Forget political party lines… the Circus that has become this Presidency has crossed into realms that previously would have strained believability in Hollywood.
On top of the first 100+ days, I have learned so much more from Trump in just the last 48 hours…
It is almost IMPOSSIBLE for a republican to win a Presidential election (never mind more republicans have been POTUS than democrats)
Trump invented the term “Prime the Pump”
Despite Comey testifying to the fact… Trump is not even convinced that there actually IS an FBI investigation to the Russia investigations!
Trump has zero backbone to tell Putin the timing of having Lavrov visit the WH is a bit off… “what am I supposed to do tell Putin no?” YES you cowardly liar… that is EXACTLY what you do!
Trump will lie early, often and boldly… yet apparently the rank and file GOP simply do not seem to care so long as they can keep their power base.
I am forced to excuse idiot douchebags like Jeffery Lord and Kellyanne Conway because they are incented and lining their pockets to defend his lies, but how can any normal citizen, even those that despise Clinton (which i get!!) be anything other than enraged, insulted and honest to goodness scared of what Trump might do to this country?
Is there anything Trump can do short of mass murder for republicans to quit playing “team ball” and stop circling the wagons for the Orange Judas?
Except in certain specific circumstances, lying is not a high crime or misdemeanor. Absent evidence of a crime, Congress, and particularly a Republican Congress, is not going to impeach the president. Which is not to say that the things he has done and said are acceptable. But impeachment requires something more than abhorrent behavior.
I think our best bet is to work on changing the makeup of the House in the 2018 election.
No, it doesn’t have to end in impeachment. And impeachment doesn’t mean he’ll lose the office (Clinton).
If you want change, then do your best to get him voted out in four years, and work towards the midterms in the mean time to try and mitigate the damage you think he’ll cause.
You might want to try polishing your talking points before taking Tzigone’s advice though. If you address people like you did in the OP, they’ll probably just tune you out.
While I am limited to what I can read in the news - which isn’t necessarily a neutral or well-informed medium in all cases - I think it’s pretty likely that Trump is a “target rich environment” and that the only thing saving him from half a dozen impeachment hearings on a variety of fronts is the fact that the Republican party is in charge.
If the Democratic party has anyone of any intelligence at all running it, they should already have a number of independent agents investigating the President on a number of fronts, even besides anything that the Democratic congressmen are aware of from sitting on the committees overseeing the various Russian investigations. With two years of time spent researching, I would expect that the time it takes (should the Democrats overtake the House in 2018) from the new congress being seated to impeachment hearings beginning could probably be on the order of a few weeks at most.
Of course, being impeached doesn’t mean being knocked out of the game. There’s a 2/3rds majority requirement for conviction in the Senate, and that will be difficult to get even if the Senate turns Democratic in 2018 (at most it will be just over the 50% line).
The most likely things to be found and successfully prosecuted are probably going to be financial misdeeds and ethics violations. These can all be cleared up if Trump is willing to finally cut himself out of his businesses. I would expect that the Republican party would offer him a trade that if he sells everything, they’ll vote to save him. And he’ll accept, because if he loses the presidency after having it revealed in public that he has a large number of financial crimes, he’s going to lose his businesses anyways.
I think it’s more likely that Trump takes a financial loss than that he loses the Presidency to impeachment.
Now if it is discovered that he helped the Russians during the campaign or that he traded several billion dollars for favorable interactions, he will be removed by the Republicans. But there’s really no knowing how likely such evidence is to surface, even if Trump is guilty as sin. It would be a hell of a show, but I suspect that the Russia connection is going to lead to Trump’s taxes and finances being revealed, which will in turn reveal that he is insolvent or has severe ethics transgressions before it is going to reveal that he is a traitor. Russian collusion is just really hard to prove, particularly given that the Russians will have required an impressive level of cleanliness if such a deal was made. They may have left tantalizing tidbits behind, but probably no smoking guns.
So, no, I don’t think that he’ll end in impeachment. He’ll be impeached up the wazoo, but he’ll last to 2020 unless he resigns or is assassinated by James Comey.
I don’t wish physical harm on anyone (well, technically speaking I guess you didn’t either - but that post comes awfully close).
Remember how some school kids cheered when JFK was shot? That was appalling. Those kids probably grew up to be Trump supporters. I don’t want to be like them.
Technically Congress can impeach and convict for whatever they want to. High crime and midemeanor is not defined and there is no appeal to a higher authority.
That said, as a practical matter they need more than not liking his haircut and certainly the president’s own party would need something egregious before they’d impeach.
Looking at McConnell one wonders if there is anything that would be too much for him.
What you really mean is congress is not going to impeach even if there is clear evidence of a crime UNLESS the public outrage is so big that are at risk of losing seats in the next election.
In case you missed it, Trump used the phrase “prime the pump” as an economic metaphor in an interview and then claimed he had just invented that metaphor. The reporter said that it was a common metaphor. Trump said that he had never heard it used before. Recordings have shown Trump himself using the phrase several times in the past.
So to answer the OP’s question, I don’t necessarily think Trump will be impeached. I’ve seen the trial balloons getting floated about Trump’s forgetfulness. I think when Trump becomes too much of a liability for the Republicans, they’ll invoke the 25th and say that he’s starting to become senile. That lets them remove him from office without having to admit to any crimes.
Dementia or Alzheimer’s ??? So the other possibility of course is that Trump could be removed from office under 25th Amendment Section 4 for being “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”.
He tires of it. Being POTUS is exhausting and unpleasant. With his temperament, and a 70-year old’s stamina, it’s well possible he can’t last that long.
Republicans realize that Trump will sink their electoral ship. This may happen if, say, polls fully one year in advance of the 2018 or 2020 elections show the GOP in a deep, deep hole - iceberg ahead, but still time for the Titanic to change course. When that happens they may turn on him in a way that even Democrats might not. They owe him no loyalty.