All the golf you can eat
Trump thinks he can still call the shots.
Trump spent the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, splitting rounds of golf with discussions about maintaining relevance and influence and how to unseat Republicans deemed to have crossed him, the Washington Post reported.
Trump, the Post said, has said the threat of starting a Maga (Make America Great Again) or Patriot party, gives him leverage to prevent senators voting to convict, which could lead to him being prevented from seeking office again.
Or, it might piss them off so much they not only vote to convict, they urge other Rs to do the same.
Also, there’s something else that might prevent Trump from seeking office again: the fact that he’s a puffy lazy slug who never gets any real exercise (swinging a golf club doesn’t count as exercise) and stuffs on ice cream and Burger King. He’s not immortal.
Mitt Romney, the Utah senator, former presidential candidate and fierce Trump critic who was the only Republican to vote for impeachment at his first trial last year, said the former president had exhibited a “continuous pattern” of trying to corrupt elections.
“He fired up a crowd, encouraging them to march on the Capitol at the time that the Congress was carrying out its constitutional responsibility to certify the election,” Romney told CNN’s State of the Union. “These allegations are very serious. They haven’t been defended yet by the president. He deserves a chance to have that heard but it’s important for us to go through the normal justice process and for there to be resolution.”
Romney said it was constitutional to hold a trial for a president who has left office.
“I believe that what is being alleged and what we saw, which is incitement to insurrection, is an impeachable offence. If not, what is?”
Backing the wrong football team?
What’s the “thinking” here – he threatens to start his Maga party if he is convicted? But once he’s convicted he can’t run for office, so what use is his own party? Am I missing something, or is Trump missing something?
The thinking is that any third party he starts would split the Republican vote, and could be used to specifically target Republicans who “betrayed” him by running candidates in their districts making it harder for them to be re-elected. Whether it would be enough to unseat them is another question, but I have no doubt that Trump himself believes he has the influence required to pull it off.
In Australia we have a Trump-type, Clive Palmer, a rich blowhard and miner. He has his own party, which has enjoyed limited success, but has achieved extremely useful things for his business holdings, including removing our Carbon Tax. He also campaigned heavily in other campaigns (outspending our two major parties combined by a wide margin), which netted him no seats, but did get him a right wing government, trashed the left wing party, and a massive tax cut.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Palmer
So it’s possible that Trump may continue to do a lot in future because of his business interests and finances. I suspect it wouldn’t be so hard for him to gum up the works in terms of preselections and more, and McConnell is already predisposed to being obstructionist, which may well suit Trump just fine.