Today’s Trump-Putin humiliation was a necessary step in Donald Trump’s demise

| 9:16 pm EDT July 7, 2017
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If you’re an American, today just plain sucked. The United States hasn’t been humiliated like this on the world stage in as long as anyone can remember. Donald Trump, the most embarrassing and illegitimate “president” in our nation’s history, met with Vladimir Putin and fully submitted to him, thus confirming that he’s indeed a Russian puppet. But if you want Trump’s demise to happen, today was a necessary – and major – step.

Donald Trump’s base probably loved it today when Trump kissed Putin’s proverbial ring today, because all his base seems to care about is harming America from within in order to punish the rest of us. But Trump’s base is no more than perhaps 15% of the country. No president has ever survived on 15%, so it doesn’t matter what his base thinks. Since Trump took office we’ve watched his approval rating slide from the low forties to the high-to-mid thirties. That may not seem like much but it’s actually everything.

Trump’s roughly 35% approval rating is 15% base, and 20% tentative support from not-all-that-political people who were never fully sold on him. We’ve that second group slowly but surely slip away from Trump as his time in office has gone on and gotten uglier. I’ve said from the start that if he drops below 30%, even the Republicans in Congress will have to find a way to jettison him in order to maintain some chance of getting reelected. They care far more about saving their own jobs than they do about Trump.

And while things like gerrymandering and voter suppression are forms of cheating, they only buy a point or two at most. So yes, the Democrats can very much win the midterms no matter how much the Republicans cheat. If Donald Trump keeps embarrassing himself on the national stage, as he did today in such plainly obvious fashion that even the people in the middle who don’t watch cable news will hear about it, he’ll become so toxic that large chunks of congressional Republican will come out against him. And that’ll be the end of him. For better or worse, the things Trump does that hurt America’s stature are also the things that march him that much closer to his demise. If you’re a regular reader, feel free to support Palmer Report