Trump is no Republican. He’s just a big fat ego.
Robert Reich on Facebook today:
I had breakfast recently with a friend who’s a former Republican member of Congress. Here’s what he said:
Him: Trump is no Republican. He’s just a big fat ego.
Me: Then why didn’t you speak out against him during the campaign?
Him: You kidding? I was surrounded by Trump voters. I’d have been shot.
Me: So what now? What are your former Republican colleagues going to do?
Him (smirking): They’ll play along for a while.
Me: A while?
Him: They’ll get as much as they want – tax cuts galore, deregulation, military buildup, slash all those poverty programs, and then get to work on Social Security and Medicare – and blame him. And he’s such a fool he’ll want to take credit for everything.
Me: And then what?
Him (laughing): They like Pence.
Me: What do you mean?
Him: Pence is their guy. They all think Trump is out of his mind.
Me: So what?
Him: So the moment Trump does something really dumb – steps over the line – violates the law in a big stupid clumsy way … and you know he will …
Me: They impeach him?
Him: You bet. They pull the trigger.
They can of course do a lot of damage in that time they “play along.”
This is all under the assumption that Trump doesn’t get to incinerate the globe before they pull that trigger.
Is he a Nero?
Or rather…. a Caligula?
Suuuure they will.
Because Trump will just go quietly when they try to impeach him. He won’t kick and scream and tell his voters that this is WAR! He won’t abuse his authority as Commander in Chief and head of the intelligence agencies to intimidate Republicans in Congress.
Because all those Trump voters that were surrounding the “normal” Republicans and scaring them into playing along will surely go along meekly with an impeachment of their hero. After all, the folks who heard “Muslim registry” and “we’ll make people say Merry Christmas” are all sticklers for the Constitution and have a deep appreciation for the Emoluments Clause.
And if those things were to happen, no doubt those Republican lawmakers would just stand up to it, being the brave defenders of the Constitution that they have shown themselves to be so far.
Trump is Rorshach from Watchmen. He’s not trapped in there with you, you knuckleheads. You’re trapped in there with him.
Well, the most important thing is that republicans get to keep their jobs.
Screechy Monkey,
I think the idea is: “First we get to do all the unpopular cuts that we wanted to push through all along, he takes the responsibility, and then, when he is all unpopular and his supporters have deserted him, then we can impeach and they will vote for us because we impeached the guy who took away their medical insurance.” That does make sense.
Alex SL,
That may well be the idea, but if so it’s a foolish one. If Obamacare repeal ends up being highly unpopular, there isn’t any way the Republicans in Congress escape the blame. Even the most inattentive voter is probably aware that they were screaming about repeal long before Trump announced his candidacy; the idea that they can blame it on Trump seems far-fetched.
I wish I had your confidence in the memory of the average voter. From what I read about the USA many citizens (a) do not understand that the ACA and Obamacare are the same thing, (b) do not understand that their state’s health insurance exchange is part of the ACA, and (c) assume that health coverage has fallen under Obama. That does not appear to be a promising starting position for understanding what is going to go down over the next few years.
(Note I am not an American, so this is not really my battle. Just commenting from the sidelines and drawing conclusions based on my personal experience with voters in my countries of residence past and present…)
This does seem a very likely scenario for the Republican Party – try to use Trump as a scape goat to create/repeal the policies they really want to then abandon him throwing support behind Pence.
It’s also a scenario that could backfire badly. Possibly because voters do indeed blame the RP anyway, but also because Trump may have built his own power base by then and be unmovable by normal political means. And by having built that power base from the worst the US has to offer Trump himself may find himself used by those factions he himself has granted legitimate authority to.
It’s strongly analogous what happened with Hitler.
I was speaking with a friend a week or two after the election and I said I suspected this might be what they try to do. I don’t think they planned it that way from the beginning, but now that he’s their man, I can see them wanting to proceed this way. I just don’t know if they can pull it off, or if Trump’s cult of personality is so strong that his supporters won’t have it no matter what.
It’s actually more that I DON’T have confidence in the sophistication of the average voter.
The average voter has a hard time even comprehending that the President isn’t all-powerful, and that there’s a difference between the White House and Congress, even when they’re controlled by DIFFERENT parties. (I heard plenty of comments over the last six years about “why doesn’t Obama do something about [X]” when the answer was “well, he can’t, without the Republicans in Congress.”)
