Those who are still predicting that Donald Trump will be impeached and removed from office are now like exotic and endangered creatures. It is like an absurdly slow dance, in which the steps are so infrequent and tentative that it is hard to remember how far participants have come since the music started. Two years ago, virtually the entire commentariat, and most of its readers and listeners, were splitting their sides at the gigantic impending farce of the Trump candidacy for the Republican nomination. Eighteen months ago, those same people had almost entirely shifted their immense mirth to the mighty Hillary Clinton avalanche that was already starting to rumble down whatever it was that President Obama renamed Mount McKinley.
The BBC was asking itself (i.e., its viewers, including any Americans watching its World Service) whether Trump was going to pull out then, to avoid the unprecedented thrashing he was about to receive at the polls (which none of the polls, even the more rabidly anti-Trump polls, then predicted). Wacky leftist filmmaker Michael Moore, with the unshakeable confidence in mind-reading that seems never to desert such people, announced that Trump would quit because he never wanted or expected to be nominated, and it was all a joke that had got out of hand.
These were not unrepresentative opinions. Trump was attacking the entire political establishment, the whole Washington sleaze factory, all factions of both parties, all the Bushes, Clintons, and Obama, the national media, the lobbyists, Wall Street, Hollywood, and the limousine Left from the Hamptons to Silicon Valley. Of course the Trump campaign was insane and impossible, and was doomed to be a ludicrous fiasco, a gigantic, comical clown act that misfired horribly.
On Election Night, Nobel prize–winning (for economics) New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said the stock market would “never recover” from the Trump victory. (It has set a new all-time high more than 90 times since.) The alarms about effective Russian intervention in the election and the confected creation of the Trump collusion myth were born with indecent haste. The ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, was soon solemnly announcing that there had been a thousand Russian agents actively assisting the Trump campaign in key swing states and that they had delivered Wisconsin, a complete fabrication (if he really believed this whopper, I have some oceanside property in Oklahoma to sell him).
A year ago, efforts were still underway on recounts, especially in Wisconsin (which resulted in increasing Trump’s margin of victory by 131 votes), and there was national television advertising, costing millions of dollars, directed at the 306 people who had been chosen to cast Electoral College presidential votes for Trump, to break their pledges. (Seven electors did so and voted for third candidates, but five of the defectors were from Mrs. Clinton.) Plans were underway to disrupt the inauguration, and engage in widespread civil disobedience; the new Democratic National Committee chairman pledged “scorched earth” obstruction; Bruce Springsteen, singing to bemused Antipodeans in Perth, Australia, crooned, “We are the Resistance!”; Madonna (who had generated a slight rise in Trump’s poll numbers by promising to fellate wavering male voters who went for Hillary) spoke of wanting to “blow up the White House.”
Veteran black-activist congressman John Lewis said Trump was “illegitimate,” and the ancient and unfeasible congresswoman Maxine Waters screamed “Impeach 45,” for causes that would become apparent as the process proceeded. Talk shortly turned to that option. As the president and his wife and party left Washington on May 19 for Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican, and Brussels, ABC political commentator Nate Silver rated the chances of impeachment at 25 to 50 percent, and David Gergen — a former assistant to Presidents Reagan and Clinton, and a very knowledgeable man until he joined CNN and was infected by acute Blitzeritis – said, “We are moving into impeachment country.”
A long sequence of crises was fanned by the Trumpophobic media: Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and the Statue of Liberty were (according to Schumer) weeping over the fate of Yemenis and Libyans not allowed onto aircraft bound for the United States. The president’s expressed thought over the Charlottesville riot — that Antifa and the extreme section of Black Lives Matter that applauded the killing of white policemen might be as odious as the Klan and American neo-Nazis — was proof that Trump was a quasi-genocidal racist and apologist for slavery. Trump virtually dismantled NATO by not specifically mentioning the collective-security clause in his speech there; was signing the death warrant of the planet when he pulled out of the asinine Paris Climate Agreement; was going to blow up the world with Kim Jong Un; and so forth, ad nauseam. And all the while, the Russian-collusion fraud festered and grew, born of Clintonian denial and frenzied finger-pointing, and reinforced by the Steele dossier — a pastiche of scurrilous gossip and malice from the most dubious sources, including in the Kremlin, cited by Mrs. Clinton in her absurd memoir of the election as proof of her opponent’s treason.
If there was any hope for their impeachment party they need to stop projecting, first the Russians…then he had dementia, then emails, rinse repeat, oh yeah sex scandals too and Trump is making money from being President.
Democrats are desperately afraid of the passage of tax reform. They are all-in on the dice-roll of denouncing and shunning tax reform and, once the tax extractions begin to shrink next year, growth explodes and jobs are available, their fear tactics will be fully exposed. This reality needs to be rammed down Schumer’s lying throat.
I see Rosie O’Donnell fully understands the Hillary/Obama/Democrat method of government, offering $2 million for a Republican Senatorial NO vote. Hey, it’s only a LITTLE bit illegal and, of course, the ends justifies the means; the ends being the ongoing subjugation of citizens to government.