Here’s how you know it’s over for Donald Trump: he’s talking about his own odds of impeachment
The fortunes of politicians tend to rise and fall not so much on which battles they win or lose, but what those battles are to begin with. Take a look at the primary topic of debate surrounding any given political leader, and that’ll tell you whether their fortunes are rising or falling. Is the debate mainly about a new policy proposal, or is it about a scandal? That’s the real barometer.
So in the case of Donald Trump, all you really need to know about his political fortunes is that from the start of his time in office, the primary debates around him have been whether or not he’s an illegitimately elected criminal puppet of Russia, and whether or not he’s mentally competent. Remarkably, he keeps putting even more focus on the former by talking about it so much, and he’s been doing so in such a bizarre manner that it’s put additional focus on the latter as well.
When the debate surrounding Richard Nixon became so focused on whether or not he was a criminal, he actually had to get up and say “I’m not a crook.” By the time he was backed so far into a corner that he had to those words, it was too late to undo the damage. And by saying it out loud, he only helped to cement the question. Similarly, the primary debate about Donald Trump is no longer simply about whether or not he’s demented, and whether or not he’s a criminal; it’s about whether or not he’s going to be impeached for being a demented criminal. And yet Donald Trump doesn’t seem to understand this concept.
If he can’t change the debate away from whether or not he’ll be impeached, he’s finished. But this evening, Trump retweeted Geraldo Rivera (of all the ridiculous people on earth) in a tweet which insisted that his “chances of impeachment went from 3% to 0% with Comey’s testimony.” Trump is now making things worse for himself by playing into the impeachment debate instead of trying to steer the public discussion away from it. What Trump doesn’t get is that when it’s gotten so bad for him that even he’s forced to engage in the debate over whether he’ll be impeached, it’s over for him. There’s no coming back from that. There will never be another day in which he gets to focus more on his policies than he does on his prospects of impeachment. He’ll be playing defense until he loses.
