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As a thought experiment, what do you guys think it would take for Republicans in congress to impeach and convict Trump?
Like, suppose all those Reddit comments are right, and Elon really is looting billions of dollars from the treasury for his personal benefit. If Trump turns a blind eye, or even worse, pardons Elon, surely that would be enough right?
At this point I don’t think anything can. If Trump turns a blind eye and pardons Elon, I believe the base will think it’s correct/legal/not a big deal. I don’t even think murder would do it; I think there would be a spin that Trump had to do it.
Actually, now that I think about it, I think if Trump supported the LGBT population, was pro-sex education, or something else very much so not socially conservative, I believe it’d do it. But then he wouldn’t be Trump, so it’s kinda a moot point.
President Clinton established that profound moral corruption was no bar to Presidential office. President Bush II established that reasonably sound moral character was insufficient to prevent disastrous misrule. President Biden killed any possible appeal to formal rule of law, and did some dancing on the grave of the moral character question in the bargain.
There aren't really a lot of valid norms remaining upright at the moment. In 2016, Democratic candidates stumped on the policy of taxing religions they didn't like and publicly laughed at the idea of Constitutional restraint for their desires. With this last election, I note that numerous Blue Tribe commentators explicitly dismissed the actual person murdered in the attempted Trump assassination, because he was a Trump supporter and therefore fair game. Likewise, one notes the Luigi fandom. If you're worried about people endorsing murder, there's no need to speculate about hypotheticals when we've got live examples around us at this very moment; likewise for other forms of extremism.
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Do... do you... you really believe Trump is a doctrinaire social conservative? Like he doesn't support abortion up til birth without apology, I guess that makes him a radical Christian nationalist or whatever the snarl word is now?
Trump's support among social conservatives is that he'll protect us from efforts to make it illegal to be socially conservative, not that he'll enact socially conservative policies. Nobody expected him to be even as socially conservative as he is, we just expected him to make sure the little sisters of the poor get left alone.
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He waved a rainbow flag once. Roy Cohn was his mentor. He weirdly petted Peter Thiel's hand in a meeting in 2016. Theil called Trump more recently and asked him to select Vance as VP. No one cares that Trump is fine being friends with gay guys. A journalist asked Trump which restroom a transwoman would need to use in Trump tower and he said he doesn't care.
I'm not sure if Trump "supports" them, but he doesn’t seem to be anti-gay.
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Trump made a gay married guy with gay adopted kids a treasury secretary.
Trump is not anti-LGBT per se, he's just pro owning the libs, so because libs funded the cause he froze that funding.
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Those are some interestingly selected examples. Let me go grab a big drink of water and -
cough hack
... are you intentionally trying to channel Darwin levels of being wrong for the engagement, or does this mean anything?
No, I’m not, and I don’t know why you want to insult me by saying I’m not commenting in good faith.
Because I’ve looked at your profile page:
( I don’t downvote lightly, and this haven’t done so here yet.)
…..I feel like the joke went over your head.
I'm pretty sure I get the joke. What I'm interested in seeing is whether it's a joke in the 'ha ha, I'm going to act the exact opposite of this' sense, or in the 'ha ha, I'm going to be extra wounded if someone notices a pattern' sense.
If you'd rather we spend three posts getting to the point where you can even recognize the "or does this mean anything?" part of my post above, I think that illustrates a lot of why I'd comment the way I did.
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Darwin never had a sense of humor, at least she's got that.
I'll respect our difference of opinion if you don't find it funny, but I chuckled.
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I am 100% certain Trump would be impeached and removed if he was caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.
Besides that, I'm less sure.
Define "caught". We're getting into territory where "how high on TDS do you have to be to believe that actually happened, rather than being an insane slander thought up by his enemies" would trump most sorts of evidence that could realistically be produced.
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I donno, he's rubbing shoulders with a Kennedy now. Maybe some of that Chappaquiddick magic will rub off on him.
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"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't
lose any votersbe impeached and removed from office, OK? It's, like, incredible."Is it really that far from precedent, though? Clinton's ATF and FBI burned a bunch of women and children to death in Waco. Obama ordered drone strikes on American citizens abroad. Cheney actually shot a man while in office. Two of those successfully ran for re-election afterwards.
And when the man Cheney shot got out of the hospital, he told the press conference, "My family and I are deeply sorry for everything Vice President Cheney and his family have had to deal with."
On the one hand, it was an accident, and it's possible that the victim contributed to it by moving too far ahead of the line of hunters too soon, and legitimately felt guilty about that.
On the other hand, it was Cheney, who you can absolutely imagine walking up to the guy he just shot and stating "If you survive this, the first thing you're going to do is apologize for getting in the way of my shot."
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As long as Republicans think that Trump will get them stuff they want, he's invincible on a personal level. Like all politicians, first you have to gut the support, THEN you have to run the smear campaign. That's why Cakegate in the UK only started hitting home when conservatives realised that Boris Johnson was going all-in on lockdowns and immigration. Mind you, I think that UK voters are more invested in outward good behaviour from politicians than US ones, though I don't know how long that will last.
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