I told you the Republicans in Congress would turn against Donald Trump if they had to
Republican Congressman Darrell Issa is now calling for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself so that an independent special prosecutor can lead a real investigation into Donald Trump’s Russia scandal. This comes just a few days after Republican Senator Susan Collins publicly called for Michael Flynn to testify in the Trump-Russia scandal. One by one, the Republicans in Congress are turning against Trump – just like I told you they would if it came down to it.
This is not toot my own horn. Me being right or wrong about this is irrelevant. But I want to take this moment to point out that this development is not a surprise, and that this is simply how politics works, because it’s crucial that liberals out there understand the strategy involved in these things. The Republicans in Congress would have liked for Donald Trump to have worked out. They could have passed their own legislation, which he would have signed sight unseen. They could have made their socially conservative constituents and their greedy billionaire donors happy. But Trump isn’t working out, and going downhill fast, and they know it, and they care more about their own chances of reelection than anything else.
Every Republican in Congress has surely woken up each day since Donald Trump took office, and immediately looked at two things: Trump’s low-and-sinking approval rating, and the rising level of public protest against Trump. They’ve been trying to figure out if he’s going to remain viable long enough for them to do any of the things they wanted to do. And they’re gradually starting to conclude that he isn’t likely to survive, even if they were try to prop him up. Trump’s Russia scandal is simply the most politically expedient way for the Republicans to take a stand against him, so that’s the issue they’re using in order to distance themselves from him.
As it is, the first month of Trump’s tenure has been so chaotic and unstable that the Republicans in Congress haven’t been able to pass any of their legislation, and they’ve spent most of their time fending off teeming hordes at town halls. They were surely hoping he would get his act together eventually, and that the protesters would peter out eventually, and then they could get on with business. But they can see now that it’s going in the other direction: Americans are now more fiercely against him than ever, and he’s unraveling.
The calculus for each Republican in Congress is a bit different. Susan Collins is a Senator from the fairly moderate state of Maine, and she’s not up for reelection for another four years. So by the time the smoke clears she’ll probably be judged by Maine’s moderate voters based on whether she did enough to stop Trump’s maniacal reign when she had the chance to. Darrell Issa just got reelected to the House by barely a thousand votes. When he runs again in two years, he knows the moderates in his district are more likely to oppose Trump than support Trump, and so Issa wants to be able to tell his constituents in 2018 that he took a stand against Trump.
Republicans from more conservative districts are more likely to stick with Trump longer, because they’re facing a different equation when it comes to their own reelections. But the point is that every one of these Republicans in Congress has their own tipping point where they’d be willing to throw Trump overboard to preserve their own chances of reelection. It’s simply how politics works. In this regard, the laws of politics are as firm as the laws of physics. With the possible exception of Mitch McConnell, whose wife was just given a cabinet position by Donald Trump, there’s no one in congress who is personally loyal enough to Trump to be willing to go down with his ship.
If you’re a liberal, you don’t have to trust any of the Republicans in Congress to do the right thing for its own sake. Instead you have to continue driving Donald Trump’s approval rating down, and continue ratcheting the protest movement up, until enough of the Republican office holders decide that standing against Trump is in their own personal best interest – and you can trust them to do that much. Because if there’s one thing that the smartest and most successful of conservatives are really good at, it’s doing whatever they think is best for themselves.
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