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As I’ve argued many times, 2018 is going to be nothing less than a battle for the Soul of America. If Trump wins, then he and Devin Nunes,  Bob Goodlatee,  Jim Jordan, and Peter King consolidate his illegitimate regime. When you see how outrageous his abuse of power and attacks on freedom of speech have become now

https://lastmenandovermen.com/2018/08/16/watergate-2-0-trump-releases-his-own-enemies-list/

try to imagine a vindicated faux ‘President’ who holds onto the House and therefore will have another two years of pure impunity before the reelection campaign? It seems to me that the GOP has made a wager-they have no good option, they suffer pain wether they support or oppose Trump but they’ve chosen to support him as that’s what the base wants. Now if they lose the House, they may begin to reconsider. But for now they have essentially bought into his belief that he’s political teflon. A lot of times you here MSM folks say that no matter what the latest outrage, Trump’s numbers will never fall beneath about 40% give or take. The wrongly surmise that his base is 40%.

It’s not. It’s no more than 30%. But prior to the election it probably won’t change that much. What’s keeping it as high as it is-though historically 40% is very low, especially considering the economy by most metrics is doing well; though wage growth remains weak-is the GOP House. They ended the Russia investigation prematurely but even before they did, they only went through the motions-they didn’t speak to a number of important witnesses and those they did, they made no effort to follow up via phone calls, texts, and emails to verify if they were telling the truth. But most importantly, these hearings were behind closed doors.

That’s the key to why his numbers aren’t 10 to 20 points lower. If the Dems take the House, and Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler get subpoena power, expect those numbers to drop to more like 30% and eventually 20%.

So as is clear, there is a great deal riding on this election. Either Trump consolidates his illegitimate regime or we make America Legitimate Again.

And the numbers are looking better and better-the analysts now clearly favor the Dems to take the House. If they do, impeachment is quite possible-at some point, after following the facts where they lead. Yes, I’m the guy who ran for NY2 in the primary on the Impeachment Train

https://lastmenandovermen.com/2017/12/13/youve-joined-impeachment-train-get-involved/

But in truth impeachment is not something to go into frivolously. The Congressional Dems will have to responsibly follow the facts where they lead. They’ll have to reopen the investigation Devin Nunes shutdown and interview important witnesses like Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos. They’ll have to follow up with other witnesses like Donald Jr and Jared Kushner to corroborate whether they told the truth. They’ll have to hold Stephen Bannon in contempt.

And, of course, they’ll have to read Mueller’s report exhaustively and see where the facts point. My guess is that may well not happen until 2020-and politically it might be better that they do it later rather than sooner. What needs to happen now is lots of investigations-Russia is the big one, but also everything from emoluments, to Trump’s criminally incompetent response to Puerto Rico, to Jeff Sessions’ mass deportations-good to see that a court recently held him in contempt, maybe Congress will do so as well after yanking him in for hearings.

One of the first things the Dems should do is direct the IRS to release Trump’s tax returns going back to 1975. And the recent news about Trump’s NDAs and his revoking security clearance for officials that criticize him needs to be scrutinized in great detail.

Of course, for Trump this is the nightmare scenario-that he finally faces real oversight and accountability.

Yet some Trump loyalists are saying something strange-that Trump wins big if Democrats take the House. 

The premise is that Trump will be a Bill Clinton rather than a Richard Nixon. Yes that’s where they are now-even his loyalists think his best hope is to be like Bill Clinton-after demonizing him for 25 years, he’s now their model for how Trump survives.

There’s a new way of demonstrating loyalty to Donald Trump and his Republican Party: Claiming that the president could not only survive an impeachment effort, but that it would guarantee his victory in 2020.

The idea gaining currency on the right is that Trump can be Bill Clinton, not Richard Nixon. It depends on a delicate political calculation — that a Republican-held Senate would never follow a Democratic House and vote to remove Trump, and that voters tired of the long-running Russia scandal will, as they did in the late 1990s with Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal, want to move on.

