What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[garbon]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2017/may/10/donald-trump-fires-fbi-director-james-comey-reaction-live?page=with:block-591306bde4b0762dda0b9b5d#block-591306bde4b0762dda0b9b5d

KELLYANNE CONWAY: "You want to question the timing of when [Trump] fires, when he hires. It's inappropriate. He'll do it when he wants to."

[grumbler]

Eh, Trump has a point in that a lot of Dems were saying Comey needed to go. My 1000' observation is Comey really did need to go, he basically went rogue at the end of Obama's Presidency; despite what was said earlier no one at DoJ gave him authority to start doing press conferences and breaking years of FBI precedent by offering opinions on whether a person's behavior was good/bad while issuing a statement that they shouldn't be prosecuted (which said statement also was out of norms for an FBI director.)

Loretta Lynch never actually said the FBI could run the DoJ, she said basically she wouldn't be involved in the investigation and the recommendation to come out of that investigation would basically be where she took her cue from, and then she only responded cagily when asked if she'd consider overruling the FBI's recommendations.

DoJ never signed off on Comey's press conferences, but reportedly were afraid to try and stop him because they thought he'd just go ahead and talk to the press anyway, or even leak to the press if they tried to stop him.

So Trump has a lot of actual cover for firing Comey, frankly Obama should've fired Comey. That makes it different from Nixon firing Archibald Cox, whose only real wrong was investigating a guilty President. It's also different because Cox was a special prosecutor, whose sole job it was to investigate a specific set of circumstances. Comey wasn't personally running any investigation, he was running the whole FBI. It'd be silly to say the FBI director should be immune from dismissal for doing a bad job because one of the thousands of active FBI investigations has political implications.

All that being said, no one thinks Trump fired Comey over the Clinton email scandal, at least not for the reasons he's publicly stated. I see only really two reasons he may have actually fired Comey:

1. To try and derail the Russia investigation
2. Basically because Comey did in fact go rogue before, and Trump hates the thought of that because he hates disloyalty, and a loose cannon FBI director is a vague threat to Trump

If it's Option 1, I think Trump is in trouble because to make that scheme work he has to do a lot more than just fire Comey. He has to then hire a true crony type, get that person through Senate confirmation, then that person has to basically shut down the investigation. Considering there are four active congressional investigations into the Russian election shenanigans, lead by guys like Lindsey Graham, they're going to be asking the FBI a lot of hard questions about the status of the FBI Russia probe going forward. If it looks like Trump is actually moving to shut it down, that's the real "Watergate moment", and to be honest I think there's a chance you'd start to see major Republican defections from Trump in both Houses of Congress.

Stop saying things I agree with.  Cognitive dissonance is a bitch.

[grumbler]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2017/may/10/donald-trump-fires-fbi-director-james-comey-reaction-live?page=with:block-591306bde4b0762dda0b9b5d#block-591306bde4b0762dda0b9b5d

KELLYANNE CONWAY: "You want to question the timing of when [Trump] fires, when he hires. It's inappropriate. He'll do it when he wants to."

Kellyanne Conway is still collecting a federal paycheck?  I thought that she had been fired weeks ago.

Damn.  I can understand why Trump wanted to dump Comey, but why would he want to keep Conway?

[HVC]

[dps]

Their electorate is now made of people who prefer Trump over a handful of other people, all at least slightly less insane. If there is a post-Trump GOP, it's a GOP led by somebody at least as insane and inane as Trump, not somebody less so.

I still don't think that's the case.  I think most of the GOP electorate would actually prefer someone else to Trump.  The problem in the primaries was that there were too many other candidates who stayed in the race too long for the people who preferred someone other than Trump to line up in favor of 1 person.

[The Minsky Moment]

I sorta agree with Otto.  I don't think Comey went rogue, but he made some serious errors in judgment.  The fact that hours before the firing the FBI had to send a letter correcting erroneous testimony given just last week, it's reasonable to see that as a last straw.

That said:
+ Big error for the Trumpistas to suggest the firing was motivated by Comey's mistreatment of HRC.  It's an obvious lie that suggests cover story.
+ Otto's option 2 seems unlikely.  Trump had to know it's a big deal to fire an FBI director, otherwise Comey would have been out long ago.  An inchoate concern over loyalty isn't enough.  There are plenty of other federal officials out there not securely in his corner.  Comey is significant b/c of the Russia investigation, and the pattern of communications out of Trump and WH suggests they are concerned about that.
+ Agree with Otto's analysis of the confirmation dynamic.  Trump's not going to get a toady through.  Not only that, but the appointment and confirmation process is going to keep the Russia investigation story high in the news cycle for months.

[viper37]

I read Viper's entire post.

I had to mention that, took a long time.

your loayalty will be rewarded! 

[CountDeMoney]

Problem is, MM, Trump doesn't see the government as it exists, but as he has always imagined it:  as fast, as controllable, as brand-conscious and at his disposal as TrumpWorld..  I really don't think he knows how "big a deal" it is to fire the Director, nor does he really care.
Otto's Option #2 is a bullshit filler; we know he's an insecure control freak running the government like TrumpCorp, so chafing at an independent FBI Director is no great reveal, and could be used as a fill-in-the-blank for any number of governance issues.


