Friday 8 January 2021

Weekend post - To Trump or not to Trump?

After a week in which he pushed for an insurrection and got the YMCA storming the Capitol, President Trump has now said he won't attend the inauguration of Joe Biden. Quelle Surprise. 

So the question for debate in the comments:

1 - Should be be impeached?

2 - Will he be impeached?

The new season of Earth:2021 is certainly shaping up to match the ghoulish horror of the 2020 season.


30 comments:

Don Cox said...

No, he should not be impeached. They have been trying to impeach him since he was elected, and it looks like a campaign of persecution rather than politics. Obama suffered a similar campaign, with the constant attempts to prove that he wasn't a US citizen.

Neither was a successful President, although Trump at least worked for peace. But both also show the strict limits on Presidential power which is such an important feature of the US constitution. French presidents, for instance, have too much power -- and as for Russian and Turkish presidents ...

Will he in fact be impeached ? I have no idea, but there isn't much time.

Don Cox

John in Cheshire said...

Should be be impeached?
My reply is, impeached for doing what?
Will be be impeached?
The demonrats are capable of anything. I think their vindictiveness will be endless for President Trump, his family and his supporters.

But, I feel that a time will come when many who worked against him these past four years, will long for his presidency. The democrat presidency will be awful; not just for the people of the USA but for the world.

Anonymous said...

Impeaching him (and removing him from office) would just motivate his base.

The house may well go through and create the articles of impeachment, like they have previously but the senate trial still needs a two-thirds super majority. So would need a number of Republicans to vote for impeachment - not sure doing so would benefit Republicans.

There's rumours that Trump will form a third party to take on the D's and R's. If so impeaching Trump just gives him increased appeal to his base.

PushingTheBoundaries said...

1. Yes, if only so he would be prevented from taking office ever again.

2. No, there is not enough time and much more knowledgeable American scholars have already said so. Add to that, that the VP needs to sign up to it and it becomes fantasy politics... So just like now really!

andrew said...

On the do as you would be done by principle:

Let him go with a party.
Then ignore him.

Nick Drew said...

he has manifestly rowed back bigly

won't be hearing much more in last week's vein from him now

(still doesn't necessarily dampen down the trouble, long-term: and - I'll say it again - if Biden thinks of throwing in the towel in a few months time ... all bets are off)

Thud said...

No he should not and if they do then the violence I sadly expect to grow over next few years will fast forward. There is a mixture of the mentally ill and the (misguided?) patriotic out there who are capable of tremendous damage. Biden mentions healing and coming together etc but its just lip service and those around him scent republican blood. It will end in tears.

Anonymous said...

If he is impeached then he will become a martyr. This would be bad enough in normal times but with the senate and the country on a 50-50 knife edge you really need to be able to build bridges with the other side. However, the Dems seem to be baying for blood and are quite happy to work with a 50.01% government, which doesn't bode well for the future.

jim said...

Interesting that just a few days ago senior Republicans were supporting Trump's claim he 'won' the election. Of course no politician really believes that. The support was merely a suck-up for his support for them in the next election four years hence. Now a massive reverse-ferret as the entire Republican party hides away from the s^&t storm. You would need a heart of stone not to laugh.

Ignore him, that is the worst punishment. Cast him and Kushner and the whole tribe into the outer darkness. Oh, and bankrupt him.

Old BE said...

Yes Jim. I said right from the beginning (to myself mainly) that Trump is mainly an attention seeker. If everyone had ignored him the last four years would have been much less annoying.

Anonymous said...

The Democrats have won.
Trump’s final days have seen him destroy his own self and his own brand.

But by kicking the corpse with impeachment that won’t pass, the Democrats are going to make that zombie army rise. Creating the yellow vests who will haunt their term.

Can anyone see Obama having done this ? Deliberately creating tomorrow’s divisions when the perfect opportunity to reach out to the deplorables has presented itself ?

Anonymous said...

I’ve no real informed idea on either question.

However 74m Americans voted for him.
There are more guns in the US than people.

President Harris is going to have a hard time.

JC

Anonymous said...

He didn't push for an insurrection. Where do you get such ideas?

He called for a protest march and rally.

I hate it when people who should know better repeat such nonsense.

