No question about it: this is a game changer. The president is in a race against time. He has until January of 2021 to destroy the constitution and the rule of law, or face the possibility of jail. He is in a war for his own survival, and he intends to survive. And he has now hired a team of loyalists who will enable him, and put them in positions of very real power. It’s not just fluid political power we’re talking about, but real power to inflict real pain on his enemies, including but not limited to significant periods of incarceration of his opponents and those associated with them.
I reach a different conclusion. The public knows that Trump has criminal tendencies. They knew it when they voted for him. They just didn’t care. They believed that Washington was a broken mess and that we needed a superman to clean it up. We went into this eyes wide open. The public isn’t blind to Trump’s nasty personality. What they are blind to is the consequences that this will have, and how he will impact them personally. Releasing the Mueller report won’t change that, only the realization that Trump is a complete and total joke of a president will.
If the public had really wanted to get rid of Trump they would have given Democrats control in both the House and Senate. They did not. They do what usually happens mid-way through a president’s term, which is to provide a check on the incumbent party’s power. There’s no fewer than 5 investigations right now.
I would agree about the absurdity if Trump weren’t doing everything possible to get impeached. This isn’t a case of him being a bully; this is about his survival. This isn’t the playground; this is a street fight, a jungle fight. This is a political battle to determine what kind of country we become after 2020, and I’ve got some bad news (or maybe some good news): the voters themselves will have to be the ones to assert their will and their power.
I think she’s doing fine with the impeachment thing.
Figure out your deadline, keep digging, get McGahn up there, get Hope Hicks up there, get Mueller up there, see if you can get the “in favor” numbers up, let Trump get worse, see where things stand when you get to the drop dead point for pulling the trigger.
Pollsters of course are asking “are you in favor?” instead of or in addition to “has he committed impeachable offenses?”
I’d kinda like to see them impeach and put Mitch in a box. Refusing to have a trial might wake some people up. And a trial would be fabulous.
Just imagine, if Putin thinks Trump is no longer useful, a pee tape miraculously shows up and is entered into evidence. That would top anything in the Starr Report.
I wish I weren’t so cynical, but I am. I don’t believe any of the above is true. It will probably motivate the anti-Trump base, but they hardly need more motivation. I suspect a Clintonian impeachment backfire is a bit more likely to be the final outcome.
Argue it is the right thing to do morally and I’ll shrug my shoulders and say “yeah, I guess.” Argue it is the smart move politically and I’m just going to frown and shake my head sadly no.
Everybody needs to stop calling that orange buffoon a “street fighter” and “survivor”. He is neither. Giving him those labels is lavishing favorable attributes he’s never shown himself to possess.
The man is a fucking imbecile and a vile lying coward. Being able to lie his way through a series of failing businesses does not make him a survivor. Can anyone imagine for even a fraction of a second him being able to withstand a good backhanded bitch slap? Of course not. He would collapse in a sobbing ugly orange heap of snot, piss and shit, at the wind up.
And those who continues to support him, even in a tacit way, are festering hemorrhoids on his fat orange ass.
I don’t understand. Does RTFirefly want to rush an Impeachment Motion through the House and watch Senate dismiss? And then what?
I’m sure you play 3-D political chess much better than I do. Pelosi’s playing 5-D chess. And she knows her opponent is the proverbial goose who struts around knocking over pieces and defecating on the board.
Just look at the recent GOP excesses. They are retweeting phony YouTubes about “Crazy Nancy” while slurring their own tweets and, increasingly more obviously, behaving like an underage brat. (The recent posed video lacked, even from his top aides, the sort of sycophancy we’re used to. I’d not be surprised to see another major defection soon.)
Recent Trump behavior is as criminal and despicable as anything in the Mueller Report. He’s being goaded into playing the fool. The Ds have the power to call witnesses and TV cameras, even without an Impeachment Motion pending. In defying the subpoenas, Trump and his gang will commit more crimes, openly.
If the asshole runs for re-election, I hope someone’s ad shows the tax statements — over a decade Trump’s Billions in Losses exceeded by a factor of ten whoever is in second place — while an actor imitating Trump says something like “All the best stable geniuses like to lose several billion dollars. Hell, now I’m Chief Dingbat, maybe I’ll lose trillions!”
Like a romantic interlude that peaks only slowly, there is no need to rush things. Let investigations go on, while the lists of charges and defendants grow. At the end let the Ds shake their heads and say “We didn’t want to this; (and obviously they should have had an ‘Intervention’). But as is, we’re left no choice.”
