It’s official. Donald Trump has just become the first American President to be impeached twice. And more importantly 10 House Republicans crossed the aisle to vote to impeach him. And with that vote, the first shot was fired in the impending GOP civil war, and it’s going to be ugly.
For starters, there is the fact that 10 GOP House incumbents voted to impeach Glorious Bleater. On December of 2020, not a single GOP House member voted to impeach. There can only be two reasons for this. Either these incumbents feel secure enough in their districts to openly defy Trump, or they did something Republicans never do anymore, they honored their oaths and voted their conscience. But once you heat, it becomes easier. Which means that if Pelosi invites GOP input, and the legislation is popular with the public, then there is a potential pool of 6-10 GOP House members who would be willing to cross the aisle and create bipartisan legislation.
But there is another factor at play here as well. In the 2020 impeachment vote, Trump was a firmly entrenched incumbent, and nobody was willing to write off the possibility that he would be reelected. Today, Trump is a humiliated one term President, and will be gone in 7 days. Not only that, but with all of his social media privileges revoked, he no longer engenders the fear factor that he did a year ago. And neither does House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
I can’t stress strongly enough how important Trump’s loss of social media presence is. For instance, the the 130 or so GOP House incumbents who were willing to give off the impression of siding with a seditious riot, did it to please Trump. With no Trump tweets, he can’t give them instructions on what to sabotage, nor praise them for their efforts. And worse yet, Trump can no longer shoot off a Tweet, urging his followers to head to the polls to support them. And as the Georgia special elections showed, even Trump’s blessings may not be enough to motivate his lazy base if he’s not on the ballot. And as more moderate GOP members start to peel off, it just makes the Trump faction look more like what they are, a death cult.
Traditionally, when there is an internal power struggle within a political party, they like to keep it as in house as possible. That won’t happen this time. Trump was too divisive a figure, and forces far to many moderate Republicans to cast politically risky votes. Whether they vote to impeach Trump or not, moderate GOP Senators are going to want their pound of flesh from Trump’s surviving enablers in the Senate. And at the head of the posse is going to be Mitch McConnell, the man that can get the job done.
And the outside interference from groups opposed to Trump, and broader Trumpism, has already started. The Lincoln Project just released a brutal new ad, holding Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy as just as personally responsible for the violence as Trump himself. The ad is airing in Missouri, Hawley’s home state. Hawley, Cruz, and McCarthy are about to become more intimately familiar with The Lincoln Project for the next few years than they are with their own proctologists. And another anti Trump group with deep pockets just announced $50 million in campaign aid for GOP incumbents who actively come out and oppose Trump and Trumpism.
And that may well turn out to be only a drop in the bucket. Because Trump isn’t the only one that major corporations are taking steps to disentangle themselves from. While publicly severing their ties with Trump, several major corporations announced that they were suspending political campaign donations to any Republican who voted to overturn the results of the election following the insurrection. This could be a kiss of death for many of these candidates, since in both 2018 and 2020, with full corporate support, they were terribly out fund raised by the Democrats insanely strong and effective grassroots fund raising.
This is just getting started. The impeachment trial of Donald Trump will close that sad chapter, and effectively slam the door on the Trump era. But the investigations, both independent, as well a congressional, will last months, if not years, easily becoming a major issue in the 2022 midterms. My advice? Get an underground tank for brewski deliveries, fire up the microwave, extra butter, sit back and enjoy the show. We’ll likely never see another one like it.
If you enjoyed this article, you might also like to check out President Evil, and the sequel, President Evil II, A Clodwork Orange . They comprise a pretty much daily report from the front of the 2016 GOP primaries, as well as the general election.
Follow me on Twitter at @RealMurfster35
Back during the holidays I saw Steve Schmidt mention on someone’s show that LP was going to be targeting the big GOP donors once Trump was out of office. I’ll bet a lot of them found out about it and took notice. LOT’S of people foresaw something ugly happening prior to the inauguration and given how quickly so many corporations and donors publicly responded my guess is that they were already making plans on how to finesse disentangling from the Trump GOP. One silver lining of the dark cloud Jan.6 brought is that they had a perfectly acceptable reason to tout for cutting off the spigot. I’m sure they HATE the idea of their taxes going up, but without a functioning economy their wealth can disappear in a hurry and they’ll “only” be insanely rich so they’ve been quietly advocating (for a while now) massive stimulus. I think they also know if things were to crash like the did in 2008 they won’t be getting a pass like they did from the Obama administration. Oh, they will still fight tooth and nail but only with semi-sane, pre-Trump Republicans and I think that’s what they are making clear. Get back to the old-school stuff or live and (politically) die on what you can raise from the masses in small dollar donations. A lot of them that have fantasies that they can imitate Trump and have the goobers of MAGA land cough up donations again and again will learn a bitter, and for us fun to watch lesson.
“And so down the road that leads to Hell,/We strode a merry band,/Sargon, Balthazar, Jezebel,/Cain with his bloody hand.”–Robert E Howard, “The Dust Dance”
“One gets the terrible impression that war settles nothing, that to win a war is every bit as disastrous as to lose one.” –Agatha Christie
Both quotes sum up where I am mentally right now.
Eight of the 10 Rs who voted for impeachment are from districts that went for Trmp, some by quite a bit.
The stench of dead fish rises with the sun.