Amid escalating feud, Mitch McConnell surrogate is talking about Donald Trump being impeached
In the weeks since TrumpCare failed in the Senate, Donald Trump has been taking timid yet public stabs on Twitter at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Now we’re learning that those tweets just barely scratched the surface. Trump and McConnell have also been shouting and cursing at each other over the phone. And now McConnell is using a close surrogate to float the idea that Trump will end up getting impeached.
The escalating feud between McConnell and Trump was confirmed tonight by the New York Times in an article which revealed that “In a series of tweets this month, Mr. Trump criticized Mr. McConnell publicly, then berated him in a phone call that quickly devolved into a profane shouting match” (link). But later in that article, you find the most stunning revelation of all.
Here’s the final sentence of the NY Times article in question: “‘The quickest way for him to get impeached is for Trump to knock off Jeff Flake and Dean Heller and be faced with a Democrat-led Senate,’ said Billy Piper, a lobbyist and former McConnell chief of staff.” There’s only one way to interpret this: McConnell is using his close surrogate Piper to introduce the idea of Trump being impeached in the nation’s largest newspaper. Sure, he’s thinly veiling it by suggesting that it’s the Democrats who would end up impeaching him. But McConnell and Piper know full well that an impeachment conviction requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate, meaning that Senators from both parties would be involved in convicting any President.
I wrote two weeks ago that Donald Trump was playing a dangerous game by targeting sitting Republican Senators like Jeff Flake for extinction. It was a given that Mitch McConnell, who has bankrolled the campaigns of many of these Senate Republicans, would fight back viciously. And now we’ve got McConnell feeding the word “impeaching” to the media. It’s gotten just that ugly.
