Establishment accomplices
by digby
Martin Longman at the Washington Monthly observes that Trump’s escalating fear of impeachment means that he’s dependent on the GOP establishment, particularly in the Senate, in a way he hasn’t been before:
[T]he president is giving the Republican Party ownership of a government shutdown they do not want on an issue they do not support. His White House operation is in shambles and the one person people trusted to keep it on track has been fired – and there is no comparable replacement in sight. Presently, the Senate is voting to essentially rebuke the president for his position on Saudi Arabia, and that disconnect will grow more serious next year. And, even if congressional Republicans wanted to fight to the death for Trump’s presidency, they’re not getting any information or guidance on how to perform that task because the legal and political teams in the White House are understaffed, uninformed, and incompetent.
Yet, Trump now believes that he needs to hold on to the support of “establishment” Republicans to survive.
That would be a difficult thing to achieve in the best of circumstances considering that Trump came to power by trashing them. They’ve basically gotten what they wanted from him already – a big tax cut, two Supreme Court justices, and a bunch of relaxed or gutted regulation. They’ve just seen two score of their colleagues cut down in the midterm elections, largely as a result of backlash against the president. There is no appetite for going into the 2020 presidential campaign with Trump as the Republican establishment’s standard-bearer.
Only two things can keep them in Trump’s corner. One is fear of a primary challenge, and the other is a massive change of behavior by the president.
The second isn’t going to happen. And I see little evidence that GOP senators are even close to believing they are more personally endangered by the larger public rejecting them than a primary challenge or the president’s twitter feed. There have been ample opportunities for them to take a stand on matters of principle and they have not done it. I think it’sfair to say at this point that they have just thrown up their hands and cast their lot with Trump, assuming (possibly correctly) that they are now so implicated in his reign of error that they might as well ride it out and see what happens.
We’ll see. But I’m not sanguine that they will ever move on their own. They need to be removed.
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