Trump will be nearing the end of his 6th term, Weekend-at-Bernie’s style, as he gibbers and drools, and Official Washington will still be predicting that any moment Republicans will rise up and evict him from the Citadel:
An inexorable decline is underway. Trump is learning about — and railing against — the limitations of his power. (He even had to cancel his proposed military parade.) But he cannot control himself. His demeaning tweets, his rampant lying, his compulsive attacks on the news media and his breathtakingly bratty behavior might thrill his base, but the rest of Washington is growing sick of him. Republicans will use him to stock the courts with conservatives, repeal regulation and finally get back at Franklin D. Roosevelt, but as soon as Trump is shown to be politically weakened, they will throw him under the bus.
Any day now. Any day. They’ll disown the monster they created. Sure they will. We have been waiting for this train since day one of the Republican primaries back in 2016 and maybe it’s time to accept IT AIN’T GONNA COME.
Look. Republicans might disavow Trump in the aftermath of an electoral loss in 2020, but in no way are they going to give up his slavering hordes of supporters, his in-house and outhouse media, the mailing lists of all the festering boils like the NRA which got Trump elected. They need those people. Those people are all they have left.
They owe the racists and hicks, the stupid great-uncle who still calls people “colored” and the tight-permed aunt who thinks it the height of tyranny to press 1 for English and 2 for Spanish. It’s not that those are Trump’s only supporters, it’s that those are the ones who make the Nice Polite Racists possible.
So long as Trump’s deplorables are still around, his wealthy white-flighters in Washington and Waukesha counties can excuse continuing to vote for anything with an R after its name because (lowers voice, sips from wineglass full of ice cubes) too many people in this country are on welfare. That will still be okay to say, because they’re not driving trucks plastered with Confederate flags around, after all.
White anxiety about the changing world is their only animating principle. Everything is explained by, and undergirded with, racism. Lower my taxes? Yes, because I don’t want my money going to Those People. Better education? Sure, give us money for private schools, because the public ones are full of Those People. Policing? Gotta keep Those People under control. Foreign policy? Just keep Those People out.
This is the base, and the money people know it. That’s all they’ve got, and once Trump made it obvious, they can’t go back. The base has had a taste of the hard stuff now, and they’re not going to support a Romney or a W. Bush ever again, not after Trump. Weak-chinned boys in suits whistling for dogs? Get on up out of here with that shit. J. Frederick LaCrosse-Tenniscourt is going to be begging people to clap for his plan to, I don’t know, privatize oxygen, and the crowd will be chanting WE WANT TRUMP.
They’ll have to roll him out like Immortan Joe and Republican senators can talk to Richard Cohen all they want about how much they hate it. This is the deal they made. It’s the deal they make every single day they don’t impeach him or resign en masse, but Richard Cohen still believes in their sacred honor:
Trump will soon learn the same lesson. It is not his government, it is ours. It is not his White House, it is ours. The deep state is very deep indeed. It booted Nixon from the White House and compelled Clinton to roll up his sleeve. To Trump, it looks like a monster rising from the swamp. To me, it looks like a shivering soldier at Valley Forge.
THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? That shivering soldier at Valley Forge, first of all, was fighting against a capricious man-baby who threw public tantrums whenever he didn’t get exactly what he wanted from his inferiors. Sound familiar?
More than that, though, that poor cold lice-ridden bastard wanted to go home. He wanted to screw the local tavern wench, smoke a pipe, and put his trench-feet up by the warm fire, and I know that because that’s all anybody wants. The only reason to fight a war is if the alternative is worse. The only reason that soldier was freezing his ass off is that a tyrannical madman overrode the desires of the people until they rose up against him. Things had to get BAD for that to happen. So far I see no Republicans being Boston-Massacred. Trump isn’t even quartering soldiers in their homes. Their stamps are still tax-free.
I don’t know who Cohen thinks the GOP is in this scenario but Republican senators are far more likely to be courtiers simpering about the glory of George III, than soldiers shivering beneath Betsy Ross’s banner.
A.
An impeachment, historically speaking, means big wins for the Other Party, as long as it is coupled with a removal from office. It would at this point be political suicide. Their chance to dump him and live to fight another day has long since sailed. There will be no impeachment. A Democratic House and Senate could limit his ability to do his dirty deeds, somewhat, and I think that that is the best we can hope for until 2020. Not even that much, as long as there are enough of us with this mouthful of ‘there’s nothing can be done’ shit, and as long as enough of us will not active work for the political change.
I think what irks me is the never-ending supply of grace for Republicans, whereas one minor transgression – real or imagined – is sufficient to end a Democrat’s career. Launch an invasion on another country on a false pretense, one that you know to be false? Ah, shit happens. No need to get all Nuremberg over these penny-ante crimes against humanity.
I wonder if they’ll disavow after a thumping in November. 2006 was about when GWB’s supporters jumped ship after sticking with him through Iraq and Katrina.