“The notion has surfaced spontaneously among a diverse set of conservatives, including politicians with Trump’s ear and young ultraloyalists of the president whose institutional knowledge of the GOP begins with its new standard-bearer. They’re also the die-hards who aren’t afraid to align themselves with pro-Trump positions even before the president has warmed to them himself.”

Yes, like after the revelations about Donald Jr’s Trump Tower meeting with the Russians broke in July, 2017, Trump loyalists started saying  ‘collusion isn’t a crime.’

Regarding impeachment, Rudy Giuliani stated back in May that the real question isn’t indictment-as Mueller likely believes that can’t/shouldn’t happen-but to impeach or not to impeach. 

But this argument here, is a few steps ahead of even that. They’re now claiming that it’s a good thing  for the Democrats to take back the House and, yes, to impeach him.

In interviews, more than a dozen Republican politicians, activists and consultants — including some current and former Trump campaign aides with direct lines to the president — said they are increasingly convinced a Democratic victory and subsequent impeachment push would backfire and ultimately help the president in 2020.

“If they take the House, he wins big,” Barry Bennett, a former senior adviser to the Trump campaign, told POLITICO. “The market always overcorrects.”

Really? So are these Trump loyalists really trying to tell us that they’d rather see the GOP lose the House and even rather see Trump impeached? Call me a skeptic. Necessity is the mother of invention.

What this does show is that even Trump supporters are coming to see a loss of the House and impeachment as inevitable. If we are talking about political optimization my preferred course as an anti Trump Democrat is for impeachment but not necessarily conviction. 

Ok I don’t necessarily want the Senate to vote not to convict. When I imagine it, I think the Dems should try to wait on impeachment and do it as close to the 2020 election as possible-think of it as their Comey letter. Then the last 11 days the MSM will be full of nothing but speculation of wether Trump will be convicted in the Senate-but then the election comes first and he loses in a landslide to Corey Booker or Kamala Harris.

Why is this? Because isn’t the dream opponent in 2020 for the Democrats a faux ‘President Trump’ who’s been pummeled for two years of investigations and the Mueller report and who has just been impeached while conviction hangs in the balance?

Few more thoughts-clearly Trump is Nixon and not Clinton. The big difference between the two is that most Americans by 1974 thought Nixon should go while most Americans in 1998 saw impeachment as the GOP’s attempt to undo an election loss. Nixon’s popularity dropped to under 20% and Clinton the week he was impeached saw his rise to 81%.

As for the Senate, assuming the GOP retains it-which is not guaranteed. It’s possible by 2020 if public opinion turns sharply against Trump-where his numbers drop from 40% to 20% that a GOP Senate could convict. The reason the GOP continues to protect Trump’s bacon for now is his support with the GOP base. But if the size of the base contracts greatly in next two years the GOP lockstep behind Trump will begin to waver.

As an aside, I do actually think that you might see some decent policies come out of a GOP Senate facing a Democratic Congress. Immigration reform actually comes back on the table. After all, Mitch McConnell’s Senate passed it in 2013. It was the recalcitrant GOP House that refused to bring it up for a vote-even though it would have passed.

UPDATE: This optimism must now be revised based on McConnell’s evident lack of expressed interest in immigration reform post Blue Wave election as noted in (Chapter A). As cynical as I am of the GOP you can never be cynical enough as McConnell’s own cynicism is boundless.

UPDATE 2.0: Of course the premise of this chapter that even the GOP co-conspirators in 2018 saw impeachment as inevitable seemed much more compelling before we had an idea of what a Pelosi lead Dem House would look like-now it’s pretty clear it’s anything but inevitable-it would be, perhaps if the Dem leadership had the courage of their convictions-but where their conscience is supposed to be you have a political consultant.

