by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
I don’t know anything about anything and you shouldn’t listen to me. But having said that, the conditions are there for Friday, March 15th to be The Ides of Mueller when The Mueller Report drops.
If it was, in fact, The Ides of Mueller, we probably would know pretty quick. Like, when we woke up. I say this because it would make a lot of sense for someone Big, say, Don Jr. to get arrested in the early morning hours.
It would make sense for Mueller to do that then turn around and submit his report to Attorney General Bill Barr.
But I’m grasping at the most gossamer of straws. It could be weeks, if not months, before the Mueller Report comes out despite all my speculation.
As an aside, while I thought if we got Trump by August 2019 that we’d be ok, I realize now that what I feared would happen at that point, that the conventional wisdom would be that we should “let the people decide,” has actually happened now.
So, in a sense, flipping the House was actually the first part of a much, much, much longer progress than I first imagined. It’d likely — almost absolute — that Trump will win re-election handily, so any impeachment proceedings would likely happen at some point in late 2021 to mid 2022. So, now it seems like we’re most likely to get rid of Trump about August 2022.
That would give Pence the ability to pardon Trump (and everyone else who needed to be pardoned) AND when two more terms in office as an incumbent.
Having said that, if things move far faster than any of us believe possible, we could very well have the absolutely surreal situation of it being absolutely clear that Trump absolutely has to be impeached — at a minimum — while the 2020 presidential campaign plays out in the background.
It would be historically messy, if nothing else.
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.
