Will Trump be pulling a Richard Nixon on us?

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From before Trump was even sworn in one of the speculations has been Pence becoming president was the plan all along. That Trump never really wanted the job. It keeps going from one extreme to the other.

As for the impeachment trial, right now it doesn't appear to be holding any water. It looks like something that was hastily slapped together in a last-ditch effort.

As the impeachment inquiry gains steam, President Donald Trump and his defenders are running their old playbook. It’s not a good playbook. It wasn’t all that convincing the first time around. But it worked once—and the modern Republican Party doesn’t have a lot of imagination for new arguments. And what the heck—if something was good enough for the Russia investigation, why wouldn’t it be good enough for, as House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes so rudely put it, “the low-rent Ukrainian sequel”?

The Trump defensive playbook has a few distinctive plays. There’s the allegation of a deep-state conspiracy. The demonization of an individual career official. The assertion that the relevant investigation was conceived in sin and is hopelessly tainted by it. The focus on throwing handfuls of spaghetti at the wall, rather than stitching together a coherent alternative narrative. And the radical refusal to see forests for their constituent trees.

Something similar is happening today: a refusal to acknowledge the whole story by instead adopting a dismissive attitude toward its constituent pieces—and refusing to see those pieces as connected to one another. There is nothing wrong with the specific text of the call transcript, we are told, or at least no quid pro quo reflected within its four corners. The president has the authority to remove an ambassador, we are told, for any reason, at any time. If the president asked for investigations, that simply reflects his concern about corruption, we are told, and Ukraine is a very corrupt place. If Trump held up military aid to Ukraine, we are told, well, the president is known to be a skeptic of foreign aid. And if a parade of earnest public servants, in depositions or in public hearings, testifies as to the connective tissue among all these elements—that there clearly was a linkage between acts of U.S. statecraft and Ukrainian willingness to announce investigations of the president’s foes—they are merely repeating second- or thirdhand hearsay or expressing policy disagreements with the president. Once again, the larger story goes unaddressed.

Is it going to work—again? That may depend on how we define working in the first place. If working means being remotely convincing to a person who spends any time with the evidence, then no, it will not work. But the playbook in that sense didn’t work the last go-around either. Relatively few people who have actually read the Mueller report, for example, doubt that Trump obstructed justice—and most readers, we venture to guess, didn’t emerge with the sense that the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia and its agents were all on the up-and-up.

But the goal of the playbook is not to convince the careful reader of the evidence. It’s not even aimed at the swing voter. The purpose of the playbook, rather, is to keep intact that narrow political coalition on which Trump’s power rests. He was elected with 46 percent of the popular vote and an Electoral College majority that depended on razor-thin victories in a few states. What keeps him in power today is the commitment of his voting base to him, and the fear congressional Republicans have of upsetting that voting base by abandoning Trump.

Oh did I forget to mention the disasterous war coming in the future?

What impeachment trial? As far as I know, the Senate does not appear to be holding an impeachment trial right now. The House is doing a formal impeachment inquiry into allegations that Trump withheld funds Congress appropriated as foreign aid to Ukraine in order to pressure its President to benefit him politically, which has thus far been corroborated by multiple witnesses. But Trump has yet to be impeached, and thus there is as of yet no trial. The House does not hold impeachment trials, but it does have the right to decide if one will take place.

I thought this was a good article from The Atlantic, looking into Trump's rhetoric and what it's got much of Trump's base, like Ezra here, doing:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ok/602185/

The President does not appear to have a coherent case, instead just resorting to a bunch of innuendo:

Keep dreaming, Zoltar! Louisiana's winner is a deeply rooted servant with conservative leanings (pro-life), Kentucky is facing a huge teacher's union crisis. These results don't mean what you think they do.

For the record, I would be fine with Trump passing the torch to Pence though.

So the plan to sabotage the campaign is proceeding as hoped.

No plan; just Trump self destructing as expected. Hopefully he won't take the whole country with him.

If you didn't a zillion other people have already.

I'm curious as to what it means if all the card readers out there get all kinds of different readings regarding the same issues?

Did you specifically predict the Santa Clarita shooting or just a shooting? Most people have dark hair.