The president was up in New London, Connecticut today, talking to the graduating cadets at the Coast Guard Academy. The way he talked about his presidency reminds me of Vito Corleone hovering over his dead son, Sonny, saying “Look what they did to my boy!”
“Look at the way I have been treated lately, especially by the media,” he said. “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly. You can’t let them get you down, you can’t let the critics and the naysayers get in the way of your dreams.”
It’s typical of Trump to make a graduation ceremony all about him rather than the people who toiled so hard to earn their degrees. But blaming the media is the only tool he has left in his box. If any of the news that is being reported is perceived as true and accurate by his core base of supporters, he’s pretty well screwed.
He needs to maintain their support to keep congressional Republicans at bay. Here’s Mike Allen’s take:
Trump’s campaign sent supporters a fundraising email yesterday with the subject line “SABOTAGE”: “You already knew the media was out to get us. But sadly it’s not just the fake news… There are people within our own unelected bureaucracy that want to sabotage President Trump and our entire America First movement.”
Watch for Trump to continue stoking his base, because his support there is what gives him power over lawmakers: They’re much less likely to abandon or undermine him if he remains popular in their states or districts. It’s his most basic survival strategy — and it’s another reason he won’t change.
For once, I think Allen nailed it.
This much of a whiney ass titty baby?
I was just coming in here to say that! Those very words! Yeesh! Sad.
Off the scale irony given his long-running birther shtick.
His mean job approval number is below 40% again. Time to blow something up (it worked last time).
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_trump_job_approval-6179.html
As an utterly unqualified goof and demagogue, Der Trumper never really had anything other than the rabid support of the incompetent white electorate. He has the (white) people.
The succession rules of the Constitution are now the friend of the establishment Repubs and the plutocrats. Pence, then Ryan. They lose nothing, policy-wise.
But the crackpots, gun nuts, white nationalists and supremacists, neo-confederates, sovereign citizens and angry white males have “elected” the greatest prez of their lifetime. The “conservative” movement (and its various reactionary offshoots) have been manufacturing such folks at an alarming clip.
So even the most incompetent strategist (presumably still Gruppenfuhrer Bannon?) understands that Trumper has to shore up this main beam or the ship is liable to collapse. And train their machine guns on any RINO that does not support America First!!
On paper it sounds right, succession will fall to an establishment GOP.
In practice, I wonder and worry about what the nutter butter base supporters will do if Trump is removed, regardless of who replaces him. For there is only one Trump, there are no equivalent figures to fulfill the “unique role” he has created for himself.
There is potential for some really weird and awful behavior, and I don’t think that seeing Pence or Ryan take Trump’s chair will make the base happy at all. And I also think it will make the GOP as a whole more deranged than it already is. They will be looking for Democrat scalps in retribution for years to come. It’s going to be completely awful.
And I don’t see how they prevail policy-wise. Once Trump is gone, who’s going to sell the base on how all the tax cuts and safety net shredding will Make America Great Again? It seems to me that even the GOP base is starting to realize that those policies are a con and Trump campaigned against so much of the agenda in fact. Trump may leave a pretty dysfunctional GOP is his wake.
Create two, three, many Oklahoma Cities!
(Apologies to Che…)
Too many people have invested too much time and money to walk away now, elected politician or private corporate citizen. They must have been sweating bullets this week, as their Golden Goose shat in the nest. Again.
The diehard followers: the rural folk, the miners, the disenfranchised for whatever reason, they will stubbornly hang on to Trump no matter what. I’m sure they see the reports of his idiocy, if they’re even paying attention, as the Liberal Media’s attack and write it off as fake news, just as they’ve been instructed.
And the Republicans, who have strained every thread of credibility or decency in the interest of their party, are clammed up. I’d love to see the directive from the upper levels to the rest of the party. It must be a big fat threat to keep quiet and lay low.
I don’t care how his political demise comes, be it a trickle or a flood. I just want Trump and his liars out for good.
You may actually have identified the one way that he could get out of office and not disappoint his base.
Trump is already playing the victim card, he’s setting-up the MSM, Deep State, HRC/Obama, Dems, etc…as the bullies, if the noose tightens and they start an Independent Investigation then he’ll go after the GOP establishment. He winds up resigning before an impeachment as a means to save face, and blames everyone in DC. He goes back to the bubble of Fox News & Brietbart where he can sit-back and criticize/blame everyone else, saying, “If only they hadn’t been so unfair to me then I could have gotten more things done”
Alternatively, he fakes a coma and they find a compassionate lookalike to finish out his term a la the movie “Dave”.
Actually I’d kind of prefer the latter.
His base will never abandon him. The only way this is even remotely possible is if he starts denouncing the very things he ran on; mainly racism, xenophobia and white grievance. As long as he continues to beat those drums, he will be their Golden Man.
This is why I have my doubts that the Republican Party will ever pivot away from him. They know that their perfect grift would come to an inglorious end very quickly, and the entire facade of the GOP would collapse. The gig would be up, and the base would walk away from establishment Republicans in a heartbeat. And they would follow after Trump, en masse, like he was the Pied Piper.
