Yup, and Congressmen like to think of themselves as principled people doing good works, even if that strains the credulity of an outsider (people have a habit of giving themselves the strong benefit of the doubt). However, that self-conception is basically falsified if they continue to support Trump after he crosses a clear and unambiguous line. Not all will be heroes, just as they were not with Nixon, but I suspect enough will, or will be replaced if they are not.

big diff between hearing about/assuming something and actually seeing it imo

eg ray rice. iirc he was arrested for domestic assault, charged and copped a two game suspension from goodell. then a couple months later the video was released and all hell broke loose

These people don't exist. I can buy the Old Testament mentality, fine.

But the people who 1) accept the story Mueller is engaged in a political witch hunt and exceeds his boundaries but then also 2) accepts some leaked material from a thing they just concluded is a witch hunt that exceeded boundaries as incontrovertible proof

...those people don't exist, Old Testament mentality or not.

The Ray Rice example isn't even a good one. Who are all the people desperate to keep Ray Rice employed as an NFL running back? Maybe like 2 or 3 people, tops? Video is allowed to stand as incontrovertible proof for Ray Rice's guilt because no one cares that much to defend him.

Not at all applicable to Trump where letting him go down and disappointing the hardcore partisan right-wingers they're all scamming does constitute a big embarrassment for the GOP, right-wing media, etc.

Many people (politicians) in Washington have sacrificed lots of money, that doesn't mean they have pure motives.

Fair enough on the example, although Comey was part of that as well and he's not exactly someone that I think has acted all that great and patriotic.

i expect you'll find quite a few ravens fans that were prepared to defend ray pre-tape and not after

The threshold of personal, political, perhaps even business interests to be like "you know what, this is incontrovertible proof, **** Ray Rice" is far thinner than the threshold for the web of voters, media, and allied interests need to say "**** Trump, let's move on and save face here."

What are the costs of a Ravens fan letting reality creep in and allow Ray Rice to be guilty? ~nothing. What about all the people and interests behind Trump?

Not at all equivalent.

All those leaks that reasonable people will say constitute incontrovertible proof will be put through the partisan right wing media ecosystem ringer and come out as the product of a partisan witch hunt borne from sore loser Democrat lawyers trying to stop Making America Great Again. I'm living on some other planet if you guys think the GOP, their media, their voters are going to let Trump's 1099-EZ reporting 1 billion dollars of miscellaneous Russian income or whatever they leak -- if you guys think is going to pass through their filters as definitive proof and everyone picks up their balls and goes home and admits the match is won. Not how the world works. Donald Trump Jr just got caught taking a meeting with a gaggle of Russian operatives with a plan to collude against HRC and that is met with a mix of celebration and denial on the right.

So long as the game is played on a field controlled by Republican voters and their elected Congress members -- you're gonna need a veritable miracle to pierce through that bubble.

not claiming that mueller fired -> meh -> evidence released -> zomg impeach is bound to happen. would depend on the nature of the evidence i think

ray rice situation demonstrates that people have a different threshold when it comes to assumed/supposed evidence vs actual in your face woah i just watched him punch his wife in that elevator really hard evidence

In addition, at least according to George Will (as told to Lawrence O'Donnell), a Presidential Pardon is only official after it is formally accepted by the recipient, and it is essentially equivalent to a "guilty" plea.

Theory:
The tax returns show ~nothing, but Trump has done all sorts of shady **** and because he is a huge moron, he himself doesn't actually know what's in them so he is super scared of them getting out.

Kasowitz (old guy who threatened the other guy via e-mail) out as Trump atty

nm apparently that happened yesterday

The reaction from Chiefsplanet is basically:

Still think his best option is to release his tax returns, announce that taking bribes from the FSB makes him a smart businessman, and let the derposphere manage the blowback.

Why bother? He's freerolling. He can not release his tax returns, make someone prove malfeasance and wrongdoing and even then just let the derposphere manage the blowback. It only would have risk if his derp army developed shame and if there was some level of wrongdoing that might make them feel silly for carrying his water. That seems basically inconceivable now. As he himself once marveled about, he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose his voters.

Support for Trump is an onion. We have differences of opinion, if at all, only on how thick the layers of the onion are and how hard they are to peel. And I think we all agree that a sizable chunk of Trump supporters, call them the core of the onion, will never be persuaded, no matter how compelling the evidence.

