The West Wing is reportedly already a ghost town, filled only with a few staffers who avoid Trump like the plague. Apparently that’s not difficult, since he rarely goes to the Oval Office any more, he just watches TV and fumes, sans Twitter. The latest ripple to hit Trump world is that Kevin McCarthy, following in the footsteps of Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell and many other GOP lawmakers, is not going to make an effort to defend Trump’s second impeachment. New York Times:
House Republican leaders have decided not to formally lobby members of the party against voting to impeach President Trump, making a tacit break with him as they scrambled to gauge support within their ranks for a vote on Wednesday to charge him with inciting violence against the country.
While Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, has said that he will “personally” oppose impeachment and sought to steer Republicans in a different direction, his decision not to officially lean on lawmakers to vote against the move constituted a subtle shift away from the president. In the past — including the last time Mr. Trump was impeached by the House — Mr. McCarthy and House leaders have lobbied Republicans intensely to stand behind Mr. Trump on nearly every issue, demanding the same degree of absolute loyalty that the president himself has required.
In the Senate, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has also conspicuously declined to defend Mr. Trump in any way or to speak out against the impeachment push, which — if it resulted in a Senate conviction — could bar the president from holding public office again. Two Senate Republicans had already called upon the president to resign, and advisers privately speculated that a dozen or so more could ultimately favor convicting the president at trial.
There is dialogue about how if a removal of Trump is actually achieved, how he will lose the many perks of being president, in addition to America gaining the biggest perk of all, that he will be barred from running for any further public office.
That begs the question of whether it would be possible for him to mount a credible campaign in 2024 in any event. There is no way he would be running again on the Republican ticket, I think we can say that with some measure of certainty. Whether he can mount a viable third party offense with the Trump Party would be intriguing to see. And in that eventuality, he would bleed off votes from the GOP candidate, whomever s/he may be. Democrats have certainly seen how that works.
This is a win/win situation for Democrats. If Trump can’t run again in 2024 because he’s barred from doing so, then he’s toast. And if he can run again, on the Trump Party ticket, then he’ll drag down the GOP into even greater depths. I like this set up.
And truth be known, I don’t think Trump wants to make the effort to run in 2024. I think that’s what he tells the rubes in order to fleece them, “our incredible journey together has just begun.” I think he just wants to be a talk show host — which is all he was in the White House and before — and have his supporters pay lots of attention and send him cash.
In all events, Impeachment II is going to be very different from the original Impeachment. This could be a lot like the political version of the Godfather, where the sequel was actually better than the first one. Stay tuned. Trump “will not be SILENCED!” as he screamed on the White House Twitter feed, before he was silenced.
Baby is only able to coo if the world’s proverbial lips are attached to his pecker.
It’s safe to say that Trump screwed himself even worse than we initially realized. If I had to make a guess, it’s the sudden evaporation of all that corporate cash in the campaign that’s spurring all this activity. The growing list of formerly reliable Republican donors, coupled with the exit of Sheldon Adelson, has got to be scaring the hell out of them.
And the loss of golf tournaments. Bedminster is his “home course”.
I mentioned this in an earlier comment board, just when will the craven GOP turn on him and sink him. I thought it was going to be about 6 months from now, when all the indictable crimes started coming out in the open and all the 2024 snakes needed to get away from his stink. But now it looks like Moscow M is going to get the win in the best possible way. I think he has hated rump from the start but he used him to pack the courts for what seems like eternity and now he discards him and gets him out of the way forever. And the remaining conniving 2024 hopefuls are all standing around with shives in their sleeves waiting to ponce. Lets just hope that the 30-40% of the rump deplorables crawl back into the swamps they came from.
All these people who were happy with Trmp as long as they were getting what they wanted, and now they’re mad at him. Boo-fucking-hoo. It’s on them, not on us who were against him from the start.
Time to pay the check, MAGA maggots.
McCarthy starts with an “M” which means in a roll call vote (which you just know some Trump fluffer in the GOP will call for) it will be a while before his name is called. I think it’s possible that if enough of his GOP cohorts have voted AYE by the time the clerk calls his name he might, having seen which way the wind is blowing jump off the Trumptanic and on to the bandwagon. Basically, he’ll play out the old saying taken from the French Revolution about his people going somewhere, asking where they were going and declaring he must find out so he can lead them! I think Liz Cheney’s statement is going to make a lot of the Sedition Caucus think hard tonight. I’d still expect the number who opposed impeachment to hit triple digits, but between Cheney and the behind the scenes word that McConnell wants to dump Trump too we might not get triple digits voting to impeach but it will be well north of 50. That’s more than enough to credibly make the case (even on Fox – and I can easily imagine Murdoch ordering even the evening crew to acknowledge it) that the vote was bi-partisan. That in turn could grease the skids in the Senate to at least make conviction a close call. Cruz and Hawley have already stake their 2024 campaigns on sedition. However I can see Ben Sasse launching his own campaign betting that an impassioned speech advocating conviction will be his ticket to the nomination. An if Tom Cotton decides the same, then watch out! Trump will have made history as the first President to be not only impeached but convicted.