You can get a good sense of the discombobulated state of American politics by perusing Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire. Up near the top we get a ludicrous story about Donald Trump leaning on God to get him through the Mueller investigation. Directly below it, we get a story about how Nancy Pelosi is about to give the green light to impeach him. So, which is it? Did Trump make it through unscathed or he is about to be engaged in the mother of all political battles?
I’m not sure anyone really knows the answer to that question. I think it’s fair to say that the president really wants to convey the sense that his problems are over. He’s been exonerated and it’s time to get revenge. Yet, he’s taking actions that send the opposite message. He seems to fear everything and everyone. He’s working overtime to fight federal, state, local and congressional investigators. He won’t let people cooperate or respond to subpoenas and he’s going to court to prevent banks from turning over his financial documents. This is the behavior of a guilty man, but it’s more than that because he’s being so aggressive that he’s destroying the arguments of the Democrats who don’t want to impeach him. Not long ago, Pelosi was sounding dismissive of impeachment. That’s not how she sounds anymore:
At her weekly press conference, Speaker Nancy Pelosi likened President Trump to Richard Nixon: “As you probably know, in the Articles of Impeachment for President Nixon, Article 3 was that he ignored the subpoenas of Congress, that he did not honor the subpoenas of Congress. This is very, very serious. But my judgment will spring from the judgment of our committee chairs.”
Her committee chairs are instinctively more aggressive about confronting Trump than she is, so this sounds pretty ominous to my ears.
Trump must know what is happening. On some level, I think he wants to have an impeachment battle. But that indicates an unresolved inner conflict. Is he desperate to have this all over or is he eager to keep up the fight? He’s probably pinging back and forth between both thoughts, but they’re mutually contradictory.
If he is truly convinced that the Senate will have his back come hell or high water, then he ought to let people cooperate with Congress and wait until he is acquitted of any impeachable offenses the House might level at him. I don’t think be believes he can survive certain kinds of scrutiny. Maybe he’s more worried about losing his reelection bid than getting thrown out of office by Congress, and that could explain some of his panicked behavior.
All I know is that if he really wants the Mueller investigation to be over and done, he shouldn’t be taking actions that compel the House to impeach him. He should be making it hard for them to impeach him.
He’s hurting himself on the optics of impeachment too, should it come to that. Pelosi has been pretty savvy and taken some heat by portraying herself as disinterested in starting the process. If she changes course, she’ll be viewed as having done so only with the greatest reluctance. That’s not what the president wants. He wants to convince the public that Pelosi is a crazed partisan banshee who is coming for him out of pure spite.
The Democrats are still divided about what to do, but they’re beginning to coalesce and harden. They were on their heels just a few weeks ago, but Trump squandered his advantage.
If there is going to be a gigantic brawl, he has only himself to blame. He could have said that Congress can talk to whomever they want and see whatever they want, knowing that the Senate would never convict him. That would have disarmed the House Democrats and dampened talk of impeachment.
That is, unless, the information is so damning that it would kill his support in the Senate, or with the public.
Above all, it’s his own consciousness of guilt that best explains his behavior, but it’s making everyone else crazy.
Seriously, Martin, when are you going to learn what motivates someone who has Narcissistic Personality Disorder? There are only two things that function in his brain: the need to avoid shame/people looking down on him, and the need for adulation and praise.
Also the way he fights stuff is the way he’s always fought: like a mobster. That strategy has worked for him his entire career. He throws lawsuits at everything and intimidates people. He has zero understanding of how Congress works and the only reason he has gotten this far is because of his ability to corrupt his staff, Cabinet and members of Congress.
You guessing what motivates him and how he’s going to proceed isn’t working. Try a different lens.
I was going to say something similar. It’s not “consciousness of guilt” because narcissists like Trump *never* feel guilty. It is, however, a quite reasonable awareness that having Mueller, McGahn, etc. testify on national TV is not going to be beneficial to him. Better for him to fight. The House can’t enforce any subpoenas anyway without DOJ help,
Probably nicer ways to express this. Just a thought.
