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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWarner puts odds at 2 to 1 Trump won't finish out his term
When members of Congress returned to their home districts in March, outrage erupted at town-hall meetings, where constituents jeered Republican officials, chanting Do your job! and Push back! The former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who is now a Republican congressman, told me that hed held eight town halls in his district. Trump won South Carolina by nearly fifteen points, so Sanford was surprised to hear people calling for him to be impeached. Id never heard that before in different public interactions with people in the wake of a new President being elected, he told me. Even when you heard it with the Tea Party crowd, with Obama, it was later in the game. It didnt start out right away.
For Trumps allies, the depth of his unpopularity is an urgent cause for alarm. You cant govern this country with a forty-per-cent approval rate. You just cant, Stephen Moore, a senior economist at the Heritage Foundation, who advised Trump during the campaign, told me. Nobody in either party is going to bend over backwards for Trump if over half the country doesnt approve of him. That, to me, should be a big warning sign.
It is not a good sign for a beleaguered President when his party gets dragged down, too. From January to April, the number of Americans who had a favorable view of the Republican Party dropped seven points, to forty per cent, according to the Pew Research Center. I asked Jerry Taylor, the president of the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank, if he had ever seen so much skepticism so early in a Presidency. No, nobody has, he said. But weve never lived in a Third World banana republic. I dont mean that gratuitously. I mean the reality is he is governing as if he is the President of a Third World country: power is held by family and incompetent loyalists whose main calling card is the fact that Donald Trump can trust them, not whether they have any expertise. Very few Republicans in Congress have openly challenged Trump, but Taylor cautioned against interpreting that as committed support. My guess is that theres only between fifty and a hundred Republican members of the House that are truly enthusiastic about Donald Trump as President, he said. The balance sees him as somewhere between a deep and dangerous embarrassment and a threat to the Constitution.
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The White House maintains that it was unaware of any links to the Kremlin, and the details of the investigations are classified. But select members of Congress who oversee the intelligence agencies have access to the findings. Recently, one of them, Senator Mark Warner, of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, privately told friends that he puts the odds at two to one against Trump completing a full term. (Warners spokesperson said that the Senator was not referring specifically to the Russia investigation, but rather the totality of challenges the President is currently facing.)
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/08/how-trump-could-get-fired
Stuart G
(38,448 posts)1. How many truly awful decisions he makes. (Who knows what they could be?)
2. The level of response to those decisions and his manner of dealing with those who respond.
octoberlib
(14,971 posts)Stuart G
(38,448 posts)Does he see that he needs to change in order to govern effectively? He must see that need, and then decide to change. He is so stuck in his attitudes and ways that conveys them, that he is .."not capable of change"
mopinko
(70,238 posts)of r's who vote against his crazy shit, i think they will start to peel off.
dawg knows the nepotism is enough to sink any and all dems who have ever been in the office.
and i dont think they will be cut in on any of the deals, either. that never goes down well.
octoberlib
(14,971 posts)I think the results from the Russia investigation will finish him.
dubyadiprecession
(5,722 posts)Because he couldn't even face the press's jokes!
Warner's absolutely right, Trump won't be able to finish his term!