Posted on 07/20/2017 3:40:09 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Donald Trump has a secret weapon. Even as controversies swirl around him like galaxies colliding, one scandal or outrage smashing into the next before the last one has fully sunk into citizens’ brains, Trump remains on his feet, defiant. He knows something his foes don’t know—or can’t admit. He knows that as low as he might go in the polls, his enemies are truly, comprehensively, utterly bankrupt in the public’s eyes. The American people may not like Trump, but they loathe the forces of respectability arrayed against him. The media? Congressional Democrats? The Republican establishment? With enemies like those, Trump hardly needs friends.
Which is a good thing, because the president does not seem too concerned about keeping the few political friends he has. His anger at Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been simmering for months, and Trump held nothing back in telling the New York Times exactly how he felt this week. He told the paper’s Peter Baker, Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman that he would never have put Sessions in charge of the Justice Department had he suspected that Sessions would recuse himself from the investigation into Russia’s involvement in last year’s election. Trump even said that Sessions had been less than forthright in explaining his own dealings with Russians. “Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers” during his Senate confirmation hearings, Trump told the Times. “He gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t.” The words are a tangle; their meaning is clear.
Picking on Sessions, the first—and, for a long time, the only—Republican senator who had endorsed Trump’s presidential campaign, was an unexpected move for a president who had just seen his own party’s Senate fail to pass a major health-care reform he had called for. It was a surprising move, too, for a president who continues to face daily innuendo about his relationship with Moscow. Trump, it turns out, had a private powwow with Vladimir Putin at the recent G-20 meeting. And this week it came out that yet more dubious Russian figures were present at his son's meeting last year with a Moscow-connected lawyer who promised to share with the Trump campaign embarrassing information about Hillary Clinton. Sessions may have caused the president a headache by recusing himself from the Russia investigation. But Sessions is more than just a Trump loyalist, and one who happens to be the chief law enforcement official in the country. Sessions is also Trump’s link to the hard-line Republican Right that was Trumpian before Trump himself was. Sessions arguably outranks Trump himself in the hearts of Republicans who yearn to crackdown on immigration and demand tough “law and order” policies. Steve King, the Iowa Republican who is another hero to immigration restrictionists, swiftly took to Twitter to defend Sessions. Trump risks losing a critical part—the braced and dedicated ideological cadres—if he makes Sessions the scapegoat for his Russia frustrations.
Libertarian-leaning Republicans would celebrate Sessions’s downfall—they were provoked this week by the Justice Department’s new rules expanding civil-asset forfeiture—but it’s hard to imagine libertarians taking the place of immigration restrictionists in Trump’s vanguard. Trump has performed political miracles, so perhaps he could demolish and remake his own movement. But it’s hard to say just how much that movement really is his own: Trump swept through the Republican Party like a hurricane last year because he united a long dissatisfied nationalist Right with the public’s (and especially the grassroots GOP’s) mounting hatred of weak and scripted establishment politicians. No one else is yet in a position to duplicate what Trump did, but the forces he harnessed are there to be yoked by others when the time is right. In any event, while the hard Right has no obvious alternative to Trump, Trump has no obvious alternative to Sessions: no more prospect of a loyal attorney general, and letting the Justice Department’s bureaucracy operate with only an acting attorney general in charge would be a prescription for even more trouble for the president. The name Sally Yates should still be seared in Trump’s memory.
Trump’s approval rating among Republicans has, so far, held up amid all the turmoil. Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, has noted that the numbers may not be as healthy as they seem at a glance, however: if the Republican Party is shrinking, as polls suggest, and anti-Trump Republicans are the ones most likely to leave the party (as seems obvious), then Trump’s apparently solid GOP support may actually be masking an erosion in the president’s standing. Complicating Nyhan’s point, but not nullifying it altogether, is the fact that Trump’s approval ratings in the counties he won last November remain positive. Trump is not politically destitute as a result of the relentless controversy in which he's embroiled. Even Trump, however, cannot afford to take his base for granted. There comes a point where doubts about Trump and revulsion toward the political establishment balance out—and a point beyond that where the balance tips against Trump.
The president remains lucky in one thing, though: dissatisfied middle Americans have no other options; the Democrats have resisted anything resembling a populist turn, while the Republican alternative to Trump, such as it is, looks like little more than Bush nostalgia—typically marketed in Reaganite drag. What would it take for “compassionate conservatism” and the “freedom agenda” to make a comeback? It would take a time machine, one that could stop George W. Bush from invading Iraq, the dream come true for neoconservatives that gave them the nightmares they’ve had to live with ever since. The likes of David Frum and Michael Gerson had their turn in power: it gave us endless wars, the Great Recession, Barack Obama and now Donald Trump. When that’s the alternative, who is shocked that Republicans stick with Trump?