The point made here about Speaker Pelosi being dragged reluctantly into supporting impeachment proceedings is right on. Nancy has clearly publicly placed herself in this position. There is a strength gained by her and the Democrats on this; it’s extraordinary likely that a plurality or majority of Americans will see the President and his Administration as the irresponsible ones in this brawl.
This sort of rhetorical positioning is going to run her and her Caucus members into some logical and moral problems, though. Hell, just yesterday Speaker Pelosi said unequivocally that Attorney General Barr lied to Congress and committed a crime in doing so. Allowing an official to continue to serve without attempting to hold them accountable for a crime committed against Congress itself is an extremely dangerous thing to do. The House needs to impeach Bill Barr; otherwise under Pelosi’s leadership they’ll be seen as accepting having their oversight powers trampled. I don’t think the full implications of the Speaker’s statement have been properly considered by the general public or the mainstream media yet.
On his MSNBC show last night, Chris Hayes asked Senator Blumenthal in a face-to-face interview if he and the rest of the Congressional Democrats were ready to do what would need to be done if the President and his Administration remain intransigent. Blumenthal began a reasoned response, and Chris talked over him for a moment. “You sound scared,” he told the Senator.
Without attempting to understand the peculiar subjective motivations of our deranged Der Trumper, he must surely be focusing on his “re-election” at this point, as it is clear he does not intend to wash his hands of the presidency after one term–he’d likely see that as consigning himself to “loser” status, and his crippling egomania/narcissism couldn’t allow that. So what’s his best route to winning another electoral college victory, as he can’t possibly win the popular vote.
To cooperate with the House or not?, that is the question. If Der Trumper cooperates and gives meaningful information and witness testimony, that’s a catastrophe because he knows what he and the crime family pulled and what the witnesses who talked to Mueller would say, except live and in color. So he cooperates and gets impeached while giving actual damaging evidence to Congress.
The other route is to maximally obstruct, let Whitewasher Barr file lawsuit after lawsuit, and give no new evidence whatsoever to the House, thus forcing them to impeach, and forcing a pre-determined senate trial where the executive has given no evidence to the House whatsoever. Der Trumper is certainly watching the polls and sees that 66% oppose impeachment, so perhaps he feels that impeachment is a political loser for Dems, thus “good” for him with the lamebrains he needs. His best bet for an electoral college victory, then, is force what he believes to be a politically unpopular impeachment, but refuse the House all evidence and witnesses needed for the charges, while tying the courts up for a year over executive privilege. (Obviously the new evidence of refusing to comply with House subpoenas is done right out in the open, but that is calculated to be meaningless to the majority of Americans and all Repub senators, of course.)
It seems to me that so long as so much of the Mueller report is redacted it will work against drawing up articles of impeachment. Maybe they can get Mueller and his staff to testify but as I understand so long as he is employed by the DOJ, Barr can forbid it. Still there is plenty in the report and otherwise known that I wonder why the dems are not making the most of it. Could it be they have no stomach for it?
I don’t understand the rationale behind this site’s format. Why can’t you just have a chronological stack of posts, with links to pages to comment — since it’s all you, anyway? And who needs all these photos (which are just stock stuff)? I know you could easily change this, since you’re using a WordPress foundation; it’s extremely flexible.
Nobody wants or needs all these “categories” or “featured articles” areas — somebody sold you a bill of goods, here. Can’t you just have an option to go back to the pure, clean logic of a straight chronology (just like Yas and Steve M. and your other compatriots)? Notwithstanding the technical issues, what you had before was ideal — perfect for an insightful, text-based site like this. Clear as day. Now we have to stare at the page just to see if you’ve added anything. (And the dates aren’t visible, so the chunks of categorized, recycled links are misleading.)
You know I love the site to death; I’ve been around for, I think, at least ten years, and your insights and commentary are the best around. But this presentation does you no favors. Please let us just browse your writing without all this large-scaled pictorial confusion!
Not being able to read the entire comment without clicking, is bad, too. I know that’s just a pushbutton preference change.
