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.