My conjecture that Trump’s natural support is in the low 20s not the low 40s was based on the idea that the Dems would do aggressive oversight-certainly never imagined that they wouldn’t have even started the lawsuit to get Trump’s tax returns in the middle of August or that they would have so few public hearings.

The good news is that it appears they have begun an inquiry now-

though they’ve been so clandestine about it, due to Pelosi’s skittishness-that some of the benefit of an inquiry has been obscured so far.

At this point his numbers remain in the low 40s but until we have public impeachment hearings I can’t say wether my hypothesis has been falsified or not.

If nothing else Trump is not teflon-nor is 42% his absolute floor as we saw after he unilaterally shut down the government in January his numbers drop into the high to mid 30s. So wether or not public impeachment hearings-and maybe releasing the tax returns which Richard Neal seems allergic to doing-would move his numbers would tank his numbers remains to be seen but it’s clear that at least some things can.

Even right now his numbers seem to have at least seen a modest dip post the furor over the fact that suddenly everyone’s noticing he’s a racist after El Paso and Dayton-as well as the little girl’s heartbreaking viral video underscores the cruelty of his Trump’s mass detentions.

It’s certainly at least plausible that if the Democrats worried less about being seen as partisan or ‘too aggressive’ Trump’s numbers would be lower. Take the tax returns-the public clearly wants to see them and this would be a very good way to hurt him politically-if Neal would stop being such a worrywart and really  aggressively pushed for them to be public-or even releases the state returns NY has so thoughtfully offered-this would certainly dominate the news cycle for weeks. But the Old Guard Dems always negotiate with themselves.

FN:  Say what you want about NY’s and California’s new Trump targeted tax laws-the MSM seems more indignant about California requiring 5 years of tax returns to get on the ballot-even though this law would hurt no one but Trump as he’s the only Presidential candidate going back to Nixon who has failed to release his returns-than the way Trump has flouted precedent and hidden his taxes from the public. If you think NY and California are ‘going too far’ that’s better than Neal and Friends who aren’t going nearly far enough.

Just like the imperative for impeachment is prospective-we have to declare Trump’s racist, xenophobic,  authoritarian, and downright treasonous-morally wether or not legally-out of bounds and beyond the pale so future Presidents-even GOP dirty trickster Presidents-get it that the rules apply to them-so is the imperative to see the tax returns. We can’t allow Trump’s thumbing his nose to the public stand. If he gets away with it you really can’t compel any future candidates to release them-why should they? If we didn’t require Trump to why are we requiring them they will fairly ask.

This idea that we still have a Rule of Law but just didn’t enforce it against Trump as it’s too much trouble-is disastrous. Right now the Democratic leadership is doing great harm to the country with their Neville Chamberlain appeasement routine.

Yes, as I acknowledged above an inquiry has-sorta kinda- started. But until  returns are actually public-not simply Neal acquiring them and then putting them in the closet and he’s actually impeached-our hair must remain on fire.

This is why the the GOP  co-conspirators-cheaters, traitors-historically considered, are so successful. While Pelosi and Friends always worry about ‘tacking to the Center’ the GOP gets that the ‘Center’ is fluid and negotiable. The key to dominating in politics is not to find the Center but to define the Center.

Every day Mitch McConnell defines and redefines it as the Dems struggle to find it. Just this morning Harry Reid has come out for ending the filibuster. 

Awesome but isn’t this always the way? Now that he’s gone he’s advocating something he never would have considered while he ran the Senate. And his successor, Chuck Schumer-has never been one to rankle feathers like Reid does.

All these painstaking policy debates between the Dem candidates are irrelevant if they don’t:

1.Win the Senate.

2. End the Filibuster

But can you imagine Schumer doing that? It’s too aggressive and too mean-hope I’m wrong but I can’t see him doing it anymore than Pelosi is up to taking the fight to Trump the way it needs to be.

End of UPDATE

 

 

 

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October 28, 2016: a Day That Will Live in Infamy Copyright © by . All Rights Reserved.

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