by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
Some people — especially liberals on Twitter — seem to think impeaching and convicting Trump would be some sort of panacea for the nation’s divisions. While I wholeheartedly support the Senate convicting Trump, the surreal defenses of Trump I’m seeing are beginning to unnerve me.
The crazy-ass part of all of this is Trump won’t even take the L on impeachment and wait for his acquittal by the Senate. While a lot of observers far, far smarter than Trump think his impeachment but not conviction is a net win for him, he, himself, obviously does not see things this way. Remember, two big things are happening at the same time. Trump himself is growing hysterical about the idea of simply being impeached. At the same time, smarter people like Moscow Mitch are more concerned with simply having Trump stay in power.
Put these two things together and you have a situation where Republicans don’t care if the trial in the Senate is not seen as valid. They would rather have the entire nation sour on the Republicans in the short term with the idea that by the time the election in 2020 rolls around passions will have cooled and they can go about their business. Throw in Trump going full autocrat by that point and their decision to acquit is an easy one.
And yet.
I keep saying there is a very real chance that it won’t even be the politics of impeachment that gets Trump — it will be Trump’s reaction to the process. So, let me say yet again — in the end it may be Trump snapping in a very, very public manner that is his downfall, not the actual politics of impeachment. We’re reaching the point where Republicans are so detached from reality in their defense of Trump that they are giving him a political pardon for anything he does from here on out. There is simply nothing he could possibly do that they would not dismiss.
Things get weird when Trump starts doing things at some point where are so absolutely indefensible on moral grounds and his grasp of reality is so tenuous as to be alarming that Republicans may find themselves in a pickle. Their natural instinct will be to absolutely defend the absolutely indefensible. It’s just when Trump’s Twitter offenses become transactional, well, I don’t know.
It’s at least possible the idea of absolutely losing the general even if they absolutely win their primary becomes something that keeps them up at night. But, lulz, who am I kidding.
Trump’s probably going to nuke us all into a hellscape and MAGA people will be happy because they think it will get us closure to the Rapture. I wish I was joking.
