Politics is about power. It’s about mojo and juice and momentum and timing. As long as a politician has power, and some sort of sizable base behind him, he can get away with an awful lot in Washington. There are always sharks in the water, but they usually just circle, waiting for the scent of enough blood. You don’t want to strike too soon. Even sharks have to be careful, wounded creatures can be more dangerous than healthy ones.
And Trump is a wounded creature. Although he has weathered all the troubles that seem to pop up weekly, they are taking their toll. Hundreds of little nicks and cuts have attracted a lot of predators. Yesterday was a huge hit. The sea is turning red around him. He has been implicated in illegal activity in a court of law, and he presents himself as a president of law and order, so this is bad for him on many levels. This isn’t a situation where he can simply deny there’s anything there, or pretend nothing happened. He is still pointing out that it has nothing to do with Russia, but no one who knows anything seems to think arguing those semantics make any difference at this point.
Make no mistake, establishment Republicans do not like Trump one bit. He is the culmination of their dalliances with the Tea Party, whom they needed to maintain control of the federal government. They hate having to deal with their white trash and evangelical constituents, but they are a necessary evil if they want to get elected. The problem with depending on an easily manipulated base is that anyone can manipulate them, and Trump is better at manipulating a mob of idiots than than the average old school GOP candidate. It takes a brashness and lack of self-consciousness that not even most sociopaths are capable of.
So Republicans tolerate Trump, as long as he provides cover for them to raid the coffers and do the bidding of their rich and powerful masters: the billionaires and businessmen who want to turn this country into a plutocracy. They are happy to leech off of his power, and use him when it is convenient, but politicians are like rats. They will flee a sinking ship as soon as it starts taking on too much water. They always make sure to get enough distance so they don’t get dragged down with it.
Every time there is some new scandal or turmoil, they sit on the sidelines and watch to see if this is the one that will sink him. When they realize that his base is still with him and keeping him afloat, they meekly side with him as much as they can without getting his taint on them. It’s going to he hard to do that this time. Even this won’t matter much to his core base, but there are other things in play besides public opinion. The unavoidable truth is becoming clear that Trump is a serious and inept criminal, and his campaign and presidency is riddled with wrongdoing. Unforgivingly, it’s wrongdoing that can be proven.
Today is the first day of a whole new era of the Trump presidency. He is directly implicated, and this is just the first in what will be a long litany of convictions and revelations and accusations by turncoats and co-conspirators, anxious to save their own hides. The politicians in his own party will start to turn on him, now that he is starting to show serious cracks. Because the midterm elections are coming up very soon, they need to make some important decisions. Do they want to be aligned with someone who looks more and more like a criminal and a traitor every day? They can’t win without his supporters, but they can’t win without the rest of their voters who are over this horrible Trump experiment. He may have finally tipped his scales from an asset to a liability. The problem the GOP faces is that there is no other ship to swim to as this one goes down. They have split the party in their desperation to stay in office, and while they will still try all their dirty tricks like voter suppression and redistricting, floods of Super PAC money and attack ads, they may have damaged themselves too much to avoid the much talked about “blue wave”.
Most likely, the GOP will grab everything they can between now and November, trying more ad more outrageous stunts like changing state constitutions. Most of them with any sense will be dropping out of their races and taking consultant jobs, or at least planning for defeat and a life after politics. They will tear themselves apart from the inside, in an orgy of cannibalism, disarray and mayhem that most people saw coming and will label karma.
The sad thing is that the sharks in the water will be Republicans. The Democrats will do exactly what Democrats do, which is stand weakly by, immobilized by fear and indecision. Already they are privately talking about avoiding subjects like impeachment because they are afraid of riling up Trump’s base in November. Democrats do not play offense. They don’t even play effective defense most of the time. They just wait for the opposition to screw up, and hope everyone else sees it without them having to point it out and appear impolite. They saw what happened to Hillary every time she appeared strong or decisive or too aloof to play the subordinate. She got demonized and attacked, and voters in her own party came to see her exactly as the Republican narrative portrayed her. Democratic politicians are afraid of their sensitive, unreasonable and easily outraged constituents as well.
So they get very little done, and they are afraid to commit to any position. They have the majority on their side, and a clear advantage with young voters, but like most people over 50, they have no clue how to relate to and energize their young base. So they stall and freeze in inaction, and waste the power and momentum they have in their camp. Obama was one of the few who knew how to energize the party, and even he was falling afoul of some of them in the end.
Regardless of all the Republican scheming and Democrat incompetence, Trump is most likely entering his death spiral. He has been primed to plummet since his ill advised Putin meeting, and it’s only going to get worse. You can see that he is finally figuring that out too. In poker, you look for tells to see how strong your opponent is. Some players are really good at hiding them, and some give everything away with a finger twitch or eye movement. Trump is all tells. When he is confident and believes he can bluff his way through yet another catastrophe, he takes to Twitter and unleashes a barrage of insults and wild claims. He was conspicuously silent in the wee hours of this morning, offering a few quiet, restrained tweets. I’m sure that is also the product of his lawyers and handlers trying to keep him in check, but they haven’t really stopped him in the past. No, he’s worried now. It is finally starting to sink in how serious this is and what wrath defrauding and lying to the government brings.
It’s only going to get worse from here. His options shrank even more overnight. There is no way he can fire Mueller now. He will incur the wrath of the nation, and the people in his own party. Of course, he is just stupid and crazy enough to try, but that will be his death knell. He might want to pardon Manafort, but it will not look good at all. Presidential pardons used on people who worked on your campaign, a campaign under intense scrutiny right now, won’t go over well. Trump has had controversies and troubles all his life, but those occurred in the business world, where treachery and immorality is expected. There is very little justice in the financial sector when you screw over a bunch of contractors or deals with the city or when you bilk the working class. It’s only when you hurt your own kind,the other billionaires in the club that you get punished.
Now Trump is in the arena of constitutional law and the intelligence community tasked with rooting out corruption. He is not part of that club. He is fresh meat, and a lot of people will be making their names on taking him down. These are people who have dedicated their lives to upholding the principles this country is based on and supposedly stand for. They are more powerful than most people realize, and more focused, and possessing more integrity than most of us can even relate to. The wheels of justice turn slowly, but now Trump is firmly caught up in them, and they are starting to grind.
I see a lot of parallels to the sixties: civil rights turmoil, a country deeply divided along political lines, a Republican administration in the White House that ultimately culminated in the president resigning in disgrace. We might be arriving at that very same place. We are entering a brave new world, but like always, one that seems oddly familiar to those who pay attention ....
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