by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
When the House flipped, I thought we had until August 2019 to “get” Trump. Guess what! I was wrong!
The very thing I thought wouldn’t happen until August of this year, people saying “let the people decide in 2020” has already begun. It’s happening now. So, there’s no window of opportunity to “get” Trump politically. We’re stuck with him until at some point in the 2021 – 2023 period for no other reason than The Resistance is so hopelessly divided between the extreme Left that wants everyone to free bleed or be transgendered (Wink! Just kidding!) and the Centrists who just want Obama to come back from grabbing a pack of cigs at the corner store.
Hyperbole aside, right now Trump’s re-election prospects stand at 100% in my mind.
Unless.
Here’s where things get really, really messy.
I see Trump politically as a chronic illness that if not properly treated can go septic at any moment. In practical terms, that means Trump is perpetually both doing fine and about to be removed from office at the same time. This can go on for a very, very long time.
But the absolute worst case scenario is this — The Mueller Report is as big as we all hope / fear and it all happens not in the context of a Congressional mid-term, but a presidential election. The absolute worst case scenario for everyone involved is Trump realizes he faces the prospect of jail time if he loses in 2020 or is otherwise removed from office. You can babble about state crimes all you want, but apparently New York State still has an anti-double jeopardy law on the books, and, as such, Trump will likely be able to weasel his way out of it if the Federal statute of limitations expires.
Now, from Trump’s point of view, a series of things would have to go wrong for the absolute, total worst case scenario to happen. For me, that would be Trump facing a material existential threat to his administration using a metric that Blue Check Liberals would see as valid.
So, to get to that point, first, The Mueller Report has to be REALLY BAD. But even that isn’t really that bad for him. Even if “obstruction is collusion / conspiracy,” if we don’t see it because Attorney General Bill Barr pulls some stupid justification out of his ass, then Trump is safe. I say this because if the most damning aspects of Mueller’s report are held up in the courts until after election day 2020, then we will have lost the battle, but been set up for winning the war against the American Nazis that are MAGA.
But, let’s suppose things continue to get worse for Trump.
So, let’s say Bill Barr decides he has some sense of honor (and wants to do his good friend Bob Mueller & or the America people a solid) and he releases the “obstruction is collusion / conspiracy” part of the report to Congress. This promptly is leaked to the American press and it goes off like a H-Bomb across political Washington.
Now, I’m pretty sure all we’d get is simply silence from the Right Wing Echo Chamber for about 24 hours until they got their talking points. There will never, ever, ever be a point when MAGA does the Pence Pivot until it’s politically expedient using white knuckled political calculations.
Things would have to continue to get worse for Trump if the “obstruction is collusion / conspiracy” move for impeachment / conviction were to continue to move forward at this point as the 2020 campaign really began to pick up steam.
Remember, at every single moment, Republican MAGA will object to doing anything because they’ll say, “let the people decide in 2020.” And once Trump is re-elected, they’ll crow that Trump’s been vindicated and why don’t you just shut up about it all and enjoy the humming economy. (If Trump loses in 2020 — which he won’t — I don’t know what they’d do. Probably start a civil war.)
So for there to be serious talk of Trump being not only impeached in the House but convicted in the Senate, Mueller would have to lay out in a material way that not only did Trump and the Russians give each other a handjob, but that they took it to the next level and at the direction of the Russians, Trump fired the head of the FBI!
I just don’t see that happening.
I could see on a political level it being seriously suspected, but if Mueller actually could prove anything, ANYTHING CLOSE to that, Trump’s goose it fucking cooked.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that’s literally the only way that it’s actually possible that we might see Trump in front of the Senate for trial late enough in the 2020 campaign that some seriously fucking surreal things would happen.
I mean, imagine if Mueller had Trump dead to rights for the Russians directing him to fire Comey and yet Trump’s base of about 37% (80% of the Republican electorate) simply didn’t care and re-nominated him. Imagine the CNN split screen of Trump giving his re-nomination speech as very annoyed Republican Senators contemplated his removal from office for effective treason.
And it gets worse. Much, much worse.
In this absolute worst case scenario, Trump is convicted in the Senate.
And he refuses to leave the Oval Office.
Just won’t leave. He spends all day, for weeks, hold up in the White House with the FBI struggling to figure out what to do as he tweets and tweets and tweets extremely passive-aggressive shit about how everyone wants him to kill himself or how he could kill himself because of those “radical Democrats.” (I said this was worst case scenario, folks.)
How this would all end, I don’t know.
I think it would be with a 9/11 level amount of national heartbreak when the FBI, sensing that the MAGA shitheads are going to do something crazy like try to form a human shield around the White House will have to go in and physically remove Trump from office.
It’s not going to be pretty and I hope, for Christ’s sake, it doesn’t happen.
I just want Trump politically destroyed. On a human level, I hope he lives long enough to have his mind uploaded into a database so he can live for fucking forever.
Anyway, reality is much more likely to be a lot more soft, take a lot longer and be a lot more inconclusive than my dire worst-case scenario.
