Inoculating his base, Trump prepares for a showdown
He knows it’s coming. We all know it’s coming. Mueller, or the House Intelligence Committee, or the Senate Intelligence Committee, or two of them, or all three, are going to issue a really damning indictment of Trump and his senior surrogates, and then the Mother of All Constitutional Crises will be upon us.
In any normal year, if a Special Counsel determined that a President of the United States had committed High Crimes and Misdemeanors while in office, the machinery of Impeachment would click into gear. The House Judiciary Committee would immediately begin public hearings. If the full House then impeached, a Trial would occur in the Senate. This is what happened to Bill Clinton, who eventually was found not guilty, and remained in office, more popular than ever.
But this is not a normal year. And 2018 will not be a normal year, if it doesn’t happen until then. But it will happen—it’s coming—we all can sense it: the circumstantial evidence is just too powerful. Trump is in the cross hairs, and there’s not a damned thing he can do about it.
Except what he’s doing right now: inoculating the base. His appallingly bad-taste attack yesterday on “Morning Joe’s” Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough was only the latest in his unrelenting war on the media, a war whose objective is obvious: to convince his base that all the negative reporting about him is “fake news.” Whether it’s from the “failing New York Times,” or the “Amazon Washington Post,” or “Fake News CNN,” or “Fake News NBC, CBS & ABC,” (all taken from his @realDonaldTrump twitter feed), the Big Smear is on—and, judging by his base’s reaction, it’s working.
Evidence? Just go to my favorite fever-swamp of the far right to find out what the wildlife is saying: Breitbart. Here’s the serial adulterer and disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich calling for an “Independent Counsel” to investigate CNN for “fake news.”
Here’s some half-nude porn star named Jenna Jameson slamming Playboy Magazine for fake news.
Here are crazy comments about an article on The Atlantic’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, who is worried (rightfully so) about attacks on reporters by violent white ultra-nationalists:
“Fake news media is the enemy of America.”
“It’s the LEFT that are the violent scum.”
“If lying, manipulating, POS reporters get beaten up because DJT tells the truth, whose fault is that?”
“We the people are not participating in the media’s lies of filth anymore, let them reap the whirlwind of their actions and suffer the consequences.”
“there is no such thing as journalism, its all propaganda.
“Libtards and MSM have ginned up violence against conservatives for years; it’s only natural for peoples anger to be turned against the real agitators.”
“The MSM media needs to be destroyed at all cost!”
“Whatever it takes. Ends justifies means.”
The disturbed individuals who issue these threats have been riled up for years by violent propaganda from Fox “News,” Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Alex Jones, the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed fulminators, and similar rabble-rousers. Trump has upped the ante to unprecedented levels of hostility: the Breitbart comments are deeply troubling. But, as I said, Trump knows what’s coming, and he knows (or thinks he knows) what he’s doing: preparing his people for war. When the indictments come down, he’ll be able to tell his base: “I told you so! Fake news, fake accusations! Don’t let them get away with it!” And then what? We’ll have millions of unhinged wack jobs with guns, determined to defend Trump’s America, on the hunt for liberals. And that won’t be fake news, folks; it’ll be for real.
Yep, crazy like a fox, he is. One of those unhinged will probably be a cousin of mine in Indiana with his closet full of guns and friends with the same kind of arsenal. I wonder what the US military will do if Trump’s madmen take up arms. Guess that would be a good time for a national security threat from Isis so he could declare martial law. Seems real enough to me.
Jeff, I think you’re exactly right. Of course, anything can happen in these surreal times, but your scenario is plausible. One thing we know is that he’s an authoritarian megalomaniac, with a nepotistic family.