It would be the end of the GOP. They know this. Every decision they will be making will be run through that filter. They are staring at the reality of political life and death here.
There is a hard core that is too invested to walk away. My guess is at least half the solid Republican electorate.
And if they remove him from office, what then? Does he seem the “go gently into that good night” type?
He’ll be out for revenge and the logical way for him to get it would be to run and fund primary challengers against the key figures he sees as having double-crossed him. Since he doesn’t actually give a shit about the Republican Party or about policy, he is the only prominent Republican who could be such a wrecking ball without losing a bit of sleep over tossing seats to the Dems.
Which is great, but if I see it, I bet the Repubs see it too. They’re stuck.
the majority of his supporters voted for him b/c they thought he would address their problems. as this begins to drag him down it becomes more clear he won’t be helping anyone – not embarrassment, pragmatics for the majority I’d argue. the hard core, may be the proverbial 27%
My wife has to drive all over Connecticut as part of her job and sees plenty of Trump nutters with Trump-Pence flags flying outside of their houses (which houses always look like someone more than a little off-kilter lives there). She mentioned this morning that over the last week or two, many of those people have taken their flags down. Maybe it is starting to become just a little more embarrassing than usual to be associated with the idiot.
Some guy around the corner from me has been flying a gigantic Trump flag on the front of his house for quite a while. So far it’s still flapping away. If he takes it down, I’ll believe the end is nigh.
The Comey testimony will be the most anticipated since Oliver North’s.
If Comey testifies that he did not believe that Trump was applying undue pressure, and that he does not believe the comments constitute obstruction of justice, where does that leave things?
It is my guess that that is what he will say.
But who the hell knows.
Let me get this straight.
You predict that Comey, having leaked the memorandum he wrote up on Trump, will then go to Congress and inform them that the memo is meaningless and nothing to worry about?
On what basis do you make this prediction?
Its possible that when it comes time to pull the trigger he gets cold feet. Maybe out of some misshapen sense of his own legacy or reputation. If he somehow talks himself into thinking that bringing down a president would make him unsympathetic in history. In short, making a bad decision by being more concerned about optics than the decision itself. He did it before.
And now that Mueller has been taken out of mothballs to take Trump down, what do you say?
Since you started with a Godfather analogy, I’ll recall the scene when Frankie Pentangeli is about to testify, then looks up to see his big brother glaring at him from the gallery, sitting next to Michael Corleone. The presence of Mueller should be enough to keep Comey’s spine straight.
Maybe because I am a litigator I see it:
Comey: Trump asked me if I would stop the investigation
Q: And after isn’t it true that after that event you testified before Congress
A: Yes
Q: And isn’t it true that if you felt pressure to stop an investigation, you had a duty to mention that?
A: Yes
And you can be damn sure that is the way every other lawyer on that committee is thinking about it.
The question is whether you can establish a course of conduct with other evidence indicating a state of mind necessary to meet the mens rea requirement for obstruction of justice.
So if there is more than just the question we know about.
I will say this: one of the most famous lines is from Machiavelli is this: If you strike at the king you must kill him.
That’s exactly why Parliament executed Charles I.
The thing is, though, Trump is not the king, though he may think so. He’s just the president. And quite a dipshit as president, actually.
“Q: And isn’t it true that if you felt pressure to stop an investigation, you had a duty to mention that?
A: Yes.”
That makes sense. But it says nothing about whether he mentioned it simply to cover his ass, or whether he mentioned it because he really wanted to and was just waiting for the right moment.
Okay, Mr. Litigator, answer me this:
Q. Is it true that the implication of the president’s question was that you would be fired if you continued to pursue Michael Flynn, and that you did continue to pursue him, and that you were in fact fired?
That’s the thing about Comey, though. He’s never been concerned about optics.
Perhaps it makes Comey look ‘above the fray’ while preferencing Republicans, which is his pattern? So Comey says that while Trump may have (he cannot speak directly to mental state) tried to influence the investigation, he_absolutely did not actually influence the investigation, and absolutely did not obstruct justice, because Comey is too pure to be obstructed?
What outcome best serves Comey’s delusion that he’s The Last Honest Man in Washington?
No, I don’t think that’s it at all.
A lot of Democrats have a vested interest in talking smack about Comey, evidently because of Hillary. But as I’ve said again and again here, Comey is not the villain in this piece, Giuliani and Kallstrom are, and they hate Comey. I’m surprised that so few people understand this. Obama always did.
https:/www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/21/obama-picks-james-comey/2447071
I’m guessing.
Because I don’t know.
And neither do you.
On what basis do you make this prediction?
On transcripts of previous hearings? I presume you know where to find a transcript from 10 days ago to see if this guy:
http://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/864936480958959616
is telling the truth or if he’s making shit up, which is very possible.
It also has the advantage of being somewhat true. Most of the bureaucracy probably does want to destroy Trump agenda though they likely just do their jobs as ever.