The Survival of Our Criminal Operator-in-Chief

Thursday, September 26, 2019.

“What d'ya say, pal? We have a deal?”: Our Criminal Operator-in-Chief brazenly trying to enlist Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in covering up Trump’s extortion attempt in their July phone call.  Trump meeting with Zelensky at the InterContinental New York Barclay in New York City, Wednesday, September 25, 2019. Photo by Doug Mills courtesy of The New York Times

From the Department of We Live In Hope:

Here are three reasons I think this one might finally sink him.

1. Giulian's all over it. Nobody likes Rudy. Nobody! And Rudy seems determined to drag Trump down with him.

2. He went after Biden, forgetting Joe's a charter member of the club he's been desperate his whole life to join and hasn't been allowed to.

That's not an uplifting thought. It’s not principle, justice, or the Rule of Law asserting themselves. It’s privilege. It’s a form of corruption----establishment insiders moving to protect one of their own, but it would serve him right.

And voters like Joe. This includes Republicans who have no intention of voting for him or whoever’s the Democratic nominee in 2020. Even he likes Joe.

There’s another dismaying thought, because it emphasizes the degree likability plays in our governing of ourselves.

3. This is the first time we're seeing him on record talking privately to a foreign leader and besides being despicable in itself, it makes it easier to imagine his other clandestine dealings with other leaders 

We can "hear" him talking like a criminal---a stupid criminal---to Putin, to Duterte, to Orban, Duda, Erdoğan, Kim Jong Un , MBS, and Boris Johnson---to all of his favorite fellow authoritarians, tyrants, and would-be tyrants and to the leaders he regards as marks, dupes, and weaklings he can bully, like Zelensky, Lopez Obrador, and, because she’s a woman, Angela Merkel, and those he’s afraid of and feels he has to suck up to, like Macron, and to all of them with the intent of advancing his own interests, the country be damned. It ties it all together and reveals how he operates, which as I said is like a criminal, and completes the picture of him as the operator---the operator-in-chief---of the criminal enterprise that is his Presidency.

Now, the reason I think he'll likely survive it.

1 of 1. Republicans.

Comments

[FDChief]

The dismaying thought is that "we" knew all this about the joker when he was just still the joke-candidate we thought would go down in flames. Mobbed-up? Y'think a casino scamster and NYC real-estate-grifter? Credulous and stupid? Birthers, anyone? Greedy egomaniac? What, nobody else read Spy back in the Eighties, when Donnie was the butt of every New York glitterati joke?

Of COURSE he runs the White House like a cheap cut-rate, small-time mob outfit, a downmarket Sopranos. Of COURSE he's grifting the Presidency, just like he's grifted everything from steaks and vodka to real-estate.

The MOST dismaying thing is that there's about 35-40% of the country that's just fine with that. They LIKE having this cheap-ass punk crook in the Oval Office because he's them - cheap, nasty, stupid, gullible, vicious...all the things they'd be if they were where he is.

And the GOP knows that. They know that their "policies" - primarily the Gilded Age plutocracy that is the beating heart of the Republican ethos - is violently unlikeable to anyone not part of the 1%. So they have to rely on the mobster values Trump represents; greed, stupidity, racism..."assholery" to give it a generic name. Because they're cobbled this coalition of mean-spirited Jesus freaks, racists, morons, plutocrats that have only "asshole" as a common thread.

So, yes. They'll ensure that he survives. He could, as he boasted, shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. They can't afford to let him go down. So he'll survive.

This nation as an actual democratic republic, a nation of "equal justice under law"?

Probably not.

[joel hanes]

I think he's going down and we'll have President* Pence before this time next year, because:
1. As Trump feels more threatened, he becomes more unhinged, in ways that get progressively harder to ignore or hide. What a difference one week has made! There are more weeks to come.
2. Giuliani is a damned fool.
3. There are transcripts of other conversations on that inappropriate secure server.
4. The public is turning against him, and by extension against those who have been protecting him.
5. There's a chance that his tax records will be disclosed. They must be damning, judging by how hard he's fought to keep them secret. There's an IRS whistleblower that Neal has unaccountably been slow-walking.

The Rs will eventually be faced with either throwing Trump under the bus, as they did Nixon, or being wiped out in 2020. (I cannot predict what Trump would do if McConnell told him that he must resign for the good of the party.)