A Post-Trump World?

Yet what might happen should Trump be removed from office, either by impeachment leading to conviction or resignation or by federal indictment from Robert Mueller?

Given the evidence so far, the results could be civil chaos, and for a variety of reasons:

.. Trump also polls about 85 percent among Republicans. He is even more popular among blue-collar “Trump voters,” largely because of efforts to

equalize trade,

restore U.S. deterrence,

end illegal immigration, and

jump-start the economy, as evidenced by a record-high stock market, near-record peacetime unemployment, and likely annualized GDP growth of 3 percent or more.

.. Minority joblessness is also at a near-record low. The startling fact is that a so-called buffoonish real-estate developer hit upon a calculus to restore robust economic growth in a way that all the degreed experts of the prior administration had not.

.. His judicial picks belie predictions that Trump would not keep his vows to appoint strict constructionists. There have been no David Souter–like or Harriet Miers–like nominations to the Supreme Court. His national-security team at Defense, State, the National Security Council, the CIA, and the UN is better than any seen in prior postwar administrations.

Mike Pompeo is not Hillary Clinton,

H. R. McMaster and John Bolton have not been Susan Rice, and

Jim Mattis is not Chuck Hagel.

Nor is Nikki Haley playing the role of Samantha Power at the U.N., or sending in countless requests to unmask the names of those swept in FISA warrants.

.. In other words, Trump did what he said he would, despite widespread skepticism. Even his critics concede that the economy is booming. In retrospect, smug prognostications of disaster should the U.S. leave the Iran deal or the Paris Climate Accord or move the embassy to Jerusalem or get tough with the North Koreans or prod NATO members into meeting their prior promises were flat-out wrong.

.. The plaint against Trump is not that he ruined the economy, but that the ghost of Obama is responsible for Trump’s present economic renaissance.

.. we have never threatened any president with impeachment primarily for purported wrongdoing before he took office... Had we done so, every president from Dwight Eisenhower (who avoided $400,000 in taxes by finagling a one-time government ruling to declare the huge royalties on his memoir as “capital gains” rather than income) to Barack Obama (who, well aside from Tony Rezko’s “gift,” faced campaign violations involving nearly $1.8 million in improper 2008 contributions that earned a $375,000 fine) would have faced non-stop legal hounding while in office. Harry Truman would have been impeached his first year, had a special prosecutor reviewed his long relationships of years past with the criminal syndicate run by Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast. In 1963, a Mueller-like special counsel would still have been ferreting out all the election tampering during the 1960 election and its relationship to JFK.

.. none of which justifies the allegations that he has committed high crimes and misdemeanors while in office.

.. on social issues or religious agendas, they might find Pence more unpalatable — and yet far harder to defame.

.. Nonetheless, do not expect the Left to cease its hysteria should Trump disappear; it would simply recalibrate and refocus on Pence. The effort would be to repeat the Trump-demonization formula of trying to leverage some sort of legal infraction into a melodramatic felony to discredit an opposition president — perhaps in the manner the Left is now seeking to turn the upright Brett Kavanaugh into a veritable monster. Getting Trump would likely only whet the appetite to go after his successor.

.. The base not only has little allegiance to the Wall Street/Chamber of Commerce view of the world on trade, immigration, and manufacturing, but could either sit out or oppose any election that returns the party to the orthodox ideology of the recent past.

The Trump base will see a Trump removal as a Deep State/elite-bluestocking effort to nullify an election. With long memories, they will be far less likely to vote Republican at the national level. We should remember that conservatives have maligned Trump voters as much as has the Left, from “crazies” to what Eliot Cohen recently referred to as a “peasant revolt.”

.. The base not only has little allegiance to the Wall Street/Chamber of Commerce view of the world on trade, immigration, and manufacturing, but could either sit out or oppose any election that returns the party to the orthodox ideology of the recent past.

The Trump base will see a Trump removal as a Deep State/elite-bluestocking effort to nullify an election. With long memories, they will be far less likely to vote Republican at the national level. We should remember that conservatives have maligned Trump voters as much as has the Left, from “crazies” to what Eliot Cohen recently referred to as a “peasant revolt.”

.. A Trump abdication of some sort would alienate current Trump voters from the Republican party for a generation.

The Never Trumpers
Republicans who for two years have made the argument that Trump’s personal downsides have outweighed his otherwise conservative agenda, or that his unorthodox ideas on trade and immigration nullify his judicial appointments and tax and deregulation record, will not suddenly be called in to nurse a Republican Phoenix to arise out of the Trump ashes.

At least 85 to 90 percent of the Republican party disagrees with Never Trump absolutism. Fair or not, the so-called Never Trumpers would be as likely to be blamed for their nonstop ankle-biting of a deposed Trump as they are to be cited as prescient in warning of the ultimate wages of his sins.

.. As cynics, we have grown accustomed to personal shenanigans from politicians — a JFK, LBJ, Clinton, or Trump; we do not expect flagrant lying, obstruction of justice, conflicts of interest, and violations of the law from our “professional” overseers at the CIA, FBI, DOJ, and NSC. And yet in the last year of the Obama presidency, they were unleashed to use likely illegal means to destroy a perceived threat, assured that a Clinton presidency would provide de facto amnesty.