by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
We, as a nation, ladies and gentlemen, are in a historic clusterfuck. This clusterfuck is such a thicket, that’s difficult to grasp what’s going on. Well, here’s my attempt to at least explain it, if not figure out a solution
The reason why this is unlike any scandal in American history is the cold hard fact that one of the two major political parties in America no longer believes in democracy. The Republican Party is pretty much a screaming white person at this point. This is important because Republicans are so unmoored on an ideological level from over 200 years of American democratic traditions as to be little more than a grunt.
We have to be honest with ourselves. Trump at this point could murder someone on Fox News and not lose a vote. He could whip out his cock and masterbate on Fox News and not lose a vote. As long as he doesn’t say “God damn” as he did it, Trump could tweet “I am the state” and within 24 hours Republicans would claim he was “joking.”
So, if you’re Nancy Pelosi, you have zero reason to what to impeach Trump. The Democrat Party is 2/3rds of the body politic and such there are a lot of moderates who would otherwise be Republicans if, well, we weren’t in a Trumpian hellscape. Her goals are simple: keep the majority in the House.
That’s it. From her point of view, there’s no upside to impeaching Trump knowing that he’ll never be convicted. What’s more, from her point of view, not only will Democrats be blamed if they impeach Trump and he loses, Trump will use his inevitable acquittal by the Senate as vindication that he can run on.
Now, if that was all that was going on, we wouldn’t be in the massive clusterfuck that we’re in. Trump would just be a chronic political problem that festered until (hopefully) he left office in 2025. (He will never lose re-election. Never. Populist autocrats never lose.)
But the reason why this is a massive clusterfuck is the longer Trump doesn’t face any political consequences for his actions, the bolder, more brazen and more surreally criminal he becomes. So, it’s not that he’s daring the House to impeach him. It’s that he knows Republicans will slob his knob no matter what he does. He will never be convicted in the Senate. If he was a normal human being, he would see this as an opportunity to grift and abuse power but in such a way that it would just be a mild nuisance.
Trump is not normal. In a sense, he sees the American government much like Hitler saw Europe in 1939. Not to have too much of an extended metaphor, but Trump believes he can invade Russia (true dictatorship) and in the end it the American system will collapse like a rotting door. At this point, he honestly believes he can “joke” his way into a life term. To date, he’s been given no indication that this is not the case.
Republicans won’t say anything and Democrats won’t do anything. But there’s a fatal flaw to Trump’s megalomaniacal dreams: himself. Trump is the quintessential self-own artist. He may be a natural when it comes to telling the disenfranchised volk what they want to hear, but he’s also a very big dumb ass.
Once this current Ukrainian scandal blows over (ETA, Sunday afternoon) he’s going to feel even more emboldened. It may not happen all at once, but in fits and starts, Trump is going to go so far beyond what any American president has ever done that we’re simply not prepared for it. Nothing is off the table. All that has to happen is a major terrorist attack or a war. In real terms, would anything happen if Trump ran for a third term? Who would stop him? Nancy Pelosi? Pod Save America?
With that in mind, impeachment grows a lot more important. But once you agree that impeachment is necessary, it’s kind of too late. If Democrats don’t impeach Trump like…NOW…the first 2020 primaries will begin and the average person’s attention will be pointed toward Nov. 2020. Our political system simply isn’t prepared for both a presidental campaign and serious impeachment proceedings.
I mean, the way things are going, Democrats won’t actually send the articles of impeachment to the Senate until August 2020. In the meantime, the average person will think Joe Biden is going to be indicted at any moment for bogus corruption charges involving Ukraine. And, really, there’s a good chance that the Democrat base won’t come out in 2020 out of a sense of disenchantment with House Democrats.
So, really, the whole thing is so muddled that it’s a lot like Brexit. Brexit it such a clusterfuck because it barely passed and was sold to the public on lies. In America, meanwhile, impeaching Trump really boils down to how strong you are on doing things on principle. If you look at the situation using strictly political metrics, then, yes, impeaching Trump isn’t a good idea. You wait for Trump to “self-impeach” one way or another.
To be honest, it’s kind of sad that the fate of the United States in a sense now rests on waiting for Trump to either lose his mind or be found to have conspired with best friend Kim Jung Un to nuke Blue State cities. Those are the only things I can think of that might cause Senate Republicans to at least mull the notion of a Pence presidency.
That’s really hanging a lot on the unknown. So, really, this current crisis with Ukraine is, in a sense, the beginning of bigger and worse abuses on the part of Trump. When it becomes obvious that the House isn’t going to do anything about it, Trump will AGAIN feel emboldened. You’re going to have to convince me that Trump wouldn’t promise Peter Thiel a pardon if he bribed the individual members of the Electoral College to vote for Trump, damn the popular vote.
What would Nancy Pelosi do about that? If she doesn’t have the backbone to impeach Trump for what he did with Ukraine, I find it difficult that she would do it for Trump buying the election. I mean, Senate Republicans aren’t going to vote to convict, are they? Nope. Trump doing that would be the final death knell of not only American democracy, but the American Republic as well. Once you can simply buy the presidency by buying off electors, either the Blue States revolt and you abolish their state governments or you break the back of the Democratic Party altogether.
Is there an answer to the impeachment imbriglio we find ourselves in? Not really. Either you’re willing to stand on principle, or you’re not. Because Trump doesn’t feel any political gravity at all, no matter what he does, impeaching him on principle is all you got. I will note how history remembers the rise of Hitler.
Would we have a better opinion of Germans if they had attempted to impeach Hitler in the early days of his rule? I’d like to think so. That in the end America was little better than the Weimar Republic is something that would give me pause for thought. It might at least make Nancy Pelosi think a little bit, too.
