The Trumpinator

A  friend and ex-colleague wrote to me on FB: “We never have had to face the reality that the Constitution empowered the President too much, with too few barriers to abuse.”

The most obvious barrier to Presidential abuse is the impeachment process. Significantly, there has never been a President removed from office after an impeachment trial in the Senate. Nixon doubtless would have been removed, but he still retained the dram of decency to resign when his own Republican leaders walked up Pennsylvania Avenue and told him the jig was up. 

There was still enough civility and bipartisanship – and patriotism – in those seeming far times for the country to right itself. Politics has always been a blood sport, but today's cauldron of bitterness and division has taken any sporting aspects out of politics and made it full-on, all-out war with no quarter asked nor given. It would take indisputable evidence of catastrophic proportions for the Republican-controlled Senate to bring to trial and remove Donald Trump.

Both the Mueller Report and Trump's taxes could, of course, contain revelations damaging to Trump, else why the tooth-and-nail struggle to keep them from the Congress and the people? Not enough to impeach, perhaps, but to convincingly sway the true supreme court of public opinion.

Bill Clinton was known as “Slick Willie” for obvious reasons. Trump, since even before day one as President, has been a true “Trumpinator,” bent on destroying anything or any person who crosses his desires or comes into his brief attention span as less than forever loyal.

This Trumpinator, through the predatory animal cunning that has been his lifelong trademark, has found a way to circumvent the established practice of Congressional vetting of cabinet members by stocking his cabinet and close advisers with “acting” department heads – loyal to a paltry man – who needn't pass congressional inspection. Trumpinator slick.

“We have the worst laws of any country in the world,” Trump has long trumpeted. The Trumpinator's answer is basically, fuck the law, and if you break it in doing my bidding, I have the Trumpinator's not-to-be-questioned bottom line of a Presidential Pardon for you.

The Trumpinator has stacked the deck at the crucial Department of Justice, too, starting at the top with his scabby toad of an Attorney General. At the same time, Trump's enabler supreme, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, is achieving his eternal wet dream of installing as many conservative federal judges as he can find. This Trumpinator damage will last perhaps for decades.

He has conducted virtually a Presidency of the Long Knives in weeding and paring his administration down to pure flunkies until now it is just a barely-performing jammed machine that ratchets this way and that to the whims of its Trumpinator driver. Example: the administration usually wins about 70% of its legal encounters. Under the Trumpinator, it is 2%. It is a leaky ship of both fools and cowards.

It could be either or both the Mueller Report and Trump's taxes that put it on the line, finally reaching the Supreme Court. Will the Court find for the people?

Or has the Trumpinator already re-written history?