There is a war going on for control of the White House. Republicans are as divided as Democrats.
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| I am loyal. Really and truly. |
The Tea Party Trump people are at war with the establishment Republican Party. Pence is caught in the middle. He is trying to signal that he is on Trump's side. The giveaway is that Mike Pence went ballistic. He needed to reassure Donald Trump. He may have overdone it.
The signs are pointing to a growing worry within the White House that the establishment Republicans, with whom Trump had made peace with sufficiently to consolidate the Republican Party behind him on election day, is now becoming an enemy once again. It is Trump against the old guard Republican establishment. They didn't have his back on healthcare or on the Mueller investigation or on Russian sanctions.
There are signs of change. Reince Priebus, that link to the old RNC, is gone. The GOP senators couldn't pass a healthcare repeal bill, defying and disappointing Trump. Trump is publicly chiding them as weak. Trump is humiliating Jeff Sessions. Mueller convened a grand jury and few Republicans are condemning that. Republican senators organized to block him from making a recess appointment which would him to fire Sessions and replace him with someone who will fire Mueller., thereby signaling their distrust of Trump.
They have got to wonder whether a fast and loose player like Trump didn't maybe make some deals with Russian finance people that will look bad under a microscope. It would make sense for why Trump is so desperate not to have his finances looked at. The problem is unlikely to be the collusion. The problem is they may find Trump laundered money within some real estate deals. He was accustomed to acting as an individual unaccountable to anyone. God knows what Mueller will find.
As Trump's links to the establishment GOP have gotten weaker an idea is getting traction: Trump is a failure and a danger to the party, but there is a wonderful Plan B as a fail safe backup: Mike Pence. Back to normal.
The idea sounds pretty good to a lot of Republicans.
Pence did not just announce that it was silly to suggest he is plotting to replace Trump. He shouted it. People are noticing that. Chuck Todd observed that a simple statement from the Chief of Staff might have sufficed. Mike Murphy said, "The guilty dog always barks the loudest." Bill Kristol said it was genius the way Pence was handling this by planting the story of his disloyalty so he could loudly deny it, thus putting out the story as a denial.
Meanwhile Breitbart, that semi-official news outlet representing Trump's populist impulses, is running multiple stories about National Security Advisor McMaster serving as a mole inside the Trump administration undermining Trump. The stories touch the important code words of disqualification: "George Soros", "Obama", "Iran Nuclear Deal." "Bill Kristol" "Jeb Bush."
Breitbart is announcing open war.
McMaster represents the "adult in the room" old style Republican orthodoxy, the people with links back to the long established foreign policy and military establishment, the Bush administration, the intelligence services. Reminder: these people are Republicans but they are simultaneously the enemy for Trump. The Tea Party populist nationalist group ran on a platform of cleaning out those dwellers of "the swamp" but they cannot disappear because many of them hold elective office and Trump may despise them but he also needs them to pass legislation.
Besides, those House and Senate members have institutions to defend, starting with Article One and their own jobs. They have been Republicans longer than Trump has. There is a struggle over who represents the real Republican party.
Trump has "the people" of his core constituency, as evidenced from his successful rallies, and it has to put fear into Republican House and Senate members. They don't want to cross him, but they also don't want to be steamrolled and forced to defend the indefensible. They defied him on health care and on Jeff Sessions and Mueller investigation, showing the split cannot be papered over.
Pence is caught in the middle, an establishment representative who needed to show whose side he was on. Trump's side. Absolutely. Fervently. Loudly.
At least supposedly.
The notion that Pence reacted too strongly is already out there in the minds of close observers as a pretense. It has already moved into the realm of satire. Comedy Central's The President Show ran a long segment in which advisors were shown looking at Pence in a brand new way, no longer considering him a lightweight but instead a very crafty schemer and political heavyweight in disguise, moving to defenestrate Trump. Oh, the realized. He isn't a toady, maybe. He is may be playing the clever long game of a man easy to underestimate and more dangerous because of it. Click the link for the five minute segment.
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| Click Here: Comedy Central Sketch |
Meanwhile, the Trump White House is pulling away from Congressional Republicans, with the fault line being Tea Party vs. establishment. Mike Pence is caught in the middle, but maybe that is exactly where he wanted to be.
1 comment:
Yes obviously a case of "Methinks he doth protest too much." So what does it mean? Simply that Abu Ivanka has yet to achieve anything but failures all along the line. His presidency is turning out to be a political disaster for himself. He has won the right to ride the tiger, and now he is having trouble controlling her.That's what makes him so vulnerable, that thoughts turn to his VP, who obviously comes into play only in case of impeachment.
On a different note, Peter Sage recently observed that "The tone of my blog is civil by intention."
I contend that this puts him in the same political boat as Count Coudenhove-Kalergi:
Aristocratic in his origins and elitist in his ideas, Coudenhove-Kalergi identified and collaborated with such politicians as Otto von Habsburg, Winston Churchill, and Charles de Gaulle.[11] His ideal political constituent was a gentleman who must respect and protect ladies, a person adhering to honesty, fair play, courtesy, and rational discourse.[12][13]. The sting is in the tail: rational discourse, fair play and courtesy.
I further contend that these values are such as to constitute a possible bridge to the constituencies that currently identify with Trump, such as the great deplorables, aka the Appalachian White Trash. Doesn't Southern antebellum gentility appeal to them?
Those people were indeed part and parcel of the Democratic party, under such statesmen as Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a solid JFK man. An enlightened and forward-looking man, full of sympathy and understanding for Muslims. A man who spoke out in the Senate against the Iraq war, only to admit that he might as well have spoken to the ocean. The "Nation" was mesmerized into a war-making mode.
Finally, the values of individualism and self-reliance that are cherished by those communities, and that have been currently usurped by Trump, ought to be preserved as intrinsically valuable parts of the American and democratic heritage, regardless of how many electoral votes for Dems they may represent.
Carlo CRistofori
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