It’s the Republicans who are going to be hoping in this hypothetical scenario that the voters are (1) sophisticated enough to appreciate that, although Trump was a Republican, they shouldn’t blame Republicans in Congress for his lousy policies because they helped impeach and remove him, but (2) not sophisticated enough to realize that those same Congressional Republicans helped pass and cheerlead for those same shitty policies.
I think that’s a pretty tough needle to thread. In 1974, Republicans in Congress for the most part behaved responsibly in being willing to impeach Nixon, which was what forced his resignation. The Republicans still got crushed in the 1974 midterms.
@Screechy Monkey #6 – that’s easy. That can say that the problem isn’t that Obamacare got repealed, it’s that Trump screwed up repealing it (repealed too much of it, or too little, or didn’t have a good enough replacement ready) which is why you don’t have coverage any more.
Unless Reich tells us who he was talking to or the person speaks up this is Fake News. We have no evidence this took place other than in Reich’s head.
So the Big Smart Guys are just cosying along until they get THEIR pet agendas accomplished? Forget about 1932, when the Big Smart Guys were going to ‘control’ Hitler, and the ‘progressives’ were too busy stabbing each other in the back to mount a real opposition.
Graham and McCain have announced that they’re going to confirm Tillerson. Yup, that’ll keep the Big Cheeto in line.
One thing is that the Republican Party tends to keep a tight grip on its members. If they vote ‘wrong’, they are denied the important committee appointments that help to bring pork into their state, or control the things they want to control.
Dems are no where near as good at that. If they were, Obama could have passed whatever he wanted in the first two years, with such a solid majority. In fact, during Bush’s first two years, he didn’t have both houses of Congress, and still got most of what he wanted because the Dems tend to agree that the Republicans have a mandate – even when the Democrats are the ones elected, often.
The only way to stop horrible things from happening is for the Dems to act as the Republicans acted when Obama was elected – obstructionist. This is difficult, since the left doesn’t like to be obstructionist, and there is too big a contingent on the left right now that is saying Trump and the Congress are there because the poor disenfranchised white working man in the Midwest wanted him, and they are sorrowful that this sad group has been neglected for so long as black LGBTQ women hogged all the good jobs and the power (that last is a bit of snark, but unfortunately only slightly hyperbolic, since that is very close to what I am reading and hearing from the pundits on the so-called left).
In short, our only hope is for the Democrats to act totally out of character and obstruct, obstruct, obstruct. Make it as difficult for Trump to govern as the Republicans made it for Obama.
Nero? Caligula? How about Commodus, Marcus Aurelius’s son. From the Wikipedia article on him,
Commodus also fancied himself a gladiator. More from that article:
He also liked to kill exotic wild animals, like on various occasions, 100 lions, an ostrich, 3 elephants, and a giraffe.
So the Russell Crowe movie wasn’t far off the mark?
brightdarkness @ 12 –
I take your point, but I don’t think it’s really accurate to call it Fake News, since the source is clearly stated and thus its degree of reliability is pretty transparent. It’s Reich reporting on a conversation he says he had, written up as a dialogue. We can all see that, so we can all see that it’s a story, not a verified recorded set of facts.
You could just re-write it as Reich’s prediction or interpretation of what the Republicans are going to do.
‘this sad group has been neglected for so long as black LGBTQ women hogged all the good jobs and the power’
I work in a classic ‘male-dominated’ field. One of the reasons I accepted my current job is that there are a couple of visible women in senior technical positions, which is unusual. I mistakenly thought that meant the company would be relatively less misogynist, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I swear, the other day I overheard the rest of my team explaining to/agreeing with each other that this whole woman thing has got completely out of hand–I mean, hirers won’t even hire men any more, for fear of looking sexist. It’s outrageous. How can these guys (in a field where guys like to brag about how rational and objective they are) actually look around at an office where pretty much all of the women are admins, and actually say out loud ‘men can’t get hired here any more’? How brain dead or deluded do you have to be?
While I find this scenario utterly believable, what worries me is the idea they (Rep. estab.) will be able to remove him from power now that he has it. He has defied all expectations until now and he’s smart with regard to accomplishing what he wants. They didn’t want him nominated, I’m not sure they even wanted him to win. I afraid they’ll try and fail to remove him from power.
