Something weird is happening in my Webstats. When weird things happen there, I have absolutely no context. All I know that it’s happening. So, here’s the weird thing: twice in the last week or so, someone has randomly looked at some of my writing leading up to the Mueller Report.
I’ve given it some thought, and there are three options:
Someone knows something about the unredacted report, given that a judge is looking at it right now
Someone agrees with me that Mueller and Barr may have had a “gentlemen’s agreement” to wrap it up as quickly as possible for “the sake of the country.”
Their interest in what I wrote isn’t about the Mueller Report, but Trump’s taxes.
My reasoning for the last one is this: if SCOTUS rules against Trump, it’s at least POSSIBLE that we could be in for a severe political crisis, so severe some pretty fucking surreal things could happen just a few months before the election.
I guess there’s a fourth possibility — someone knows something and they know that any crisis about the unredacted Mueller Report would be the first of Trump’s ill-gotten second term.
We may — maybe — be careening towards a perfect storm. It’s possible that within days of each other, The Mueller Report will drop in the States and No Deal Brexit will occur in the UK.
This would have us on track (should we actually ever learn what’s in The Mueller Report) for one of the most eventful Aprils in our nation’s history in the sense that no only will there be growing calls for impeachment of POTUS, but the global economy will come to a screeching halt.
But there’s a lot we don’t know at this point.
Trump could lock away The Mueller Report with his taxes. No Deal Brexit might not happen or might be significantly delayed.
We just don’t know.
There is, however, a greater than zero-sum chance that Trump will, in April, face an unprecedented political existential threat to his administration. There’s also the chance, of course, that America is so divided that not even if Trump’s electorate base melts down to anti-vaxxers and flat earthers will he be removed from office.
Because of demographic, economic and social trends, it may be that Trump will simply be the beginning of a political dynasty that lasts until either the country finally tears itself asunder or the youngest of the Baby Boomers finally begin to die off just as the browning of America begins to have real political impact.
But if you want to waste time time with me, let’s reflect on what would happen if Friday (March 15th) was The Ides Of Mueller and The Mueller Report somehow not only dropped by was obviously an existential threat to the Trump Administration.
The thing that I’ve long thought is that if we got Trump by August 2019, we could put this all behind us and move on. But what I didn’t fact in was the the moment the polls closed for the 2018 Congressional mid-terms, the 2020 presidential campaign began.
As such, it is taking the American ship of state much longer to right its course. Furthermore, it’s possible that criminality associated with the Trump Administration is so massive that it won’t be sorted out until 2021. Thus, the drumbeat of impeachment will be just a lot of white noise in 2020 and people are really going to be more interested in the economy and paying off their mortgage.
And, yet, if The Mueller Report is the rhetorical and political equivalent of Caesar walking into the Senate in 55BC, the distance between what is politically possible and necessary may snap back into place in a pretty fast, pretty dramatic fashion. I say this because right now for some pretty white knuckled political reasons, both parties feel they have a vested interest in slow walking any talk of impeachment. They feel this, in large part, because of, you guessed it, the 2020 presidential campaign.
But what happens if The Mueller Report turns March 15, 2019 into The Ides of Mueller and the whole political equation of the moment is thrown out the window? I struggle to think of it would play out. It seems as though the House Democratic Leadership sees immediate impeachment ahead of the 2020 campaign as a fool’s errand.
I’m enough of a student of history, however, to know that occasionally the dead hand of history has other ideas. This, of course, is the worst case scenario. There are plenty of scenarios where what I expect will happen, happens — there’s a slow boil that finally begins to bubble at some point in Trump’s second administration.
If the issue of impeachment should happen to be become a crisis sooner rather than later, the most likely scenario is Trump is impeached in the House, acquitted in the Senate and he runs around saying he’s been “exonerated” of every illegal thing he’s ever done in his entire life.
But let’s play pretend.
Not know anything means there’s a chance that what I — and we — don’t know is far worst than we could ever imagine, so bad, in fact, that at some point in the next few months the “bipartisan” part of Speaker Pelosi’s demands for impeachment are met and away we go.
This is where things get crazy. Trump could literally stir up civil unrest on a massive scale. He could start to pardon everyone he needs to pardon. He hold up in the Oval Office and should be actually be impeached refuse to leave. And he might not leave unless Federal agents physically remove him.
But that’s the absolute worst-case scenario.
The absolute worse. Reality is likely to fall in some sort of murky, muddled in-between that takes far longer than any of us would like. That’s why I see Trump either being succeed in 2024 by someone like Tom Cotton or maybe, just maybe leaving power in some way around August 2022. Maybe if Ivanka is allowed to become VEEP?
Who knows. The macro problems that led to Trump aren’t going anywhere are likely bound to only get worse.
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