The Endgame for Trump Comes Into View By Frank Rich

[elleng]

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, the fallout for Trump from Michael Cohen’s guilty plea and Paul Manafort’s conviction on multiple felonies.

When you looked back on Watergate last summer, you found that the scandal unraveled incredibly slowly until, in August 1974, Nixon’s presidency collapsed all at once. This week, Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted on multiple counts of fraud and Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer and fixer, pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations he says he committed “at the direction of the candidate.” Have we reached the August 1974 of the Trump presidency?

There have been so many times when Trump was doomed, dating at least as far back as his denigration of John McCain’s war heroism three summers ago, that it would be foolish to declare any new horror the final blow. But I do believe, as I wrote last summer, that Trump’s path to “a premature exit from the White House in disgrace” is “on a comparable timeline” to Nixon’s. The tumult of August 2018 hasn’t finished off his presidency, but the endgame looks closer by the day. We know we’ve reached a nadir when the president’s lawyer is reduced to claiming that “truth isn’t truth” and even a lowlife crook like Michael Cohen can take the moral high road by professing he’d rather go to prison than be “dirtied” by a Trump pardon.

It is important to remember that the unrelenting lockstep loyalty of the feckless GOP leadership and the party’s base to Trump are not indicators of his fate. An occasional outlier in the Jeff Flake vein aside, Nixon’s party was wholly loyal to him too. Like today’s Vichy Republicans, they remained loyal despite the indictments of Cabinet members and aides as close to Nixon as Manafort, Cohen, and Michael Flynn have been to Trump. They remained loyal after the nation was riveted by the devastating Watergate hearings of the summer of 1973, which portrayed all the president’s men as counterparts to the mobsters seen in the previous year’s Hollywood hit The Godfather. They remained loyal even that fall, when Nixon’s firing of the special prosecutor in the “Saturday Night Massacre” attempted to blowtorch the Constitution and the rule of law.'>>>

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/trump-impeachment-the-endgame-comes-into-view.html

[Eliot Rosewater]

1. Nance says kgb hacks elections, a few of them, flip R to D, leave trail showing D did it

then rump calls elections invalid.

This WILL happen if they can do it.

[Grasswire2]

2. to what end?

"Invalid" elections are almost an American tradition, going back to LBJ. "Calls" elections invalid? What does that mean? POTUS has no power to invalidate elections where the states select their representatives to Congress. No power to cancel them, either.