I think there are two schools of thought, one of which hypothesizes that by starting the official impeachment process, the investigations into Trump will become more newsworthy, get more coverage, make Trump look worse, become a round-the-clock, 24-hour news story, and IIUC, put more pressure on Republicans to pressure the WH to release more information about the investigations and all things related to Trump. If all this happens, maybe, just maybe, his poll numbers crater and Republicans concede that it’s time to give up on MAGA. I concede that this is possible, but ultimately conclude that the outcome is far from certain, and I tend to view this outcome as very unlikely.
If you look at the timeline for Nixon’s impeachment, Nixon’s poll numbers collapsed during the investigative and pre-impeachment phases of the scandal. The testimony of insiders like John Dean wasn’t during the impeachment phase, but the pre-impeachment phrase. It was also during the pre-impeachment phase that other events began to take their toll on the president’s standing, like the resignation of Nixon’s FBI director who destroyed some of Howard Hunt’s files. There was the resignation of the Vice President. There was the firing of Archibald Cox. There was Bork. There was also the start of a pretty severe economic decline, and we had basically conceded defeat in Vietnam and knew that our conflict there was coming to a messy, messy close. Everything in toto led to the collapse of Nixon’s popularity. The current situation is just different in so many ways.
This doesn’t mean that Trump’s popularity will last forever, though, and I think that is what Pelosi is keeping in mind. She’s playing the long game. It’s pointless to start impeachment when, at minimum, there’s no evidence to suggest that it would cause a seismic shift in the electorate. Trump’s already surpassed Nixonian level depravity, and he’s done it in plain view. We can think that he shouldn’t get away with this all we want, but like it or not, the rest of the country has to be convinced and persuaded that it’s not in their interests to support Trump or the GOP. I think Pelosi wants to keep the pressure on Trump knowing that he will eventually do something that will turn the country against him. Moreover, whether the public can ultimately be convinced that impeachment is necessary or not, she understands that it is far better to let the public walk away from the Trump era with the feeling that the result reflects the popular will.
They have the theoretical power - which would be helped along if they’d apply some damn sanctions already - but iDJiT and disBarr are impeding the process.
To beat my old, tired drum, Barr wants SCOTUS to rule the unitary executive theory into law. If the Dems don’t circumvent that tut suite, impeachment and removal won’t mean a damn. We’ll have authoritarian rule with no end in sight.
Quicksilver, asahi, and septimus: some really good stuff there, kudos. Just one quibble with asahi:
This is a misreading of that election. Democrats won 23 of the Senate races last fall, while Republicans won only ten. The only state that elected a Republican senator (very narrowly) that is not deep red was Florida. And they were choosing between an increasingly popular, pragmatic governor (surprising given what a right wing nut he started out as) and a left wing black candidate.
I haven’t seen the video you are referring to, but I think you are on to something. I have been mulling what thread to post this in, but now I’ll just put it here: even before you wrote this, my Spidey sense was telling me something is going on behind the scenes in the GOP ranks. I listen to the National Review podcast The Editors every week (along with left-leaning pods like the Slate Political Gabfest). The usual configuration of that pod is that David French represents the Never Trump perspective (while still sometimes criticizing Democratic “overreach” in attacking Trump), while the other three panelists allow as how Trump might be a little uncouth, but he and his cronies are basically defended as being in the right. For instance, just a few weeks ago, all of them but French were totally defending Barr’s characterization of the Mueller report and mocking Democrats like Adam Schiff.
This week, without any overt explanation, it was a very different tone. They discussed the tweetstorm from Republican congressman Jusin Amash (MI) and the backlash he has received from House Republican leadership including Kevin McCarthy.
Not one of them agreed with McCarthy: they insisted that being conservative should not mean being a “Trumpite” or being a “party hack”. And not one of them criticized Amash or even accused him of going too far. In fact, they lavished praise on him.
The most they could all offer was that impeachment would not be “prudential” “this close to an election”. Wow. Where did this come from? Are they hearing rumblings from the Cabinet or top aides? Stay tuned.
I’m not disputing that the Democrats scored a pretty convincing victory in the last mid-term election, but what I’m saying is that if the country had been really determined to get Trump out of office, Democratic senators would have swept Missouri, Indiana, Florida, and North Dakota.
Sorry if I sound like a broken record, but as I’ve opined before, Trump is painfully ignorant and incompetent in terms of actually being president, but he understands how to manipulate people. He lies because he knows that many people want to believe his lies. He understands the dynamics of power between people.
At times, to some extent. What masterful game was he playing when he attacked John McCain months after he died? Does he really sound convincing to anyone when he repeatedly calls himself a “stable genius”? Are there really people so dumb as to not hear the incredible insecurity in that? Or to not see the conflict between “I’ll hire the best people” and then insulting everyone who started his administration as “dumb as a rock” etc.?
…but she isn’t playing 5-D chess. She’s playing high-stakes poker and she only has a pair of nine’s while he’s got 4 aces hidden up his sleeve.