Anonymous said...

btw, covid - talking to someone with knowledge who says her local hospital, a big one, has tripled their ICU beds*. So try not to get covid or be otherwise hospitalised til at least April, if that's ok with you all.

* obviously there won't be enough ICU consultants/doctors/nurses to go round, others will be stepping in.

Old Git Carlisle said...

Surely interim president Biden will not be stupid enough to di either but what about the Real next president.

Is Nichola ant better than Trump - will she be nailed by her randy predecessor? Far more interesting from our point of view.

Bill Quango MP said...

Anonymous Anonymous said...
He didn't push for an insurrection. Where do you get such ideas?

He called for a protest march and rally.

I hate it when people who should know better repeat such nonsense.

12:30 pm

LBC today were in ultimate hysterical mode. Super liberal Matt Frei reporting on “The Failed Coup.”

dearieme said...

Since an impeachment would be intellectually vacuous showboating there must be a non-negligible probability that it will be attempted.

andrew said...


In the UK and much of Europe I think he would be in deep trouble.

But in the us things are different.

The incitement to violence test is v. high in the US -
government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action"

From the quotes I have seen so far he did not say anything
"directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action"

He has skirted the edges in the past (cleared on appeal) and knows where to draw the line.

You would also have to prove that his statements were "likely to incite or produce such action"

I still expect a lot of headlines on "imminent prosecution" but no real chance of action not least as the local police clearly did not consider there was anything "likely to incite or produce such action" either,

On impeachment - much more interesting.

If impeachment is triggered, you *really* upset the core trumpers and force republican congressmen and senators to choose trump - or not.
As time goes by and more of his misdeeds are uncovered, you have a good club to hit his supporters with - the incumbent voted for 'teh bad guy'

If impeachment is not triggered, the core trumpers may quietly move on from the reality TV show.

E-K said...

No. It will just incite his supporters - many of them ex military with skill sets.

Will he be ?

I sincerely hope not.

dearieme said...

In Britain we can impeach someone even after he's left office.

(Though it's an awfully long time since it was last done. Let's do Blair, eh?)

Anonymous said...

"As time goes by and more of his misdeeds are uncovered"

I'm sure that many of the people he surrounded himself with will turn on him, partly to save themselves for future careers and partly for money.

But most of his misdeeds - tax cuts for the rich, more cheap H1B Indian coders for Google and Facebook (which they took then stabbed him in the front), sucking up to the Saudis (still slaughtering babies in Yemen) and Israelis - are thoroughly approved of, so I don't know what you have in mind.

He got there by listening to people like Steve Bannon. When in office, he listened to Mr and Mrs Kushner.

Anyone noticed that out of the "big 3" countries, only in the US do the oligarchs have the power to essentially attack and deplatform their own head of state? Putin fought the oligarchs (at great personal risk, post-Soviet Russia was gangsta paradise) and established a modus vivendi with them, those who wouldn't play lost their power and sometimes more. China have just unpersoned Jack Ma, the Chinese equivalent of Jeff Bezos.

(I still find it near impossible to believe that Biden got more votes than Obama, let alone Trump. Biden's appearances on the stump gathered audiences in the dozens, while Trump was addressing tens of thousands. Biden won fewer counties than Hillary, yet got ten million-plus more votes)

andrew said...

Anon
There are a number of state level investigations into tax, trump uni, other bankruptcies etc.

The question is whether any of it will stick and if it does will it be seen as politically motivated revenge.

Anonymous said...

"if it does will it be seen as politically motivated revenge"

We know the answer to that - the left/Dem/media will call it richly deserved comeuppance, 75 million voters will call it politically motivated revenge.

Good article today by former speaker Newt Gingrich (no, I don't know where they get their names from either).

https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/dec/21/why-i-will-not-accept-joe-biden-as-president/

The truth of the Hunter Biden story is now becoming impossible to avoid or conceal. The family of the Democrat nominee for president received at least $5 million from an entity controlled by our greatest adversary. It was a blatant payoff, and most Americans who voted for Mr. Biden never heard of it — or were told before the election it was Russian disinformation. Once they did hear of it, 17% said they would have switched their votes, according to a poll by the Media Research Center. That’s the entire election. The censorship worked exactly as intended.

Typically, newspapers and media outlets band together when press freedom is threatened by censorship. Where was the sanctimonious “democracy dies in darkness?” Tragically, The Washington Post is now part of the darkness.

