The Growing Popularity of Impeaching Trump

Loyalty can be fleeting in the political realm, especially among Republicans who have to date shown they will happily sell their souls to Donald Trump in exchange for avoiding a primary challenge from someone even more tawdry who is willing to stir up Trump's putrid core base of support. Thus, the minute allegiance to Trump becomes a political liability, the spineless congressional Republicans may decide it is in their best interests to throw Trump overboard. As noted in a previous post, anti-Trump animus appears to be powering Virginians to favor a Democrat takeover of control of the Virginia General Assembly. If the Virginia GOP suffers another electoral defeat next months, some Republicans with the spine of a jellyfish might be ready to re-calibrate their allegiance to the liar-in-chief,  Add to this the growing support for impeachment and Trump becoming a liability may become a reality sooner than some of his current sycophants think.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at what may be fueling the growing support for both impeachment and the removal of Trump from office.  Here are excerpts: 

In the first few days after House Democrats announced impeachment proceedings against President Trump, a series of anti-Trump conservatives published columns arguing that they were making a giant tactical error. Bret Stephens (“Pelosi’s Bad Impeachment Call”), David Brooks (“Yes, Trump Is Guilty, But Impeachment Is a Mistake”), and George Will (“The best antidote for a bad election is a better election”) all produced the same argument. Trump has done awful things, but impeachment will repel the public. Only an election can remove him.

The flaws in that argument have already become apparent. Impeachment is growing steadily more popular. . . . A commanding majority, 58 versus 38 percent, support the House’s impeachment inquiry. The fear that Trump somehow desired impeachment has been belied by essentially all the White House reporting, which shows the president alternating between depression and raging and flailing for a strategy.

The fear that impeachment would backfire was not crazy, but almost every piece of evidence so far has vindicated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s strategy. There are several reasons why the politics of impeachment have turned in the Democrats’ favor:

This isn’t Russia. The anticlimactic denouement of the Russia investigation weighed heavily on the impeachment skeptics. But the political impact of the Russia probe was smothered both by its dependence on Robert Mueller, . . . . and the sheer complexity of the affair. If the only important facts in the Russia story were Donald Trump negotiating for a several-hundred-million-dollar payoff from Vladimir Putin during the campaign and then lying about it, the outcry might have toppled him.

The Ukraine scandal is much simpler. There is a lot of evidence of wrongdoing, but it all revolves around a single narrative of Trump pressuring a foreign country to investigate his domestic rivals. And the narrative is controlled by Congress, which is willing to charge the president with a high crime, not a reclusive prosecutor who has decided it is improper for him to make any such accusation.

Even Republicans have trouble defending it. For all the public affirmations of support from Trump’s fervent base in the party and party-controlled media, even his supporters are harboring some qualms.

Anita Kumar has a revealing story quoting hard-core Trumpists — ones who stood behind him throughout the Russia scandal — expressing their belief that this time he went too far. “Russia was never real,” an outside Trump adviser says, “Ukraine is.”

The story can get worse. One thing that ought to have been apparent at the outset of this scandal, but which many people missed, is that a lot of people were involved. Turning American foreign policy into an episode of The Sopranos isn’t easy. You have a whole bureaucracy that’s used to operating along established channels, and distorting its functions in such a gross fashion sends ripples throughout the system.

There are going to be more witnesses and more records of communication. Trump is going to keep lying and saying crazy things. It’s not going to be easy to deprive the story of oxygen.

The politics can get worse, too. Republican support for Trump may be louder than the criticism. But the silence of many Republicans, not just the handful of quasi-independent voices, speaks volumes. Many Republicans are withholding judgment, perhaps criticizing impeachment as hasty, but not defending Trump’s behavior or ruling out removal if more evidence emerges.

Mitt Romney is planning to rally Republicans for impeachment in the Senate. Romney has a lot of respect in his caucus, and a lot of fame among the public. Can he get enough senators to remove Trump? Probably not. (Though “probably” is a lot different than “absolutely.”) But some measure of bipartisan support for impeachment is going to strengthen the message that Trump has done something seriously wrong.

This will hurt Trump’s reelection. The biggest mistake the impeachment skeptics made is their assumption that impeaching Trump are unrelated to, or at cross-purposes with, defeating him in 2020. “An election can save the country. An inside-the-Beltway political brawl will not,” predicted Brooks.

Most voters are locked in to one of the parties. The swing vote tends to be low-information voters with a hazy grasp of the issues. Impeachment is a signal to those voters that Trump has done something seriously wrong. It’s not a magic trick that works against every president — there needs to be misconduct people can easily understand, and which the news media covers as a serious scandal. This easily qualifies.

There’s no real political magic here. Having the news dominated by a scandal even many Republicans can’t defend, with a constant drip of damning new details, is extremely unhelpful for [Trump] the president.

I personally hope the momentum of growing support for impeachment continues.  Another wild card Republicans need to be gin worrying about too is how involved was Mike Pence?  I suspect Pence was up to his ears in the operation. 

Voters Are Warming to Impeaching Trump

Perhaps Trump fatigue is finally taking hold or perhaps the Ukrainian shakedown and requests for yet another foreign intervention into U.S. elections has awakened the heretofore lethargic, but two polls suggest that a plurality of Americans support seeing Trump impeached and ultimately removed from office.  One can only wonder if support for impeachment will grow if Democrats are smart in how they conduct hearings and properly expose Trump's criminality and abuse of his office for personal gain with no thought about the best interests of the nation (in Trump's narcissistic mind, the two are one and the same much like dictators and despots of the past).  Whatever the cause for growing support for impeachment, it is seemingly a good sign that decency and a thirst for honesty are not totally dead in today's America.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this shift in voter opinion.  Here are excerpts:

Two new polls suggest that American voters are warming to the idea of impeaching President Trump. According to a Morning Consult poll conducted from September 24 to 26, 43 percent of the public now backs impeachment proceedings. That figure has increased seven points from an earlier Morning Consult poll, carried out from September 20 to 22. Meanwhile, an NPR–PBS NewsHour–Marist poll, conducted the day before the whistle-blower report became public, finds that voters are roughly split on the subject; 49 percent support impeachment, and 46 percent do not.

