Tag: impeachment

A Trump Tipping Point

Shelton Bumgarner

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

The reason it’s so difficult to reason with MAGA is they really, really, REALLY like Trump’s policies. Add to that a basic difference in values, and debating with them about kids in cages or unnecessary tax cuts or whatever is kind of a moot point.

That’s the reason why Republicans were so nervous about the Mueller investigation. For a few months there, they were kinda freaking out that Mueller might find some “light treason” on the part of Trump. When that threat evaporated they let out a high sigh of relief and went back to counting young conservative Federal judges and tax cuts.

And, really, here’s the rub. If it weren’t for what has happened in the last few days, they could pretty comfortable that Trump would be re-elected. They could sit back enjoy the corruption and graft without a care in the world.

Then Trump started to show signs of losing his mind.

Now instead of light treason to worry about, they have to spin the president acting rather erratically. Trump has always acted erratically, but now it’s reached a tipping point of sorts. People are taking another look at Trump’s words. No longer is to be dismissed. People of all political stripes are honestly beginning to grow worried that Trump is losing his mind.

And so MAGA simply doesn’t say anything. Rich MAGA gets tax cuts and poor MAGA gets young hack conservative Federal judges. If they’re not talking about policy but Trump’s conspicuous and erratic behavior they really don’t have much to say.

Now being bonkers is not, in itself a “high crime or misdemeanor.” But what you do as a result of being bonkers can be. As I have said before, it would not surprise me that should we actually get around to an impeachment inquiry that there may come a point when the House is talking to shrinks about the president’s state of mind. The president’s erracting Tweeting could itself be one of the articles of impeachment.

But having said all that, Trump is an avatar for systemic problems in the American political system. As such, I honestly believe Trump could rip off all his clothes and screaming and naked in front of the White House and we would not convict him in the Senate.

So, really, I think it’s more a matter of what sort of Regency is established more than anything else. We’ve had one before with Edith Wilson ran the country for her husband Woodrow Wilson after he had a stroke. That was very private — and the one for Trump may very well be as well. If Trump finally lost it, he would have to do it in a manner that was televised or it didn’t happen.

It should be noted that if you wanted to get white knuckled in your political calculations there may come a point in the next few months if Trump does need a Regency that Republicans may decide that Pence has a much better chance of winning re-election than Trump does. And given how the Constitution is written, he would have the opportunity run for re-election AGAIN in 2024.

We’re no where near that point yet, however.

And maybe we never will be.

The Need For ‘Radical Resistance’ Is Ever More Urgent: Speaker Pelosi — Either Impeach Trump Or Step Down

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Let me be clear — I hate violence. I’m a man of peace and of ideas and nothing I’m about to write should be taken as anything more than an attempt to articulate an ideological vision.

Now, having said that, I think it’s time for Speaker Nancy Pelosi to step down and someone willing to aggressively impeach Trump to take over. We have a very tight window of opportunity — if we don’t give Trump the historical stain of impeachment by August, it’s just not going to happen in his first term.

I used to think the United States would never become a “managed democracy” like Russia, but now I think it’s a foregone conclusion that is already effectively this. When Mueller punted on the issue of Trump’s criminal activity while in office, that effectively gave him a pardon and now we’re all very screwed.

It just doesn’t matter what happens next. Trump is going to consolidate power because of some serious systemic flaws in the American political environment and, barring something fluky none of us can expect the Trump’s are likely to rule the United States for the next 20 years. I give that timeframe because it’s about 20 years out that the youngest of the Baby Boomers will finally begin to drop dead just as the the browning of America really begins to reach a tipping point.

Having said all that, the point is — we honestly have nothing to lose at this point. We need to impeach Trump now. Even if it in the short term it helps Trump, in the long term we’ll have at least been seen as putting up a fight before the long night of managed democracy finally began.

That’s why I believe we need Radical Resistance. We need to overthrow the existing Democratic leadership in the House and find someone willing to do the job Nancy Pelosi apparently isn’t interested in. She’s so busy playing eight dimensional political chess that she totally misses the historical need for immediate impeachment.

I understand why she thinks it’s a trap — Trump will run on it once he’s not convicted and he’s going to consolidate power aggressively afterwards. She thinks we can make our last stand at the ballot box in 2020 and avoid impeachment altogether. “Let the people decide,” is her opinion.

