I don't think he's purposely setting out to destroy the rule of law or usurp power.
Literally everything he has done since day one contradicts such a thought.
He simply doesn't understand how things work.
He has been toying with the Presidency for well over thirty years. He may not have understood the job in the first few months—even the first full year—but that excuse doesn’t wash anymore.
He's a spoiled, sheltered man who has always gotten his way, has never been held accountable for anything in his life, and is acting in accordance with his experience.
Being sheltered does not necessarily equate with being grossly ignorant of the rule of law. Quite the contrary, in fact, since he has continuously broken the law and then had people like his father and Roy Cohen and the like to fix it for him.
That is someone who knows
exactly how the “law” works and how to get around it, not someone who is clueless and just bumbling through a privileged oblivion.
but I do believe his actions fundamentally stem from ignorance.
Again, contrary to literally everything he’s done. He is a criminal who knows how to cover his tracks and that takes a deep understanding of what those tracks entail.
Iow, he plays the fool to fool people into believing he’s a fool.
At some level he probably understands that some of his actions are illegal, but that's never been a problem for him in his business life
Again, quite the contrary. You’re mistaking deliberate acts and knowing exactly how to get out of them with innocent bumbling.
He's not sitting in the Oval Office plotting the destruction of the rule of law and the Constitution.
Someone who has the power to whisper in his ear and/or affect policy most definitely is, so if he is not a willing participant, he is clearly a useful asset to whoever is behind it.
He's sitting there wondering "why aren't people following my orders? I'm the boss!"
Again, that is what we are supposed to think of him, but everything he has actually done betrays some other force at work, either within him or behind him pulling the strings, or, most likely, a combination of both. Considering the fact that nearly every single person who has ever worked for him in this campaign is either indicted, facing a trial or quit/been fired
and the same conditions remain firmly in place, the evidence argues for an ongoing, willing (or coerced) participation on his part.
Iow, the fact that everything has changed around him, but nothing has changed in regard to the damage he is deliberately inflicting on America’s standing in the world betrays the fact that it’s all centered on him and not any other factor. That, again, would necessarily require him to be more than just a “useful idiot.” Useful, yes. Idiot, no.
Not possible for an idiot to nevertheless go
this long and this deep, consistently and without alteration of agenda even if that idiot were being puppeted through.
On the other hand, I do worry that the senate will not go along and that impeachment would fail.
And for that, we go back to Mitch McConnell, whom I do believe is fully aware of the damage he's doing. For him, Trump is a useful idiot, and the vessel upon which he and key Republicans have hung their hopes for turning this country into one with one-party rule.
I agree he finds Trump a “useful idiot” but that’s out of opportunity, not design. And there is a design at work behind everything Trump has done. It’s the same pattern he employed in every single business “deal” he’s ever been a part of. The purpose was never the intended facade; never to build a building for the sake of the building, rather to build a building for the sake of it going bankrupt so that he could profit off of the detritus.
He’d sell his name, take out huge loans and make everyone
think he was all about the building up not the tearing down. Vulture capitalism.
That takes a con man’s intelligence and guile and that’s exactly what we’re seeing in his persona; a long con. Again, whether that’s him on his own or, more likely, him being puppeted by Putin (as all the evidence points to) may not ever be definitively revealed, it’s clear that after two years in office he can’t still claim “I’m new to this and don’t know what I’m doing.”
The GOP once ran 16 challengers against Trump, and seemed fairly well surprised that he won the nomination so convincingly. Instead of trying to regain their party from this one bombastic idiot interloper, they've gone "all in" and as a whole have no intention of mounting a serious challenge to his 2020 nomination. They are absolutely setting about to usurp power, and Trump is their way to get that done.
Possibly. It’s difficult to tell, because the GOP is exceptionally good at hiding their true colors. It’s what they do professionally after all (most to the point of serious harm to others to hide their secrets). There are—however—serious challengers already arising (Weld, for example) and clear calls within the more “moderate” parts of the party that just aren’t trumpeted on Fox News and Breitbart.
But that should be no great surprise. The Republicans only have ONE “news” organization (Fox) after all. Nothing else comes close, so if it’s not being vomited on Fox every twenty minutes it doesn’t leak out into the real world the way every tiny shit a Dem takes gets amplified.
But there is definitely a “silent” and a “not so silent” element within the 40% potential Republican swing/disgruntled voter ranks and no Republican Senator up for re-election is forgetting that fact or the devastation from 2018.
It’s not enough to scare the untouchables, of course, but then, there never is.
) and watching him squirm and whine about it might even alienate a significant portion of his base.
