Thread by @GregBufithis

The Mueller report shows that bad guys who play dirty, like Trump, always win. For the Trump presidency, exposed in all its ugliness in the Mueller report, is predicated on a willingness to shred the rules and norms that sustain liberal democracy. And it relies for its success ..

... on the unwillingness of liberal democracy’s guardians to do the same. There is a fundamental mismatch here: Trump cutting every corner, trampling on every ethical guideline, while Mueller and those like him primly weigh up the legal niceties and nuances. They are thumbing ...

... through the rulebook of the monastery while in front of them a mafia don creates havoc. This is the authoritarian populists’ great strength, and not only in the US: they break all the rules, banking on the fact that their opponents will stick to them and be weaker as ...

... a result. It is the perennial villain’s advantage: they play dirty, knowing you’ll play nice.

And yet Mueller has not failed. He has handed Congress that revolver along with a full clip of ammunition, thereby giving the Democratic-controlled House a dilemma. Should it ...

... impeach Donald Trump on the basis of the evidence Mueller has set out? After all, the constitution demands action against a president guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors”, a category not confined to prosecutable felonies. Mueller’s report includes a heavy hint ...

... that it is Congress’s task to apply “our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law”.

Of course Trump's campaign colluded with Russia. But unfortunately that's not a crime. And the trouble is, while Democrats might ...

... have the votes to impeach Trump – that is, charge him – in the House, they do not have the two-thirds majority, 67 senators, they would need to convict him in the Senate, thereby removing him from office. Republicans are more tribal than they were in Nixon’s day: they ...

... have repeatedly shown that they will simply rally behind their leader, no matter what he’s done. Trump would stay in office, just as Bill Clinton did in 1999. That near certain prospect of failure, coupled with the fact that impeachment would devour Democrats’ energies and ..

... consume their agenda when they’d rather be talking about jobs or healthcare, makes it politically unappealing.

Even so, they cannot ignore what Mueller has shown them. If they did, they would be accepting what Trump has done: they would be normalising his destruction of ...

... essential norms, allowing him to tear down those barriers that stand between liberal democracy and a form of elective authoritarianism, a gangster state. Impeachment will not be politically fruitful.

It may even be doomed. But it might just be Democrats’ duty.