Monday, August 8, 2016

The Impeachment of President Donald J. Trump: Hoist by his Own Petard — The Briefest of Histories

 
THE DUOPOLY WATCH | Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

 
Dateline: Sometime in the summer of 2017.

As is well known, even after the Great Rearrangement of Trump (not of his hair, but of his outward persona) that took place in August of 2016, there was little expectation that Mr. Trump would be able to win the Presidency. The list of his political peccadillos had grown to be endless.  Chris Hayes, a political commentator for MSNBC, kept a list of the “Last Ten Trump” gaffs, blunders, political wall-bangers and what have you.  Hayes characterized them as “Things Trump Has Done That Would Have Ended Any Other Campaign.” However, shortly after the “Gold-Star mothers/Nazr Khan/relations with the Russians” debacles of late July, there came to be a huge gathering of campaign staff, RNC staff, and perhaps most importantly, family.  After what was by all accounts a very intense weekend, Trump’s behavior slowly began to change.

Of course, to date, no one knows exactly what went on in the series of meetings, with and without the candidate, that were held.  The best guess as to what went on goes something like this.  First, it was established that Mr. Trump really did want to be President, not just look towards raking in the millions that would come from his next book, win or lose.  Second, family members finally got him to pay attention to the “behavioral issues” that concerned everyone else in the room.  Third, and this is only on speculation of the most speculative kind, it is possible that Mr. Trump, because he really did want to be President, agreed to go on medication.

Whatever it was, his behavior did change.  But his standing the polls didn’t.  He had already done so much damage to himself, that only his “base” that had gathered around him from the early days of the Republican primaries, continued to stand by him.  The process remained the same.  Regardless of what he did or had done, regardless of how many lies he told (and that did not stop with the “new Trump”) his acolytes stood by him.  Trump proved at that time, that for a significant minority of U.S., race trumps everything.  And, and it was a big “and,” big GOP money finally started rolling in (except for, for some reason, that of the Kochs). 

But then came the “race riots” around the country of early October followed by the apparently coordinated terrorist attacks of mid-October that took a death toll surpassing that of 9/11.  Like the latter event, right from the outset, there were strong suspicions of “false flags” behind both sets of disasters.  Nothing has been proven, and it might never be.  After all, 15 years after 9/11, even with the release of the famous “28 pages,” although the circumstantial evidence ring grew tighter and tighter, nothing had been proven conclusively by that time.  But, false flag or no, Donald Trump rolled into the Presidency.

The Republican Establishment, even those who had stood to the side, or perhaps just a bit to the side, was thrilled. Trump or no Trump, meds or no meds, they had gotten what they were primarily after in the election: control of the Supreme Court, the decimation of all Federal regulatory programs as fast as that could be accomplished, further tax cuts for the rich, further destruction of the U.S.’s pitiable “safety net,” from Social Security to Medicaid, a rapid increase in the already bloated but oh-so-profitable levels of spending for the Military-Industrial Complex, the end of ANY action on global warming and so on and so forth. Of course with the Trump win, the Republicans actually not only strengthened their House majority but their one in the Senate, too.

Click here for the full commentary. 

Source: The Greanville Post

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