P. S. Martin, I created this new login because I can’t access my old one — the password isn’t working and the mechanism to have it send me a link hasn’t worked the four or five times I’ve tried it, and there’s no contact link anywhere on the site, so I have to do it this way. (Obviously I’m not complaining in the slightest! It’s merely a technical glitch; you’ve explained the cost and difficulty of migrating all of your thousands of users.)
Where you talk about ” the pure, clean logic of a straight chronology … Notwithstanding the technical issues, what you had before was ideal — perfect for an insightful, text-based site like this” — can’t say I disagree. I loved the old format, I always believed it had a big influence on what kind of a blog this has become. Nobody’s questioning the urgent need for a technological upgrade, but I do think format has a huge influence on the feel of any blog.
One thing I do like here (I had often wished for it before) is that we now have total access to past comments. How often I would use it I don’t know, but I think it’s great to be able to.
But two of my really favorite features seems to have gone — unless I just haven’t figured out where they are — namely, the signed ratings and the listing of comments to comments. The reason I think these features are important is that they enhance substantial dialogue among posters. You could often often continue and often resolve a discussion with one or two other posters for a few days even after most other people had stopped reading the post. The signed ratings was a way of quickly saying “I agree!” so that people would know who was saying that. (People rarely used it for anything else, especially not for trying to get someone banned.) You do have a sort of thumbs up, thumbs down voting here, but it’s not the same, as there’s no way to see who’s putting in the vote.
Individual-1 is not at all concerned about being removed from office by conviction. He has too many supporters running dilatory interference for him, and he knows that he will not be convicted.
What he is terrified of is the prospect of losing the election. Forget the narcissistic blow, there’s the legal exposure.
To some extent, the assault on Mueller (whoever engineered and is guiding it) is intended to accomplish the following political purposes, among others:
You’re right about the political purposes of the assault on Mueller, but there’s one that’s even more basic … to try to discredit Mueller and his findings. And that started early long before the report came out. And I don’t think it worked, either.
I would just point out that all these purposes, particularly the four you mention, are extremely fraught and desperate moves. They could succeed, but they all greatly raise the ante — leading to more determined resistance. We’ve been seeing that particularly over the last few days. Honestly, these guys are gangsters, but the FBI has a lot of experience fighting gangsters. The House committees have barely started. We ain’t seen nothin yet.
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I have to say, when I saw that Trump “leaned on God”, the first thing that popped into my mind was, “A lovely universe you got there, Be a shame if something happened to it.”
What Trump has been way more successful at than most of the pundits expected is getting almost total fealty from the Republican members of the house and now, most importantly, the Senate. But if Trump understands one thing, it is the angry, authoritarian seeking lemmings that now form the cadres of the Republican party that demand a constant diet of hate and fear. If there were any independent minded members of the Republican delegation, and I doubt there really are, they live in fear of Trump turning that base against them- See what happened to Lindsey Graham. What better way to stoke the hate and fear that keeps his party in line than provoking a total war with the Democrats. It is dictator wanna-be lesson #1: Always have an enemy. In particular, he is provoking a war where Democrats will have to rely heavily on the courts, which are being stacked with Republican partisans on a daily basis and also now that Barr is in control of the Justice department, he can (and most likely will) launch politically motivated prosecutions right back at Democrats.
“…provoking a total war with the Democrats”. Sad but true.
It makes me wonder do any Republicans care about our country anymore? Declaring war on fellow Americans is an incredibly un-patriotic act. It is deplorable.
I think his motivation is fundamentally about reelection and perhaps his life after office. He knows the GOP will never convict him, because even the handful who might be inclined to do so are so afraid of his base of mouth-breathers that they’d never go through with it.
The most you’ll get in the Senate is all the idiot talking heads looking to Mitt Romney as some kind of Principled Conservative™, and Mitt will then do what Collins did on Justice Rapey.
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Centerfield: I agree that Nancy Pelosi can’t have it both ways. She can’t tell us that Barr lied and committed a crime and then fail to impeach him.
Martin: I enjoyed the points you made in the main post. All of them.
I liked the old site and I’ll learn to like the new site. That is all.
It’s time to return to my uncle’s villa in Puteoli.
Pliny the Younger