As if on cue, a news story appears to back up the red-bolded claim. Refusing to enforce the Clean Power Act, as Trump and Pruitt have decided to do, will cause
Who cares? The only calculation that matters is:
Will Republican donors make more money due to this decision? If “yes”, then it is a good thing. That is all.
Oh god, how I hate these people.
Best Case Scenario:
Trump causes a full out political collapse of nationalist/arch-capitalist/social conservative coalition that makes up the GOP.
This doesn’t strike me as completely impossible; Trump seems to have a rare gift of turning allies and friends into rivals and threats. But this all began long before Trump was interested in political fads. Ideas like Social Security, the FDIC, and the United Nations have had skeptics for generations.
There are generally many good answers for most problems in politics, some are better than others. But there are many situations where the “popular” answer is not a good answer. It may popular to discuss ethnic, religious or racial chauvinism, but such policies are clearly not good for the country as a whole.
So for decades, Republicans have essentially been offering these three groups special ideas at a low profile. “Dog Whistling”; quietly suggesting these ideas while not necessarily being enthusiastic of the consequences. These wedge issues are carefully cultivated and bear a hard core of support.
And here’s Trump.
This guy can not dog whistle, can not apologize, and he can not shut up. He’s managed to turn things like the NFL and Gold Star Families into political battlegrounds, and he flat out threatened to run third party against the GOP and yet they’re still rolling out the carpet for him.
Congress is already failing to get anything done, in spite of the whole Trifecta - House, Senate, and the Presidency - belonging to the GOP. There may very well be a massive Blue Wave election in 2018, but I can tell you right now, who ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT take responsibility for the loss.
Hint: It’s Donald Trump.
Instead, Trump will blame someone, anyone, for the loss. Even if he gets impeached it will never be his fault, he and his hard core will keep on attacking. And those attacks aren’t really being aimed at “Chuck and Nancy”. They’re going to keep firing on ‘disloyal’ Republicans.
The Republicans are only a political party as long as they agree they’re a political party. The Two Party nature of the Federal System imposes high requirements for political parties to splinter or fail, but it doesn’t take too much creativity to see an embittered Trump running third party in 2020 after the GOP toys with their primary system to take it away from him.
The best case scenario is to make the current political options and strategies of the political right disproven and unpopular with the elites that formerly believed them. America can then shift to a more rational, reasonable posture at home and abroad with common sense ideas that work.
My best case:
Dems take house and senate in 2018. They immediately impeach trump and remove him from office. Trump reveals in a screaming tirade that everyone who voted for him is a loser and a chump and he despises each and every one of them and says everything he ever did in office was to benefit himself and his cronies. There are no followup questions because he then collapses from a fatal aneurysm. Pence is revealed the next day to have tertiary syphilis. He is consigned to a madhouse.