One possible reason for the increase in public support for impeachment is so obvious it almost doesn’t need an explanation. Trump is not having a very good week: As a call record and now a declassified whistle-blower report attest, Trump asked the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate the son of a political enemy — Hunter Biden — with the assistance of the Justice Department and Rudy Giuliani. Trump later tried to withhold military aid from Ukraine. The unspooling crisis encourages talk of impeachment, and a number of House Democrats have come out in support of beginning the process.

By now throwing her support behind an impeachment inquiry, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has helped shift public opinion in tandem with media coverage of Trump’s misconduct. But she is an extremely late convert to the cause of impeachment, despite the president’s corruption and alleged sexual violence. Her ambivalence provided shelter to more moderate and conservative members of the party, who think an impeachment inquiry would cost them their seats. Whether these members will follow Pelosi’s lead is an open question.

Though no one can say with certainty that voter enthusiasm for impeachment will continue to grow, the president’s handling of the Ukraine scandal has clearly harmed him. A good number of Democrats already seem to realize that the story leaves them with no option but to endorse impeachment proceedings.

But there are still stragglers. Some, like conservative Henry Cuellar of Texas, equivocated even as evidence of presidential misconduct became increasingly difficult to ignore. Cuellar, who is currently locked in a primary battle with progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros, has said that he’ll support proceedings “if investigations prove that impeachment is the necessary course of action,” the Texas Tribune reports.

The events of this month make Tlaib look prescient and underscore the risks of the party’s fearful approach to impeachment. We’ve been here before: Morning Consult says that this month’s poll numbers “nearly match” its findings in August 2018, amid the convictions of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen. Public opinion is malleable, but Democrats behave too often as if the opposite is true. The window is open, and they can’t afford their old ambivalence.

One can only hope Congressional Democrats are re-watching the tapes from the Watergate investigation and formulating an approach that will convince all but the racists and religious fanatics of Trump's base that it is time for the cancer in the White House to be removed.

Trump and Boris Johnson on the Brink

Johnson with Trump - two liars and utterly unfit leaders.

It is somewhat ironic that in the same week Donald Trump and the UK's Boris Johnson - each of whom has political sought power by pandering to the ugliest elements and racist bigotries of their respective country's populace -  have hit a potential brick wall this week.  For Johnson, it was the British Supreme Court's ruling that his suspension of Parliament was illegal and that Johnson had lied to the Queen, and for Trump it was the launching of a formal impeachment inquiry trigger by Trump's apparent withholding of military aid approved by Congress as a lever to extort that nation into launch a bogus investigation of one of Trump's biggest rivals, Democrat 2020 nominee front runner Joe Biden.  Trump's behavior was akin to that of a crime boss making threats a piece at MSN looks ate Trump's willing accomplices - while Johnson's was that of a proliferate liar (a trait Trump shares) which has triggered growing calls for his resignation.  In both cases, the ultimate test is whether the rule of law will prevail or, instead, whether lying bullies prevail and both countries in turn slide towards authoritarianism.  A column in the New York Times looks at this aligning of the stars to see two unfit leaders face serious blow-back.  Here are excerpts:

To see them together in New York, the two charlatans, after all their nationalist-revival shenanigans, encountering the quiet force of the law was an exquisite thing. I am not sure I have ever experienced Schadenfreude in purer form.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying President Trump had “seriously violated the Constitution” and a formal impeachment inquiry would therefore begin. Lady Hale, the president of Britain’s highest court, telling Prime Minister Boris Johnson that his advice to the Queen to prorogue Parliament was “unlawful, void and of no effect.”

That two dignified women delivered the messages on the same day to these brothers in boorishness — men-children who have made a mockery of the special relationship between Britain and the United States — seemed particularly apt.

Trump, according to the reconstructed transcript of a July 25 call, tried to get the Ukrainian president “to do us a favor” by speaking with his lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, along with Attorney General William Barr over potential dirt that might sully Joe Biden, a leading Democratic candidate in the 2020 election. Johnson maneuvered to railroad through a British exit from the European Union on Oct. 31 via the suspension of Parliament for several weeks. The machinations were of a piece with the manipulative habits of the two egos in chief.

The law is not malleable or optional. It is what stands between civilization and barbarism, democracy and despotism. Just ask the youth of Hong Kong, who know what extradition into the lawlessness of dictatorial China would mean.

President Trump’s bluntest expression of his view of the Constitution to which he swore an oath was this: “Article II allows me to do whatever I want.”

It does no such thing. The framers, through checks and balances, were intent on limiting power, not unfettering it. They knew that absolute power corrupts absolutely. America did not go through a revolution to recreate in the new world the monarchical diktat of the old.

Richard Nixon took a similar view of the powers of his office. “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal,” he said. Things did not end up too well for Dick.

Trump has never understood what his oath of office meant. How could he? This man was the product of two things: his family business, where no constraint on his authority existed, and contractors were there to be stiffed; and a reality TV show that prized outrage, indulged his megalomania, and gave viewers a high by mainlining cruelty. Accordingly, Trump chose to play Chicago politics with Ukraine, as if a sovereign nation at war on its eastern border with Vladimir Putin’s Russia was there mainly to be squeezed for his re-election campaign. He has trashed the press, judges, the Federal Reserve, members of Congress — anyone or anything that stood up to him. He has set up operations at the White House as a shambolic exercise in terror. His cabinet fawns, as Saddam Hussein’s once did, scrambling to find loftier expressions of adulation that might delay execution. I don’t know if the impeachment inquiry serves what must be the fundamental goal of Democrats: to remove Donald Trump from office as soon as possible. . . . It has little chance of leading to his removal because, even if the House charges Trump with high crimes and misdemeanors, the Republican-controlled Senate is highly unlikely to vote to convict him.

All of this worries me, but in the end I don’t care. The balance has been tipped. Nobody can accuse Pelosi of rashness. She has been deliberate. She said, “No one is above the law.” That principle must be cardinal.

