I’ve come to believe that the real crux of Russiagate is that the Trump base, along with about 75% of the Republican Party leadership - know that the Trump team colluded and they don’t care. They think it was a good thing. They actually think Putin’s interests are more closely aligned with the US than Hillary’s. This is the new patriotism.
So, he’ll never be punished, no matter what they do or what they find. He’ll probably be re-elected. Or else he’ll have Kushner or Ivanka run and they’ll be elected.
Well, we might get a test of GOP mettle. Trump floating the idea of replacing Sessions with Giulliani, who himself might be part of the investigation into Russian ties, thus having a very good reason to massage the laws.
I’m seeing a bit more pessimism here than seems warranted. Yes, a significant minority of American voters seem to have been completely brainwashed, but THEY ARE A MINORITY. Due to gerrymandering and demography, the Democrats need to win the nationwide Congressional popular vote by about 7% to actually control the House. Right now, 538’s polling average has them with nearly a 10% lead. Once they have the House, they control the Congressional investigation and can start an impeachment process.
Yes, it’s quite possible that Trump will be able to maintain the loyalty of enough GOP Senators to stay in office to the conclusion of his term, and that his use of the pardon power will enable many of his cronies to avoid prison. Who cares? The important thing is that his Presidency lead to catastrophic Republican defeats in 2018 and 2020.
Of course, it is a highly uncertain situation and there is a lot of time before the elections, but right now the situation seems to call more for cautious, non-overconfident optimism than for wringing of hands and howling “We’re doomed! Doomed, I say!”.
Exactly. Republican congressmen care only about the small minority of committed Republican primary voters who will get them the nomination. From there, Gerrymandering will insure that they are elected. As long as the 20% of core Trump supporters remain on-side then congress will tut-tut about Trump and do nothing.
(ETA - if and when they do nothing after Sessions and Mueller are both gone, and the pardons have been issued, then is the time for MASSIVE demonstrations. I’m talking Solidarity/Arab Spring levels, with strikes, and massive numbers in the streets. Nothing less than that will have any effect.)
Is it just me, or does Kushner’s public statement today where he didn’t know the details of why they were meeting, wasn’t there for the relevant parts of the meeting where the campaign may have come up, and wasn’t around when any papers were or were not transferred appear designed to separate himself from Junior?
He’s not denying the facts of the case, just that he wasn’t involved in the dirty parts.
How does the “post truth” cycle work? I assume you’ve studied up.
For someone who thinks I’m not in the present you sure can do a lot of confident declaring about what happens next. You notice I’m not doing that. I’m trying to parse the realities. We may be in a new reality, but even that new reality will probably not look like a prediction you make today. You have to admit reasonable people can disagree about definitive pronouncements about future events. You cannot address events that are this unusual with old lenses, even ones that are 1 or 2 years old.
You don’t seem to want to make a distinction between trump voters and the nation as a whole for one thing.
I’m still not sure why you think goldfish pardons are a win for the goldfish. I think reality tends to intrude on this kind of thinking. You don’t seem to be able to use your super powers of foresight to project what happens next, meaning also for you and me, clinton voters, the rest of the world, you know, people that exist in the present. Without truth we are in for a clash. I don’t know how you can pin this down to a time frame.
Trump voters have Republican congressmen by the balls. And Trump voters do not believe in facts. They do not respond to logic. They do not listen to reasonable analysis.
They believe what Dear Leader tells them, via his tweets and via places like Alex Jones’ Infowars, World Net Daily and the National Enquirer. Everyone else is the enemy, and cannot be trusted. Putin is now their friend.
And Republican Congressmen cannot win a primary without them. They know this. So they will do nothing.
What I’m saying is that you can’t sit back and think “the political system” will work. and reasonableness will be restored. It won’t work, and we are now in a different era. Don’t count on the politicians - they are compromised. Count on yourself and your fellow citizens to do something. It may get ugly. But you will have to take action, and not wait for the system to put things back to normal.
Something I’m surprised hasn’t come up; why aren’t rich liberal people using the power of the dollar?
It’s well known that GOP politicians are heavily bought and sold by the likes of the Koch brothers and other moneyed interests, but there’s billionaire liberals, too. Why not get them to primary-fund the career destruction of Congresspeople who refuse to oppose Trump? I’m told these Hollywood elites have money; they should start using it. “Impeach Trump or I’ll give your primary opponent’s campaign twenty million dollars.” That’d get attention.
