Quote:
Originally Posted by u crank
Don't think so. The adult supervision is now on DEFCON 1. Trump is a twitch away from the 25th Amendment and he knows it.
Nah I think it is over. No one is going to listen to or do anything he tells them to if it even remotely sounds bad or dangerous. They would simply resign as some have already done. Or leak it to the media. Same goes for foreign leaders. They will simple wait for two weeks. He's done. The best he can do is probably issue a few more pardons.
Trump has hurt the GOP in many ways with his refusal to accept the election outcome and his meddling in Georgia but there is always a bright side. The threat of Trump running in 2024 is all but gone. The attack ads for the GOP primary all but write themselves. That guy with the horns would be a star. 
People will get over it and Dems the best weapon for 2024 will no longer exist. Everybody wins.
Now in the key of C ... everybody ... Kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya..  |
On the whole, I agree with this, but, remember, things have been moving very, very fast in the current situation; when I made my post, a great many aspects of what exactly was going on, or what may or may not happen, in the White House regarding Trump's possible behavior were yet unknown; the whole thing could have gone another way, and the usual response of "Oh, that could never happen", just doesn't apply when it comes to Trump, as experience has shown; the sheer magnitude of the insanity Trump has leveled on the US Gov't. and the citizens of our country was beyond the imagination of most rational, logical people; that the nation has come to the point where the process of democratic elections has been so compromised, that the notions of what are the "norms" are so, blurred, that the nation's very Capitol building would be besieged by lunatics, that the office of the Presidency would be teetering so close to the option of the 25th Amendment, and so many other lesser, but no less disturbing issues, all are something that, in the beginning, in January 2017, very, very few persons could have foreseen; even Trump's most vocal critics at the beginning didn't raise the specter of the scenario we now face; we are down the rabbit hole nd it is, indeed, "curiouser and curiouser" and, to a disturbing extent, scarier and scarier...
While the White House may be on Defcon 1, the fact remains Trump, as president, still has a wide range of available powers, notably, the power of Executive Orders, something he, and the GOP, reviled and railed against when the power was used by Obama; this power is virtually unchecked and unbounded; the only thing that really checks an EO is the reality of pragmatism, of the reality that of "Can it really be done?"; there are a lot of different little, or seemingly little, things a President can do by an EO that can have broader implications further down the road; Trump has issued a whole slew of EOs and an awful lot of them have had no real life ramifications simply because they were either non-operable in the larger context of the Constitution and/or the law, or they were mainly PR stunt intended to make the Trumpettes think their Fearless Leader was actually doing something, or they were simply the obvious manifestation of the megalomania of a man who really liked the spotlight of having the media record him sitting at his little desk, scrawling his awkward, sprawling signature with his Sharpie, and then holding it up like a kindergartner student saying "Look what I did!!"; EOs can usually only be countered by an action of Congress or a ruling by SCOTUS and, until that happens, the EO in question would still be technically in force and enforceable and require action by the appropriate entities or administrators; in the usual transition of power, it is not uncommon for an outgoing president to make some perfunctory, but mainly symbolic, EOs as a sort of final 'hurrah' or final FY to the incoming administration, occasionally hamstring the new occupant for a while until they can either issue a countermanding EO (with the attending PR implications) or modifying the old EO; its sort of a PITA situation; the EO is just one of the possible "buttons" a President has at his disposal, not just "The Button", as I previously noted...
But, given the wildly irrational nature of the last 4 years of Trump, you have to be leery of what damage he could do in a very brief period; who would of imagined that, in the last 72 or so hours, we would have seen what has transpired so far?; Trump is now cornered animal, a sociopathic cornered animal, and we all know cornered animals are particularly dangerous and unpredictable; while there are a lot of others in the White hose and the GOP who may be in position to attenuate any foreseeable or probable Trump excesses, remember there are those who have Trump's ear, who feed Trump's mania, people like the extreme Stephen Miller, who may egg Trump on to some whacked out 'endgame'; I was personally concerned about what Pence might do, given his outward proclivity to defer to Trump in all matters, but I am encouraged Pence has found, if you will pardon the pun, "religion", and seems to be on board with squashing any attempts at crackpot schemes by Trump:
An 'angry' Pence navigates the fallout of his rupture with Trump over election, Capitol riots --
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ts/6582212002/
The idea of an 'angry' Pence is a bit scary; I've witnessed many times repressed, highly religious people snapping suddenly and lose their cool and it is not a comforting sight; still, if you wanted someone to be a voice for sanity and restraint in a time of madness and wantonness, someone who has practiced restraint as a lifestyle may be who you need...
I'm not fond of the idea of the 25th Amendment or of another impeachment in the waning days; I'm content if they just keep Trump on a short leash, you know, get him a set of colored Sharpies and let him sit at his little desk with some coloring books for the next several days until the real adults take over on 20 Jan; as I've said before, once Trump is gone, as far as I'm concerned, he's done with whatever affect he has on the office of POTUS and the courts can have his sorry ass and the rest of us can go back to some greater degree of sanity and deal with 'normal' problems...
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