I think part of the problem is that the Republicans are in the majority in Congress and they don’t really want to impeach him if they don’t have to. As long as they get stuff passed or removed, they are happy to just ignore his antics. I think it’s going to take either the Russian probe to heat up a lot more and show some illegal actions or the 2018 and 2020 elections to bring in a lot more Democrats to Congress to start moving things along
I don’t think there’s a chance he’ll be impeached unless something seismic occurs. And I think that’s a good thing; far better for the electorate to remove Presidents, that’s what elections are for.
He is far from unimpeachable, but at this point he is still nominally useful for the GOP majority if for no other purpose than to absorb criticism that should rightfully be directed at them. When Congress can’t pass a budget or continuing resolution, they’ll try to make it a Trump vs. Democrats, even though it is the GOP which, if they would get their shit together and not be held hostage by the Freedom Cock-Ass, could pass a budget and with minor concessions to the Democrats get enough votes pass it over a presidential veto. Trump will be the face of that failure and Mitch McConnell will continue to sport that shit-eating grin that makes me want to use his head as a speed bag.
Eventually, Trump is going to be found doing something too egregious, like covering up for Flynn and others who were in collusion with Russian agents, and impeachment will essentially be inevitable, with McConnell, Ryan, et al disclaiming any responsiblity for having bolstered Trump, and we’ll either have a trial, or he’ll just resign one way or another to avoid responsiblity and blaming everyone in sight via Twitter about how unfair it is. And then…we’ll have President Pence, who also won’t talk to Angela Merkel, not because he is a supercilious dickhead but his wife won’t let him.
Just remember this: Trump is not normal in the sense that an elephant shouldn’t water ski, and the Republican party fell in line behind him in full knowledge of that fact and should be held accountable for Trump’s election. A pox on the lot of them.
There was a LOT more to Nixon’s story than “covering up complicity in a burglary and cursing on tape.”
All of the Trump impeachment talk I’ve heard so far, is based on relative nonsense. Lying in a campaign, saying crude things about women, and saying stupid things on twitter aren’t impeachable offenses. Nixon wasn’t in trouble for LYING, he was in trouble for using the power of the Presidency to actively undermine and even prevent the prosecution of actual crimes, and for misusing Federal government resources to actively break the law, such as having someone break into the offices of a political opponents doctors office, in order to get “dirt” on him.
I expect that what will be found when the investigations of Trump and his peoples’ interactions with Russia are complete, is that Trump allowed his ego and his gullibility to rule him, and ended up saying a lot of really inane positive things about Putin, but that he didn’t actually sell the US out.
Some of his supporting crowd might be found to have similarly ignored all good judgment, and cooperated to criminally twist the recent elections in their favor with Putin’s help. Some even took money, I think genuinely letting their anti-Democratic anti-Liberal bias cause them to deride the laws that they KNEW THEY WERE BREAKING.
Unless Trump actively interferes with the investigation and prosecution (should that occur) by firing the investigators (like Nixon did), he wont have done anything that rises to the level of impeachable offense. ESPECIALLY since his own party controls both houses.
The only reason why Clinton was impeached for lying about diddling Lewinski, was because the Republicans were looking for ANY excuse to overturn the American Peoples’ vote. Had Clinton been a Republican, the very same self-righteous people who loftily complained that “he lied under oath,” would have sniffed and passed it off as meaningless.
Not impervious, but also not really pervious yet. Trump has done lots of stuff that confirms to people who didn’t vote for him that he really, really should not be president, but he hasn’t done very much to alienate people who DID vote for him. As yet, if you’re predisposed to like him and make excuses for him, nothing egregious has happened to change that; if you are predisposed not to pay attention to the news at all, everything seems like business as usual.
I think that could change very fast if Trump makes a major screwup that is clearly his fault, like a botched disaster response or a military adventure that goes badly; if the economy takes a downturn (regardless of whether it is Trump’s fault); or if 2018 turns out to be a major Democratic wave election (in which case, the surviving Republicans are likely to view it as his fault).
The public won’t get to decide on Trump’s fate until November 3, 2020.
Between now and then, it’s Congress that has the power to remove him from office so their opinion matters more than the public’s. Congress is controlled by the Republicans for now and they seem to feel Trump’s a benefit to them - or at least not enough of a liability to be worth impeaching. That may change between now and 2020.
The other possibility is that the Democrats might take control of Congress in 2018 and they might weigh the issue differently.
Considering it’s still Trump’s first hundred days in office and people are discussing impeachment, I hardly feel it’s justified to say he’s impervious.
You might want to read this. The Senate Intelligence committee is probably the main effort on the Congressional side and has been investigating since before the inauguration. That committee includes Graham and Rubio with McCain as an ex-officio member due to his role as Armed Services chair. (“Alex, who are three Republicans who hate Trump? Russian involvement for $800 next.” ) It’s the Intelligence Committee dealing with potentially sensitive if not outright classified information. That means they can, and are, holding closed hearings with the details not available to the public. You won’t see much insta-google-tweet-faced till they are done and release unclassified findings. That’s not the same as not investigating.
Oh and this week House oversight committee: Flynn might have broken the law. It’s about not disclosing payments from the Russians on his security clearance application and in violation of the Emoluments Clause. It’s meatier than the possibly unconstitutional Logan Act issue that we knew about. That gives a bigger stick for a deal to possibly get him to testify on other issues.
Oh and the DOD inspector general was already investigating those claims against Flynn before the announcement.
And then see President Pence try to turn the US into a Christian theocracy? Of course, Pence’s ultra-religious ultra-rightness is compensated by his complete lack of charisma which would make his 2020 odds a little long.
I was under the impression that they needed actual evidence of an impeachable offense BEFORE they could begin the impeachment process.
So what have you got?
There’s Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters who is constantly demanding impeachment, in spite of the lack of evidence of an actual impeachable offense, because she’s a bitter, old, over-the-hill, Californian who hates old white male Trump.
It wouldn’t take much effort on your part to goad Waters into doing your bidding.
Impeachment proceedings are always deeply political and presumably can start for any reason or none at all.
That said, the OP seems to be wondering why the President’s own party doesn’t impeach him for outraging the other party. I don’t understand why one would think that would ever happen.
He’s highly impeachable. The GOP controls the congress and he’s not really one of theirs. They’d prefer Pence as president. They need a motivation to do it and that’s mostly likely to be Trump embarrassing the party. They’ll need an excuse also, his conflicts of interest are sufficient, and more serious matters could turn up. That doesn’t mean they will impeach him, but it’s a rare to have the circumstance where a president’s own party could benefit from his impeachment.
Yeah, you think he’s impervious let there be a wave election in 2018. There’ll be hearings and motions of impeachment before you can say ‘emoluments clause’.
And vice versa. If all the outrage still leaves plenty of Republican voters to keep Congress red, it won’t matter. I kind of despair about that, it kind of feels like it won’t matter. Nothing Trump is doing now is new, it was all foreshadowed by his 50 years of publicly known history before the election. He’s acting exactly like you would predict.
Well. To be honest, he’s doing worse than I would have predicted. I figured Trump would be a greedy bastard/asshole, but I assumed he’d be an effective asshole. Not someone who throws out useless executive orders or backs down from one of his desired goals in an instant.