“Why would Trump be ‘fucked’ if he hadn’t done something so awful as to cause its revelation to ‘fuck’ him?”
By Robert Reich
The Guardian (4/21/19)
Democrats in Congress and talking heads on television will be consumed in the coming weeks by whether the evidence in the Mueller report, especially of obstruction of justice, merits impeachment.
Meanwhile, the question of “wink-wink” cooperation with Russia still looms. Mueller’s quote of Trump, when first learning a special counsel had been appointed – “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked” – has already become a national tagline. Why, Americans wonder, would Trump be “fucked” if he hadn’t done something so awful as to cause its revelation to “fuck” him?
Added to this will be Mueller’s own testimony before Congress, and Congress’s own investigations of Trump.
But let’s be real. Trump will not be removed by impeachment. No president has been. With a Republican Senate controlled by the most irresponsible political hack ever to be majority leader, the chances are nil.
Which means Trump will have to be removed the old-fashioned way – by voters in an election 19 months away.
The practical question is whether the Mueller report and all that surrounds it will affect that election.
Most Americans hold a low opinion of Trump. He’s the only president in Gallup polling history never to have earned the support of majority for single day of his term.
Yet Mueller’s report probably won’t move any of the 40% who have held tight to Trump regardless.
So how to reach the 11% or 12% who may decide the outcome?
Reveal his moral loathsomeness. …
- Wisconsin’s Russia-GOP Connection. It Goes Well Beyond Poll Data In Mueller Report — The Mueller Report had plenty of information as to how Russians worked to subvert our elections and gained influence in our current US government. But what jumps out to me is how much of that story and related Russian affairs connected back to Wisconsin. Our state appears in the Mueller Report as one of a handful in the Midwest that former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort passed information about to a Russian intelligence agent. The report indicates that this was done to tell the Russians the best way to boost Trump’s chances in those states. … Read the Rest
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The Lesson Of The Trump Presidency: The Rich Won’t Save Us & We Can Grab Our Economy Back
By Bob Hennelly
Salon (4/21/19)
Post-Mueller report release, the only consolation is that the Russian-enabled elevation of Donald Trump to the Presidency may have finally inoculated the American electorate against ever electing another “businessman” to this country’s highest office.
The titans of the business elite that might be locked out of the Oval Office until further notice, like Howard Schultz and Michael Bloomberg, have only themselves to blame. They failed to effectively police their own, which permitted the ‘Don from Queens’ to rise to power ‘by any means necessary.’
Our fever for picking business types to run government is rooted in idolizing great wealth and in the case of Trump, just the illusion of it. Since the vast majority of us spend our lifetimes struggling to pay our way to provide for ourselves and our families, it is perhaps understandable that we imbue the wealthiest among us with near deity status.
We are soaked in this in everything we see and hear from the corporatist mass media echo chamber that’s financed by hawking luxury goods and feeds us the news and entertains us. We’ve been programmed to believe that our net worth is the only metric by which we should measure our own success and just how we must rank everyone else we encounter.
Up until Trump’s election, we were infected with this notion …