As a practical matter, I doubt that leaks will add much to the equation if Trump fires Mueller. For starters, I'm not convinced that Mueller or others on his team would leak a bunch of information to the press. And even if they did, the leaks would largely consist of Mueller or others on his team describing what the evidence seemed to show or what their findings might have been. That will be easy enough for many GOP supporters to wave away. It's very unlikely imo that anyone on Mueller's team would ship hard drives full of documents to the WaPo.

We know Trump will be devastated when the tax returns show that he's broke and owes more on everything than it's worth, but the Trumpkins won't care about his pretending to be rich anymore than his pretending to be religious or patriotic. In fact they'll like it.

Seems better to just get it all out at once rather than have months of leaks.

I'm struggling to understand why he hasn't already fired Mueller. It's obvious he'll get away with it. GOP slappys are already laying the ground work with the "look at all his guys giving money to democrats" line, and congress critters long ago made clear they are useless in checking Daddy. And once he gets away with firing Mueller, that's gg rule of law. And not a damn thing will be done about it. I don't even know what the end result is.

I agree. There's a plausible case for that. OTOH Trump still seems to believe he can control the leaks, presumably threaten his way into controlling that investigation if not kill it, and then get the best of everything.

Failing that, a second best outcome is that he can't put out the fires but then he has the deporables to manage the blowback. Perhaps he might be more transparent and admit to some crimes or release embarrassing tax returns once he accepts that controlling the leaks and investigation is hopeless, but I don't think he's there yet.

https://newrepublic.com/article/143984/were-brink-authoritarian-crisis?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_cont ent=link&ICIk

So true.

He's probably some mix of dumb and overly confident that he has it under control. I suspect the increased chatter he'll fire Mueller is that the Don Jr. meeting leaks have him rattled, perhaps he's starting to hear more and piece it together that he did criminal stuff or was guilty in ways he didn't appreciate would be problematic.

One of the warning shots from the intelligence community types are that people who become co-opted can usually go for a very long time before they realize they'd been duped by Russians. In my own private experience traveling to a lot of different businesses, sometimes when you see people make mistakes or do questionable stuff, and you revisit the process that got them to really bad wrongdoing, it took people a long time to even realize they were flouting company policies or doing something that really damaged their business. "I didn't think THAT would happen" or "I didn't think THAT would really matter" despite the fact the company had a policy to prevent just that from happening.

None of this is to apologize for Trump, like in a "pity his ignorance" kind of way. That's not what I mean. But I could honestly buy the story that he's just now starting to figure out that whatever skeletons are in his closet leave him or his family or whoever more criminally culpable than he realized before, or he's realizing that nothing was done as surreptitiously as he thought, and so the urgency to fire Mueller is greater. He may have spent the last month or two assuming he was more innocent than he was or that he couldn't really get caught or didn't realize this deal and that deal were criminal, or were meant to co-opt him. He's a dumb narcissist, he probably thought he magically talked Russians into handing him this sweetheart deal or that great price for this real estate or this great interest rate for debt and all he had to do was take them up on their suggestion to let Manafort be his campaign manager, what a bargain.

I mean in the end: who knows. But I can buy the trope that Trump is a moron and his haphazard strategies and timing of political maneuvers are because he is very slow to process information or recognize even simple facts.

In a post Mueller world, just remember that dishing his dirt on the Hill and naming names who can be called in does a lot more damage than anonymously sourced WaPo stories. I don't think there are any laws preventing Mueller from telling us every bit of his investigation even now, merely FBI custom.

Riverman, the reason he hasn't fired Mueller is Priebus begs him every couple of days not to.

Really? How can this be so?

If you have ever hung around old, rich narcissists, you know that they have an incredible capacity for self-delusion. Trump is more emotional than someone like Putin and probably less capable of viewing himself objectively.

Trump doesn't want to think of himself as a strongman who maintains power through intimidation, suppression of dissent, etc. He's willing to use those tactics, but what he really wants is to be a beloved emperor. That's how he thinks of himself.

Firing Mueller is a little inconsistent with that fantasy, which is probably why it has taken him a while to get serious about the idea.

People are more likely to believe testimony than WaPo stories.