Trump’s assault on truth, the press, institutions, civility, and the law has been relentless. His unfitness for office has been so glaring as to be breathtaking. As Stephen Burbank, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, wrote, “There comes a time when strategic political calculations must yield to principle if pragmatism is not to entail complicity.” He continued, “The impeachment process is integral to the architecture our founders created for the preservation of democracy.” For Congress to ignore what Trump has done would be to set a dangerous example for future generations.

On both sides of the Atlantic, we have witnessed two men making audacious claims to power and suffering resounding rebukes from two separate but equal branches of government that made clear the executive is not above the law — in Britain from its highest court applying an unwritten constitution, in the United States from Congress exercising its constitutional prerogatives.

An important lesson is this: It takes independent institutions to make the law meaningful and hold the executive to account. That is why dictatorships, or illiberal systems like Hungary’s, seek to suppress them.

Let's hope that if the House issues articles of impeachment an adequate number of Republicans will put the Constitution and democracy over Trump and their own re-election desires. 

Trump Is Forcing the House Towards Impeachment

Anyone who has followed Donald Trump's real estate career should have known the man is utterly unprincipled and has long viewed himself above the law.  He has long operated more in the mode of a Mafia Don than a normal businessman or entrepreneur. Placing him in the Oval Office was a disaster waiting to happen, and given his malignant narcissism and view of himself as unbound by the law or tradition, t has always been only of question of time until he crossed the line of legal presidential conduct. The man embodies why the Founding Fathers designed the Electoral College system - a system electors failed to honor so as to protect the nation from someone like Trump who seemingly views himself as George III or some other despotic monarch (which explains his love of brutal dictators).  A piece in New York Magazine lays out why Trump is pushing the House of Representatives to begin impeachment.  Increasingly, members of Congress who take their oath of office have no other option than to move to impeach an unfit and dangerous occupant of the White House.  Ultimately, the question for Republicans will be whether they place party over country and value avoiding a primary challenge over their constitution obligations.  Here are article excerpts: 

The anticlimactic denouement of the Mueller report produced a mixture of relief and gloating for Republicans. For President Trump it also produced something else: An almost intoxicating sense of impunity, a realization that his attempts to cultivate Russia as an ally, and largely successful efforts to gain control of the Justice Department, gave him carte blanche to plan his next crime. In June, he announced on television that he would accept dirt on his opponent from a foreign government if offered it again. He dispatched his lawyer to Ukraine to deliver the message that he demanded an investigation of his leading Democratic rival, and that he would use the powers of his office to leverage this end.

It is primarily because Trump is indicating his war on democratic norms will not end that Congress is barreling toward impeachment right now at astonishing speed. On Monday morning, the headline on Politico’s story on House Democrats began, “Reluctant Democrats Weigh Impeachment.” By evening, as more reporting poured in, it had changed to “Dems Moving to Condemn Trump as Impeachment Fever Grows.”

The most important impediment to impeaching Trump has always been the reluctance of the most vulnerable House Democrats to take a vote that they feared would alienate their constituents. But all the signs are now pointing toward those Democrats throwing aside their reluctance. Seven newly-elected freshmen Democrats from vulnerable districts have published an op-ed in the Washington Post demanding Trump hand over the suppressed complaint from an intelligence whistleblower of Trump’s pressure on Ukraine. “If these allegations are true,” they write, “we believe these actions represent an impeachable offense.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has urged restraint out of a desire to insulate those vulnerable members, who she needs to preserve her majority. Pelosi’s behavior, too, has shifted notably. Her close ally, Rosa DeLauro, issued a statement demanding the entire whistleblower’s complaint and opening the door to impeachment. The Post reports Pelosi is sounding out members on impeachment, and “many leadership aides who once thought Trump’s impeachment was unlikely now say they think it’s almost inevitable.”

It is possible Trump could defuse impeachment by releasing his block on the whistleblower complaint. But surrendering his claims of secrecy and almost unbounded executive privilege run counter to his instinct for domination. It could also quite likely supply evidence incriminating enough to lead to his impeachment anyway.

The politics of this maneuver are highly uncertain. Whatever their motive, Democrats are not seeking political advantage, and there is a distinct possibility proceedings would backfire on them. Despite Trump’s unpopularity, strong majorities have opposed impeachment throughout his term.

But there is at least some reason to believe the politics of the Ukraine scandal will play out differently than the politics of the Russia scandal. The Republican phalanx of support has failed to materialize in its usual strength. Normally passive Mitt Romney issued a surprisingly sharp rebuke, demanding Trump “should make available the whistleblower complaint that has been deemed to be credible and urgent, and that if not “it will be up to the House to decide how to proceed.”

Other signs of discomfort in the party are more subtle. The normal mouthpieces of the Party line, while tonally in support, are refusing to outright defend his actions in Ukraine. . . . The Wall Street Journal editorial page scolds, “What we know of the call underscores Mr. Trump’s greatest flaw as President, which is his political narcissism. Every decision boils down to how it affects him or his re-election prospects. Other Presidents have made similar calculations, but Mr. Trump lacks the basic filter to know when he is crossing a line that creates trouble for himself or the country.”

Even more tellingly, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declined to defend Trump’s coercion of Ukraine, or even to repeat his attacks on Biden, but instead made a tepid complaint that Democrats “have chosen to politicize the issue.” It is probably relevant that Trump was defying the wishes of Republicans themselves by refusing to allow the military aid to Ukraine that Congress had passed to go through. Trump personally ordered the aid to be held up, the Washington Post reports, in the latest explosive development. McConnell may or may not care that Trump is abusing his power to smear Biden, but he surely cares that Trump is abrogating laws passed by McConnell.

The House will probably vote soon to make clear its intention to impeach Trump unless he hands over the full whistleblower complaint. Perhaps he will do so, and perhaps it will not incriminate him. What seems more likely now is a prospect that had appeared remote just days ago: The House of Representatives will hold impeachment proceedings for President Donald Trump.

