Is this the issue [conflict of interest] that is actually going to bring Trump down?

Politics & Elections
21

It’s not just conflict of interest. He’s about to school the nation on exactly how much legal restraint does NOT exist over he President’s activities. Conflict of interest, nepotism, bullying the free press, raiding the treasury, and much, MUCH, more.

He’s filling his cabinet and west wing with deplorable, incompetents mostly, to avoid any future prosecution, I suspect. When things get too hot he’ll can a couple of them, and replace them with others of the same level. The revolving door will again, insure prosecution (where there actually ARE laws to break! Not many!), would be complicated, if not next to impossible.

Now take him away from watching eyes in DC, and leave him in NY, (a cool mil a day for protection!), and he’s got a built in ‘the wife, the kid, the butler’, ''recalls", he was/wasn’t present for /home that day, etc, etc, etc, on endlessly.

(Bonus points for getting the tax payers paying his inflated rent in NY city, to none other than…Donald Trump! )

Creating a shadow government, in NY, of his kids makes them all untouchable as well. I mean, seriously, whatcha gonna do about it?

Y’all need to buckle up, this boy is just getting started! He’s not even in office yet, he’s just setting up the game board.

The racism, while disgusting, is nothing more than a distraction. It ALWAYS grabs press, makes the talking heads spin etc, etc. He won’t hesitate to use it, again, and again, so no one will see what he’s actually up to.

And when they do? I think they’ll discover, far too late, there is nothing that can be done to stop him ultimately. Y’all just gave the wiliest of foxes the keys to the biggest hen house on earth. It’s gonna be a wild ride.

(I firmly believe, the level of overt, shameless: profiteering, influence pedalling, nepotism, financial manipulation, etc, etc, is going to be truly breathtaking!)

22

I don’t see conflict of interest being a significant factor with Trump.
He isn’t going to resign over it.
The Republican House won’t impeach him for it.
No court can order him out of the office.
His base doesn’t care.
There isn’t enough Democratic power in Washington to order a cup of coffee right now.

I don’t see how this will be significant. Every time the publicity gets uncomfortable, Trump will just tweet SQUIRREL! and the media and social media will drop whatever they are discussing and run over to Trump.

It isn’t going to be an issue because no one who has the power in Washington wants to make it an issue.

23

That sounds delightful. In the Utah State Senate the joke is that the Democrats are a “one-pizza caucus”. There are, I think 5 of them.

24

My God I’m glad I live in California. This election gave the Democrats supermajorities in both houses here.

25

Once he places a new Supreme Court Justice for the Republicans, his only value to the party lies in his ability to maintain popularity.

As yet, he had never won a popular vote, not even within the Republican party. There is no massive ground support for the man and the Republican party’s victory this year had more to do with Hilary and the economy in the Rust Belt than it had to do with anything Trump ever did. His polling only ever went up when he was being quiet and party faithful had some time to talk themselves back into supporting him after one of his big appearances. Every time he was big in the news, his polling went down.

Trump’s only has two ways to stay/become popular, and both of them require him to follow through on his promises. He either needs to resuscitate the Rust Belt or he needs to cut out lobbying, add term limits, and put it to the banking system (e.g. drain the swamp).

Bringing back the Rust Belt is probably impossible. Closing off trading with China and Mexico is going to hurt the people he’s trying to help more than it is going to help them (in the short run at least. Maybe with 20 years of tariffs in place, low quality goods manufacturing might move back to the US for domestic demand, but no one’s going to move their production back here unless they’re pretty sure that the trade blocks are going to stay in place. And even then, setting up those factories is going to take a few years.) And, similarly, he’s probably not going to get a lot of support from the banking community, for this purpose, due to the lack of probable success, and certainly not if he’s spending his time penalizing them for the banking crisis of the Bush years.

And in the other track, if he opens the spigots on the banks, then he’ll piss off the people who supported him. And if he tries to establish term limits or shut down the lobby system, he’s going to be up against the Republican party. And as said, if he has already appointed a Supreme Court Justice, he basically has no leverage against them.

And if we look at what he is actually doing, he’s creating a highly nepotistic government, he’s appointing lobbyists to his staff, he’s planning to de-regulate the banks, etc. On the whole, he’s doing most of what he can to ruin his support from the electorate on path #2.

So unless you think he will do better on path #1 than he is doing, or liable to do, on path #2, I think it’s reasonable to say that he’s not going to find much support from the people. If he works on establishing term limits, he’s going to anger the party. The party would almost certainly prefer to have a President Pence than a President Trump. And so, again, unless he can maintain a popularity rating higher than the Republican Legislature, he will have to keep a clean, (literally) unimpeachable lifestyle.

Trump’s only chance to survive is to not nominate a Supreme Court Justice until he’s cleaned the swamp. It is the only leverage he has in his office as President against the Republican party.

26

That’s not really leverage. Because Acting President Pence can also appoint a Supreme Court Justice. That’s actually the main reason I want Trump to do it–he may pick someone who will backfire, and then we won’t have to worry about anyone else dying.

Then impeach him or declare him mentally unsound.

27

The GOP Congress would certainly prefer Pence to Trump, but they recognize that Trump has the ability to sell programs they badly want sold to the American people–chiefly privatization of Social Security, Medicare, and K-12 education. There are literal fortunes to made from all the privatization the Republicans want to do.

Pence wouldn’t be much good at selling all this. He wasn’t personally popular in Indiana and it seems doubtful that he’ll achieve personal popularity with the nation as a whole.

So the Congress is pretty much stuck with Trump until he can achieve all the big-cash grabs the Republicans have been drooling to commit for years. Once he’s done it, though, they might go for impeachment—IF Trump and his many, many military cronies haven’t already sewn up martial law and a Presidency-for-Life.

And that’s a big “if.”

28

If Trump continues to piss off China, they will have a word in some very influential ears, and Trump will be tossed out before he knows what is up.

World commerce is very integrated now. China has the power to fuck things up so that the multi-billionaires lose a fortune. Sure, China will be hurt, but they are thinking long term - they can weather a much, much worse situation than the US (think famines leaving millions dead… China has survived this before and could again). The US would capitulate in a second.
I think that the election of Trump has just sped up the inevitable… The decline of the US as a world power and the rise of China to the #1 position.

Right now, I’m confident that leadership in China is making plans.

29

And that was over a decade ago.

30

They would not be able to impeach him during a battle between the Legislature and the Executive branch over term limits and lobbying regulations. If he decides to take them on, over those two, the people will back the President. But he would probably not be able to win over them without something to trade.

31

I can’t find his Tweet directly, but the OP quotes Mr. Trump:

[Oh yes he can!

](http://bigstory.ap.org/article/democrats-cite-govt-trump-must-divest-dc-hotel)Will Mr. Trump fight this?

32

He’ll ignore it.

33

Governor of the Moon, Newt Gingrich, says we should just get over it. Businessmen gotta do what businessmen do.

34

He will simply appoint a new member of the GSA, who will either find no problem with the existing contract, or re-write it to eliminate the troublesome clause.

Elected and rank and file Republicans will say “who cares, whatever, yawn”, while Trump rakes in the money.

Trump is in this for the money he can make. Elected Republicans are in this to eliminate government services in medical care, social security and education, and turn these money-makers over to their private sector donors.

35

^ That is the most accurate 36-word description of our current situation that I’ve seen (or expect to see).