Want To See Trump Impeached?

The Weekly Standard is a neo-con Republican publication founded by News Corp (Rupert Murdoch) in 1995. Many of their top writers are conservative ant-Trumpers. I'll bet some of them were watching Trump's favorite TV show Wednesday morning, Fox and Friends, when Brian Kilmeade explained how Omarosa "out-smarted" the obsessed Trump. Remember, while normal heads of state are dealing with issues of war and peace and issues impacting the lives of their countrymen, Trump is fighting childish twitter wars with random imbeciles like himself. Since he managed to worm his way into the White House with the help of the Kremlin, overdose deaths have increased to an all-time high, despite his campaign promises on the subject, and the White House was formed to apologize for lies about black employment figures Trump had just pulled out of his ass.

Trump is inadvertently help Omarosa sell her book and it is sending him into a dark rage. Kilmeade: "She has come out with a series of tapes and in many ways, seems to have outsmarted the president who has taken the bait and gone out and tweeted directly after her." Her strategy for using the senile "president" to accomplish her goals are stunning. You think Putin or Xi couldn't do it much better? This clown is a complete joke on the world stage.

So, getting back to the Weekly Standard. yesterday, one of the editors, Jonathan Last, was fretting about Omarosa's tapes and explaining the uniquely dangerous ground Trump is now on. "I hope," wrote Last, a solid Republican, "there isn’t a tape of Donald Trump using the N-word in a manner that’s clearly meant to be offensive, bigoted, and derogatory. We’ve now reached the stage where the existence of such a tape is not proven, but is more than theoretically possible. We have a recording of Trump campaign aides talking about the potential of such a tape in a manner that suggests they find it within the realm of possibility. And we now have Penn Jillette saying that he was in the room when Trump said-- frequently-- 'racially insensitive things.' (Jillette won’t say exactly what he heard Trump say.) Lastly, we have the bizarre spectacle of President Trump insisting that his former business partner, TV producer Mark Burnett, called him to say that no such tapes exist-- while Burnett himself remains publicly silent." Can you imagine how leaders in other countries are looking at Trump fighting with-- spending all his energy on-- some random person from his old TV reality show?

This is insane... and everyone inside the White House knows it. Trump's base, of course, for whom this is all one great big reality show to take them out of their miserable hateful existences, absolutely loves it. And, no, "hard evidence" in the way of tapes means absolutely nothing to them. Anything can happen on TV to alter reality, right? Last asked about what will happen when the tapes get played publicly. "Do you think he’d lose support from his base? Do you think he’d pay a price for lying about the tape’s existence? Or for using the N-word? I do not. Everything we know about the president's base supporters suggests that there is no straw that will break the camel's back-- only goalposts, receding constantly to the horizon. This is a comment on the character of his base, certainly. But it’s more about how narrow his base already is to begin with. Trump’s approval rating among strong Republican partisans is extremely high: 93 percent of the people who voted for him in 2016 approve of him to this point. His approval among everyone else is dismal: 39 percent among independents; 9 percent among Democrats. Just as a structural matter, he doesn’t have very far to fall with either of these groups. And if the last two years are any guide-- Stormy Daniels, tariffs, denigrating America while praising Russia, the fluffing of Kim Jong-un, personnel scandals-- then Trump is already resting on his foundation.

The Trump presidency is oddly dependent on tapes. Trump’s entire existence is so strange and outside the norms of decent behavior that many of his foibles simply cannot be believed, absent hard evidence. Who would believe that Donald Trump would call reporters pretending to be a publicist in order to brag about himself? If you didn’t have the tapes, no one would. Who would believe that Trump would admit-- almost to a total stranger, while wearing a microphone-- to grabbing women by their genitals and forcing them to do whatever he wanted? Without the tapes, no one would. People have speculated for almost two years about a Russian pee tape that almost certainly doesn’t exist. And everyone will continue to view it as a fantasy. Unless it surfaces. At which point we will all shake our heads and say, “Actually, we should have known...”

The other factor in why you need documentary materials is that the president, his advisers, and his supporters in the media use gaslighting as their primary means of defense. They make frictionless transitions from “no one ever met with Russians,” to “the meeting with Russians was about adoption,” to “of course they met with Russians about getting oppo on the Clintons and why do you have have a problem with that?”

Without tapes, or emails, or hard evidence, Trump World simply denies everything as a matter of course.