Pelosi: Please Stop Coddling Donald Trump

I like Andrew Sullivan's writing skills and applaud the fact that he finally left the GOP and has come to recognized the toxic force that party has become - he now needs to leave Catholicism, in my view - but in his latest column he seems too hard on Democrats and Nancy Pelosi in particular.  Yes, Pelosi has been cautious and has danced around impeachment out of fear of a reprise in 2020 of what Republicans suffered after their impeachment effort against Bill Clinton.  In the argument in favor of impeachment of Trump, the differences between Bill Clinton's lying about a personal sexual misdeed versus Trump's never ending lies and clear obstruction of justice are in totally different leagues.  Yet, a majority of American voters appear opposed to impeachment - something Pelosi must take into account like it or not and whether or not it is even a rational perspective. Plus, unless and until Democrats take control of the U.S. Senate, impeachment would ultimately go nowhere.  Indeed, Trump could be video taped raping a 13 year old girl (or boy, but that would more likely be the closeted Mike Pence) on the high altar of St. Peter's basilica, and today's Republicans would still not vote to impeach him,  Decency, morality and the rule of law long lost favor in today's GOP which worries only about the satiating the hatreds that motivate the party's racist and religious extremist base.  Of course, Democrats have other options which Sullivan lays out and, in the case of Trump's New York State tax returns, they ought to pursue vigorously. The following are highlights from Sullivan's latest column in New York Magazine:

I suspect many of us voted for the Democrats last fall because we wanted a serious check on President Trump’s intensifying authoritarianism. That includes many of us who don’t support the far left’s takeover of the Democrats, but who saw the urgency of an opposition with teeth, confronted as we are by a deranged, tyrannical bully in the White House. What would happen if the Mueller Report emerged with a Republican House still intact, we worried? How could we begin to investigate Trump’s tax returns, or his cronies’ corruption, or his foul pedophile friends, or his murky real estate money-laundering, if Paul Ryan, the Randian eunuch from Wisconsin, were still in charge?

It turns out, six months later, that on all these topics, the Democratic House majority didn’t matter much at all. Whenever a serious administration abuse of power seems to demand investigation, Speaker Pelosi springs almost instantly into inaction. There is nothing she won’t not do.

When, for example, a highly dubious decision years ago by Labor Secretary Alex Acosta — to give Jeffrey Epstein an incredibly lenient plea deal for the sexual abuse of 40 underage girls — blew back into the headlines, Pelosi instantly ruled out any notion of impeaching Acosta: “It’s up to the president, it’s his Cabinet. We have a great deal of work to do here for the good of the American people and we have to focus on that.”

Really, Madam Speaker, oversight of shady dealings by Cabinet officials is the work of the president now? And holding a corrupt administration to account is not “work … for the good of the American people”? This “distraction” from real “work” meme is, in fact, a Republican talking point.

The most epic moment of Pelosi’s oversight abdication was, of course, her response to the Mueller Report. She was completely out-foxed by Bill Barr’s shameless misdirection at first, and once his sleight of hand became obvious, she seemed to have no strategy to hold Trump to account in any way. She was presented with striking evidence that President Trump repeatedly abused the power of his office to obstruct justice — the charge that brought down Nixon, and one charge that forced even Bill Clinton into a Senate trial - and was all but invited by Mueller to move the ball forward through impeachment: “If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” Pelosi immediately, reflexively, punted.

Later this month, we will finally get testimony from Mueller. This week, the House Judiciary Committee has issued 12 new subpoenas for Trump officials, including Jared Kushner. This time, they tell us, they’re serious. These subpoenas come after almost all previous ones were rebuffed entirely by an unprecedented blanket assertion by the president that all oversight inquiries are of a partisan nature and should therefore be ignored. But last month the Democrats passed a resolution seeking court enforcement of their subpoena power. How long will this process take? Who knows?

Or take the issue of Trump’s tax returns. Judd Legum is aghast that it took the Democrats four months even to ask for them! When Trump (surprise!) refused to hand them over, Ways and Means chairman Richard Neal filed a lawsuit arguing that the reason he was doing so was not because he wanted to see if Trump had committed fraud or other financial crimes, but that he needed “to decide if legislative action is needed” on “the mandatory presidential audit program.” He believed the claim should be as modest as possible to help guarantee an eventual court victory. But “eventual” is the operative word here.

The goods are there though. So when Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill allowing Trump’s state tax returns to be examined directly by Neal, Neal refused, even though the data would be largely the same as the federal returns. He preferred to wait for the result of his own federal legal case — which could be months or years in coming! . . . It is an effective abandonment of a critical tool for exposing presidential corruption.

I know that aggressive oversight, especially impeachment hearings, is a politically fraught decision, full of risk. I know the polls suggest it splits the country and, by her own expert counting, divides the House Democrats as well. I know her party won the House in 2018 by focusing on health care, rather than Trump. I think that should be their focus next year as well. But fortune favors the brave. If she doesn’t act against a serious threat to the Constitution, voters will infer that the Democrats don’t actually believe there’s a threat. If she lets this president own the narrative, as he keeps doing, Democrats will end up following his story rather than their own.

And there is no essential conflict between holding impeachment hearings and making the case for your policies. It should be possible for a competent and gifted Speaker to do both.

The best gloss I can think of to explain Pelosi’s abdication is that she believes that it’s only a matter of time before Trump loses in 2020, so why risk alienating moderates who get nervous with the I-word now? Why impeach when the Senate will acquit? Why go to war now, when it might imperil electoral victory next year?

Here’s why. There is a strong possibility that Trump is going to win the next election. I know it’s early but the head-to-head polling against most of the Democratic candidates is very close — and that’s before the GOP has gotten to work on oppo research on those Democrats who aren’t well known. Incumbency in a strong economy is usually dispositive.

If Pelosi keeps playing it safe and Trump is reelected, it will set a precedent that a president can obstruct justice and be rewarded for it. He can avoid all serious congressional oversight and get away with it. The Congress will continue its journey as a withered limb in a Constitution that actually gives it pride of place, Article 1. And every time Trump gets away with another crime, or abuse of power, he is emboldened. Vindicated by re-election? God help us.

And what Trump now knows after six months of Democratic control of the House is that he is as free from congressional checks whether it is run by Democrats or Republicans. Pelosi has shown every future president that they can obstruct justice with impunity, refuse every subpoena with impunity, lie with impunity, and violate the separation of powers with impunity.

