Thread by @MariBrighe

Attention: Incoming thread of some thoughts on Trump, Impeachment, and GOP strategy.

One of the things I’m growing increasingly concerned about is that Trump is a squid who thinks he’s a shark swimming with actual sharks. He THINKS he’d savvy and slick, but as we have seen, he truly isn’t.

But he’s playing with folks who experts at political strategy.

He’s also done nothing to cultivate loyalty from ANYONE. Everyone knows he’d throw his own children under a bus to save his own skin. So the ONLY reason anyone is his party backs him is for their own gain.

And the minute it’s politically advantageous, they will turn on him.

And I think that moment is running up on him really quickly, and he definitely does not see it coming. And if the GOP can pull it off, we’re all going to be terribly fucked for a decade or more.

Mueller closing the net, and it seems inevitable that Trump is to get crushed.

But the GOP will continue to back Trump and encourage him to fight on until January 20th. After that, they’ll be ready to flip the minute the pieces align.

Why?

Because Trump will have served half of his term. That has big implications.

Once we hit that half-way point, if Trump is impeached (or less likely, resigns), his replacement can stand for re-election twice, and the GOP gets a chance to lock down executive policy making for 12 years at least.

Here’s how I see this playing out.

Mueller’s investigation reveals something big enough that Republicans can pretend it’s a “major revelation” and decide to actually hold Trump accountable.

In a stunning show of sudden bipartisanship effort, Articles are passed, a trial occurs, and Trump is booted.

As soon as that process starts, the Right Wing propaganda machine goes to work. They talk endlessly about how Trump was never really a Republican and point to his history of political oppprtunism and his lack of actual faith as reasons why they aren’t like him.

They point to people who “resisted” within the GOP and elevate them and laud them as voices of reason and the moral center of the party.

They build bullshit stories how Mike Pence was quietly the leader of this “resistance” and paint him as the hero who saved us all.

One Trump is booted, Pence is sworn in with much fanfare, and pledges to return “civility” and “normalcy” and “morality” to politics and to America.

The GOP then holds themselves out as the party willing to hold their own president responsible for misdeeds.

They make a few efforts at easy bipartisan legislation: immigration, a budget, and an infrastructure package. Centrist Dems, eager for a win, take the bait— hook line and sinker.

Pence smooths over the foreign policy and trade fuckups, gives some “presidential” speeches.

Somewhere in that first two years though, the Trump policies catch up and the country tips into a massive recession. Unemployment skyrockets again, and Pence points to “wasteful entitlements” and “special interests” as the cause, dumping blame on the Dems as much as possible.

The GOP machine goes to work and subtly stokes white fear, and saying only they can save America. They tout Pence’s leadership through the “Trump Crisis” as a proof that he’s a good man in a storm. They attack LGBT rights, abortion, and racial justice as “IDpol distractions”.

Pence handily wins re-election on the back of this economic fear.

Of course, as all this is going on, Pence and his pals are eroding voting rights, LGBT rights, women’s rights. They’re increasingly policing and allowing Evangelicals churchs to control more and more.

By a year or two into his first elected term, Pence has delivered the return to the 1950s that straight white people have been desperately crying for, and they think they’re in a damn utopia.

But the rest of us are now just as fucked as we were in the 50s.

Obviously as this thought experiment stretches out longer, it’s a bigger guess.

But this shit keeps me up at night. Trump is an unhinged clown. But Pence is a shrewd, calculating operator.

I want no part of a Pence administration.