Republican Congress goes Weekend at Bernie’s with Donald Trump’s rotting carcass
Donald Trump’s presidency is dead. If it wasn’t clear when the week began, there’s no question now. His presidency was officially killed off by this new confirmation that the Trump campaign was seeking to conspire with Russian puppets to commit election hacking crimes. If you want proof of that, just take a look at how the Republican Congress is suddenly pulling a Weekend at Bernie’s trying to temporarily prop up the rotting carcass.
Suddenly, after several months of bipartisan cooperation, the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are no longer willing to continue investigating the Trump-Russia scandal at all. Suddenly, other Republicans in Congress are trying to draw attention to a very old and very fake scandal involving Hillary Clinton, President Obama, Russia and uranium. Suddenly, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley wants a Special Counsel to investigate imaginary things about Hillary. There’s a word for this: pathetic. There’s also another word for it: desperation.
The Republicans in Congress took one look at Trump’s new Cambridge Analytica scandal with Russian hackers, concluded that he’s a goner, and decided that they have no choice but to find a way to prop him up long enough to pass their tax cuts for the wealthy. Because Trump’s unstable and illegitimate presidency has been dying since the day it was born, the GOP hasn’t been able to do much of anything for its craven base. But the GOP is at least going to divert billions of dollars to its wealthy donors before everything falls apart, because it knows which side its bread is truly buttered on.
That requires propping up the Trump presidency’s rotting carcass for at least a few more weeks so it can take that desperate stab at the tax bill as the walls are caving in. After that, Donald Trump is on his own. We all learned from the movie that the Weekend at Bernie’s charade only works for a brief time before it simply becomes dead weight. Even the GOP knows that propping up Trump’s carcass isn’t tenable.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report