Trump’s Impeachment Firewall

Yesterday afternoon someone expressed surprise in a conversation we were having because, the way she put it, “I don’t understand why more Republicans haven’t come out against Trump.” And I didn’t have a good answer for her until after I watched part of Trump’s Kentucky rally last night.
Why did I watch the rally instead of one of the cop shows, like 48 Hours or Live Cop TV? Because like Don Corleone used to say, ‘keep your friends close but your enemies closer.’ So I watched about 10 minutes of Trump.
And I happened to be watching the point in his rant when he reminded the audience that the next day they needed to go out and vote for the Republican incumbent, Matt Bevin, who’s locked in a tight race against the state’s Democratic Attorney General, Andy Beshear. The outcome of today’s vote is not only being viewed as some kind of litmus test on the Trump impeachment in a red state, but is also a possible signpost for how Mitch McConnell will do in his own re-election campaign next year.
Every time that Trump holds one of his Nuremberg-style rallies he always spends a few minutes recognizing GOP office-holders with whom he shares the stage. He also regularly visits states to plug GOP candidates engaged in tight races. The mainstream media only reports on his rallies when either he says something awful or when a dispute breaks out inside or outside the hall. But the degree to which these rallies are an opportunity to build support for the GOP is somehow never mentioned at all.
I don’t recall Obama ever leaving the White House to go out and rally the troops except when his own re-election was at stake. What I do recall is that after he came out to the Rose Garden and signed the Affordable Care Act, he then disappeared from public view and within two weeks the Republicans owned the public narrative on why the new law was so ‘bad.’
The truth is that Obama was a great campaigner for himself but for the Democratic Party as a whole he was a complete dud. And the proof of that statement lies in the fact that more than three years after he and Michelle moved from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue up to Kalorama, the three people leading the contest to head the 2020 national Democratic ticket are all more than seventy years old.
I thought the whole point of a political party was to nurture and develop new leadership. The current leadership all came of voting age before LBJ announced that he was going to quit.
Oh, I forgot. The national horse race has a guy running just behind win, place and show whose total political creds consists of making sure that the garbage is collected in a small, mid-Western town. Oh, I also forgot that he’s a veteran who happens to be gay. Big, friggin’ deal.
In the more than 50 years that I have been following politics, I have never seen any President who defines his role in more political terms than Donald Trump. He doesn’t care about policies except when a policy can be turned into a slogan to be chanted by his adoring crowds — ‘Build the Wall.’ He also couldn’t care less about whether anything he says actually aligns with the truth because he knows that everything he says will reverberate through the media, and it’s his media presence alone which defines everything he does.
For all the talk about whether Trump’s poll numbers are going up or going down, I haven’t noticed that his daily comments made to a dutiful White House press corps have diminished one bit. If anything, he also seems to be holding more evangelical-like mass meetings than he did before.
And that’s why the GOP not only won’t run away from him during the impeachment phase. They might even remain faithful if it looks like he, rather than Hillary, might end up being locked away.
