For a while now, we've been watching the slow and painful disintegration of both Donald Trump's regime in the White House, and the Republican Party in Congress, and wondering when exactly the final cataclysmic explosion of both was going to happen.
From reports I'm seeing online, it truly looks like we are at the beginning of what we know from the James Bond films as the big final fight that leads to the final cataclysmic explosion of the villains base, and the death of the main villain, although in this case, it's the destruction of the Trump regime and the Republican Party with them.
At this point, Trump can only count on his base to support him, and his base isn't anywhere near as big as it was. His base now only consists of extremists on the far right of the political spectrum. Even Moderate Republicans, along with Independents, Centrists and Democrats, are now seeing Trump for who he really is, and they don't like it either.
But the Republican Party in Congress haven't caught up with this, and they're trying their damnedest to either protect him or come up with successful distraction strategies, but they seem to be failing with both.
And what makes it worse, is that we are seeing the Trump regime revive the classic Republican trope of the circular firing squad, and try to take each other out in order to avoid getting taken out themselves. The amount of panic in the Trump regime is growing exponentially and the net result of all this is what we are currently seeing.
In the ongoing public impeachment hearings, several Trump administration officials have repeatedly given testimony pointing to Donald Trump's guilt and that's causing mass panic in the Republican camp and in the Trump regime. Donald Trump even managed to take over Fox & Friends on Friday morning to claim that this impeachment is going great for him, and he's looking forward to his trial in the Senate, in an hour long rant that even the hosts were feeling somewhat uncomfortable about at some points. Then Republicans in Congress began parroting this same idea, and some people actually fell for it.
However, this was all undone by the end of the day when reports came out from inside the White House via the Washington Post and the New York Times, that Trump was "miserable" in the White House and was finding the whole situation "intolerable". It was then further undone when Trump called Republican senators to Camp David to 'persuade them' not to convict him. If you honestly thought that the Impeachment proceedings against you were going well for you, then why would you call your buddies from the Senate to persuade them not to convict you? The answer of course is that you wouldn't. So, that totally destroyed the narrative that you had set up earlier in the day.
This is just adding further hard evidence against Trump. It shows just how corrupt he is and that he thinks he can somehow subvert the whole process. However, he fails to recognise the underlying truth about all Republican politicians in both the House and the Senate. That truth is that when it comes to making sure they get re-elected, the President of the United States has absolutely no say in their decisions, because it isn't about protecting him, it's about protecting themselves. If the numbers in their state or their district say that convicting him is their only course of action, they will convict him. It's not the extremists that win elections, it's the moderates on both sides, and the Centrists and Independents. If a Republican thinks they can win more votes by convicting him, than by not convicting him, they will do it, and the numbers generally look like that's more likely to happen than not.
Of course this leads to the next question, which is will enough voters switch to vote for a Republican if they do convict him. This at the moment doesn't look so clear cut, and the possibility of Republicans losing what had previously been considered to be fairly safe seats is a not insignificant one. At the moment, there doesn't seem to be enough of a swing against the Republicans to wipe them out in the House, nor enough to ensure a clean sweep of Democrat victories in the one third of Senate seats that will be up for grabs. But that could change, and based on what is currently happening, it's a change that could hurt Republicans even more than it already is.
For instance, there is Trump's personal lawyer, Former New York Mayor and walking 9/11 meme, Rudy Giuliani. He's already in a boat load of trouble, and it got worse this past week, as not only were House Republicans more than ready to throw him under the bus to protect Trump, but also when it was revealed in the New York Times, that the Feds has subpoenaed a Pro-Trump Super PAC in an investigation that is about 3 people. Lev Parnas, Igor Fruman... and Rudy Giuliani. Parnas and Fruman are associates of Rudy's, and Parnas was even born in the Ukraine, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. Fruman was born in Belarus, so both are immigrants, which further adds another level of hypocrisy to the Republicans' anti-immigrant stance.
Now, Super PACs rarely get subpoenaed, so this is in itself, quite a big deal. A PAC is a Political Action Committee, which is basically a group that pools campaign contributions from its members and donates them to campaigns for candidates, or ballot initiatives, or legislation. In the wake of the Citizens United decision, a new kind of PAC was created, known as the Super PAC. Whilst PAC have set limits on what members can donate, Super PACs do not, and they can engage in political activity independently of the campaign they are supporting. However they are barred from making actual contributions to candidates or parties.
Now, it seems likely that these subpoenas relate to donations to that Super PAC from foreign donors, which is illegal under US Electoral Law. Parnas and Fruman are already in some trouble for sourcing illegal foreign campaign contributions, so it's very possible that these subpoenas might relate to funneling foreign money through the Super PAC to Donald Trump, which as I've already pointed out, Super PACs are barred from making contributions. If this is the case, then Parnas, Fruman, Giuliani and Trump are all potentially in boiling hot water. Parnas has even said to CNN that he's willing to testify to Congress about the roles of Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, and Republican Representative Devin Nunes's roles in the whole Ukraine situation. Not only could this throw both Giuliani and Trump under the bus, but it also opens up the possibility that Republican politicians in Washington are in this whole mess up to their eyeballs, and if that's the case, then that could lead to further revelations about othe Republican politicians in Washington and their connections and it could compromise the whole of the Washington Republican establishment, and that could really spell trouble for the Republican Party.
And that's the just the tip of the iceberg. A grand jury in New York has the Trump Organisation firmly in its sights at the moment in relation to Trump's hush money scandals, and looks likely to indict not only Donald Trump himself, but also members of his family as well, on State charges, which Trump cannot pardon himself for.
Then there's Secretary Of State Mike Pompeo, who was just sold out by State Department officials, who were forced to turn over materials relating to the Ukraine situation to a court. A judge had ordered these documents turned over before Midnight Friday. But then it was revealed that Pompeo had leaked to the media that he was going to resign from the State Department to run for the US Senate in Kansas, which might be a pipe dream considering he too is up to his neck in the whole situation, and could well be arrested.
And there's probably a lot more that we don't yet know. But this is very much what happens when a criminal conspiracy is unraveling before you. Normally the best move would be to stick together, try and ride things out together. But the old saying about there being no honour among thieves, is one that is proven true time and again, because individual players will start thinking about what will protect themselves, usually in a panicky state, and will often make the situation for themselves and everybody else in the conspiracy, because these panic moves usually backfire.
To seasoned observers of Washington politics, this is following predictable patterns of behaviour to their logical conclusion. We've been witness to a party that has actually been slowly disintegrating since the days of Watergate, and now, we're seeing what could be the start of the final disintegration of the Republican Party as a political force, via the corrupt dealings of the Trump regime. Something else will come along to replace it unquestionably. This happened before in the 1860s, when the Republican Party itself emerged out of the ashes of the Whig Party in the US. But this could be even more damaging than the Whig's self induced implosion, which didn't have a trigger for it on a scale anywhere near this big. What would happen in the aftermath of this, is very much uncharted territory, and it will be interesting to watch it play out. Right now though, it is kinda fun and kinda painful, to watch both the Trump regime and the Republican Party hit the self destruct button repeatedly and to see the whole situation blowup, just like watching the villain's base in the James Bond films get destroyed in explosion after explosion.
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