You couldn’t help but make a direct, almost umbilical connection, between Michael Cohen’s parting words yesterday … “Given my experience working for Mr Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, there will never be a peaceful transition of power” and the performance of 99% of the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee.
As was plain to everyone watching, the Republicans, led by the loudest and most cynical of the (so-called) Freedom Caucus, had zero interest in refuting anything … anything, mind you … Cohen accused Trump of being. Not of being a “racist”, or a “con man” or a “cheat”. Hell, if Cohen produced a HiDef video of Trump kidnapping schoolgirls (or boys) off the streets of Mole Hill, West Virginia and shooting them up with opioids the Republican response would still be, “Oh, yeah! But you want a book deal, you lying bastard!”
Trump’s flagrant incompetence and corruption has never bothered the likes of Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan and … it’s very important to emphasize … it never will.
Those two, the leaders of The Wrongest of The Right Wing, get elected and stay in office because they bring full-on toxic cultural warfare, not in spite of it. They are the equivalent of Subutai the Mongol for America’s fear-driven racist under-class. For that sad over-stressed crowd, ethics, legality, logic and human decency are incidental to defeating … liberals. “Liberals” of course being code for uppity women, blacks, Hispanics, climate change, electric cars, mass transportation, cheaper prescription drugs and everything else that comes with common sense in 2019.
Meadows and Jordan may not be quite the abject fools and buffoons that some of their colleagues are. Here’s looking at you ex-Loooosiana Sheriff and wearer of weird, ill-fitting vests, Clay Higgins
(may you personally re-confiscate Cohen’s “boxes”), or Carol Miller of West Virginia,
or Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, 
or … well, it got to the point, before the lunch break, where the Republicans looked to be in a competition to see who among them could sound most most like they were having an ischemic stroke; bug-eyed and struggling to put two coherent sentences together. With the exception of Justin Amash from Michigan, you’re excused if you thought the brain-eating zombie apocalypse had already attacked and fed off the GOP caucus.
Lord, what a collection of goobers.
But my point here, and it too is somewhat apocalyptic, is that this crowd; bred, raised and sustained on the raging gibberish of talk radio (several of them are ex-talk radio hosts), don’t have the genetic composition to concede defeat. Because of that, it is worth considering that they will see Trump being driven from office by the legal weight of Robert Mueller and the Southern District of New York and/or defeated at the ballot box in 2020 as the catalyst for all-out civil insurrection.
As Cohen suggested and others who have known Trump for years have concurred, Trump will resort to anything to avoid (or reject) defeat. This is acutely true in the context of this moment, where the Presidency may be the only thing that temporarily protects him from total financial destruction. Should the SDNY indict him for bank fraud, tax fraud, insurance fraud and on and on, the penalties for could easily leave him penniless, a blubbery shamble in a Trump Gardens efficiency, rocking a soiled wife-beater and eating cold, day-old KFC out of a bucket.
Facing that prospect Trump will have no choice but to rally the goober masses, the cesspool swamp of deplorables that re-elect the Jim Jordans, Mark Meadows, Glenn Grothmans and Carol Millers of the planet … because of their indifference to decency and common sense and revulsion of “liberals.”
Now, we always want to avoid hysteria and hyperbole. But you know that line you keep hearing about how, “this isn’t normal”?
Well, it could very easily, and likely, get even less normal.
I fear the same thing. I don’t know what to do about it.
The “he will not go gently from his Andrew Jackson painting” thing keeps circling around the virtual wall I’ve built for myself to prevent panic. What, exactly, will the eviction of trump, pence and their gaggle of deplorables look like? Really, what?!
Thus endeth my simplistic, gut-based thinking. For now.
Frankly, this IS NOT something that is keeping me up at night. Sure, I expect trump to rant and rage some, but I expect that the machinery will continue to function. I expect that by the time he loses, many of his supporters (but certainly not all of them) will have realized that Trump was just another politician, who may have been sincere, but sold them out just like all the other politicians before him….
Trump supporter’s own cynicism will turn them away from Trump. They already believe that all politicians are crooked and corrupt, and just waiting to take advantage of them. They will believe the same things of Trump, just as they believed the same things of W. (and of McConnell, and Ryan, etc.).
