Honestly, at this point if they gave him emergency powers to run the nation by dictatorial fiat I wouldn’t be all that surprised. Especially after seeing the shit they’re pulling in various states.
It’s actually probably more likely than an impeachment.
A Republican Senate will absolutely, positively, not convict Trump. There is no realistic sequence of events that would cause that to happen.
Primarily because it’s unclear whether Trump can even be indicted for anything. That would certainly go to the Supreme Court, and the McConnel would just say that Trump is innocent until proven guilty until then.
I truly believe that Senate Republicans are so far gone that they would prefer to lose the majority and the Presidency rather than impeach. They may think that’s inevitable anyway.
I don’t think Trump is the kind of man who will bow out and let Pence run in 2020, so if Trump loses his re-election bid, he will have lost it to a Democrat and Pence won’t have any pardon powers anyway.
Trump’s shown us that he’s 90-95% focused on himself, with maybe 5-10% leftover for his kids. I can imagine a backroom deal where Trump agrees to “declare victory” and resign if Pence will pardon his entire family. He’ll still face state charges, which is why I have a hard time seeing him accepting this route.
I think a realistic scenario is one where Fox turns on him. Fox is a major part of what’s keeping his base supportive, which in turns keeps the Republican Congress behind him. Most Republican politicians are terrified of being primaried, and they know that after years of broken promises (repeal Obamacare, etc) they have little or no independent credibility with their voters.
But if Rupert Murdoch and the other Fox executives believe that Trump is becoming too costly, they’ll turn on him. We’ve already seen a preview of this with Tucker Carlson beginning to criticize Trump in the past few days. If Fox turns, the base will get wobbly, and then you might see a few tentative Senators begin to float the possibility of impeachment.
Yeah, this is the one that scares me most. It was such a repudiation last month that Trump had no realistic option to contest the legitimacy of the vote. But when he’s on the ballot in 2020, if the results are close, I could easily see where Trump and the Republicans join arms and claim voter fraud, an illegitimate election and then nullify the results. There was an article the other day about the sweeping emergency powers latent in the modern Presidency, waiting for someone to use them.
Thankfully, the Democrats now hold 1/2 of one of the three branches of government, so it’ll be harder to pull off compared to 2017.
That starts civil war. I guarantee blue states and blue population would not stand for it- you’d see either nullification, a second federal government form (that claims red america Seceded)
I expect the military would just stay home if Trump tried to order them to enforce it.
Trump can’t nullify the election, for the same reason he can’t pardon himself for state crimes. Elections are managed at the state-wide level. Once a state chooses the individuals to serve as electors for the EC, there is no mechanism to review or change that decision at the federal level.
Case in point: the investigation and possibility of repeat election for NC-09 is exclusively handled by various state-level agencies. The federal government can’t order a new election, nor prevent one.
Now conceivably Republicans could coordinate at the state level to change the overall election results. But this is unlikely to work, because elections are ultimately certified by someone appointed by the governor, and Democrats now control enough governorships to achieve 270 electoral votes.
All I know is that all of my liberal friends knew that W was so horrible there was no possible way he could win a re-election bid, and if he did, we’d literally be living under martial law with death camps.
You act like the rule of law matters. It’s adorable.
I mean you’re correct, but Federalism only exists these days because the Federal Government follows the rules. If the Feds decided to ignore the courts tomorrow… what could say, Nebraska do about it?
Bubbles are funny things. He was also Hitler somehow. Cause Hitler really cared about African people?
First of all, the Feds, meaning the federal civil service, generally do follow the rules. If they get an illegal order, they ignore it. If Trump does not have a majority of the EC, then in January 2020 all his orders are illegal. He can call himself President for life, but without the machinery of state at his disposal he has no power. Even if all Republican civil servants were willing to play along (they wouldn’t), there aren’t enough to accomplish anything.
And don’t even start fantasizing about the military stepping in, because they wouldn’t. First, they are even more rule-bound than the civil service. Second, without a functioning civil service, the military doesn’t get paid, which means they will be just as outraged as everyone else at the departure from SOP.
So they were right, you’re saying?
No one taking Jan 2025? Lotta optimism in here. I mean at least March 15th, 2023, after another historic midterm defeat, right?
I also forsee Jan ‘21. He can’ t be impeached and nor should he be. The midterms show that he’s like an anchor around the Republicans’ necks so why would you want to get rid of him. Didn’t Clinton see a significant boost in popularity after the GOP tried to impeach him? I can’t see him getting a second term. Of course the deplorable states are gonna do what they do but I don’t see him winning the same rustbelt states that he did before. Wisconsin, Penn., Michigan, I forsee those states flipping back to the Dems. Is that enough even if Florida continues to be Florida?
To stop the attempted destruction of international order and stability?
(I understand your point, however.)
I think this is quite the quandary for Democrats - Jennifer Rubin touches on it here.
Rubin also said Democrats would have a moral obligation to try to impeach Trump if evidence emerged he had committed an impeachable offense. But she also said making such a move would be “politically unwise.”
“You wouldn’t be able to remove him, and it would infuriate a good chunk of the American people,” Rubin said. “So what do you do if you really are caught in that position where there’s overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing, of criminal wrongdoing?”
On the one hand, Democrats are morally obligated to impeach trump. I mean, do you want to be party to setting a precedent that allows a sitting President to go unpunished for committing felonies?
OTOH, it’s politically dangerous. Republicans are going to be outraged regardless, but what about noncommittal low information voters? As we saw in 2016, it takes only a tiny fraction of voters to swing an outcome in our undemocratic system.
During Watergate, Republicans didn’t abandon Nixon until the release of the tapes. I doubt we’ll have anything like that in trump’s (likely) laundry list of criminal activities, and by and large Republicans don’t seem to care anyway that trump and his cadre of cronies committed numerous felonies (“what about illegal don’t you understand?” only applies to those people seeking asylum.) The GOP strategy that Republican voters will believe anything trump tells them isn’t misplaced, after all.
But, if trump is impeached, the trial in the Senate will include I would think incontrovertible evidence of wrongdoing - so even when the Senate votes not to convict, maybe a majority of Americans will (finally) realize Republicans have abandoned the rule of law.
Maybe the Dem strategy should be to defer impeachment while demand loudly and constantly that the DOJ indict Trump. They pair this with holding their own hearings, both on his misdeeds and on the substance of the DOJ policy that he can’t be indicted. I think that approach as some legal politically.
This thread is a real downer. The end game is: he will be forced to resign after the dems take control of the house, well before 2020 election. Once they and Mueller compare notes and concrete evidence is presented, it’ll be over. I hope him, his slimy family, and all of their associates rot in prison. Cohen and Manafort are the beginning.
Well, I assume that in 2020, after he leaves office, he’ll be indicted.
Who or what will force him to resign? The Senate won’t convict him, and the DOJ thinks he’s immune to prosecution as long as he’s in office. So, you know, he won’t leave office of his own accord, because he doesn’t want to be indicted.