From Jim’s blog again Politics played for keeps:
This is not necessarily a good way of removing Trump. Not in 2020, and not in 2024. In the impeachment vote, every Republican voted party line, which is an extraordinary and startling turn around. This is a vote that signals a hope that Democrats will never be allowed to return to power, and an expectation that such a return may well be prevented.
The Republicans, faced with increasingly dire threats from the enemy have united behind Trump. With the threat in front of them that from henceforth politics is going to played for keepsies, they are going with keeping.
This is not surprising. The dems stood behind Bill Clinton in 1998. Trump is not as bad as the GOP feared in 2016-2017 he would be. The US economy and stock market is booming , there is geopolitical stability, and the democratic 2020 candidates are, predictably, bad. And also, Tump has been pro-Israel to a fault, which helps, obviously, in endearing him to the GOP. I think there was an implicit agreement between House Republicans and Trump in 2016-2017 or so, that as long as he played ball on Israel and not be too hard on China and Mexico regarding trade and immigration, that they would stand behind him unconditionally.
And Trumpism is increasingly moving to the position “screw the constitution, if we are ever removed from power, the constitution is dead anyway. Lets grab on to power and hang on for our dear lives.”
Not really. Trump has been unable to do much of anything, especially on any of the major stuff he campaigned on such as immigration, ‘the wall,’ trade, Opium addiction crisis, returning jobs to America, etc. He makes some sort of vague threat or promise and then if there is even the slightest resistance or difficulty he either abandons it or recants. Now, true, he has not pulled America into another war ,so he gets credit for that. If trump really grabbed on to power as Jim believes he has, then likely Epstein would be alive (or at least we would know who killed him), Hillary would be under investigation (as Trump promised in 2016) and Roger Stone would be a free man, Julian Assange would be pardoned, there would be major economic sanctions and or tariffs on Mexico, etc.
It’s easy to lose track of things because it seems the same headlines are recycled over and over (China, tariffs, sanctions, etc.) but Trump has a tendency of easily backing down and reneging, which is the common thread.
So for example, here he is on April 2016 threatening sanctions on Mexico for cartels and trafficking:
Trump threatens to sanction Mexico over drug trafficking
…and then in June he calls it off:
Trump Calls Off Plan to Impose Tariffs on Mexico
On November 6th, 2019, an American family of 9 Mormons is killed by cartel gunmen, and here is Trump declaring war against carrels for the umpteenth time even though he said he would do this 6 months ago, and nothing will come of it anyway.
Yet Trump imposed sanctions on Turkey and threatened to destroy Turkey’s economy for defending itself against Kurdish terrorists. As Vox Day correctly notes, the Turks, as much as they may suck, are U.S. allies, not the Kurds. Just a day after the sanctions, Turkey backed down, and Trump kept his end of the bargain and ended sanctions, so if Trump can so easily twist Turkey’s arm using economic leverage, then why not do so against Mexico regarding cartels and immigration. So Trump has the power but is choosing not to use it, which as described above is part of the implicit agreement he signed, not to.
None of this come as much of a surprise to me. In mid-2017 I predicted, based on my observations of his leadership style, that, save for the tax cuts (which were a shoo-in) and court appointments, there would otherwise be little substantive progress or reforms by the administration. The first sign of this was the appointing neocons and other ‘establishment conservatives’ to his Cabinet, but then backing down on the travel ban after outrage by the left even though the ban, as many noted, excluded the actual Sunni countries (such as Saudi Arabia, conveniently) responsible for terrorism but rather targeted Shiite ones. I think literally one or two people were inconvenienced by the ban, that somehow was an existential threat to American democracy and the prelude to concentration and internment camps, because , obviously, it makes perfect sense to intern rather than deport the very people you don’t want in your country. In early 2019, Vox Day and others kept saying to ‘trust the plan’ or that ‘Trump will deliver’ or to ‘give him 48 hours’ and yet I was saying to myself ‘there is no plan’and ‘nothing will happen.’ Then the dominoes began to fall: the dems won the House. And Trump also backed down on the shutdown, expressing contrition for those poor furloughed government workers, who apparently were on the verge of starvation and cannibalism after being deprived of pay for 2 weeks, and, as we all know, are a major pro-Trump voting bloc. If they weren’t going to vote for Trump, they sure will now. lol