Seriously, even Sean Hannity is only using Trump to get rich. He’s not a true believer in anything, much less Trump. Sure, he’ll rage and pout, but he won’t actually do anything, and neither will the majority of Trump’s followers (OK, there may be a couple of bombings of pizza restaurants where the pedophiles hang out in the basement, but….)
I think the “bored with Trump” concept is valid. At some point even his crowd wants a fresh model. But his numbers with Republicans are still in the stratosphere and likely will remain there until “the movement’s” real leaders — Rush and Sean and Fox & Friends — set their sights on a new (ratings) savior. But as I say, Trump faced with near certain financial ruin thanks most likely to the SDNY will have no choice but to make every insane appeal and call in every chit he can. And as long as that keeps the eyeballs tuned to Hannity it has the very real potential to be an extraordinarily ugly and wasteful episode.
Yes, it will be ugly, but the Hannity/Rush/Fox talking heads will not be telling the unhappy rubes to grab their pitchforks and guns, rather they will be telling the rubes to send cash to them! Tune in to us and we will tell you the truth!
The Fox News (et. al.) business model works better in opposition than it works when in power. They made more $$ with President Obama than they did with President W or President Trump. Much higher ratings. They would have done better with Clinton than with Trump.
Sure, they’ll have plenty of indignation, but the only violence will be isolated incidents. The reality is that they are as much a part of the system as any other politician. They will benefit hugely from a change in administration.
Hey, I’m all in on the argument that the Hannitys and Limbaughs will do everything they can to monetize whatever comes next. But in that context can you imagine anything … anything … sweeter and more potentially lucrative than fighting off a months-long attempt by the libtards to run Trump out of office? The Donald being the existential hero to much of their audience. Talk about wet dreams. The greater point being that the right-wing media/entertainment complex has only good shareholder reasons to inflame the process, demonizing every legal and legislative institution that isn’t pro-Trump. I’m not saying that all the goobers will grab their guns and head to DC. But, based on polling, there are millions of them out there primed for a truly fevered defense of Trump and the “values” he stands for … in their minds.
Thanks for the soliloquy, and others before; nail on the head.
Peter Maritz, you’re still in denial. I wonder how many of the heavily-armed Trump troopers you actually know. And I see insufficient evidence to justify the confidence you place in our hired guardians of the status quo (militarized police forces; world-policing military forces) to shoot down their brothers, cousins, and uncles in defense of a democracy they themselves dislike and don’t believe in. “It can’t happen here” syndrome should have been discarded after November 8, 2016.
You expect the fascist rank-and-file to become bored, or to reach a point where the scales fall from their eyes. Face facts. They haven’t yet. If putting children in cages, and kissing North Korea’s ring, can’t shake them–NOTHING will. Face it: Donald Trump’s giving the Republicans in office, and the revved-up, armed-to-the-teeth & well-brainwashed masses, exactly what they want. 95% of elected Republicans, and 95% of the popular base beneath them, haven’t budged. Like their fuehrer, they’ve discovered the totalitarian tactic of never admitting error and never conceding anything, no matter what the facts or the truth may really be.
Liberals need to believe in democracy and be willing to learn to defend it in the most literal and immediate sense. Disabuse yourselves of the comforting thought-habits of a liberal version of “American exceptionalism”—and be wary also of the risk of viewing social, political, and economic phenomena through filters consisting of one’s own mostly unconscious–and consequently, unsuspected–class or caste biases. From these generalities to the particulars of what actions any one of us must be ready and willing to undertake, there is no formiula to follow. Only history to study.
So have you got your guns ready and loaded? Prepared to man the barricades?
I also question Mr. Maritz’ premise that “Trump is just another politician.” No, that can’t be true. He is a sociopath, so much more than other greedy selfish corrupt politicians as to register as a different KIND, not simply a different DEGREE. Repulsive as the thought is, Trump belongs in the class of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin & Mao, rather than the crowd of Reagan, Cheney, Junior Bush, Nixon, and their awful ilk. You say Trump’s not a mass murderer, just a crook traitor and lynch mob instigator, and I pray he doesn’t get it into his head to launch atomic warheads but we all know that no wisdom or common sense or sense of compassion would deter him if Trump were tempted to “play chicken” with Armageddon. His ego is precisely that of: “No one’s ever done this but I am so unbelieveably important and powerful that I shall be the one!” [Never heard of Harry Truman, naturally.]