I can’t see how that would happen, short of an actual coup. And when I think about a coup I can’t really see how he would make that happen either, given how widely loathed he is among military people and spooks alike.
In a way he is smart with regard to accomplishing what he wants, but only in a way. He can’t get respect from most people, and he can’t get their silence or submission either. He keeps displaying his frustration about that on Twitter…and when having a chat with the CIA, as he did yesterday.
So…yes it’s true that he keeps surprising us by getting past hurdles…but he also keeps falling flat at different hurdles.
guest, I have seen similar. A job I used to work was dominated by women – in the trenches. Most of the high level staff was men. So one year, the administration looked around, and announced that they were hiring 17 more examiners, and that all of them would be white men, because we were “low on our quota”. Never mind that we had only one person of color above the level of custodian. Never mind that the group I entered with was half men (there were 12 of us) and only one of them managed to survive past probation. Men typically either left or were promoted, that is why we were short on white men.
And the other thing I learned, while working in personnel – the tendency of personnel departments seems to be to get an absolute count of racial diversity. So they counted everyone, and announced we had more people of color and more women than we ‘needed’. My boss (a woman) had me doing a special project to present to the powers that be – she had me separating out women and people of color based on position and salary. And guess what? Most of these people of color were in jobs like changing sheets and emptying bed pans. Most of the white women were in clerical positions, typing the immortal words of the white men who ran the joint and made more money than the people who were more abundant than ‘needed’.
I never heard the outcome of her presentation. Which means, I imagine, it fell into the black hole of obliviousness that was (and is) white male privilege. CHS would be proud.
@iknklast Actually in my office there are very few women altogether, let alone women in non-support positions. I just don’t understand how someone can work in my office and utter the statements ‘men can’t get hired here’ and ‘this company discriminates against men’. And have other men agree. (As far as I can tell the company seems to do reasonably well in not discriminating against people by ethnicity/race/country of origin, though I couldn’t say for sure. Given the corporate culture I’m certain anyone with a non-standard sexual orientation would be prudent to keep that to her/himself.)
Guest, one thing I’ve learned is, the minute one woman gets hired, it is seen as being the end of men getting hired. The next ten years, another gets hired, maybe two more, but still mostly men…and mostly men being hired. Still, all they can see is that women are getting hired, which means that men aren’t…
I was paid less at one of the positions I had, and when I said something about it, I was given that old canard: “he has to support a family”. This said to me by someone who knew (1) that ‘he’ was single, no children, and a girlfriend who made good money herself; (2) I had a son that I was supporting on my own; and (3) my ex wasn’t paying child support, and I couldn’t afford a lawyer to make it happen (which I had to, because our custody had changed informally, but still not formally because he wouldn’t make the change, which would require him to pay support, so I couldn’t go to the Child Support Services. They couldn’t help me, they said, until he was court ordered to pay). My boss was aware of all of those facts, and sympathetic to my situation, and still said something so jaw-droppingly stupid that all I could do was back away and go back to my desk mumbling something about male privilege making people blind.
Oh, and in case any MRAs show up to mansplain to me why I wasn’t worth the same money: I had the exact same job title, and actually had duties that were at a higher level than my job title. Because they underfilled my job (I was qualified for the job I was doing, not just the job I was being paid for), they were able to have me do a job that was actually more advanced, and still get less pay.
Blood Knight in Sour Armor, post #16:
I think you mean “Gladiator”. I never saw that movie. From its Wikipedia article,
I’ve been thinking that this was the (intended) endgame for awhile now, actually.
Remember, one of the key motivators of the Deplorables is the fact that they never managed to ‘get’ Bill Clinton. You could see it the way they kept focusing on him in order to smear his wife (you know, the actual candidate). They’ve always resented that he escaped impeachment.
Now, imagine how an actually skilled politician could spin the impeachment of Donald Trump: “See? Unlike those corrupt Democrats, when one of our guys steps out of line, we hold him accountable.” Then they get 3 years of President Pence, all while claiming to place virtue over party loyalty.
Of course, as has been noted, Trump has consistently confounded the efforts of the GOP establishment to shut him down, and this sequence could get overturned by Trump’s minions making it clear that they would punish (electorally, violently, you know–whatever works) any GOP Congresscritter that doesn’t back Dear Leader.