The GOP Congress just made a huge mistake
Now that Donald Trump has managed to buy himself a temporary reprieve by having his mouthpiece William Barr misleadingly announce that the Mueller report has cleared him, Trump is off to the races, in the most deranged directions he can think of. We don’t know what he thinks he’s doing, and considering his psychological makeup, maybe he doesn’t either. But the GOP Congress might want to try to figure it out in a hurry.
It’s not just that Donald Trump is suddenly moving to take health insurance away from tens of millions of people, while also trying to kill the Special Olympics. Sure, these are broadly unpopular moves that are going to severely damage the entire GOP’s reelection prospects in 2020. But there’s more to it. Even as Republicans in Congress struggle with whether to marry themselves to Trump’s nihilistic new stances on the issues, the Republicans seem to be eagerly embracing the other part of Trump’s nihilist streak.
Various Republicans in the House and Senate are now demanding that everyone in America apologize to Donald Trump. Some in the GOP are demanding that a second Special Counsel be appointed to investigate why Trump was investigated to begin with. They’re painting Trump as some kind of innocent victim in all this, and they’re marrying themselves to the notion.
So what happens when, a week or a month from now, the actual information in the Mueller report becomes public? We all know it’s going to happen one way or the other. And based on how feverishly Barr is working to try to protect Trump from the report, it’s not difficult to figure out that the report is a disaster for Trump. Soon enough these same Republicans in Congress will be made to answer for why they went along with a phony “exoneration” of a president who ended up being the toxic criminal that everyone knew he was.
Donald Trump is going with this desperate endgame stunt of trying to mischaracterize and bury the Mueller report, because it’s the only feeble hope he has left of surviving in office. This strategy is likely to crash and burn, and even Trump probably knows it; he just doesn’t have any better options. These Republicans in Congress who are overenthusiastically hitching themselves to this new Trump train are making a huge mistake, and one they’ll very likely have to pay for in the 2020 election.
