Month: March 2019

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.

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

A Constitutional Crisis usually happens not because the system doesn’t work, but because human nature runs up against at cross purposes in a quirky way that one could never foresee.

As such, given my back-of-the-envelope knowledge of the Special Council guidelines, it seems there’s a quirk that might cause the entire American Constitutional system to freeze up until someone blinks.

The potential Constitutional Crisis goes something like this: Attorney General Bill Barr being a Trump loyalist takes one look at what is laid out in the Mueller Report and sends over a few pages summing up that while some seriously shady shit happened between the Russians and the Trump Campaign, because it did not reach the level of statute for “conspiracy,” no collusion happened (even though the two things are not the same.)

Now, the crisis kicks in when one of two things happen — Barr words what he sends to Congress in some a way that it’s obvious that he’d hiding some seriously big news against the Trump Administration or it leaks out that while Trump, Don Jr. or Jared weren’t actually indicted by Mueller, a propendency of evidence points to Trump himself needing to be indicted….

…but he can’t be indicted because of DOJ guidelines…

So we would have a massive clusterfuck on our hands as Trump hunkers down to not release this information (even though he’s been babbling about the need for “transparency” for months now ) because for the ostensible reason of not “casting aspersions against the assumed innocent” (him). But because in that case only Congress could weigh the political necessity of impeachment first in the House and later in the Senate (hopefully) if they don’t get that information, they can’t very well do the job of impeachment properly.

This tug of war could go on for some time, bouncing back and forth in the Courts long enough for Trump to sail to reelection and they we actually get into the business of getting rid of Trump at some point between 2021 and 2023. The absolute worse case scenario being, of course, that Trump does Nixon one better and simply ignores SCOTUS should they somehow have a shred of decency left and vote against him when it comes to releasing as much of The Mueller Report as possible. (Given that this would likely happen in the middle of a Trump’s re-election campaign…I think he probably would ignore SCOTUS until after he’s been re-elected.)

And, yet, if you’re a Trump supporter — or one of his dipship lackies — I wouldn’t whip out your cock and start stroking it for joy quite yet. Remember, the reason why The Mueller Report is actually so important is because it will kind of mark a significant moment in the Trump Era because the now Democratically controlled House will have to weigh the political moment to see if it’s worth finally beginning the process of impeachment.

This is going to happen no matter what we learn — or don’t learn — about Trump via The Mueller Report, even if all the most damning aspects of it never see the light of day. Once the House realises they can’t use The Mueller Report as political cover, they’re going to keep investigating Trump anyway and while it might take some time, Trump’s going to have to account for his political sins at some point in the future by, say, 2023.

Or put it another way — Trump’s second term is going to fucking suck.

It’s a historical truth that typically presidential second terms are much, much worst than the first and Trump’s is unlikely to be any different. In fact, in a way, Trump’s second term, in itself, is an existential threat to Trump’s political future.

What I mean is, I give up on getting rid of Trump between 2019 and early 2021. We’re stuck with him, no matter what.

But once his second term starts, the clock resets. We have a solid three years before the talk of “letting the people decide Trump’s legacy” begins in about 2023. As such, if the House stays Democratic, which it should, Trump’s totally fucked.

He. Is. Fucked.

If he’s not driven out of office, he’ll be impeached and come extremely close to being convicted in the Senate. In fact, he might actually even be convicted in the Senate. Yes, if you’re MAGA, you’ll have had a solid six or so years of destroying America, inciting needless violence and racial discord. You’ll have had the opportunity to ram young, conservative hacks into the Judiciary. You will have gotten your tax cuts. You will have had the opportunity to destroy the environment and either destroy or dramatically change the nature of the “administrative state.”

But let one thing be clear — the political depth charge that will be Trump’s final demise at some point between 2021 and 2023 is likely to be so dramatic, so surreal and so damaging to the long-term MAGA agenda, that you fucktards might at least pause between counting your tax cuts long enough to reflect on how maybe, just maybe Trump might have been something we could have avoided if we’d be a little less craven.

So, people like me just have to hunker down for just over 2 years.

Once we lose the 2020 election and Trump runs around naked on the National Mall proclaiming his “vindication” and pardons every MAGA person in America of every crime they’ve ever thought about committing, just know that the clock, at last, is finally ticking.