I hate to break it to her, but that’s bullshit. Trump is already doing everything she’s afraid an unsuccessful impeachment will cause, so why not do it? Wouldn’t it be better to go down fighting than meekly let Trump walk all over us on his way to Putin-like levels of authoritarian control?

So, either do your job, Nancy, or step down.

History is calling.

Strategically, Things May Be About To Get Very Messy For Democrats

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Between now and January 2021, the Resistance is going to face some pretty messy strategic decisions. If Trump survives until his second term — and I think he probably will unless No Deal Brexit causes the global economy to come to a screeching halt — then either he will talk about how he’s been “redeemed” or we’ll finally learn that his crimes against the Constitution are so egregious that he has to be impeached, if nothing else.

And, yet, I don’t know. There’s simply no easy answer.

No matter what Democrats in the House do, Trump is going to scream at the top of his lungs. Unless they act like Republicans, that is. Then he’ll be sweet as can be.

The Great Political Conundrum Of 2019

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

We’ve officially entered that strange twilight period in the Trump Era when on the face of it, we know Trump faces some existential threats to his administration, and yet the Democratic leadership of the House is sitting on its hands for various reasons.

The divide between what we know and what Democrats in the House are willing to do politically is beginning to grow so deep and large that whenever things snap back into place, it could be pretty astonishing.

What I mean by this is — while the House Democratic leadership is beginning to look into the vast amounts of crimes and abuses of power on the part of Trump, they continue to wait for the ostensibly “objective” Mueller Report to “force their hand” on the matter of impeachment. For various macro reasons, they feel as though only after the Mueller Report is released can they actively move to impeach Trump.

Alas, I fear that’s going to be quickly seen as quaint thinking soon enough. I have long believed that the moment the House begins to do its job, the political momentum for impeachment will race out the gate. The issue, of course, is about 37% of the electorate — the people who elect Republicans and vote for them in primaries — is so cult-like in their support for Trump that it would be some outside force, not anything that Trump may have done that would ultimately lead to his impeachment and potential conviction in the Senate.

Ultimately, it will be the economy. If No Deal Brexit happens and the consequences of it are as bad as we fear, then that, no anything Mueller may report to Congress, will be what drives Trump out of office.

And that doesn’t even begin to address the cold hard political fact that if Trump’s fate isn’t actively being decided in the Senate by August 2019, we’re going to have to wait for “the people to decide” in 2020. And, as we all know, America is now a corrupt autocratic plutocracy, not a democratic constitutional republic and as such, Trump is likely to cruise to a fairly easy re-election.

If Trump is re-elected in 2020 (which as of now looks like a political absolute certainty) he will likely go full autocrat and pardon everyone he needs to pardon and get his proxies on TV to say, “the people have spoken, they don’t care, let’s move on. Besides, shouldn’t we be at work with Iran by now?”

And, yet, there may come a point between now and August 2019 when a tipping point occurs and there simply is no escaping the absolute need to impeach Trump in the House. The worst case scenario in the Senate being, of course, that they will punt the whole thing and not even take up the articles of impeachment against Trump in the first place.

So there’s a very real possibility that the absolute worst case scenario for all involved is Trump eludes conviction in the Senate, he gets re-elected and then the economy tanks in a massive way…and even though his approval rates drop down to the flat earthers, Qanon believers and anti-Vaxxers, there simply will be no political will to do anything about it and the entire country will grind to a halt for about three years until we start fighting over Trump’s “legacy” in 2024.

What’s worse, should the good guys “win” and Trump be somehow miraculously convicted in the Senate, I believe Trump won’t physically leave the Oval Office without the “assistance” of Federal Marshals. In that case, it would be the most devastating domestic event in American history since 9/11.

I guess what I’m saying is I have no idea what the endgame to all of this is and there are a lot of real nasty ones you can think up. It could be that all things considered our best bet is some sort of extreme version of Iran-contra whereby we all know Trump should be impeached and convicted and somehow that is enough to maybe, just maybe allow a progressive liberal to be elected in 2024. (If we still have elections at that point.)

