The worst part of any political future in which voters resoundingly punish the GOP for getting into bed with Trump will be Republicans showing pretend remorse for having pretend "lost their way" and reporters (pretend?) believing them.
— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) January 18, 2019
America is so politically skewed that Republicans are at no risk in the near future of being punished worse than they were in 2006 and 2008 -- after which they didn't show remorse for backing Bush, they merely pretended he'd never been president, while rebranding the GOP as the party of Mitch McConnell obstructionism and Tea Party extremism.
That's the downside risk for Republicans if Trump leaves office with poll numbers as low as Bush's. I strongly doubt that will happen. Bush spent much of his final year in office with job approval numbers in the 20s. Trump has never dipped lower than the mid-30s, and I maintain my certainty that he won't go significantly lower than that -- maybe he'll suffer a dip if he can't get a wall funded, but I don't think his base will blame him even for that.
Matt Yglesias is right:
At the end of the day if Trump says “yes, it’s all true — I conspired with Vladimir Putin to hack Hillary’s emails so I could win the election and put conservative judges on the bench and in exchange promised him Crimea” who in the GOP is going to say that’s a bad trade?
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) January 18, 2019
Trump will never be a figure of disgrace on the right. If Democrats give the GOP a thumping in 2020, Trump may become invisible -- but he'll soon be resurfaced. Expect to see some of these with Trump's face the minute the next Democratic president struggles at all in the job:
And I'm calling it now: There'll be schools and other public facilities named after Donald Trump in deep-red America -- even if he's impeached and removed from office. (It won't be very different from the South naming so many things after Confederate generals.)
Some Republicans would certainly express phony remorse after Trump's downfall if they felt they had to. But I think they'll conclude they don't have to. And given the persistent anti-Democrat hatred in much of America -- a hatred Trump has come to embody -- they'll be right.
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