Donald Trump all but begs the GOP Senate to finish him off
It’s happened again, for the fourth time in the past two weeks. Donald Trump has made the kind of uniquely corrupt and idiotic move that even the Republican Senate can’t allow him to get away with, for fear it’ll blow back against the entire party at the ballot box, only to watch it blow up in his face. So what’s he doing?
Donald Trump has nominated Ken Cuccinelli to lead the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. It turns out the GOP Senate has a problem with this – not because Cuccinelli notoriously hates immigrants, but because Cuccinelli is a longtime enemy of GOP Senate leaders like Mitch McConnell. Predictably, GOP Senators are telling Politico that they’re eager to kill the nomination, meaning Trump will likely have to withdraw Cuccinelli’s name. But this isn’t a mere one-off incident.
Last week Trump announced out of nowhere that he was placing a five percent tariff on all Mexican goods, as punishment because Mexico hasn’t stopped immigrants from approaching the U.S. border. This would cause so much damage to the U.S. economy, GOP Senators are now talking openly about stepping in to override his tariffs. After all, several of them are up for reelection in 2020, and they don’t want to have answer for Trump’s economy-killing antics.
This comes shortly after Trump floated the idea of pardoning Edward Gallagher for alleged war crimes. Trump can get away with pardoning any random criminal he wants, and the GOP Senate won’t say boo to him for it. But the GOP has to keep up the illusion that it cares about military law and order, in order to keep a certain kind of voter in the fold, so the Senate is trying to pressure Trump into dropping the matter. This also comes as Trump tries to sell arms to Saudi Arabia – a move whose optics are so bad, even Trump puppet Lindsey Graham is taking legislative action to try to stop it.
Donald Trump has been given nearly carte blanche by the Republican Senate to do almost anything he wants. Instead of taking advantage of it, Trump has decided to try to get away with the specific handful of things that he know the GOP Senate actually will balk at. It’s as if he’s begging his own party leadership to throw him out of office before 2020. The more he forces the GOP to reluctantly put its foot down, the more the GOP Senators will have to ask the question of whether their own odds of reelection are better with or without him in place.