But if you literally use that as political history roadmap, it’s not exactly all that encouraging — Bush won in 1988 and Clinton only won because of the dead hand of history. Given that the youngest of the Baby Boomers won’t start to die for another 20 years, there’s a good chance it won’t be Trump who finally pushes until to a “managed democracy” like Russia, but his younger, more competent and indological successor.

V-Log: Trump, Mueller & The ‘Dead Hand’ Of History

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Some thoughts on 2019.

V-Log: The Case For Impeaching Trump In 2019

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

This is my response to people who think we “don’t have time” to impeach Trump in 2019.

Let’s Face It, Trump Probably Isn’t Going To Get Impeached

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

A cold hard fact of modern American politics is the Republicans are so complicit, so Vichy in their support for the possibly treasonous administration of Donald Trump that we’re stuck with Trump for a solid two years, if not longer.

The conditions that have brought us to this point are so complex that they probably would require a few fairly long books to fully detail. The United States is so politically polarized — and the Right so well organized when it comes to a culture of faux victimization — that even if it’s proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Trump personally colluded with the Russians, he just ain’t getting impeached anytime soon.

And I am not one who believes there is any assurance that there will be a “Blue Wave” in 2018. It could be that there will be a lot talk but for various reasons nothing will happen. That two, four, six years from now we’ll still be talking about how if only this or that thing happened Trump will be impeached.

What’s more, remember that even if Trump was impeached by the House, it doesn’t mean he would be convicted by the Senate. That’s something that’s never happened in our nation’s history and since Trump will never resign, his conviction would be the only way to get rid of him.

We’re entering a surreal time in our nation’s political history where we’re so polarized that while about half the nation is openly talking about collusion, treason and impeachment then conviction, the other half think it’s just an evil plot by unpatriotic loser liberals who are looking for a reason to explain their unexpected Electoral College loss.

It’s all enough to leave you bewildered.

Even worse from my point of view, there’s no reason to believe Trump won’t right his personal ship of state and not only survive, but prosper. He may very well serve out his term and manage to use his weirdly adroit political skill to get Mike Pence elected as his successor.

A lot of my worry about this possible scenario comes from the division and weakness of The Resistance. The Democratic Party is split between the liberal Hillary Clinton wing and the social democratic Bernie Sanders wing and it’s easy to imagine that rift opening up to such an extent that a major center-Left independent candidate would run in 2020 and we’d really be fucked.

History rarely goes in a straight line, so there are any number of different ways things might play out. An unexpected strong candidate out of left field like Jon Stewart might throw a lot of my personal assumptions out the window.

But my main concern is that the United States isn’t a liberal democracy anymore. That we’ve entered a new epoch in our history where the only thing that prevents us from being a semi-imperial autocracy is the fact that there’s an assured open presidential seat every eight years. When the final political history of the United States is written that quirk of our Constitutional system may be seen as the thing that made it more difficult for us to realize that we had finally evolved out of our traditional republican roots.

The really scary thing about the Trump Administration is there is a real risk that it will do irrevocable harm to the country in ways that may take generations to fix. Our decades old reputation as the moral leader of the free world may be gone for good. It might require some exceptional leadership on the part of future presidents to bring that back and the system we have now is so corrupt that it’s unlikely that is going to happen anytime soon.

If it weren’t for that particular aspect, the Trump Administration wouldn’t be so scary. The thing about Trump is it’s too easy to fall into the trap of falloning him when he tweets something like covfefe to such an extent that we totally lose sight of him leaving the Paris Accords or appointing psychopathic Federal judges or whatever. The amount of damage Trump can inflict on the republic is so wide and deep that it is breathtaking.

What’s even more disheartening is there is really no recourse other than being politically engaged. As I have begun to say at every opportunity: Don’t rage, engage. Do your civic duty on an individual level to help, even in a small way, the continuance of our civil society. Don’t assume that just because someone disagrees with you that they are trolling you. Vote. Protest. Speak out when given the opportunity. Call your Representative and Senator on a regular basis.

The strength of American civil society is pretty much all we got at this point. It may take generations for the full impact of the Trump Administration to be fully understood. But don’t have any regrets. Don’t look back and realize you didn’t do your part to prevent a dystopia from being not just the thing of fanciful dreams, but a very cold, hard reality.

Shelton Bumgarner is the Editor and Publisher of The Trumplandia Report. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.