The great fantasy of Trump’s critics is that once he’s gone, the old dynasties will return to their natural place in power. This has all been a horrible aberration, they believe, a last-gasp racist spasm by dying Red State yokels seduced by Vladimir Putin. Once the opioids have kicked in and put these Wisconsinites and Pennsylvanians and Michiganders to sleep for all time, global integration can resume; history will be back on track. America will once again face a safe choice between Obamacare and Romneycare, while wise men and women reenact the Cold War until the end of time.
The recusal was inexcusable. Russia is a fat nothingburger that Mueller will turn into a perjury trap. In the end we will spend millions for the DOJ to prosecute someone for “lying” to some scumbag government agent who will tell a thousand lies to set up the crime.
Meanwhile, Hillary’s many documented crimes are ignored and instead he decides to bypass the legal system to shake down small business owners for cash.
I despise Sessions and his ilk.
LOCK HER UP wasn’t just a rally meme for Trump voters... they want the criminal deep-staters stripped of all power.
You gonna link a Chris Stirewalt article here? Are you joking? NRO is >>>>>> that-away, NeverTrumper.
The great fantasy of Trump’s critics is that once he’s gone, the old dynasties will return to their natural place in power.
Trump is getting the crooked media and Democrats to chase the laser pointer while he works on his agenda.
LOL> More propaganda form the Democrats.
In terms of hard facts—voter registration data, for example—precisely the opposite is true.
Republicans are gaining ground against Democrats in virtually every state, with the exception of places like CA and CO.
Freeper LS has been tracking this and posting about it frequently...
Valid criticism doesn't have to be a humiliation. For example many people like Sessions but they are critical of what he has done as AG.
If you and the author want to call that a humiliation, then that's on both of you.
“The DOJ employees are not his friends and he needs to learn to accept that.”
Too late. He should have fired hundreds of DOJ scumbags by now. What is the actual number? Zero, is it not?
He’s not weak or incompetent...he’s a fifth columnist.
Probably spends all his spare time with Felonia von Pantsuit, chewing her underwear clean.
> “Trump risks losing a critical part—the braced and dedicated ideological cadres—if he makes Sessions the scapegoat for his Russia frustrations.”
This writer is a waste of time. Trump is losing nothing. He is laying down the law inside the West Wing. ‘Either you get in tune with the People or you get out!’.
Sessions has not been fired. He has an opportunity to grow a pair or stick his tail between his legs and walk out.
This very minute Sessions can rescind his recusal, fire Rosenstein, fire Mueller, and announce that full-fledged investigations will start immediately into the organized crime of Washington DC and the political establishment that leeches off it.
President Trump gave all the swamp dwellers an opportunity to get in line with the will of the People and they have unfortunately but predictably fallen back onto their habit of pointing fingers while exalting themselves.
Donald Trump can still remain above the fray by hiring the meanest SOB ever to occupy the Office of the Attorney General. And that won’t be Sessions.
L8r
I have been writing the White House and reinforcing my support. In fact, I received a reply, obviously a form letter, that had the President's signature.
We live in a political banana republic and Sessions can’t or won’t see it. I hope DJT has a huge MEGA rally in Youngstown on the 25th. We need to begin to rally our side because there is a siht storm coming.
I’m voting for you next time. Seriously.
The fact that the Hammonds and the Bundys are still rotting away in jail as political prisoners on show trial is enough to tell me that Sessions is absolutely worthless.
“The American people may not like Trump, but they loathe the forces of respectability arrayed against him”..........WRONG, We the People LOVE TRUMP.......it isn’t just that we are sick of the elitist establishment that runs both parties.....
We know TRUMP IS ONE OF US.....! (That’s why the RINOs are trying to undermine his agenda)
Pray for President Trump, God has given us a chance to recover our country.....
“The great fantasy of Trump’s critics is that once he’s gone, the old dynasties will return to their natural place in power.”......don’t the Bush’s hope so.…? More room for 9-11 type stunts maybe?
Forces of respectability ? Are you nucking futz ?
Yes, the continuation of that injustice is bitterly disappointing. Sessions expressed support for the prosecutors of those cases.
For all my own disappointment at what a spineless AG Sessions is turning out to be I have to ask what the hell is Trump thinking by talking to the NY Times, he gets rid of General Flynn and puts McMaster in that position(he is SO going to regret that), Tillerson is a disaster and being undermined by his own people! There are others he needs to confront and fire.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.