Donald Trump vowed to drain the swamp but instead brought the sewer. The sewer contains rats, which continually turn on one another, and today, it looks like Mick Mulvaney is out to gut Alex Acosta, because it’s in his interests to do so. Politico:
Mulvaney told Trump on Monday that the continuing drip of damaging information surrounding the 2008 agreement Acosta struck to keep billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein from a heavy jail sentence would hurt the administration, according to two people familiar with the conversation.
Mulvaney also may be seizing on an opportunity to try to depose a frequent antagonist who has frustrated some conservatives in the White House and business leaders on the outside.
Acosta critics, including Mulvaney, have argued that he has not been aggressive enough in stamping out Obama-era workplace regulations and employment discrimination lawsuits, and they are using the Epstein lawsuit to push him out the door.
As the British Ambassador said, “The knife fights are real.” Going along with this thought, guess who has thrown out a challenge to Donald Trump on this issue? Fox News is not only out to get Acosta, a host named Melissa Francis actually took Trump to task for praising Epstein in the past. Francis called Trump’s quote “horrifying.” Oh my ears and whiskers, what is this all about? Here’s what she said:
“Obviously, there are these older comments surfacing that have been everywhere, of him saying that they both liked women, comments that have been requoted and are horrifying in the light of day now given what’s going on with Epstein.”
“Trying to put on the record, I guess it was, that they had some huge falling out and they haven’t been friends 15 years. I don’t know why he would address this at all, especially in this setting. It seems unwise.”
“But I don’t know that this was the right place or time or way to try and clean that up. Especially when you’re connecting it with Acosta. There needs to be a massive investigation into what happened there and if there was corruption afoot.”
My prediction? Acosta is toast — and well he should be, not because of his political enemies in Washington or because Fox News has inexplicably decided to play their hand this way. Why that is taking place is a story yet to be told. You recall on Sunday, Trump went into a Twitter meltdown saying that Fox weekend anchors were as “boring as CNN” and that Fox “forgot who got them there.” Consensus is that it was Fox’s Epstein/Acosta coverage that so incensed Trump. Apparently, Fox wasn’t sufficiently rattled by Trump’s ire to change their narrative to something Trump might find more pleasing. They’re still on the dump Acosta train. If you want to place bets, the smart money would be Acosta leaving sooner rather than later.
I think it more accurate to say that Trump has forgotten who got him where he is. These ongoing leaks of private spates are continuously updating evidence for my case of NOT fearing the GOP right now. The Reagan Coalition has been broken, leaving only middle management to play their own private Game of Thrones.
Tell me more about how the Reagan Coalition has been broken. That do I long to hear.
It all comes down to something that has been lacking in the GOP since W went away: centralized leadership. Boehner, McConnell, Ryan, both Governor Scotts…these are grifters and middle managers who lack the chops for the top slots. Only a party this lacking in such a regard could have allowed something like Trump to happen.
Nor has Trump really done the major factions of the Reagan Coalition any favors in the last two and a half years. The NRA is imploding financially thanks to a combination of declining money and March For Our Lives. White evangelicals are becoming more despised the tighter they hypocritically cling to Trump and that’s before you get into how their own numbers are dropping. And now even big business (save the private prison industry, perhaps) is feeling the burn over Trump’s idiotic trade wars and tariffs that is costing them real money to the point where the Mercers, Chamber of Commerce and Koch network want NOTHING to do with his reelection campaign. So, for them, I see no upsides.
Dimwit Donny has loyalty to only one person.
Himself.