But this is just a start. When Twitter censors four of five Rush Limbaugh tweets in one day, I fear for the country.

When these monolithic Internet giants censor the president of the United States, I fear for the country.

When I see elite billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg are able to spend $400 million to hire city governments to maximize turnout in specifically Democratic districts — without any regard to election spending laws or good governance standards — I fear for the country.

When I read that Apple has a firm rule of never irritating China — and I watch the NBA kowtow to Beijing, I fear for our country.

When I watch story after story about election fraud being spiked — without even the appearance of journalistic due diligence or curiosity — I know something is sick.

The election process itself was the final straw in creating the crisis of confidence which is accelerating and deepening for many millions of Americans.

...

This is just the beginning. But any one of those things alone is enough for Trump supporters to think we have been robbed by a ruthless establishment — which is likely to only get more corrupt and aggressive if it gets away with these blatant acts.

For more than four years, the entire establishment mobilized against the elected president of the United States as though they were an immune system trying to kill a virus. Now, they are telling us we are undermining democracy.

E-K said...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-9130483/DAN-HODGES-sees-alarming-echoes-Trumps-America-Britain-today.html

Could it happen here ?

Well I have good information that the Palace of Westminster security is impassable. Though I do recall the Commons being stormed by anti fox hunt supporters by Bryan Ferry's son.

The Sun headline was For Fox Sakes ! (their best ever)

andrew said...

On the Gingrich Op-Ed:
interesting, grammatical, I checked the first relevant assertion

"In Georgia, rejection rates dropped from 6.5% in 2016 to 0.2% in 2020."
A quick google shows this assertion to be untrue.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-georgia-rejected-ballots-fo-idUSKBN2832CM

and yes, I did actually track back to the FB posts by the GA Secretary of State.

Like BQ said, I am open to be persuaded that something 'bad' happened in the election counts - but articles where the author has provided assertions that were shown to be untrue over a month ago as a reason for not accepting the election results now indicates he was only seeking to reinforce prejudices.

I hope that we dont let things like this pass unchallenged in the UK (too often).




Anonymous said...

We're in uncharted territory here, where a sitting President is unceremoniously thrown off his main media platform, he moves elsewhere (Parler) and Parler is closed down by Amazon whose servers they use, and the Trump Store's payments people are removing their services.

It's all getting a bit 1934, or maybe 1984. Not a good sign for the US going forward, to put it mildly.

“Politics in the United States are not as they are over here. There, you do not leave office to go into Opposition. You do not leave the Front Bench to sit below the Gangway. You may well leave your high office at a quarter of an hour’s notice to drive to the police station, and you may be conducted thereafter very rapidly to an even graver ordeal.”

Anonymous said...

Still, I think they need Trump alive (though horribly weakened and impoverished) to be the Emmanuel Goldstein figure. They don't have to jail him to send a message to every other independent-minded billionaire (e.g. Peter Thiel).

iOpener said...

The best part about this post is the assumption, so readily made, that Trump "pushed for an insurrection".

What did he say or do that one could make such an assertion? Dog-whistles, that only lefties can hear?

I like the post because it reveals how readily even apparently sane people accept leftist statements and assumptions, and repeat them unexamined and without stating supporting evidence.

The left wins and will continue to win until the right contests their assumptions and refuses to debate the supposed implications of their lunatic assumptions, and pounds away at the assumptions.

hovis said...

Trump did not "push for an insurrection", if the Capitol protest was an insurrection then I'm the Queen of Sheba. If I am the Queen of Sheba then the Portland riots were a genuine attempt at UDI.

But back to the question, will they impeach Trump, they will certainly try.

Should they, No. He did not incite violence or call for insurrection, despite what the fevered imaginations of the corporate media would like to dream about. (If that was truly an insurrection then well, how embarrassing.) Interestingly the Capitol police did not expect trouble and had not drafted in manpower.)

This, if successful, will mean it is possible to impeach not for what is said but what is implied by partisan opponents. Additionally it would imply that the dumbest actions of supporters (or even agent provocateurs) is enough to impeach.

A ridiculous precedent for presidents.

iOpener said...

I get more annoyed by this silly post, most unusual here, so here's more.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/01/11/which-of-these-words-by-trump-would-cause-you-to-riot-n1327633