Given that Bob Mueller is wrapping up without a major indictment of someone like Jared or Don Jr. (so far), I think it’s safe to say the Mueller Report will not be the thing that brings down Trump in any meaningful way.
In other words, the thing that everyone wants it to be — objective, non-partisan reasoning as to why Trump should be immediately removed from office for the sake of the nation — it ain’t gunna be.
What’s worse, given that Mueller is likely to say that there is a preponderance of evidence that Trump did collude, but did not “conspire,” the actual impact of the Report probably won’t last beyond one Twitter news cycle. In other words, maybe 20 minutes.
It will be a lot of news, but not much substance in the way people like me have been hoping for. Trump and his allies will came Trump has been “vindicated,” Trump will run on “Carnage Again In America” and because Democrats are so divided, he will easily win. Add to this that American Industrialists have a big old boner for Trump, I just don’t see there being any respite from this hellish experience.
What’s worse, the most damning portions of the Report are unlikely to ever be seen.
So, I guess it’s Trumps for the next 20 years until the youngest of the Baby Boomers begin to drop dead and the “browning of America” finally reaches a tipping point.
Unless there’s a race war / civil war before then.
But if you want to waste time time with me, let’s reflect on what would happen if Friday (March 15th) was The Ides Of Mueller and The Mueller Report somehow not only dropped by was obviously an existential threat to the Trump Administration.
The thing that I’ve long thought is that if we got Trump by August 2019, we could put this all behind us and move on. But what I didn’t fact in was the the moment the polls closed for the 2018 Congressional mid-terms, the 2020 presidential campaign began.
As such, it is taking the American ship of state much longer to right its course. Furthermore, it’s possible that criminality associated with the Trump Administration is so massive that it won’t be sorted out until 2021. Thus, the drumbeat of impeachment will be just a lot of white noise in 2020 and people are really going to be more interested in the economy and paying off their mortgage.
And, yet, 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.
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.
I can’t sleep tonight and for some reason I have the Watergate Saturday Night Massacre on the brain. I have no inside information and I’m pretty much just feeling a bit uneasy for no reason.
Some of my uneasiness comes from how relatively quiet things are.
The only reason why I don’t think there is likely to be another Saturday Night Massacre is two fold — one, Trump has already done a slow-mo version of it and two, even he knows firing the Special Council would be a bridge too far, especially given that the House is now in Democratic control.
And, really, Trump is far more likely to pardon everyone he needs to pardon than fire Mueller. It would have made a lot more sense to fire Mueller months ago instead of waiting this late to do it.
While Trump is demonstrably stupid, he does have his political wiles and as such he’s not going anywhere unless some outside force changes the equation.
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 interesting thing is we have a chronic problem of the Mueller Report being both about to be released and not about to be released. What is so interesting to me is all the chatter of it about to come out is coming from the intelligence community.
That members of the IC are so absolute in their belief that not only is the Mueller Report coming out soon, but that some “name brand” members of the Trump orbit will be indicted is odd, to say the least. I have no ready answer for what all that means.
I still think nothing that happens domestically is going to determined Trump’s fate. It’s going to be something macro, like No Deal Brexit, that will be the thing that decides what happens to Trump. As such, it won’t be anything Mueller reports that will bring Trump’s downfall, but rather the economic consequences of No Deal Brexit on the global economy.
But, again, I just don’t know what the endgame to all of this is. Nothing as of yet has occurred to change my view that Trump is a modern-day Reagan in the sense that 20 years from now he will be as revered by Republicans as Reagan was..until Trump came around.
This is really paranoid, but it would make a lot of sense if Putin knowing Mueller is maybe on the cusp of dropping some major indictments in the next few days stirred up a major foreign crisis with Ukraine which would give Trump the cover he needs to fire Mueller and pardon everyone he needs to pardon as we wait for the House to officially flip in January.
Let’s look at the state of the “Phony War” now going on between Trump and Mueller. As I keep saying, given that if the House simply does its job Trump will be impeached in early 2019, it makes a lot of sense for Trump to strike first. Add to this there is a real possibility that the American economy — and that of the globe, for that matter — may face a real shock in the guise of a bungled Brexit in Great Britain and it definitely seems like Trump should leverage the power he has now to do a sneak attack on Mueller.
If I was Trump, I would fire Mueller immediately, pardon about a dozen people and hunker down for an extended fight. If you think about it, Trump has about 2 months to brainwash his base into believing the “which hunt” is over and that the House is totally wasting its time in investigating him at all. At this point, I have to note that anyone who thinks the House shouldn’t investigate Trump because it will only “help” him politically is really living in political la-la land. The dead hand of history has decided Trump’s fate and that fate is he is going to be impeached by the House in early 2019. There’s no going back at this point. It’s nearly a done deal.
As such, it makes pretty obvious sense to me that Trump should go on the offensive now while he has the time. It doesn’t make any sense to wait until the House officially flips to do anything about Mueller. Every moment Trump doesn’t fire Mueller and pardon people is a wasted opportunity for him in the long run. Again, in my view, there’s a real chance that Brexit is going to be completely bungled and as such it would deprive Trump of the one thing he has going for him at this point — a “humming economy.” So it makes even more sense for Trump to be as proactive as possible. Trump has until January to continue to rule as an absolute tyrant and once the new House is sworn in, the jig is up, as they say and he has an completely new political reality to deal with.
The issue for me about Mueller is he has a real weak hand in the short term and a decent hand long term. I say this because if Mueller indicts someone big like Don Jr., he’s bound to be fired one way or another. But once the new House is sworn in, they can demand he — and everyone on his team — tell them everything they know. That, in turn, will get Trump impeached as he will anyway for a whole host of things ranging from abuse of power to “light treason.”
Speaking of “light treason,” it seems going forward that the only thing the Senate would get anywhere near convicted Trump for is whatever it is he talk to Putin about in their hour long secret meeting. If the House talked to the American translator of that meeting and found out Trump really did conspire against the United States, while it wouldn’t meet the Constitutional definition of treason, it would definitely would get pretty damn close from a political standpoint.
Having said all that, it definitely seems as though the first quarter of 2019 is going to be damn bumpy. And if the economic consequences of Brexit turned out to be Trump’s ultimate undoing that would be a fitting end to this political nightmare that we find ourselves in.
It seems pretty obvious to me that every moment Trump doesn’t strike first against Mueller is a moment wasted. It seems from a politically strategic standpoint it would be best for Trump if he struck first and struck first hard. I would fire Mueller as quickly as humanly possible, then pardon everyone involved in what happened and then hunker down for the next two months. I don’t understand why Trump would wait until either Mueller strikes first or the House officially flips.
It just doesn’t make any sense.
So maybe something’s going on that I don’t know about. Maybe, there’s a lot going on that I don’t know about. But I will be shocked if this “phony war” between Trump and Mueller lasts until January. It makes a lot more sense for Trump to strike Muller now during the holidays than wait until people might have their fully attention focused on Trump in January.
I honestly don’t know what is going to happen at this point.
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