One slight (SLIGHT!) reason for optimism on that front is that they’re both canny enough operators that you wouldn’t see any evidence. That is, Paul Ryan might be 85% convinced that it will be necessary to impeach Trump in the next month… but giving any public hint to that effect would be crossing the Rubicon. Because if he’s seen to be pro-impeachment, he’s instantly burned all bridges with Trump and anyone who is truly pro-Trump.
As for the general “Republican congressmen and senators won’t impeach Trump as long as they want him in office to keep advancing their Republican agenda”, why would that be any less true of Pence? If public opinion turns sharply against Trump, there’s no real reason for pubbie elected officials not to throw him under the bus.
I bolded that last part because I think you’re probably right on this point as well, unfortunately. I think that post-truth will end when the people who don’t believe in truth ultimately get smacked in the head with its consequences. But that’s not going to happen when the economy’s at almost at full employment and the stock market’s at record highs. Trump’s supporters have the luxury of believing him. They voted to make their country ‘theirs’ again.
I think RickJay is looking at world history and seeing dangerous parallels. Honestly the Republican party’s support of disastrous foreign and economic policies should have sunk it a decade ago. And yet here we are with the right wing controlling pretty much most of the federal government and more than 2/3 of states. Trump should never have even been considered anything other than a joke candidate and shouldn’t have made it past the first TV debate. And yet here he is, our president. He’s a president who tells lie after outrageous lie, accuses his predecessors and former public officials of committing serious crimes without any proof in an attempt to stop investigations into his own conduct. I mean, honestly, drad dog, you’re not getting it: this is not how a normal, functional democracy behaves. This is how a democracy behaves when its democratic institutions are on their deathbed.
You seem confident that pardons would be the final straw. I can only hope so, because what’s not been said yet is that, if that turns out not to be the last straw, then we essentially have a president who is now above the law and can do what he wants with impunity. This might well be the last straw, but it might also be the last opportunity to stop an American despot.
Well, because there’s tens of millions of voters who’d be furious at them. Whatever his politics, no one voted for Mike Pence outside of his family; he’s not even popular in his own state. He’s boring. No matter his politics, if you impeach Trump, you’re impeaching the Only One Who Could Fix It, the guy who can Make American Great Again, and a guy who will be absolutely tearing Mike Pence fifteen new assholes a day in the media if Pence has the nerve to succeed him.
The thing about strongman politics is that it’s about the man, not the office.
I remember when George H. W. Bush lost the election people made fun of him for not outlasting Saddam Hussein in office. Those people were fools. George H. W. Bush was not the important figure in American politics, the people were. Bush was an officeholder, the 41st (well, really, 40th; they count Cleveland twice) to hold it in an unbroken, Constitutionally sound line of succession back to 1789. On January 20, 1993, someone else was the President, but it was still the President. Saddam Hussein WAS the Iraqi political system. He was succeeded, in any constitutional sense, by no one at all. The U.S. Presidency outlived him.
Trump and his Trumpists really see Trump a lot more like Saddam Hussein than they do liek George H.W. Bush. It’s not the office that matters at all - which is why decency and law don’t matter to them. It’s about the Strong Man, the Father, the savior who will fix all their ills. If laws have to be broken, well, the Strong Man is Decisive and is Getting Things Done. They like Trump for the same reason Vladimir Putin and Recep Erdogan have supporters; some people want a dictator. A constitutionally appointed successor won’t do, because it’s not the Constitution that matters, it’s Trump. Mike Pence may be a fundamentalist and a conservative, but he’s not The Strong Man they wanted. They’ll see him as part of the anti-Trump conspiracy.
This morning, Rudy Guiliani was being floated to replace Jeff Sessions. Rudy G, caught between a rock and a hard place, decided to wriggle out as best he could by saying he supports Jeff Session’s recusal.
Right. But my point is, IF (and it’s a big IF) enough of the electorate turns against him that various senators and congresspeople decide they’re better off also turning against him, they won’t be held back by a need to get their agenda passed.