Pelosi is gambling. She’s gambling that things aren’t going to get worse. She’s gambling that her strategy will pay off at the elections. But the cards are stacked: and not in her favour.
Yep. This is propaganda. And it works. This isn’t a sign that “we are winning.”
The current Dem strategy means no consequences to defying the subpoenas and no consequences for committing more crime, openly. If they aren’t going to impeach then they should be ramping up the hearings. They should be doing more than what they are doing. But they are not.
I have a lot of time and respect for Pelosi. But she isn’t perfect. The way she handled Ilhan Omar was to be quite frank: pathetic. She lost a lot of currency with marginalised people when she threw Omar under the bus. So as much as I respect her I don’t have blind faith in her and you shouldn’t either.
This isn’t a fucking romantic interlude. People will die. People have died. Between now and the next election the Trump administration will continue its rampage and a lot of people are going to get hurt. The very least you and others can do is to acknowledge this. If she isn’t going to impeach then so-be-it. But she and those that support her decision better make fucking sure that the decision pays off. That means doing more than pretending that we are in a “romantic interlude” until the next elections. Many people don’t have the luxury to be able to wait until the elections. They are paying the price now.
I think they see it as an act. His supporters don’t take the schtick seriously; they take his pugnacity seriously, and they see strength in his defiance of his critics and prosecutors. Trump takes advantage of people’s ignorance. Trump is doing serious, long-lasting damage to the United States government in innumerable ways, but the average person doesn’t see it because they’re ignorant. Things look normal, like they always have, except that there’s more noise on TV and more ranting on their Facebook wall.
I don’t know if it’s been pointed out before, but SDMB is not really indicative of the mood of the country. It leans pretty hard left. A lot of issues that seem weighty to us just aren’t in the minds of many voters. Even among those who don’t like Trump the person, they can on some level appreciate the fact that he’s an unconventional politician who’s fighting back against the political establishment. Trump understands how the mind of the average TV-watching Joe works. He’s been playing to crowds for decades.
I’d also point out that he’s far more familiar with the inner bowels of politics than a lot of people realize, going back to his Roy Cohn and early Manhattan real estate days. He doesn’t always understand the law, but he understands how to break the law, how to get others to break the law, and how to get everyone else to look the other way or settle up in court. He’s been doing that for years. He would have been right at home in Tammany Hall.
She’s working with the power that she has. Impeachment would simply be an escalation, and there’s no evidence that it would work. As I pointed out (either here or elsewhere), when Nixon’s popularity collapsed, it happened during the pre-impeachment phase when there were already investigations, live testimony, and resignations. All of the kinds of things that began to bring down Nixon’s popularity in 1973 have happened already during the first 2 years of Trump, and guess what? Trump’s popularity is pretty much the same as it always was.
There is no evidence - zero, zilch, nada, nothing - that impeachment would be anything more than just an intensified version of what we’ve had the last 2 years. People who think that it would move the 10-15% of people in the middle have no evidence to support that prediction. The sad reality that a lot of us here on SDMB don’t want to accept is that, in some respects, this country has changed from 1974. In some ways, our values have changed. We have lower expectations about the presidency now - maybe because of the aftermath of the Nixon, Clinton, and GW Bush’s presidencies. Things that would have been outrageous a generation or two ago, like serial philandering, manipulating intelligence, and graft, are tolerated now. A large part of the population is so cynical that they believe that this is just part of politics. The thinking goes, “As long as I’ve got an income, whatever they do doesn’t really affect me.” That may not be how Dopers view it, but that’s how a lot of the country feels.
Pelosi gets it. She knows that using the Constitution and the rule of law itself isn’t going to beat Trump. He’s not going to let himself be defeated that way. She knows that the most practical way to defeat Trump is to let Trump and his Republican enablers hang themselves with their own rope. She understands that Trump is a terrible president and that, in time, that will be evident to many more people than it is now. The trade war is already causing pain; it will cause even more pain because that’s where Trump’s ignoance will have a price. The anti-abortion radicals are going to make the party as a whole less popular - they probably already have. GOP economics aren’t that popular even in a growing economy, and they’ll be a lot less popular in an economy that’s contracting.
Meanwhile, by showing a modicum of restraint in re impeachment, she’s not revealing cowardice. She’s not doing nothing. There are still ongoing investigations. There are still subpoenas. There are court filings. There is a LOT that is keeping Trump and his defenders working overtime to save what is ultimately going to be a failed presidency. And when she has the opportunity to do so she uses Trump’s aggression against him, just like she did during the government shutdown and just like she did with the infrastructure meeting. She knows what she’s doing. She’s letting Trump beat himself, because she knows he will. And he might take the entire party down with him.
Great visuals!