At some point, Madam Speaker, history may show you had one critical chance to stop this slide toward populist authoritarianism. And you decided you had better things to do.

Pelosi's Consummate Skill at Goading Trump

Donald Trump's relationship with women is not pretty.  The man is a sexist pig even when not boasting about being a sexual predator.  He's the embodiment of the type of man that decent parents would never want their daughters - or sons for that matter - ever involved with.  His narcissism and mistreatment of women is stunning. Yet there is one woman who seemingly can not only stand up to him but can leave him totally unsettled and somehow emasculated - something that tears his fragile ego apart.  That woman?  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who seems to be able to play on Trump's insecurities and fragile ego.  Perhaps her skill is enhanced by the fact that Trump likes to surround himself with women willing to grovel to his ego and who justify their relationship with a serial adulterer by closing their eyes and counting the money (let's get real, it cannot be because Trump is physically attractive - the thought of him naked is beyond revolting). Whatever the basis, as a column in the Washington Post notes, Pelosi gets under Trump's skin like few others and can get him to rashly act against even his own long term interest. With luck, her skill at the game will continue to Trump's disadvantage and political damage.   Here are column highlights:

There is something about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that allows her to unnerve President Trump as seemingly no one else can.

“I pray for the president of the United States,” she said on Thursday. “I wish that his family or his administration or his staff would have an intervention for the good of the country. Maybe he wants to take a leave of absence.”

The proof that she had hit the giant bull’s eye of Trump’s insecurities was his response: “I am an extremely stable genius.”

Exchanging insults with Trump is not an endeavor that is normally productive, as many others who tried it have found. But Pelosi is a dangerous foil for a president who operates on impulse and outburst. While Trump succeeds in making everyone else around him dizzy, Pelosi’s unique talent is an ability to keep her focus on the endgame.

Her current goal is to assure that the president vacates the Oval Office, as swiftly and as surely as possible.  That means Pelosi must do two things at once: Keep Trump off balance, and restrain those within her Democratic caucus who are urging a precipitous drive toward impeachment.

Pelosi knows that unless and until there is overwhelming, bipartisan support for such an effort, it will end with Trump’s acquittal in the Senate. And that would only help him win another four years in office. “He wants to be impeached so he can be exonerated by the Senate,” she told top Democrats in a private meeting. “His actions are villainous to the Constitution of the United States.”

The speaker argues for another course: Continuing congressional oversight and relying on the courts to provide air cover as six different House committees seek documents and testimony from a stonewalling administration. While not as gratifying to those who are eager to begin impeachment proceedings, and who argue that anything less is a dereliction of Congress’s duty to hold Trump accountable, it is the more likely path to defeating him in 2020.

The Democratic caucus would be wise to trust her instincts and experience. Pelosi is patient, disciplined and resilient because she has had to be. No woman in U.S. history has ever risen to a more powerful office in government than the one in which Pelosi now sits for a second time.

All of this has not come without a price. Pelosi’s adversaries have caricatured and demonized her, and even some of her allies have dismissed her.
 Pelosi reclaimed the speaker’s gavel by doing what it took to win in congressional districts where she — and her liberal party — are not particularly popular. Those are the seats she knows she must protect in 2020.

So far, her strategy of keeping one foot on the congressional oversight accelerator while tapping the brakes on impeachment is winning. The prospect of unending scrutiny is getting to Trump. . . . [Trump] bristled at Pelosi’s characterization of that aborted infrastructure meeting as a “temper tantrum,” and pressed five different White House aides to attest he had been “calm” in his three-minute session with the lawmakers.

By Thursday night, Trump and his allies were reduced to the shameless gambit of circulating doctored and heavily edited videos suggesting it was the speaker’s mental stability that should be questioned. . . . Pelosi is exactly who she has always been. What’s changed is that Trump is beginning to understand what that means.

Trump's real problem with Pelosi?  He cannot handle strong women who see through his lies and bullshit and see him for the mentally disturbed and needy narcissist that he is in fact.

Keeping Trump in Office will Destroy the Republican Party

As Democrats in the House of Representatives debate what action to take in the wake of the release of the Mueller report, some are arguing that impeachment would be a foolish move and could harm Democrat prospects in 2020, especially f the party fails to nominate a viable candidate and the cultist in the Sanders camp keep their vow to vote for Trump if Bernie Sanders is not the nominee (a move, in my view, that shows they are irrational at best).  Instead, continued investigations of Trump under the guise of Congressional oversight, a constitutional duty, and allowing Trump to further alienate more and more of the populace could be the Democrats' best bet at destroying the Republican Party - or more aptly, allowing Trump and his knuckle dragging base to destroy it. For decades the GOP has had no long term plan and Trump is accelerating the GOP's self-inflicted suicide.  Here are highlights from an op-ed in the New York Times that makes this argument:

In the fall of 1998, Erskine Bowles, the White House chief of staff, traveled to Capitol Hill to meet with the speaker of the House. Mr. Bowles enjoyed a better relationship with Speaker Newt Gingrich than anyone in the Clinton White House, partly based on a shared Southern heritage and commitment to fiscal conservatism. At the end of the meeting, Mr. Bowles put a very direct question to Mr. Gingrich: Why were the Republicans intent on impeaching Bill Clinton? The speaker replied, “Because we can.”

Just as Speaker Gingrich did in 1998, Speaker Nancy Pelosi could direct the impeachment of President Trump because she can. Unlike in 1998, she stands on firmer ground: The Clinton case involved an egregious personal mistake and purported steps to cover it up; the Trump case involves an effort to thwart an investigation into a foreign attack on our democratic system.

Inevitably the news media and the political chattering class, of which I count myself as a card-carrying member, have focused on the party politics of impeachment. With the benefit of hindsight, impeaching President Clinton was a disaster for the Republicans. Mr. Clinton’s job approval was at a record 73 percent the month he was impeached, Democrats defied the odds and picked up seats in the midterm elections and Mr. Gingrich returned to the private sector.

Impeaching Bill Clinton was wholly a political decision; the substance mattered little in 1998. Two decades later, Democrats face almost the exact opposite dynamics.

