01-14-2021, 11:44 PM
At the very least, this impeachment will be a useful way of distracting Trump. Trump is monomaniacal. He’s not the 3 dimensional chess player his supporters see. He couldn’t even handle checkers let alone ordinary chess. In the salad days of his administration, while Trump fixated on his obsession du jour his minions would be working on other schemes. But alas, his minions have followed the rats as the ship of State sinks.
History tells us that threats to Trump will see him glued to live TV coverage of them. The only concern will be if he regards Mitch McConnell’s refusal to bring the impeachment trial on urgently as a victory for him. If so, his attention will immediately return to evil scheming. We’ve seen that before: when he considered he’d dodged the Mueller bullet, he immediately implemented the Ukraine strategy that would see him impeached. And after he was acquitted of that, he started pushing the big lie of the rigged election in a bid to kill early and absentee voting and lay the groundwork for baselessly challenging a Biden victory.
But can he afford to return to business as usual? McConnell has a gun to his head now. While McConnell claims it’s impossible to start a trial before Inauguraion Day, if Trump starts doing something particularly egregious, I have a feeling McConnell would be able to organise an up-and-down vote within hours. More importantly, Trump knows any new outrage will add fuel to the fire when this impeachment does come to trial and may see McConnell ordering his Senators to convict in order to kill Trump off for good.
It certainly would be an outrage if Trump pardons all the insurrectionists on the way out the door, especially as investigators are investigating the murder of the Capitol police officer who was beaten to death. Could he pardon of all crimes other than murder? The problem is that every insurrectionist could be charged with the felony-murder of that officer. Leaving murder on the table would have the perverse result of leaving prosecutors with that charge when they would have otherwise charged those who weren’t directly involved in that killing with lesser charges. Imagine if Trump pardons cop-killers ...
I reckon this impeachment was a really sensible move. It has already extracted a hostage video from Trump that will sit alongside the Johnny Depp Pistol and Boo video when it comes to insincerity.
History tells us that threats to Trump will see him glued to live TV coverage of them. The only concern will be if he regards Mitch McConnell’s refusal to bring the impeachment trial on urgently as a victory for him. If so, his attention will immediately return to evil scheming. We’ve seen that before: when he considered he’d dodged the Mueller bullet, he immediately implemented the Ukraine strategy that would see him impeached. And after he was acquitted of that, he started pushing the big lie of the rigged election in a bid to kill early and absentee voting and lay the groundwork for baselessly challenging a Biden victory.
But can he afford to return to business as usual? McConnell has a gun to his head now. While McConnell claims it’s impossible to start a trial before Inauguraion Day, if Trump starts doing something particularly egregious, I have a feeling McConnell would be able to organise an up-and-down vote within hours. More importantly, Trump knows any new outrage will add fuel to the fire when this impeachment does come to trial and may see McConnell ordering his Senators to convict in order to kill Trump off for good.
It certainly would be an outrage if Trump pardons all the insurrectionists on the way out the door, especially as investigators are investigating the murder of the Capitol police officer who was beaten to death. Could he pardon of all crimes other than murder? The problem is that every insurrectionist could be charged with the felony-murder of that officer. Leaving murder on the table would have the perverse result of leaving prosecutors with that charge when they would have otherwise charged those who weren’t directly involved in that killing with lesser charges. Imagine if Trump pardons cop-killers ...
I reckon this impeachment was a really sensible move. It has already extracted a hostage video from Trump that will sit alongside the Johnny Depp Pistol and Boo video when it comes to insincerity.