And Trump waited 18 days to fire Flynn because:

1) it would all eventually fall off the radar, just like a shit-selfie from the accelerated news cycle of the campaign.
2) Flynn was his bag man with the Russians.  One of them, at least.
3) He doesn't care.

[Kleves]

Do Trump voters even care about his treason? It's not like he had a private email server or did anything really serious.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Trump voters make up like 25% of the country; the GOP Congress would start taking moves to insulate themselves from Trump's toxicity if a large majority of the country had turned against him in an extreme way (i.e. like if he was seen to be blocking an investigation into himself, or if Russia connections were proven), and that can happen without any Trump voters jumping off his ship. But it's likely at least some of them, too, would turn on Trump, but I think most would probably stay loyal.

[dps]

I sorta agree with Otto.  I don't think Comey went rogue, but he made some serious errors in judgment.  The fact that hours before the firing the FBI had to send a letter correcting erroneous testimony given just last week, it's reasonable to see that as a last straw.

That said:
+ Big error for the Trumpistas to suggest the firing was motivated by Comey's mistreatment of HRC.  It's an obvious lie that suggests cover story.
+ Otto's option 2 seems unlikely.  Trump had to know it's a big deal to fire an FBI director, otherwise Comey would have been out long ago.  An inchoate concern over loyalty isn't enough.  There are plenty of other federal officials out there not securely in his corner.  Comey is significant b/c of the Russia investigation, and the pattern of communications out of Trump and WH suggests they are concerned about that.
+ Agree with Otto's analysis of the confirmation dynamic.  Trump's not going to get a toady through.  Not only that, but the appointment and confirmation process is going to keep the Russia investigation story high in the news cycle for months.

While I broadly agree with you and Otto, I'm not sure about the bolded part.  Trump is arbitrary enough for it to matter in some cases and not in others.

This is a great story for those who just want to watch chaos, though.  Nobody looks good.  Trump looks like a crook (which he is IMO), the Democrats look like hypocrites (which they are), the Congressional Republicans look like sycophants (which many of them no doubt are), and Comey himself looks like a tool that got used and then discarded (which he probably isn't, but oh well, you can't have everything).

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Their electorate is now made of people who prefer Trump over a handful of other people, all at least slightly less insane. If there is a post-Trump GOP, it's a GOP led by somebody at least as insane and inane as Trump, not somebody less so.

I still don't think that's the case.  I think most of the GOP electorate would actually prefer someone else to Trump.  The problem in the primaries was that there were too many other candidates who stayed in the race too long for the people who preferred someone other than Trump to line up in favor of 1 person.

if they wanted someone else than trump they should have voted clinton.

[dps]

Their electorate is now made of people who prefer Trump over a handful of other people, all at least slightly less insane. If there is a post-Trump GOP, it's a GOP led by somebody at least as insane and inane as Trump, not somebody less so.

I still don't think that's the case.  I think most of the GOP electorate would actually prefer someone else to Trump.  The problem in the primaries was that there were too many other candidates who stayed in the race too long for the people who preferred someone other than Trump to line up in favor of 1 person.

if they wanted someone else than trump they should have voted clinton.

If they were Clinton supporters, they wouldn't have been voting in the Republican primaries, now would they.

Though it's an amusing idea that lots of Clinton supporters switched parties to vote in Republican primaries in order to nominate the worst possible Republican candidate, which then backfired badly on them and the rest of us, there's no evidence of any such thing happening.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Their electorate is now made of people who prefer Trump over a handful of other people, all at least slightly less insane. If there is a post-Trump GOP, it's a GOP led by somebody at least as insane and inane as Trump, not somebody less so.

I still don't think that's the case.  I think most of the GOP electorate would actually prefer someone else to Trump.  The problem in the primaries was that there were too many other candidates who stayed in the race too long for the people who preferred someone other than Trump to line up in favor of 1 person.

if they wanted someone else than trump they should have voted clinton.

If they were Clinton supporters, they wouldn't have been voting in the Republican primaries, now would they.

Though it's an amusing idea that lots of Clinton supporters switched parties to vote in Republican primaries in order to nominate the worst possible Republican candidate, which then backfired badly on them and the rest of us, there's no evidence of any such thing happening.

The primaries weren't they only moment to prefer someone else above Trump. If these republicans can't vote for someone not trump when it really matters then they are no different from his supporters.
In that situation there was but one course of action: you pinch your nose and vote for the candidate that isn't Trump.
Seems that when push comes to shove the French show more maturity than the americans (though that may very well have been the last time).

[CountDeMoney]

Though it's an amusing idea that lots of Clinton supporters switched parties to vote in Republican primaries in order to nominate the worst possible Republican candidate, which then backfired badly on them and the rest of us, there's no evidence of any such thing happening.

Pretty sure Jesse "The Body" Ventura was nowhere near the top of the polls the night he was elected by a plurality of LOL YNOT voters Minnesota.