Not the end but the beginning
Charles Blow says it’s only going to get worse.
I expect Trump to admit nothing, even if faced with proof positive of his own misconduct. There is nothing in the record to convince me otherwise. He will call the truth a lie and vice versa.
I also don’t think that Trump would ever voluntarily leave office as Nixon did, even if he felt impeachment was imminent. I’m not even sure that he would willingly leave if he were impeached and the Senate moved to convict, a scenario that is hard to imagine at this point.
I don’t think any of this gets better, even as the evidence becomes clearer. I don’t believe that Trump’s supporters would reverse course in the same way that Nixon’s did. I don’t believe that the facts Mueller presents will be considered unassailable. I don’t believe Trump will go down without bringing the country down with him.
In short, I don’t believe we are reaching the end of a nightmare, but rather we are entering one. This will not get easier, but harder.
Cheerful.
I’ll do him one better: I don’t believe that the facts Mueller presents will be considered facts.
Yeah but I don’t want Pence any closer to the presidency than he already is.
So much this…I want Donald out, because he is clearly unfit to be president. I do not want Pence in. That is another nightmare that would be just beginning if the Donald happened to leave for some reason.
There really is no way out of the mess that Trump’s voters, combined with the archaic and racist concept of the electoral college, got us into.
Nixon wasn’t that voluntary. Top Republican leaders paid him a visit and told him he’d lost their support so resignation would be best.
If Mueller’s report is truly damning, I honestly believe Republicans will drop support for him, if only to protect their own political futures. This would have to be very clear collusion, very clear obstruction of justice, or very clear and serious perjury, much worse than what’s come out so far.
Will that happen? We will see. I’ve previously posted her an article from Wired that argued pretty convincingly that Rod Rosenstein’s behavior is consistent with someone who knows Mueller’s report is going to be a disaster for Trump.
Truly damning? What, because what we already know isn’t truly damning?
The honesty of the belief isn’t the issue, the issue is what evidence there is for the belief and how it stacks up against evidence opposed to the belief, and so on.
There is always a possibility that once he’s cornered to the extent that even his narcissism accepts that he’s tucked , Trump will himself start singing like a canary on cocaine, and despite his obvious shortcomings in the intelligence department I wouldn’t put it past him to have collected and kept all the dirt on which he could lay his grubby little mitts on everybody he’s ever had dealings with. Pence might act like he’s the moral superior of Christ but there’s got to be skeletons in his closet; he is a high-ranking politician of the Republican flavour, after all.
Trump has managed to shift the Overton Window (Overton Floor?) for truth itself. He has told thousands of obvious, public, easily discoverable lies since he started his run for the Republican presidential nomination. He was obviously, grotesquely and shamelessly unqualified to fulfill the requirements of the presidency. He had a series of gaffes, blunders and outbursts, any one of which would have forced a normal candidate out of the race, resulting in the end of their political careers. Since winning it he has failed to do most of what the position calls for and has actively undermined, criticised and, interfered with the traditions, norms and institutions of all three branches of government, the proper constitutional relationships of which he is totally and fiercely ignorant of. His reprehensible personal behaviour and boorishness are manifest almost every day. All this without the slightest reference to or consideration of anything to do with Russia. He was tainted, spoiled goods long before any Russian connection. And somehow, in the eyes of his suporters, and others, none of this is “truly damning.”
Too many people (Hello much of the news media! Howdy Congressional Republicans!) have become so habituated to his perpetual corruption and mendacity, that they need bigger and bigger instances of it to even notice it above the background radition of outrageousness. You can’t see the forest for the forest fire, and once Paradise/Pleasure/Wherever have burned down, once the hurricane has blown itself out and the paper towels have been used, it’s just another funny little mistake in a compendium of callous ignorance and inattention.
Quite so, like Skeletor above, saying “what’s come out so far” isn’t “very clear obstruction of justice”…which I find staggering given how public Trump is about it.