Years ago—two, but it seems like many more—I thought, “At some point Republicans in Congress are going to realize they are hooked to the most toxic piece of sludge that ever disgraced the Oval Office and it will destroy their party if they don’t throw it under the bus.”
Not for the sake of any principles or values, of course—they couldn’t care less about inequality of income (except in their mission to increase it), poverty, infrastructure breakdown, racism, sexism, sexual predation, racist law enforcement, climate change, gun carnage or doing anything decent and good—just to maintain their own power and positions come next election.
I waited for this to happen, sure that each unprecedentedly stupid, insane and/or cruel T***p move would trigger it.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And started to feel like they never would, that their internal polling was showing their supporters were so venal there was nothing the cancer on the Oval Office could do that would disgust them. But still waited.
And waited some more.
But Lawrence O’Donnell last night made me think maybe the long wait is at least starting to be over.
O’Donnell explains the game-changer (transcript and emphasis mine):
The president was weakened today, in more ways than Trump voters and probably anyone in the White House actually understands.
Mitch McConnell turned the ship of the United States Senate around and started heading away from Donald Trump for the first time.
When Donald Trump shut down the government, Mitch McConnell’s position was he would not consider even bringing up a bill to a vote in the Senate if the president did not already approve of that bill while it was being negotiated. [Illustrative McConnell clip]
And that is all over.
This time around, O’Donnell points out, McConnell agreed to and scheduled a vote on a bipartisan legislative package without T***p’s approval, then showed him it was going to get more than 80 votes (it passed 83-16), in effect forcing him to announce his support.
O’Donnell concludes:
It’s a whole new ballgame in the United States Senate because of that procedure. Mitch McConnell decided he no longer needs Donald Trump’s support to bring a bill to a vote, and that alone is a devastating blow to Trumpism in the US Senate.
What happened was, enough Congressional Republicans checked their internal polling on a second government shutdown and saw their heads on the 2020 block if it happened to enable a presidential veto override (2/3 of Senate and House both required).
The first guest analyst, John Heilemann, national affairs analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, points out that it is indeed a matter of mathematics.
I think that is a watershed moment in this presidency because, to me, it is the most important math calculation of all math calculations that every United States senator has to do. Does it cost more to stick with Trump? Or does it cost more to abandon Trump? And for two years and two months, the answer has been it would cost us more to abandon him.
At this moment, on this issue, and potentially now on many more issues going forward—and some of great consequence and moment including the existence of the Trump presidency—this will be the moment where Republican Senators have figured out there’s a different math game in town, and that could be incredibly, incredibly bad news for President Trump.
[...]
That’s all it’s ever about with these people, their self-interest.
Going forward, the significance of yesterday’s events is not about the shutdown or the wall, Heilemann says:
It’s an answer to the question of people that have been asking us for two years, saying there’s no way Trump will ever be impeached and convicted in the U.S. Senate… this kind of thinking is the kind of thinking that leads [Republican Senators] to challenge Trump on a variety of other things… because of self-interest, and potentially to challenge him on the question of his entire presidency, because it’s not going to be about spine or principle or caring about America—it’s about them being able to keep their jobs.
In other words, according to Republicans’ internal polling, the potential second government shutdown was a red line for voters. Enough GOP senators detected this to contain T***p on this issue. Anything as or more offensive to voters that T***p tries, they’ll squelch. And if his approval rating falls enough—perhaps around tax time, and/or when enough indictments drop—they’ll decide it’s time to jettison him completely.
Meaning: democracy is working. And T***p is skating on increasingly thin ice.
Yes, if Congress impeaches and removes him, we’ll get a Mike Pence presidency, but with the House controlled by Democrats the amount of damage he can do is limited. Also, I’d be surprised if Pence doesn’t get rounded up by Mueller with all the others, considering he was hand-picked by soon-to-be-lifetime-Big-House resident Paul Manafort, and was in charge of the transition, during which some of the treachery went down.
P.S. for Rick Wilson fans, he was on this segment too, and if you wonder whether he loosed any of his characteristic delicious verbal burn, there was this: “A fairly pathetic whimper to end this whole wall drama.”
Watch:
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