I think the chances are about 25% that Republicans try to talk Donald Trump into resigning office before the new Congress is sworn in next January. No, I’m not engaged in wishful thinking, and I’m not saying it’s especially likely, since those are the same odds I give Republicans of finding their ass with both hands. But if Republicans were capable of strategic thinking, they would hear me out.
Trump’s Sunday tweet acknowledging that his son and campaign officials met with Russian nationals in Trump Tower to discuss emails that had been stolen from the Clinton campaign. By doing so he not only scuttled all his previous denials, he also stripped his every defender of their best excuse for looking the other way. As long as they could pretend that any meetings with Russians were innocent, they could join in Trump’s “witch hunt” defense. His claim that this behavior is legal isn’t going to survive a 24-hour Fox News cycle. It’s not, and Republicans with all their teeth know it just as well as we do.
Why would Trump admit such a thing? It’s not because he blurts — he’s shown himself capable of sticking to lies for years when it benefits him. My buddy William of Ockham says it’s likely because he knows prosecutors have evidence that he was aware, in advance or later, of the meeting’s true purpose, and this is his attempt to get in front of it. The problem is that this leaves his defenders hanging out to dry. If this is a witch hunt, investigators just found a cauldron filled with eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog.
The answer to when elected Republicans would abandon Trump has always been, “When he’s doing them more harm than good.” I have been surprised by how much damage they’ve been willing to take, and I chalked it up to the fact that Russian donations to the NRA went to a lot of candidates, not just Trump. Self-protection would give Republican senators incentive beyond mere polling numbers to stand by their homunculus.
If it’s true that pre-Trump Republicans are acting out of self-interest, they will soon figure out that the Mueller probe just got harder to kill or minimize, at least as long as Trump stays in power. And if the probe reaches its probable conclusion — that large sums of Russian money were funneled into the last American election, and that many people in Republican leadership positions knew about it in real time — the whole dark-money edifice, essential to continued GOP viability, becomes endangered. Nobody’s talking about it yet, but dissent in the Citizens United decision predicted it would open the door to foreign influence. There probably will be a strong push by Democrats to overturn it.
The Republican “intelligentsia” are the 10,000 chimps with typewriters — one of them is bound to realize that the only way to shut down the probes before they implicate the whole GOP is to hustle Trump out of office pronto. With his son facing prison time, they might be able to pitch Trump a deal for a full-family pardon from President Pence. The fact that they already used the blanket-pardon procedure to absolve everyone involved in Iran-Contra makes it more likely they’ll stumble upon the method again.
I should make clear that I think such an attempt will be successful, and I don’t even give the attempt a great chance of happening. But if the underlying truth is what I think it is, this would be the only smart play for the GOP.