For Democrats, leaving Donald Trump in office is not only good politics — it is the best chance for fundamental realignment of American politics in more than a generation. Mr. Trump is three years into destroying what we know as the Republican Party. Another two years just might finish it off. Trumpism has become Republicanism, and that spells electoral doom for the party.

Mr. Trump has abandoned most of the core principles that have defined Republicans for the past century. . . . What’s left of the party [GOP] is a rigid adherence to tax cuts, a social agenda that repels most younger Americans and rampant xenophobia and race-based politics that regularly interfere with the basic functioning of the federal government.

Republicans today are the party of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson — a coalition that, in the face of every demographic trend in America, will mean the long-term realignment of the federal government behind the Democrats.

[K]eeping President Trump in office is the best way to cement Trumpism’s hold on the Republican Party.

Republicans themselves know it, and that simple fact is a huge problem for them: By and large they don’t like him, and they know he’s a long-term problem for the party — but in the short term they know they can’t get re-elected without his voters. For Democrats, it’s the dream scenario — as long as he completes his term.

President Trump should be impeached because he is unfit for the presidency. . . . But if Newt Gingrich taught us anything, impeaching the president is likely to be bad politics.

Nothing will unite an increasingly fraying Republican Party more than trying to remove the president anywhere but at the ballot box. Democrats risk the kind of overreach that doomed the Republicans 20 years ago. And in any case Democrats are not likely to succeed in getting votes in the Senate to convict the president. And in politics, a loss is a loss — there are no moral victories.

I fully understand the historical imperative of holding the president accountable for his behavior. I also share the sentiment of so many Americans who want to punish him for what he’s done to the country. But I believe there is something bigger at stake.

Allowing Mr. Trump to lead the Republican Party, filled with sycophants and weak-willed leaders, into the next election is the greater prize. Democrats have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to realign American politics along progressive lines, very much like Ronald Reagan did for Republicans in the 1980s.

Trumpism equals Republicanism as long as Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket. And a real shift to progressivism in America will be delivered by a devastating rebuke of the president and his party, a rebuke that will return control of the Senate and state houses across the nation. Politics is always a gamble — and this is the best bet we’ve had in a long time.

The argument makes good sense. Pray that the Democrats come up with a credible 2020 presidential nominee - someone other than Warren and Sanders - and Biden.

The Second Coming of Nancy Pelosi

Rather than conducting a witch hunt against Ralph Northam which I predict will leave the Virginia Democrat Party deeply divided and unable to win control of the Virginia General Assembly - I already know I will not be voting for my state senator and delegate and may even decide challenge one of them - a piece in The Atlantic looks at Nancy Pelosi and what ought to be Democrats' sole focus of attention: reining in and, hopefully, dispatching Donald Trump. Unlike the civil war within the party in Virginia, this policy could rally all Virginia Democrats come November and in 2020.  Here are article highlights:

Perhaps it’s because as a child she practiced her penmanship by logging the favors owed to and from her powerful politician father in a record book so they’d never get lost. Perhaps it’s because she gave birth to five children in six years. Perhaps it’s because she first ran for public office at age 47, when her youngest kid was a senior in high school and she knew herself, and her mind, and what she had to offer. Perhaps it’s because she never gives up. 

Whatever the reasons, Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi has clearly not only reemerged as what she already was more than a decade ago—the highest-ranking woman in the history of the republic, as speaker of the House—but as the single Washington leader best able to frustrate, sidestep, stymie, outfox, infuriate, and when it suits her purposes, simply ignore Donald Trump. “She’ll cut your head off and you won’t even know you’re bleeding,” her filmmaker daughter Alexandra told CNN last month, describing her mother’s negotiating style. “That’s all you need to know about her. No one ever won betting against Nancy Pelosi. She’s persevered.” No kidding.

That analysis could just as easily apply to her deft handling of the restive young Democrats, who just two months ago were grumbling that her day had passed and were all but openly wondering how they might block her from becoming speaker again. Now she’s the unquestioned heroine of the anti-Trump left, on par with the iconic Ruth Bader Ginsburg and rapidly climbing to the level of Eleanor Roosevelt, if not Joan of Arc.

Pelosi’s own public response to her reversal of fortune has been understated, but sly.  . . . . Pelosi co-opted the crop of insurgent Democratic freshmen who might have threatened her rule in part by pledging to serve only four years as speaker, but also by listening to their concerns and hearing them out, and addressing them. She has a healthy sense of her own status, but doesn’t let her ego get in the way of the task at hand.

“She knows how to count votes better than anybody,” says former Representative Tom Downey of New York, who grew close to her after she first came to Congress from San Francisco in a special election in 1987, two years before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born. “She’s perfectly politically centered to lead the new dynamic members of Congress, because she was once one of them. She gave her first speech on AIDS when she got to the Congress. She’s really absolutely the perfect person for this moment.”

Not coincidentally, her face-offs with Trump have solidified and consolidated her power over her own caucus. . . . She won it because she stood up to him [Trump].” McCarthy added bluntly, “She wants to break him.”

“It goes to show you,” she reportedly told a closed-door meeting of Democrats after her December confrontation in the Oval Office. “You get into a tinkle contest with a skunk, you get tinkle all over you.” The Washington Post reported that she added, “It’s like a manhood thing for him. As if manhood could ever be associated with him.” Still later, she mocked Trump’s ever-shifting definition of his proposed border wall, telling USA Today, “He’s already backed off the cement—now he’s down to, I think, a beaded curtain or something.”

Pelosi uses [Trump’s] the president’s most inflammatory statements as a mere foil to talk about whatever she wants to talk about.

Pelosi’s strategy is bearing fruit. The latest Quinnipiac University poll shows that voters trust her over Trump, by a margin of 49 to 42 percent, with women trusting her even more: 54 to 37 percent. . . . . And voters overall trust congressional Democrats more than Trump on the issue of border security, by 50 to 41 percent.

“She holds some grudges, as you have to in politics,” Tom Downey says, “but she’s not consumed with it, and it’s not a big part of her plan. Trump’s a silly man, and she knows it. He’s not going to be a problem for her.”

