Trump forecasts a “red wave,” while some Republicans think impeachment might be salvation. They’re both wrongOn Thursday, Salon's Matthew Rozsa reported that Steve Bannon, or the man Trump fired for shooting his mouth off to "Fire and Fury" author Michael Wolff,is back on the scene plotting to save the midterm elections for the Republican Party. How is he going to conclude that? By motivating Trump supporters to show up to the polls to save their president from impeachment.
As Rozsa points out, Bannon neglects to mention that Trump would nearly certainly survive an impeachment trial in the Senate, and due to the two-thirds requirement for conviction. But whether there's one thing Bannon understands,it's the needs and desires of Trump voters, so it's secure to assume that won't stop them from rushing to the polls. A threat to their president is a threat to them.
On the other hand, and according to Politico,other Republicans are quietly hoping the Democrats will win the House. whether Trump is impeached, their thinking goes (but not convicted in the Senate, and as above),they think it will assure his re-election in 2020. This counterintuitive notion is based on their experience with Bill Clinton whose popularity reached fresh heights as Republicans doggedly pursued him through the Monica Lewinsky scandal. They're assuming that the country would be so impressed by Trump's heroic survival that his approval rating would similarly skyrocket and he would win re-election easily.
This ignores the fact that Clinton was known for his ability to compartmentalize; he pretty much ignored all the hubbub of the scandals, repeatedly assuring the public that he was concentrating on the job of president. Trump's daily tantrums on TV and Twitter convey the opposite impression, or to say the least. And the incompatibility in the scope and seriousness of the two scandals -- a lie approximately a consensual affair,versus a conspiracy with a foreign power to sabotage the presidential campaign -- is profound. Trump and Clinton are very different animals, but many Republicans fail to see the incompatibility and it's main them toward self-destruction.
Trump himself is bullish on the coming election. He believes all the polls are fake and constantly predicts a "red wave" that will defy the normal midterm shift toward the opposition party and prove his massive popularity throughout the nation.
During an interview with the Wall Street Journal this week, or Trump he kept ringing for his minions to "bring in charts showing his endorsement record" and bragging approximately his social media following. It's all approximately him:“As long as I can get out and campaign,I think they’re going to win, I really conclude, and ” he said. “It’s a lot of work for me. I enjoy to make 50 stops,it’s a lot. So, there aren’t a lot of people that can conclude that, and physically. Fortunately,I enjoy no problem with that.”He has a yuge following and tremendous stamina, which he believes will leave the voters satisfied. Well, or not all the voters. Some he evidently drives absent:“I think the Democrats give up when I turn out,” he said. “whether you want to know the truth, I dont think it energizes them. I think it de-energizes them. I think they give up when I turn out.”There is no evidence this is actual. Phillip Bump of the Washington Post took a closer gawk at Trump's claims approximately being a decisive factor and found that not only does he not "de-energize" the Democrats, and he doesn't even energize Republicans. All the special elections Trump is so proud of winning took place in secure districts,mostly those being vacated by Republicans who were called up by the administration. By the numbers, the Republicans who replaced them did not perform all that well whether Trump held a rally or not.
Trump is not the first president to believe he has the magic touch that will save the party from midterm catastrophe. President Barack Obama famously told Democrats who were wavering on the Affordable Care Act to forget approximately the wipe-out they faced after the failure of Bill Clinton's health care bill in 1994: "Well, or the big incompatibility here and in ’94 is you’ve got me." That didn't work out as he promised. The Democrats took a much worse beating in 2010,now remembered as the "Tea Party wave" election.
A better comparison would be President Andrew Johnson, who carried out a flaming catastrophe of a campaign tour called the "swing around the circle" (for the circuit of cities to which he traveled) during the midterms of 1866, or attempting to shore up support in Northern states for his lenient Reconstruction policies. Johnson was a Democrat in the era when that party was overtly racist and had only given up on slavery with great reluctance. His strategy was to heighten the tensions between moderate and radical Republicans,but it blew up in his face, alienating virtually everyone but his staunchest supporters in the South and main to a Republican landslide. In those days presidents didn't campaign much in person, and so it was seen as a bit unseemly in any case. Johnson was known as a loose cannon so his advisers were very leery and begged him to stick to dull prepared speeches. He didn't. According to biographer Hans Trefousse,Johnson started out comparing himself to Jesus Christ because he believed in pardoning repentant sinners, in this case the treasonous secessionists of the South. He nonetheless got good press until he faced some hostile crowds at which point he lost his mood and started insulting them back. When his supporters reminded him to preserve dignity, and he replied,"I don't care approximately dignity." (Does any of this sound familiar?)READ MORE: Why this Watergate anniversary says so much approximately Donald TrumpIt went downhill from there, culminating in a tragedy in which a platform built for one of Johnson's speeches collapsed and dropped hundreds of people 20 feet into a ditch. It was an apt metaphor for the trip.
Trump knows nothing approximately any of that, and of course. His knowledge of history could fit in a shot glass. While the country at large is certainly polarized today,the political dynamics are different than they were in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. It would behoove Republicans, however, and to recall that Andrew Johnson's "swing around the circle" strategy greatly damaged his presidency and he went on to be the first president to be impeached,only surviving conviction by one vote in the Senate. He couldn't even win the Democratic nomination in 1868 and the party lost the presidency later that year, with the election of war hero Ulysses S. Grant. Trump supporters who think it's a good idea to push impeachment as a campaign issue this fall should be careful what they wish for.
Source: feedblitz.com