I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I’m an old fart. I’ll be 60 next month, and I’ve been a political junkie for most of my life, but I’ve never seen anything even close to being like this in my entire life.
Every President is different, just as every snowflake is. They all come in with different hopes and expectations for their Presidency, just as they all come in with their own political and possibly personal baggage. But I have never seen a President check into the White House with a Trump Tower bellhop behind him, his 4 wheeled cart piled to the brim with baggage. Every President checks in for his stay with a different popularity rating, but when is the last time you saw a President check in who needed a miner’s helmet to find his poll popularity?
So what? We’re stuck with him for four years, right? We’re a constitutional democracy, we can’t fire him, and the government can’t dissolve and hold new elections like they love to do in Europe. This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, designed by our founding fathers for stability, and also to warn us. We made our collective bed, now we can lay down in it for the next four years. There are only two ways we can get rid of him, either he dies, or we impeach him, which requires articles of impeachment from the House, and a trial in the Senate. Considering both of those are in Republican hands, how likely is that?
Right now, not very likely, but don’t touch that dial. There are already dark clouds on the horizon for the Trump Presidency, and he hasn’t even laid his hand on the bible yet, which despite his loudmouthing to the contrary may be the first time in his life. But those dark clouds are there, and he hasn’t even done anything yet.And that’s part of the problem, he hasn’t done anything.
To start with, his personal ethics problems. When the head of the Office of Government Ethics feels compelled to come out before you’re even inaugurated to tell you that your bait and switch divestment scheme doesn’t pass the smell test, it doesn’t bode well for the future.
In fact the first challenge to him is already here. Last week Rachel Maddow broke the story about Trump taking over the foreclosure on his son Li’l Donnie’s failed business in South Carolina with an eye for rehabbing and updating the property for future use. The only problem is that the place is a derelict mess, including having toxic waste stored in it, and The Cheeto Prophet wants the State of South Carolina to clean it out, claiming that he had no prior interest in the property. This puts the state in a dilemma. Do they say no to “Trump the businessman” and in the process piss off the President of the United States, or do they comply, and stick the taxpayers in the state with the bill? And this is just the start.
From the time he takes the oath of office, I expect that the media is going to be watching every transaction his companies do, looking for possible conflicts of interest that they can trumpet to the skies. If Trump is smart (which he isn’t), before he takes office he would issue an order barring his hotels and service companies from doing any business with foreign businesses or diplomats. But it won’t be enough, Trump has spent his entire career skating on thin ice, and I can’t see his kids being any different.
But the fun doesn’t stop there. His continued bromance with Putin is already a source of friction with the hawk wing of the GOP, who don’t like it, but now it’s becoming potentially dangerous. When the Chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee announced he was holding hearings, it was originally limited to the hacking and cyber security, they would not be investigating connections between the campaigns and Russia. But after the closed door Senate briefing with Comey and Clapper, he turned around and announced that they would investigate entanglements between the campaigns and the Russians, including using subpoena power to obtain documents and compel testimony from campaign staffers. What I wouldn’t have given to have been a fly on the wall in that briefing, to know what was so juicy that it has the Democrats boiling oil, and the Republicans willing to investigate their own President’s secret ties to a foreign power?
And let’s not forget that the New York Attorney General is still conducting an investigation into Trump’s deeply flawed NY based charity. If he comes up with anything, and David Fahrenthold has already shown us that there is a treasure trove of things to come up with, these are acts committed by Trump when he was a private citizen, his office doesn’t protect him. We could be presented with the national spectacle of a sitting President being deposed and possibly having to show up in New York to testify at trial.
Look, everybody knows that one pebble can’t sink a boat, but 1,000 of them can swamp the damn thing. I have little doubt that as long as The Cheeto Prophet refuses to completely divest his business and put it into a blind trust, more and more issues are going to come up. This is assured for one good reason if none other. Don’t forget, Trump got involved in that South Carolina property because his son, the budding mogul, managed it into foreclosure. If he does the the same thing with the Trump companies, there is no way Trump can keep from stepping in. If he does it in the open he can bleat out his “no conflicts” line and might get away with it, but if he tries to do it on the sly, and gets caught, then he’s displayed guilty knowledge that what he was doing was wrong.
But the kill shot would be the intelligence committee findings. There has already been a DIARY in here that stated that intelligence agencies are investigating if Trump has been compromised. Israeli intelligence is investigating their own information, and the CIA is investigating illegal campaign contributions from the Russians to the Trump campaign. and the Trump team was forced to admit that there was direct phone communications between the incoming NSA chief, Michael Flynn, and the Russian Ambassador on the same day that Obama announced sanctions against Russia. If the Intelligence Committee interviews those people, even behind closed doors, and has compelling evidence to prove it, I honestly don’t know how the House cannot begin impeachment proceedings. Fuck politics and ideology, we’re talking about national security here. If it is proven that Trump was compromised, either willingly or unwillingly, the emoluments clause isn’t even an appetizer here, we’re talking about a national security crisis. We cannot tolerate a President who has been compromised by a foreign power.
Will any of this actually come to pass? I don’t know, and neither do you. But the fact is I have neither seen a President come into office under such a cloud of distrust and potentially crippling problems. One thing is certainly possible, that the majority of the GOP agenda may be upended by the constant responses and possible investigations brought on by Trump’s disastrous election. Now more than ever we need to be vigilant.