Given the ever more likely Democratic majority in at least one chamber of Congress in the midterms, Pence would be largely contained anyway.
But what was interesting was the second graph, which indicates that 64% want to know more about Trump’s business activities. As we’ve all mentioned before, this is Trump’s nightmare, and I’m not even sure the nightmare is about his probably criminal conduct as it is the realization that he’s a fake billionaire.
His obsession with the projection of power, brains, business acumen, competence in bed, and wealth, in the absence of these in reality, is what’s telling. This is why he’s terrified of Mueller and why he hated Comey: he worried that they would do what our incompetent news media couldn’t, which is to untangle his finances and spell it out for everyone that he’s not a real billionaire.
This is also why he despises Jeff Bezos and Mark Cuban – because they’re real billionaires. What’s even more telling is that despite receiving criticism from many other real billionaires, from Warren Buffet to Richard Branson, is that he only calls out one: Bezos. And that’s because Bezos just so happens to own the Washington Post, which has been one of a handful of news outlets that has tried to rip the mask off of Trump’s bullshit facade. But despite goading from Cuban and criticism from Buffet, he has pretty much left them alone, probably because he’s afraid that they would be able to explain why Trump is a fake billionaire and not a real one. Real billionaires, real successes, people with real intelligence are Trump’s kryptonite. He doesn’t dare touch them.
I think Pence would be even less capable of acting on them. Trump won an election. He’s popular with the base. Right now, Republicans are scared to act against him because they don’t want to alienate the cult and lose a primary or an election.
Pence has none of that. If he ends up president, he will be the lamest of lame ducks. And I don’t think he knows enough about national politics to make much use of whatever little leverage he might have.
More so than Trump in the same circumstances.
Getting Trump’s finger off the nuclear button would be worth it for that alone.
There are reports that Trump has been asking supporters to go on the news to demand he fire Mueller. No reason to do that if you aren’t planning on firing Mueller.
Fox News poll: 71% say Trump will fire Mueller
I don’t think Trump has ever really wanted to fire Mueller (or even Comey for that matter); he was hoping that his subordinates would just take the hint and drop the investigation. They haven’t, and now they’re threatening to expose him as one of the greatest frauds in human history. I think this is no longer a simple debate about law and politics, though whatever decisions he makes will indeed have legal and political consequences. But from Trump’s point of view, this is all about his survival, and the survival of his crime family and enterprise. I think he’s eventually going to give into the temptation to fire Mueller. Republicans have been trying to convince him that they can end the investigation in other ways, and he might have been satisfied with that for a while, but the Cohen probe opened up a second front, and I’m guessing this is really starting to hit close to home.
I think it’s a given that he’s going to at least try to fire Mueller. When Mueller committed the “unforgivable sin” of raiding Cohen, it became personal to Trump. It’s not about politics, or political games. To him, at this point, it’s about revenge. Mueller raided his attorney. Mueller is looking into his finances. Trump fooled the public into electing him. Now everyone is supposed to bend over backwards to keep him happy. He still has that corporate mentality where he can just get rid of any troublemakers, which Mueller is, to him.
Just to note: the raid on Cohen, and the charges against Cohen, were not done under Mueller’s direction. The raid was conducted by the FBI, under the direction of the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York.
Now, all of this was the result of a referral from Mueller, and undoubtedly related to information that Mueller had uncovered, but it was technically separate from Mueller’s investigation. So, it may be a matter of semantics, in Trump’s mind.
Indeed.
And, even worse, firing Mueller does nothing to stop the probe into Cohen. Heck, it likely wouldn’t stop Mueller’s probe. Someone else will pick up that ball.
One has to wonder: what would the actual political fallout be if and when we get to the point of Trump’s version of the Saturday Night Massacre? How much would the public care? As I’ve said before, I think the public would be concerned, but until the economy and country starts suffering direct consequences of Trump’s administration, I don’t think they would necessarily care enough to have Trump impeached. And I’m not even 100% sure he would lose in the next election - it would depend on how unified his opposition is in the Democratic party.
Now if the economy goes down or if there’s a major war and Trump gets the blame for erratically causing it, then all bets are off. I think that’s the tipping point. But until we get there, I think Trump is capable of pretty much everything and the temptation to pull the trigger on Mueller and anyone else who gets in his way - Rosenstein, Sessions, Wray or anyone - will only increase. At some point, I think it’s going to too difficult for the “counter puncher” to resist the temptation of swinging the clinched fist of Executive power at his enemies.
He’ll go after them, too. He won’t necessarily succeed, but if he gets support from his Republican soldiers in Congress, as he has continued to enjoy throughout all of his many outrages, then he will continue to go after his enemies one by one. And at some point, this has to have a chilling effect, a demoralizing effect on career people within the DoJ and various supporting agencies. If you worked anywhere near Andrew McCabe and James Comey, for instance, how can you not be feeling at least a little bit of heat right now?
We have to get to a point when Republicans themselves feel as though their experiment with plutocracy is a failed one and they look for other ways to win elections. I don’t see that right now. Maybe a good drubbing in the upcoming elections will change the dynamics a bit.
Mehhh… His supporters would LOVE a war. Especially if it’s against Mooslims, or tiny rocket man. A down turn in the economy will take a while to affect people with out any significant investments and may be out of work to start with. And besides, it’s Hillary’s fault.
Previous Fox News poll: 68% say Jesus spoke English, rode a Stegosaurus and founded the NRA, 23.5% unsure
Hannity says Trump is going to fire Mueller after the hurricane passes.