by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
A pyrrhic victory is a victory that costs you so much that it’s not really all that much of a victory in the long term. Republicans because they have no shame and crave power for power’s sake are careening towards two major pyrrhic victories. What is so astonishing about the pyrrhic victories is they’re not even tactical in nature. If they occurred they would likely be existential pyrrhic victories.
The first one of these is political.
Democrats, feelling they have Trump red handed, rush through the impeachment inquiry. Support for impeachment runs high, but access journalists wring their hands that it’s going too fast. They say Democrats should hold weeks of televised hearings to control the narrative. Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell takes a read of the nation and strikes. The day the House votes for impeachment, he says two things: one, House Democrats haven’t proven anything near an impeachable offense. Two, for the sake of the nation he believes that the “people should decide” in Nov. 2020 because were within a year of the election.
Such brazen, self-serving interpretations of the Constitution have worked before with Supreme Court justices. So, McConnell has every reason to believe he can pull it off again. He lets Republican Senators off the hook, there’s not trial and Trump can go back to meddling in the 2020 election. Since he’s made it clear that Trump has North Korean-levels of absolute devotion to Trump the very idea of ever holding him accountable is negated. Trump grows so emboldened that he bribes individal Electors in broad daylight should Russia’s efforts to directly hack the election prove unsuccessful.
There’s a problem with this seemingly airtight solution for McConnell. While he doesn’t care what his place in the history books will be — lulz! — there’s a real chance such behavior would be a thunderclap in American political history. It’s such a simple thing to explain to the average person — even if Democrats aren’t in control of the narrative — that there’s no telling what the long-term consequences to this might be. If McConnell finally is explicit that he is so craven, so absolute in his lack of shame and desire for power for power’s sake that he wouldn’t even let Senators hear the case against Trump that’s a massive crime against the Constitution and the people of the United States.
I won’t go so far as to say there might be civil unrest — Trump would just use it as excuse to dissolve Blue State governments, anyway– but the political consequences to the Republican Party might be far, far more damaging than they could possibly imagine.
The second pyrrhic victory is criminal.
Trump is notorious for “joking” about how people should be murdered for opposing him. Now, Trump’s already cueing this up to happen. It’s extremely brazen and reckless for him to even bring a hint up this concept up. I say this especially given how deranged most of MAGA is. Would it really help the MAGA cause to murder the whistleblower? Does that make any sense? While if it happened, Republicans would say Trump was “joking” and just “free styling” his frustration with the situation, and he, himself, did not commit the crime.
If things have gotten so bad in American politics that enough people this that Trump isn’t held accountable, I don’t know if I want to live in this country anymore. Again, it’s pretty likely that Trump creating an environment where crazy people want to kill his political opponents might not be a good political situation for Republicans going forward.
Anyway. Stay tuned.
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