Robert Mueller’s got this – but do we?
This week we learned that even the most “reasonable” Republicans in Congress – for reasons known only to them – are now willing to burn down every inch of American democracy (and destroy themselves) in order to prop up Russian puppet Donald Trump as long as they can. This week we also learned that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is even more steps ahead of these bumbling, if increasingly demented, villains than we thought. Mueller will make it to the finish line. But where will we be when he gets there?
We just now found out that Robert Mueller has had Reince Priebus’ notes for months. That means Priebus flipped on Trump months ago. We also just found out that Mueller has Jeff Sessions nailed to the wall in ways we didn’t even know about. It took us forever to find out that Mueller has had the Trump transition team emails all along. It took us four months to find out that Mueller had arrested George Papadopoulos. Even another two months after Mueller strategically revealed that fact, we still don’t know who all Papadopoulos flipped on. This should all be comforting, because if we don’t know what Mueller is up to, neither does anyone he’s trying to take down, or anyone who’s trying to stop him.
This week has left me more strongly of the belief than ever that Mueller will prevail, and that Trump will be taken down. But this week has also forced me to reconsider my belief, which I’ve espoused since the day after the election, that this would be a four year fight. It seemed all along that the Republicans in Congress would prop up Trump as long as they reasonably could, then cut bait to save their own skin, and try to coast along with whoever lands in the job once Trump is ousted. That’s now out the window.
Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley, who have long been two of the most reasonable Republican villains in the Senate, knowingly crossed a line when they demanded that Trump-Russia dossier author Christopher Steele be prosecuted for imaginary crimes simply because he’s an enemy of Trump. This is straight out of a banana republic. More importantly, it means that if and when a real democracy is restored, the likes of Graham and Grassley won’t be able to participate in government any longer; they may not even be able to exist outside of a prison cell. They know what they just staked themselves to with this move. They know there’s no coming back from it. They now have to burn it all down, or they go down.
So we’re now looking at a 2018 landscape in which the Republicans in Congress are so far out on a limb with Donald Trump and Russia, they have no choice but to spend the year trying to burn American democracy to the ground. They’ll try to destroy us before Robert Mueller can destroy them. You think they’ll stop at Steele? Next they’ll try bringing phony criminal charges against Rachel Maddow, or Chuck Schumer, or me, or you. Now is the time to prepare yourself, because the original four year fight to obstruct and run out the clock on this illegitimate presidential term just became a shorter and more focused battle.
The Republicans in Congress have just staked themselves to being not only out of a job, but quite possibly in a prison cell, if they can’t destroy us before we vote them out in 2018. We now have the opportunity to be done with this treasonously criminal Republican Party cartel once and for all, if we can outlast them through November. But we must also soberly accept that the Republican Party is now trying to murder American democracy before election day. For both sides, the stakes just got infinitely higher.
