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

[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.)