The burgundy pantsuit that Pelosi wore when she was sworn in as speaker the first time in 2007 is already in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Curators had better be on the lookout for the iconic item of apparel or personal effects that could symbolize her second tour. She’s already well on her way to earning the honor.

Senate Republicans May Block Another Trump Shutdown

While Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, remains bellicose about his "border wall" despite the fact that polls indicate that 71% of voters do not want it and/or do not believe it is worth a government shutdown,.  Senate Republicans - in contrast to the misnamed "Freedom Caucus" in the House of Representatives which might just as easily be called the KKK Caucus - seem to have gotten the message that Trump's monument to himself might prove costly in the 2020 Senate elections where the GOP will face a far more challenging map than in 2018. Thus, as Politico reports, some Senate Republicans are even talking about a bi-partisan agreement that might be veto proof and which could end Trump's delusions about a border wall for good despite the lingering anti-immigrant hatred that binds his base to him.  Here are highlights that reflect how Trump may yet see his delusions of grandeur dashed (Joni Ernst is, in my view, a certifiable nut case and hopefully not representative of even semi-delusional Republicans): 

Senate Republicans can’t stomach another shutdown.  After weathering 35 days of a partial government closure, the Senate GOP is dreading the possibility another one will hit in less than three weeks — a sentiment that could prevent President Donald Trump from closing the government again.

Though House Republicans aren’t ruling out supporting the president should he choose another confrontation over his border wall, the Republican Senate majority — which actually has governing power — has another view.

Most GOP lawmakers dutifully stuck with Trump in public as the partial government shutdown dragged on. But privately, Republican support began to crack as their polling and the economy both suffered. After a half-dozen GOP senators defected last week, Trump dropped his demands for border wall money before a full-scale revolt unfolded.

[W]hile White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday that Trump “doesn’t want to go through another shutdown,” she declined to rule it out if Congress doesn’t come up with a border security plan to Trump’s liking. Neither did House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), a close Trump confidant.

Senators are already making calls to gauge what their fellow conference committee members might support ahead of their first meeting Wednesday. And Republicans writ large are touting the panel as a possible solution for the problem.

But if that committee fails, as many on the Hill privately believe is likely, Trump has touted two paths to again try to build his wall: a shutdown or a national emergency on the border. . . . Senate Republicans loathe both options, but for now, they’d choose almost anything over another funding lapse.

The Republican retreat from the border wall confrontation was evident on Monday not just among the rank and file.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) barely mentioned the standoff over the border, other than to ding Democrats for voting against a Middle East policy bill during the shutdown.

It seemed few Republicans had any desire to rehash the episode. “There is little or no appetite for it,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). “Those who thought that shutdowns were a good idea have been disabused by that.” Some Republican centrists are even suggesting that a bipartisan border agreement could withstand a veto threat.

“I think the committee will come up with a deal ... If they come up with something that isn’t crazy, I think it’ll have enough votes to override a veto in the House and Senate,” Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho said Monday. . . . “Because we’ve all learned, hopefully, that shutdowns don’t work, and they’re stupid.”

But even as some Republicans look to use their influence with Trump to nudge him away from another self-destructive shutdown, others are just as queasy about being at odds with the president.

Take Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who is up for reelection in 2020 and could face a tough Democratic challenge. She disliked the shutdown and said it made everyone in Congress look bad, but she was not among those thinking about bolting from Trump’s position last week before the president himself caved.

Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), who was among the few Republicans to support Democratic funding bills to reopen the government this month, acknowledged that nobody wants another shutdown. But he said Democrats — specifically, Pelosi — would take the heat this time if the border security talks collapsed, despite polls consistently showing the public sided with Democrats.

McHenry warned not to read too much into polls showing Trump was hurt by the shutdown: “So to say that is going to have some lasting impact is not commensurate with the last two years of experience.”

Senate Republicans would disagree. They face a more difficult Senate map in 2020 than they did last year and could be dragged into the minority if Trump's popularity collapses. And if in two weeks the conference committee isn't going anywhere, they're the ones that will have to put a bill on the floor to fund the government — and potentially shirk Trump’s demands for the wall.

With luck, Senate Republicans will have learned a lesson and will put self-preservation ahead of boot licking and politico fellatio of Trump.  With luck, some apparently brain dead government employees who voted for Trump and/or the GOP  in 2016 and 2018 will also have learned a lesson and will vote Democrat in 2020.

 

Pelosi and Shumer Have Only Just Begun Reining in Trump’

For most of his life, Donald Trump has lead a life where he has escaped consequences. Born to wealth, he escaped service in the Vietnam War by his father's buying of a medical excuse to win him a deferment.  Throughout his business career, he has used bankruptcy to ditch failed ventures and let the pain fall on others - others he typical failed to pay. When banks ceased loaning him money, he seems to have found Deutsche Bank's apparent Russian money laundering operation to keep his business going when he wasn't selling properties to Russian oligarchs in his own money laundering gambit.  Then in his first two years in the White House he had emasculated Republicans only too happy to engage in political fellatio so as to avoid primary challenges from Trump's unwashed, hate-filled base of support.  Now, the game has changed with the shift of control of the House of Representatives to Democrat control.  This, combined with a majority of Americans opposing Trump and his agenda, means Trump's in for a continuing shock.  A piece in The Daily Beast suggests that Trump had best brace himself for numerous political spankings.  Here are article excerpts:

So, having won round one so resoundingly, what should the Democrats do next about the wall?

One thing: Remember that this is Donald Trump’s problem. And Mitch McConnell’s, and Kevin McCarthy’s (who? The House minority leader). They’re the ones who are trying to push a minority position down the country’s throat. [Trump] The president in particular, of course. But majorities of Americans are against the wall and always have been. So let Trump turn that around, if he can.

It’s worth chortling again for a few paragraphs over how ridiculous and weak they made Trump look. Remember, this is a man who spent years, going way back before he started campaigning in 2015, saying over and over and over how easy being president would be. Bring the Chinese to heel? Very easy. Make Middle East peace? Please. Get Mexico to pay for the wall? Piece of cake. He’s been saying these things in books and television appearances for years.

