RIGHT-WING OPINION DOESN'T MOVE WITH EVENTS

I'm back. Thank you again, Yastreblyansky, Crank, and Tom, for some great posts while I was away.

Elizabeth Drew is asserting in The New York Times that impeachment is inevitable:

An impeachment process against President Trump now seems inescapable. Unless the president resigns, the pressure by the public on the Democratic leaders to begin an impeachment process next year will only increase.

It's true that Trump seems weakened:

The midterms were followed by new revelations in criminal investigations of once-close advisers as well as new scandals involving Mr. Trump himself. The odor of personal corruption on the president’s part — perhaps affecting his foreign policy — grew stronger. Then the events of the past several days — the president’s precipitous decision to pull American troops out of Syria, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s abrupt resignation, the swoon in the stock market, the pointless shutdown of parts of the government — instilled a new sense of alarm among many Republicans.

According to Drew, Trump's time in the dock is coming because ... well, it just is.

Too many people think in terms of stasis: How things are is how they will remain. They don’t take into account that opinion moves with events.

But the only opinion that matters to Republican officeholders is the opinion of the GOP voting bloc, and that isn't moving.



In Trumpistan, opinion doesn't move with events because Trumpistan and the rest of America don't agree on the meaning of events. In Trumpistan, everything Trump does is good (or, at worst, forgivable -- tweeting rudely, momentarily threatening not to shut down the government to get a border wall), and everything bad is the fault of Democrats, the non-conservative media, and Hollywood. Anything that looks bad for Trump is fake news. You know all this.

Drew is a veteran journalist who covered Watergate and the Clinton presidency. I read her opinion piece looking for hard evidence that impeachment and Trump's premature departure from office are likely, but the best she can come up with is gut instinct.

It always seemed to me that Mr. Trump’s turbulent presidency was unsustainable and that key Republicans would eventually decide that he had become too great a burden to the party or too great a danger to the country. That time may have arrived.

But why should we believe that? If Republicans in Congress were ready to make a break with Trump, the unpopular shutdown is a golden opportunity -- and yet they're doing nothing to bring it to a close.

Martin Longman (BooMan) thinks the latest Michael Cohen revelations, if proved correct, signal the end of the Trump presidency. Why? Again, simply because.

On Sunday, April 15, 2018, I wrote, “If Michael Cohen went to Prague, then Donald Trump will be impeached, convicted, and removed from office, assuming he doesn’t resign.” The piece was in response to a Thursday evening article Peter Stone and Greg Gordon had written for McClatchy that claimed that the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) had evidence that, contrary to his repeated denials, Michael Cohen actually had traveled to Prague in the late summer of 2016 just as he was alleged to have done in the Steele Dossier.

Now those same McClatchy authors write that there's technical evidence Cohen was in the area of Prague in 2016:

A mobile phone traced to President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen briefly sent signals ricocheting off cell towers in the Prague area in late summer 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign, leaving an electronic record to support claims that Cohen met secretly there with Russian officials, four people with knowledge of the matter say.

That's game over, Longman writes:

That there are reportedly intercepts that independently confirm his presence there is the exact kind of corroboration that is required to lock down that there has been a gigantic coverup.

This is why I wrote back in April that “if Michael Cohen went to Prague, then Donald Trump will be impeached, convicted, and removed from office, assuming he doesn’t resign.”

Really? That's it? The Trumpers won't continue to haggle, distract, and dispute the evidence all to the bitter end, with the backing of nearly every Republican in Congress?

I see nothing to indicate that Republicans will turn against Trump even if every allegation linked to the collusion and coverup story is proved true -- yes, including the pee tape. There was an exchange in comments yesterday:

Trump could rape and strangle an entire daycare center live on “Fox and Friends” while simultaneously setting alight a basket a basket of kittens, and his base would cling to him like grim death.

That would be firm and manly in their view. They would not only not mind it, they'd applaud. Getting peed on might be another matter.

But Trumpism is theology. If Trump did it, it's justifiable. If it's impossible to justify, then he didn't do it -- the tape is doctored. Also, what about Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein and Ted Kennedy and...

Collusion is the same. Yes, Cohen says he was in Prague, but he's lying because he's a Democrat now, or because he wants to be treated better by the Deep State. All hard evidence against Trump is manufactured by spooks, who concocted it while destroying evidence of the real crimes of the Obama administration, the Clintons, and Trump-haters in the FBI.

Nothing's changed. Trump's base of support is as solid as ever. Change is not inevitable.