The N-word tapes occupy a middle ground in the public consciousness between the Access Hollywood and the Russian pee tape. There is circumstantial evidence to suggest they might exist-- and people within Trump World have privately acted as though they believe the tapes might exist. But so far they remain mythical.

Last made the point that Trump's moron fans won't care if the tapes are released but he worries that when they do come out Trump will be like a cornered rat, refusing to resign, with a cowardly, partisan Senate that won't impeach him. "What then?... The only way Trump leaves is if he loses re-election in 2020. For both good and ill, President Trump is our reality and he will continue to affect the world around him. So now we must imagine what a weakened Trump would be like for the next two years. Do you think he’d knuckle down, start acting like a statesman, and try to unite the country? Or do you think he’d push for more chaos and division in the hopes of somehow drawing to an inside straight (again)? Assuming he does, the only possible downside of such a strategy, from Trump's perspective, would be salting the ground of American political life for any potential successor. And he would view this not as a bug, but as a feature. If you look at the Trump administration and think it can’t get worse, then you haven’t contemplated what a scorched-earth Trump might be like."

But the worst outcome is the one that requires the least speculation and imagination. As things stand right now there are still a handful of norms left in public life. Not saying the N-word is one of them. It would be nice if we could hold on to that norm. If we have a tape of the president of the United States saying it and he suffers no proximate consequences, that norm will be shattered.

Think of it this way: The Access Hollywood tape didn’t break Donald Trump. It broke the Republican party’s willingness to insist that character matters.

How about obstruction of Justice? Yesterday Trumpanzee admitted to the Wall Street Journal that he took away Brennan's security clearance because of his involvement in the Putin-Gate probe. This morning the John Brennan OpEd in the NY Times, President Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash, was pretty conclusive. "Russian denials are," he wrote, "in a word, hogwash."

Before, during and after its now infamous meddling in our last presidential election, Russia practiced the art of shaping political events abroad through its well-honed active measures program, which employs an array of technical capabilities, information operations and old-fashioned human intelligence spycraft. Electoral politics in Western democracies presents an especially inviting target, as a variety of politicians, political parties, media outlets, think tanks and influencers are readily manipulated, wittingly and unwittingly, or even bought outright by Russian intelligence operatives. The very freedoms and liberties that liberal Western democracies cherish and that autocracies fear have been exploited by Russian intelligence services not only to collect sensitive information but also to distribute propaganda and disinformation, increasingly via the growing number of social media platforms.

...The already challenging work of the American intelligence and law enforcement communities was made more difficult in late July 2016, however, when Mr. Trump, then a presidential candidate, publicly called upon Russia to find the missing emails of Mrs. Clinton. By issuing such a statement, Mr. Trump was not only encouraging a foreign nation to collect intelligence against a United States citizen, but also openly authorizing his followers to work with our primary global adversary against his political opponent.

  Such a public clarion call certainly makes one wonder what Mr. Trump privately encouraged his advisers to do-- and what they actually did-- to win the election. While I had deep insight into Russian activities during the 2016 election, I now am aware-- thanks to the reporting of an open and free press-- of many more of the highly suspicious dalliances of some American citizens with people affiliated with the Russian intelligence services.

  Mr. Trump’s claims of no collusion are, in a word, hogwash.

...[H]ow many members of “Trump Incorporated” attempted to defraud the government by laundering and concealing the movement of money into their pockets.

Is there a way to persuade Republican senators that it is in their own best interest to disassociate themselves from Trump? Self-interest. The Democrats are likely to win over 50 House seats in November, perhaps many more than that. But the Senate map for this year is very favorable for Republicans. There is one Senate seat-- one-- that would send Republican senators scurrying: Texas. If Beto O'Rourke beats Ted Cruz, Trump is D.O.N.E.-- done. There is no excuse Republicans can come up for in their minds to write that off. And this week Beto actually came in first in a poll; he's been gaining on Cruz consistently. In 2020, the Senate map is much more favorable to Democrats. At the very minimum, we'll be looking at Cory Gardner (R-CO), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Susan Collins (R-ME), Steve Daines (R-MT) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) all looking over their shoulders and doing the calculus about how much damage Trumpism will do to them. If Last's scorched earth scenario plays out Dan Sullivan (R-AK), David Perdue (R-GA), Pat Roberts (R-KS), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Ben Sasse (R-NE), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) are suddenly in play as well. Most of those people hate Trump's guts. Almost all of them would vote "guilty" when the House impeaches him-- if they think their careers are on the line. But it all starts with Beto O'Rourke. That's what that Senate thermometer in all about.