Steven Pearlstein last Friday in the Washington Post:
Remember this day, July 28, 2017: The day Donald Trump became a lame duck president. More significantly, the day the tea party revolution ended and Washington began the return to “regular order.”
As much as I and a lot of normal Americans — and normal people around the world whose fate is tied to America — would like that to be so, it’s not going to come true. The defeat of the repeal of Obamacare will energize the hater-base and result in the GOP finding and nominating more Trump-clones out in congressional districts where the last of the moderate GOP representatives reside and primarying them to oblivion. While that could open the door to some Democratic wins, it won’t be enough to sway the party off its lemming-like run. So many districts have been gerrymandered into Republican enclaves it would take a seismic shift of Watergate proportions to do in the GOP majority in the House. So far, that doesn’t appear to be on the radar.
The other element is that the Trump base seems to get their rocks off on having Trump and his minions under siege. The more the elites in Washington and New York and Miami and San Francisco rail against him, the more sure they are that they voted for the right guy; the one who will piss off the pointy-headed latte-sipping Volvo-driving Russian-loving (oh wait) snobs who mock Trump’s glitz and glamor. Any move to impeach Trump will be seen as a conspiracy against the God-chosen One, and even if Trump is somehow removed from office, he won’t go quietly, and neither will they.
So we have a bit of a dilemma. Attempts to remove Trump from office by legal means, be it the impeachment process or Amendment XXV, will only make things worse even if they succeed because there will always be the vocal base who claim it was a coup d’etat and they’ll try for their own. But the longer he remains in control the worse things get both politically and practically. As noted below, nothing can be done in Congress as long as they’re forming their own death squads.
One of my favorite movies is Dave, where the president is incapacitated by a stroke and his body double (both roles played by the incomparable Kevin Kline) takes over and starts undoing all the disastrous policies the real president had implemented, and even repairs his marriage. It’s a fantasy, but if only…
There’s a long, depressing analysis of where the majority of Republicans are now in relation to Trump. Those voters who voted for him still adore him. The representatives from the districts made up of a majority of those voters point fingers at other members of Congress, particularly in the Senate, who, they say, aren’t “true” Republicans and are screwing up the President’s agenda (whatever that may be). A few loyalists are nervous about Scaramucci and wish he hadn’t said what he said, but they’re quiet about it. Your attorney general, Pam Bondi, is typical of the firm supporters who hope Trump will simply take control and ignore Congress. This is how Hitler got in.