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There's a lot of political implications from this week that have to be talked through, so I guess this place is going to be busy for a while with top level posts.
I've been thinking about this suggestion that Republicans should let Trump be impeached for a while since it was posted. What does getting rid of Trump get Republicans? The left is going to really enjoy getting the guy they've wanted to get and they would hold Orange Hitler over the Republican Party for perhaps decades. He got Republicans a lot of wins. He is probably the most Red Tribe candidate, in terms of policies and rhetoric, that Red Tribe could have gotten in 2016. To ditch him seems pretty ungrateful and Machiavellian.
On the other hand, politics really are inherently Machiavellian, and if Republicans don't ditch him, he stays in politics even after leaving office. That means he still exerts incredible influence to eliminate good candidates through primary challenges and condemnations, put forward bad candidates with campaign money and endorsements, and hog the spotlight. Just like JD Vance's debate in 2024 with Tim Walz, everyone will have to talk very carefully to not accidentally speak ill of his presidency or his policies or his ideas, unless he undergoes some kind of personality shift.
With how Trump has performed, and how much political capital he had already spent, I imagine that there would be appetite among surviving GOP Congressmen to let Trump be impeached. He could be tyrannical at times, and threatened to primary a lot of people, and for many of the conservatives that submitted, their reward was career suicide.
Edit to add: Marco Rubio may be considering resignation. Blue commenters smell blood:
I have no doubts that much of Congress is thinking the same thing. There is will, capability, and justification to prosecute every single member of the administration, including Rubio. In my opinion, they won't stop at Trump. They'll try to get everyone.
This smells to me like misinterpreting the political mandate in the same way Trump seems to have: our recent election cycles seem to be "which do you dislike less?" to the median voter (they are to me, at least). Reading the election outcome as embracing left-wing, as opposed to left-center or even just not-right-wing, views is just going to repeat the cycle. Voters still don't want no enforced immigration laws, even if they voted against maximal jackbooted enforcement.
To wit, I think various attempts at prosecuting Trump during the Biden administration was a huge self-own that drove the 2024 cycle. Did "37 felonies" on rather, uh, Trumped-up charges win them votes they didn't have already? It certainly let Republicans argue they were being politically targeted, and that anyone who fell out of the progressive line would be next.
Current politics is just Mean Girls without the adults.
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I did a post back in May about the primaries in my area:
The point of the post at the time was to suggest that Republicans in general weren't as enthused as Democrats, and that that might be a harbinger of impending doom, though it was hard to make the argument since Bartolotta had essentially run unopposed for a decade and there was no way of comparing turnout to prior races. The more interesting observation in terms of your post is that, as recently as May, moderate Republicans in state-level races felt the need to prove their loyalty to Trump. For Bartolotta's part, she soon found herself in a bitter general election challenge from an independent running on a platform of opposition to data centers. Bartolotta came through again by double digits, but the race should never have been close; if a locally-prominent Democrat led that kind of challenge then fine, but an independent single-issue candidate shouldn't be able to mount a competitive race against a popular incumbent.
It seems obvious now that a lot of Republicans were disillusioned with MAGA and stayed home for the primary, and that Bartolotta could have more easily trounced Buchtan had she stressed her moderate views and willingness to work across the aisle. The Trump ass-kissing turned off a lot of a lot of independents and Democrats who would have otherwise supported her, and created an opportunity for an out-of-nowhere independent challenger. She ended up winning both races by comfortable margins, but, needless to say, there was no discussion of Trump during the general, and things were a lot tenser than they had been in the past. The overall point I'm trying to make is that a lot of Republican politicians don't know where they stand regarding how much of their support derives from MAGA and to what extent their support of it is a liability. In 6 months Bartolotta went from concern that not toeing the MAGA line over an issue everyone will forget about in a year would cost her the nomination, to having to distance herself from Trump to win a district with a massive Republican advantage.
So who in the Senate is willing to take this kind of risk? MAGA may be on its deathbed as a national political force, but there are plenty of individual constituents out there who don't want it to die, and there are plenty of Republicans who rely on those constituents. There are plenty more Republicans who have glued their lips to Trump's ass and can't pry them away without alienating the only people who would conceivably vote for them. If Camera Bartolotta couldn't read the tea leaves in a district small enough that door-to-door campaigning is a key part of her strategy, how can someone like Katie Britt or Mike Crapo do the same for an entire state? Are the people in the party who want change going to express that at the primary polls in 2028, or will they simply stay home? If it's the former, then supporting an impeachment bid may be too little too late for those who hitched their wagons to Trump, and if it's the latter, then the only people showing up will be those who are already in the bag for MAGA.
The question thus becomes which Republican senators have an obvious incentive to back an impeachment bid. I said in another comment that I think that after two failed bids, the Democrats aren't going to risk another one that may backfire, and that they'd only go along with it if a sufficient number of Republicans were driving the bus. The current best case for Democrats is 57 Senate seats, which would require 9 Republicans to favor impeachment. That's assuming that Fetterman goes along with it, which isn't a guarantee, but we'll be making a lot of assumptions here. Murkowski and Paul are the two obvious ones, so we need 7 more. Hawley is a maybe, but Missouri wasn't involved in any elections this year and is pretty Red. Looking at states that saw flips, Jerry Moran is faceless enough that he might be able to pull it off, but he probably wouldn't be vocal enough about it to inspire confidence. Chuck Grassley predates Trump and probably isn't running again, so count him in. Ted Budd is in trouble but is too close to Trump to turn on him. Tim Scott should theoretically be on this list but has only grown closer to Trump as his career has gone on, even as he's criticized Trump at various times. Put him in the maybe pile. Ted Cruz is an interesting one because he's the kind of guy who might be willing to risk it if he thinks it increases his presidential odds. Everyone else is either in a state where it won't matter or won't be up for reelection until 2030 and thus have no reason to go out on a limb. By my count that's 7 of nine needed, and I don't see Grassley, Moran, or Scott actually pushing for this, so the odds of a Republican-led impeachment and removal are unlikely.
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