I don't know that Trump was being well served by his insiders who ostensibly know how things work though. Priebus is just a party apparatchik, hard to really see what his redeeming talents were at really anything he's ever done. So yeah sure Scaramucci is probably clueless, but the WH is a garbage fire of nonsense and presumably the guys who are supposed to have a clue like Priebus are supposed to be employed to prevent just that from happening. Hard to see why anyone would sing his praises other than to note his job is probably impossible.

Dear leaders need scapegoats and enemies especially when they are completely incompetent. Hillary hate is perennial but if she takes one for the team and stays the hell out of the spotlight on her various hiking tours even that will begin to wane for all but the P7 style super deplorables. Trump would burn the GOP to the ground to get a 1% bump in the fake news media polls. If "we" can somehow keep his ire focused on preibus et al even their spineless acquiescence and bootlicking wont save them forever.

Eye on the prize, all signs point to GOP Congress doing absolutely nothing when Trump fires Sessions and shuts down Mueller. See the usual bundle of quotes regarding high concern levels in WaPo and NYT today. He's going to get away with it.

I laughed. And then I cried.

So I write this post then 5 minutes later read this article

What Happened, due out in September, will tell her story of the electoral battle with Donald Trump in ‘a deeply intimate account and a cautionary tale for the nation’

Le sigh.

Hillary hate isn't going anywhere. CP kicks off almost every thread with some version of LOCK HER UP. No joke, she's going to be the centerpiece of the Republican party's 2020 campaign even if she dies tomorrow. The Republicans will want to prosecute her ghost. We'll have her testifying in Senate hearings via Ouija board. 2,000 years from now, if we're in some Canticle for Leibowitz dystopia, the tribe of Del'plora will still tell of the legend of how Hillarah's Buttery Mail destroyed the civilization of elder times.

The deplorable's irrational hate for Hillary is the most powerful force in politics, and we badly underestimated it in 2016.

Grassley is saying that they won't confirm a replacement AG in 2017, which is something:

http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-actio...eneral-nominee

It's the ultimate question. I'm with Nate Silver -- I'm not so sure:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...e-over-russia/

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...-trumps-world/

I agree he could get away with firing Mueller in isolation and he'd be likely to get away with it. Firing Priebus and Sessions would be audacious.

Mueller he can turn into a partisan game. But his party loves Sessions, especially the Senate. Priebus is Paul Ryan's boy. Cleaning house like that seems way riskier than firing Mueller. I realize he probably has to clean house to get to Mueller, but that's where all his risk is. Unlike poor people, the country, the integrity of elections, etc., the Republicans presumably care about Sessions.

At some point, I agree, it seems like Trump can defy political gravity. But part of his gambit is that the Republicans have to think they get something out of it. To give him the institutional support he needs. It's been 6 months of basically no accomplishments where he's left them to dangle on the vine. Now he's going to gut their dudes like a fish and toss em to sea? At some point they're not going to stand by this bargain. Nixon and the GOP were at least tightly aligned on most of the important issues of their day. Trump is making an audacious play, offering the GOP basically nothing but shame and embarrassment and hoping they'll stand down.

It might work but it's unique. I don't think we have precedent here.

We still have two days to go.

dvaut,

If you gut a fish you don't then throw it back into the sea.

I see a new level of deflection coming from the WH with Mooch there - with more confusion, more theater, less substance.

I've said it before but this whole administration is a complete sham. It's a bunch of rich, smooth talking actors playing the role of government staff and cabinet positions. There are no details on any subject. The heads of each department are the opposite of who they should be and they were all put in there, almost as Trojan horses, to gut the departments they work for while pretending they have anything beyond a bullet pointed cover sheet on policy. Or pretending that accomplishments are anything of substance, rather than the tearing down of existing laws and policies.

In case you're wondering, this is exactly what a phony government looks like. It's also turning into the kind of America that Vladimir Putin dreams about daily.

What are they gonna do, tho? I'm trying to imagine Lindsey Graham activating beast mode and voting for Trump's impeachment, I just can't see it.

DVaut1: Fish Serial Killer

I think Dvaut is chumming the waters for sharks. He's still got that Shark Week hype going.

I dunno. It's always hard to piece out the varying degrees of deplorable affections. But some, maybe most of the Brietbarts seem really distraught about the fate of Sessions and Bannon. Understandably since they were supposed to be the generals of the various deplorable projects inside the WH. Trump's also got Gingrich and Tucker Carlson threatening him:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ne...rticle/2629570

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefi...a-useless-self

If Trump is going to lose all of the ideologues and hardcore deplorables who see their project going up in smoke, what is he offering these people, really? What's the conservo-deplorable wing of the party getting out of this once the dust settles? I suspect they'll see it's basically ~nothing and revolt. Will it be impeachment or the GOP doing a bunch of ham-handed obstruction tactics, ala Grassley threatening not to confirm Trump's new AG? Maybe that instead of impeachment?