I can’t imagine who believed him—and if anyone out there was a big enough idiot to do so, that’s their problem. But the point is that he believed it. . . . . But in January, he met reality.

Nancy Pelosi took him to the cleaners, and she deserves enormous credit. Her State of the Union gambit was just inspired. The awesome tell at the way she discombobulated Trump was that he couldn’t even come up with a nickname for her. Did you see that? “Nancy Pelosi, or Nancy, as I call her…” Wow, Don, good one! Her first name!

Taking nothing away from her, though, it wasn’t all Pelosi. Chuck Schumer was the one who goaded Trump into accepting responsibility for the shutdown at that Dec. 11 meeting.

And it was right after those [Senate votes last week] votes that McConnell called Chuck Schumer into his office. McConnell wanted Schumer to agree to a down payment on the wall. Schumer said no and counter-offered a continuing resolution and put together a conference committee to negotiate this. And this is exactly what’s happening.

I’ve followed this stuff closely for many years, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve complained about the Democrats wilting during some congressional confrontation, not staying unified, and getting their hats handed to them by Republicans. Well—no more. The Democrats can play hardball now. They did it already on health care and tax reform, when they didn’t lose a single vote. And there’s no reason they shouldn’t do more of it going forward, on the upcoming debt ceiling fight, on budget stuff, and in the House on investigations and subpoenas of every kind. They have the leverage now to deny Trump a win on anything.

So this week, this conference committee that Schumer suggested will start their talks. The Democratic conferees are Richard Durbin, Pat Leahy, and Jon Tester from the Senate; and from the House, a sextet led by Nita Lowey of upstate New York. They’re mostly pretty senior, and the only lefty in the bunch is Barbara Lee of Oakland. The Senate Republicans are led by Richard Shelby of Alabama, who’s plenty conservative but not really a MAGA fire-breather.

[T]hey might find a way to cut a deal. And maybe the Democrats should cut one—if  and only if they get just massive concessions on Dreamers and temporary protected status people and whatever else.

But what they absolutely should not do in this case is make a deal for the sake of seeming like reasonable people. Healthy majorities of Americans are against the wall and think it’s basically pointless or won’t do the job Trump swears it will do. So the position they’re representing right now—no wall—is the reasonable position. They don’t need to budge an inch from that.

Trump already told The Wall Street Journal that he'll shut the government down again and considers a deal to be less than a 50-50 shot. He has probably persuaded everyone he’s going to persuade by now. He can buy all the duct tape from here to Laredo and it still won’t change things. And if it comes to him declaring his emergency powers, then so be it. That will be really popular.

Easy? His life has been easy. Life tends to be that way when you start it with $300 million. But he lived his whole life in a bubble of no consequences. Those days are gone. He owes consequences a very large bill indeed, and on a number of fronts, it’s about to come due.

Trump’s Wall Retreat Bewilders His Racist Supporters

It's a relief to have the government shutdown over for now, especially since I have family members who have been furloughed or forced to work without pay. Beyond that, it is truly delicious to see the shocked reactions of Trump's MAGA hat wearing supporters (wearing a MAGA hat is today's equivalent of donning KKK robes) at his surrender to Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat controlled House of Representatives. Making it even more delicious is the perception of Trump's angry male base is that Trump lost to a woman - a 78 year old grandmother no less. A piece in Politico looks at the shrieks and angst among Trump's racist, anti-immigrant base.  Note how one former aid describes Trump's surrender as watching a house burn down. Here are excerpts:

Before President Donald Trump finished speaking from the Rose Garden, putting a temporary end to the five-week government shutdown, a running group text between several of his former aides lit up with complaints.

“[Speaker Nancy] Pelosi ordered everything off the menu and left Trump hanging with the bill,” one Trump ally texted to the group.

“President Nancy Pelosi, she runs the country now,” said a former White House official. “We went from indefinite shutdown, to down payment, to cave — all within a span of 24 hours.”

That official said that Trump’s core supporters and former aides are “furious” and “melting down.”

[S]ome of his most loyal supporters fretted that Trump was in danger of losing his fervent base that has fueled his presidency. It didn’t help that special counsel Robert Mueller had just released more details about the Trump campaign’s alleged attempts to backchannel with WikiLeaks during the election.

It all left Trump staring at a tough road ahead. Having staked his nascent 2020 reelection messaging to the wall fight, Trump now can’t claim victory as Democrats start entering the field. After stumbling in his first bout with Pelosi, Trump must now face an invigorated Democratic-led House keen to investigate the White House. And following Mueller's reveal of more evidence that Trump’s 2016 team tried to furtively gather intel about hacked Democratic emails, Trump will have to fend off increasing calls for impeachment.

During the month-long shutdown, Trump’s approval ratings dropped to record lows, his much-touted economy lost steam because of the shutdown and conservative immigration activists rolled their eyes over the his wall fixation.

“FAA shutting airports is a losing card,” said a former Trump adviser who remains close to the White House. “He doesn’t care about federal workers. But pissing off travelers — watch out.”

“I’m not sure allies are going along with it, more just letting it happen. It’s like watching a house completely engulfed in flames; there’s nothing you can do except watch,” a former campaign aide told POLITICO when asked about the reaction from hard-line immigration groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, whose president Dan Stein appeared to tepidly endorse Trump’s latest strategy.

Three former Trump aides disagreed with Stein’s assessment, claiming [Trump] the president raised a white flag on Friday and surrendered the already-limited leverage he had left. All three expressed dismay at the president’s strategy over the past 72 hours — from him submitting to Pelosi’s request to delay the State of the Union until the government reopened to endorsing a wall-less spending bill while congressional Democrats and Republicans hash things out.

The White House allies said their chief concern going forward is a situation in which Trump backpedals again if a deal isn’t struck in the coming weeks. The White House has left a national emergency declaration on the table, suggesting the president could still invoke executive authority to secure funding for a barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border. Attorneys in the White House counsel’s office have spent weeks reviewing the legality of such a move, parsing the various options, according to one Republican close to the White House.

“He’s going to cave again in [three] weeks,” predicted the former campaign official. “Democrats have Trump by the balls.”

Anything that makes Trump's and his supporters' day hell, warms my heart.