I’m not confident about anything. I’m trying to look straight ahead. We may be screwed. I never said the pardons are the final straw. That’s what you all have been saying. First pardons, then totalitarianism. Why question the sequence when it sounds good? That’s exactly my point. It’s not a gesture of omnipotence. It’s a gesture of desperation, quite obviously. And there are consequences we are not able to predict well right this second.
But how can you make declarations about how democracies behave on their deathbed and not recognize we are in a process not determined by your fears? It’s a good line but it’s not more reflective of accurate prediction than anyone else. Are you a political scientist?
Would you rather have had a smart, purposeful, populist demagogue or what we got? We may be lucky believe it or not.
If I’m honest, the letter sounded pretty realistic and unscripted. I’m sure that his lawyers combed through it and made him delete a few sentences that were off-point and tighten up some sentences that were too wishy-washy, but it reads like a letter written by a single person in a single sit-down, saying what he thinks.
Granted, that’s not necessarily proof of anything. There’s no rule that a person can’t be a good enough liar to write something that doesn’t sound like a lie. And, of course, we know what was in his email box. If he had been paying any attention at all, he would have clearly noted that the email chain which lead to the meeting was questionable as all getout, and there’s really no way to know whether he did or did not read it to any extent. His explanation for why he wouldn’t have sounds reasonable and will probably resonate with a large body of office workers, who similarly receive a large body of email every day.
The parts where I do question the letter are that:
Despite it seeming like a simple, non-legal runthrough of the facts, I do note that there is quite a gap between presenting the concept that he doesn’t read email chains and the part where that becomes relevant. This does seem to make it clear that he is clearly trying to avoid implicating himself in the Donnie Jr. meeting from well in advance of getting to that point. Overall, that does seem to be the main subject that he’s intending to address, not the back-channel meeting or anything else. Obviously, it’s the one that he fears the most, though whether it’s because he realizes that the email chain is sufficiently dangerous or because he is sufficiently complicit is up for question.
Everyone who attended the meeting seems to agree on these two points, a) Kushner and Bannon weren’t paying much attention, and b) the lawyer presented the materials against Hillary before getting into the adoption sanctions. It seems unlikely that you would be immediately bored upon arrival if the discussion is about Hillary receiving money from Russia. But, Kushner does say that he arrived late.
Is that just a happy coincidence that Kushner and Bannon both show up late enough that Junior has already done introductions, received incriminating materials against Hillary, reviewed them, rejected them, and already gotten lost in a new conversation about adoptions before either of the other two men would join the meeting? Just how late were they?
At the most favorable, we can assume that the lawyer had no real understanding of the Hillary documents. She was given them to hand over and, possibly, had no inkling of their content beyond a one sentence description that she’d been given. She couldn’t do any better to explain their meaning than to parrot that same one sentence.
We might also say, in their favor, that she would have turned the conversation quickly to something that she did know a lot about and was interested in as soon as she could, rather than look dumb because of a lack of knowledge of finance, and waste time with someone who might eventually have a position in the White House.
But even in this most favorable of cases, I don’t see all of that happening such that Kushner could have been anything less than 15 minutes late for the meeting. And I feel like if you’re going to be much later than that, you are liable to just skip it if you genuinely have no idea what it is all about, because you have not been paying attention.
I do note that, while he gives the exact text of the message that he sent seeking an escape, he does not give an exact time. If his message was sent pretty much at any time much earlier or later than 4:25, I would seriously question his story. Hopefully, someone will ask him for the timestamp.
If it was not sent around 4:25, then that would not only indicate that Kushner was lying, but that there has been sufficient coordination between the parties (US and Russia) to come up with a story that removes Bannon and Kushner from the firing line.
Well, I posted the survey links not so much as an indication that the idiot will be impeached, but merely to point out that public sentiment is starting to lean that way.
One interesting thing about the 2018 election is that it’s eight years after the census data was used for the gerrymandering. Or am I wrong and they gerrymander based on other data?
If my supposition is correct, there may be a few districts that are more vulnerable than is commonly thought. Illinois 6 strikes me as a possible gain for the Dems. (I live in Illinois 5). The prevailing attitude of the GOP is that Roskam has a lock on the district, but I’m not 100% sure that’s the case. There’s a strong Indivisibility group in IL-6, but more importantly, I think the demographics of Dupage County have shifted somewhat.
OK, maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part. Roskam was my Rep before they redistricted, and he’s an asshole.