Donald Trump just screwed over the Republican Senate, and it won’t end well for either of them
We should have seen it coming. Over the past week, Donald Trump has been posting increasingly apprehensive and agitated tweets about the upcoming Senate vote to kill his national emergency. Senate Democrats can’t pass the measure by themselves, but more than enough Senate Republicans are on board, and Trump will lose this vote. Some of his allies tried to bail him out, but he just screwed them over.
Donald Trump’s remaining Senate allies have figured out that the only way to prevent Trump from losing this vote is to keep it from happening at all. To that end, they floated legislation that would essentially let Trump keep this ridiculous “national emergency” intact (unless the courts intervene), while limiting his ability to declare future national emergencies. The hope within the GOP was that this measure might have been enough to convince the dissenting Senate Republicans to come back into Trump’s fold.
Trump either doesn’t understand this kind of strategy, or he’s too far gone to care, and so he’s stepped in and made a point of killing the intervening legislation that might have prevented him from losing the big vote, according to the Washington Post. This means Trump is now actively sabotaging his own Senate allies, because he wants absolute power or nothing. If anything, we expect this will prompt a lot more GOP Senators to vote in favor of killing his current national emergency, perhaps even enough to override a veto.
Donald Trump’s presidency and freedom are now entirely dependent on convincing Republican Senators not to go along with impeachment and removal. If twenty of them turn against him (out of fifty-three), he’ll be ousted from office, and then he’ll be arrested by the SDNY. Trump just gave Republican Senators every reason to lean toward kicking him out of office. This won’t end well for them or him.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report