He’d have to be removed before the end of his term, which right now seems unlikely. If he makes it to 1/20 at noon, a subsequent impeachment and conviction won’t affect his status under the Former Presidents Act — he’d keep the perks. (Congress and Biden could change the act, of course.)
I suspect the perks are important to him. This is someone who used his charity foundation to pay his son’s Boy Scout dues. A free protective detail and a six-figure pension are things of value; he would put serious effort into keeping them by running out the clock.
I’ll just point out that – from a security perspective – there’s no more ideal situation for the Secret Service to protect of a former President than an isolation cell in a federal prison.
Given four years for the RW media to work on it I suppose they could convince the rubes that Nikki Haley is totally Caucasian. Hell, they managed to convince the rubes Trump was presidential material. Twice. A minor fib like “Haley is Caucasian” ought to be easy.
The fact she looks the part helps. But probably even that isn’t strictly necessary for the fib to succeed.
According to traditional racial categories (Caucasian, Ethiopian/Negroid, Mongoloid) South Asians like Haley are Caucasian. Those from northern India are also Aryan.
But the whole theory rests on the conservative belief that Democrats are helpless when confronted by race and gender; we’d have to vote for Haley because she’s vaguely non-white. It’s the siren call of identity politics!
This is an example of conservatives drinking their own koolaid. The Republicans are the ones who are wrapped up in identity politics; as I noted above they only vote for white men. Democrats don’t obsess over race or gender; we can vote for Joe Biden or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris. We vote for a candidate based on their abilities and ideology not based on their skin color or genitals.
So Democrats wouldn’t vote for Nikki Haley because she’s a conservative and Republicans wouldn’t vote for her because she’s a non-white (by their standards) woman.
Republicans/conservatives aren’t that dumb - they’re perfectly aware Democrats would never have voted for Palin, for instance. Rather, they are trying to use the hypocrisy angle - “these liberals claim to be feminist, yet here they are savaging a woman.” It was one of their primary reasons for wanting Barrett to be nominated for Supreme Court; the optics of Democrats criticizing a female nominee.
As to the second, my point was the power of RW media is such that given 4 years to work on it, the typical Republican could be made to believe Nikki Haley is as uppercase-W White as the late Barbara Bush.
You’re of course right that’d still leave that whole pesky being-a-woman thing as a reason for R voters to not vote for her. My point, such as it was, was meant semi-facetiously. But only semi-.
I’ve addressed this in a little more detail elsewhere, but they also have a big problem in that Trump and his hardcore supporters own the RNC and all the fundraising platforms, and they apply strict pro-Trump purity tests on candidates they fund and endorse.
It could just be Trump being a petty dumb-ass. Trump just wants everybody to know that Rudy isn’t get paid, regardless of who has actual authority to pay him. I could easily imagine that Trump doesn’t even know who’s supposed to be paying him.
Now we know why Rudy wanted 20K/day. He surely knew that maybe he’d get two or three billables in before Donald screwed him over.
He has always come across as the kind of top boss who sort of says to the room in general, to everyone and no one in particular, what he’d want to happen, and then see whoever falls over themselves trying to figure out how to make it happen.
So the hat rack is perfectly within the scope. More likely the TV.