Trump's threats of dominance are always implicitly backed up by him claiming dominion over deplorable allegiances. But if that calculation is wrong, and I think it might be, then I don't see what he really has to threaten these guys with anymore. Even a small degradation of GOP support for Trump is going to be disastrous. His coalition was not large. He never had Nixon's margins to spare. His targets are now guys the GOPers like, the establishment people AND the rank and file -- guys they really like and appreciate, like Sessions. Not losers like Jeb Bush and RINOs like McCain. He's going after the guys who thread the conserva-deplorable establishment + base like Sessions. Seems super, super risky.

That was sort of the implicit humor of the mixed metaphor, that he's threatening to tear up these guys down to their insides then toss them away -- with no utility or nourishment to justify the killing. The point was the GOP isn't going to continue to line up for what are ultimately pointless self-destruction just to preserve Trump, who offers them nothing.

If Trump offered sacrificing Jeff Sessions so they could move to whatever is next, tax reform or something, I can see the logic. Trump is arguing to the right that their heros need to be sacrificed for the cause of limiting the Trump family's legal liabilities. What else is he really offering them? Obviously the GOP establishment, the GOP caucus in Congress are feckless and dumb but surely they want something out of this besides being deeply unpopular and getting caught up in Trump's various scandalous escapades.

I hate to even say this, but maybe it's better off for the country if we get the GOP idiots out of there and have Trump influenced by the NY guys?

Absolutely there will be an insane amount of corruption, but could it lead to fewer terrible social policies or something? Plus a GOP implosion is fantastic news for 2018.

I really hate even thinking this.

As long as Bannon and Miller are advising him Trump will continue to be awful policy-wise. No amount of staff shakeups can make him not be awful in general.

To be fair, neither of them are essential.

Dunno about Miller, and as always some of this royal court intrigue stuff is pretense more than reality, but it sure seemed like Bannon was in Scaramucci's cross-hairs and he's ostensibly always been opposed to the Kushner and New York people who are now the growing powers in the Trump WH. Don't see how Bannon survives long if Priebus goes. Although we all contain multitudes and Bannon isn't exactly diametrically opposed to the finance industry, part of his personal Venn Diagram is that he was a VP at Goldman. They might keep him a round since he's not in the way of firing Mueller and may be able to keep the deplorables at bay.

Trump’s White House goes full reality TV, as Scaramucci spews innuendo about Priebus on CNN

"As you know, from the Italian expression, the fish stinks from the head down. But I can tell you two fish that don't stink, okay, and that's me and the president. I don't like the activity that's going on in the White House. I don't like what they're doing to my friend. I don't like what they're doing to the president of the United States or their fellow colleagues in the West Wing.

Now if you want to talk about the chief of staff, we have had odds, we have had differences. When I said we were brothers from the podium, it's because we're rough on each other. Some brothers are like Cain and Abel. Other brothers can fight with each other and get along. I don't know if this is reparable or not; that will be up to the president. But he's the chief of staff. He's responsible for understanding and uncovering and helping me do that inside the White House, which is why I put that tweet out last night."

I'm hoping it goes all hitlers bunker before too long but what do we do in a world where trump falls not because he's incompetent, not because he's ignorant, not because he's a rapist who admitted multiple sexual assaults, not because every deal he's involved with leaves a wake of robbed investors, bankruptcies, loan defaults, and scammed customers, and not because he colluded with a psychopathic foreign autocrat but because he just wasn't quite racist enough. Or at least not committed enough to racism to satisfy the base of the most political powerful party in the most powerful country in the world.

Talk about a pyrrhic victory.

The Secretary of the Interior is now reportedly threatening Alaska's senators over Murkowski's health care vote.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-i...lth-care-vote/

9 year olds generally have better English writing skills than that.

Sent from my HUAWEI CUN-L01 using Tapatalk

Trump may not even want to be POTUS for 8 years.

He mostly wants to play golf, have his family not go to prison and do some rallies. Apparently saying "This PC business has gotten out of hand" can put 10k people at a rally anywhere in the country and is pretty much all the red meat required for most Trumpkins. Trump could fire Bannon and the biggest loss for him would be that it would piss off Mercer and Trump may want to do that for ego sake anyway.