Will Trump survive?

Kaleidoscope
By Perry Diaz

Anti-Trump rally.

Have you noticed that the day after the midterm elections President Donald Trump has acted strangely?   As little boys would say, “He’s weird.” First of all, Trump did not concede. On the contrary, he declared that he won! Makes one wonder why he made that claim? Then I realized that he did indeed win the Senate with a net gain of one seat! But when asked about the Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives, he responded that it was a “tie” because the Republicans are still in control of the Senate. Okay, okay… it’s a tie then. He quieted down, which seems to work like a pacifier. But of course he knew he lost BIG TIME! The Democrats had taken control of the House of Representatives including the once-formidable “Reagan Country” in Orange County, California where all six Republican incumbents lost. It was a massacre! All in all, the Republican Party lost seven of the 14 Republican congressional districts in California.

Then Trump played his trump card – he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions and appointed Sessions’ chief of staff Matthew Whitaker as acting Attorney General, whose intimidating persona could scare a pack of hyenas. With the appointment of Whitaker, speculation is rife that he’s Trump’s hatchet man who would fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller to end the investigation on the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia. Everybody is now waiting for Muller’s head to be chopped off. But Trump was hesitant to give the order to his executioner.

As Whitaker anxiously awaits Trump’s order, the FBI, like a squad of Sherlock Holmes, started scouring Whitaker’s dirty laundry. Within a few days, the FBI special agents – zingo! — found some incriminating information on Whitaker.

The news, as reported by CNN, said: “Matthew Whitaker, the acting US attorney general, was on the advisory board of a Florida company that was shut down by the Federal Trade Commission and served with a $26 million judgment earlier this year for what court documents called ‘a scam that has bilked thousands of consumers out of millions of dollars.’”

One-two-three punch

Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker.

Ordinarily, a scandal like this would either lead to the resignation or firing of Whitaker. But Whitaker stood pat, seemingly confident that Trump wouldn’t let him go. He also knows that Trump needs him more than anybody else, which is to get rid of Mueller. And he also knows that no other person would take the executioner’s job, not at a time when the ship of state is caught in a maelstrom of controversy.

Clinging to his job by a thread of uncertainty, the Democrats demanded that Whitaker recuse himself from the Mueller investigation, claiming hostile statements toward the investigation and allegations of multiple conflicts of interest. But he’s digging in for the long haul.

Then, when the issue of Whitaker’s scandalous involvement with the patent marketing scam subsided, he received notification from Mueller’s office of Michael Cohen’s – Trump’s longtime lawyer — signed guilty plea of lying to spare himself of prison time.

While the notification has no direct effect on Whitaker, the whole gamut of setbacks took its toll on Trump. Indeed, the one-two-three punch hit the mark squarely in the jaw that politically incapacitated Trump. And nobody is happier than House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi who is poised to take the Speakership on January 3, 2019. To Pelosi, it was a personal victory. For eight long years, she was the punching bag of every Republican running for office. But she endured without hitting back at her detractors.

Angry mob

Trump with his supporters, Bikers for Trump.

Trump must be feeling like the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi when he was running for his life. In the end, the angry mob pulled Gaddafi out of a storm drain pleading for his life, which reminds me when Trump had incessantly called the Democrats “angry mob” during the midterms. It must have been a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But Trump never gives up. It’s in his DNA. He always got up each time he fell flat on his face. He filed for bankruptcy six times and six times he got back up ready for the next fight. If he had to lie to extract himself from a tight situation, he’d do it in the blink of an eye, which begs the question: Can he redeem himself from a world of unforgiving habitants? Can he free himself from the demons that have possessed him?   And does he have the will power to fight it out with the rejuvenated Democratic Party in 2020?

Three-headed Hydra

Three-headed Hydra.

But that’s two years away. In the coming year, Trump would be facing a three-headed Hydra. If he cuts off one head, two more would grow back. They depict the three ways that could remove him from the presidency, to wit: by resignation, by impeachment or by the 25th Amendment.

Resignation is an easy way out. But there is a caveat. If he resigns, there would be tons of criminal and civil cases waiting for him. If he wouldn’t resign, then the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives could – nay, would — impeach him, which they can easily do because they have the numbers. The problem would be in the Republican-controlled Senate, which could be pressured or manipulated to exonerate him. The last is by invoking the 25th Amendment. If the Republicans in Congress remain loyal to Trump, then removing him by the 25th Amendment would fail. However, if the Republicans lose their faith in Trump and are convinced that he’d bring down the GOP in the 2020 elections, there is no doubt that they would throw him out of office and put Vice President Mike Pence to lead them to battle in 2020.

However, if Trump survives all three attempts to remove him and would still be the GOP’s nominee for president in the 2020 elections, he might want to remind himself of the recently concluded midterm elections. At every rally that he attended, he told the audience that a vote for a Republican candidate would be a vote for him. In other words, he was telling the voters that the midterm elections were a referendum on his presidency and that a “red wave” is coming. But as it turned out, the electorate overwhelmingly voted for the Democratic candidates.

Indeed, it was Trump himself who created the “blue wave” that reversed the “red wave” that Trump predicted.   He turned off the voters because of his negative campaign rhetoric against immigrants. The Democrats gained 40 congressional seats giving them a formidable majority in the House of Representatives, the largest in five decades.

This must have troubled Trump who had been hoping that he’d retain control of the House. It’s the worst nightmare in his political life. With justice hanging like the sword of Damocles over his head, it makes one wonder: Will Trump survive?

(PerryDiaz@gmail.com)

Author’s note: I started using this column, “Kaleidoscope,” in 2011 to weigh in on the political issues in the U.S. It mainly touched on the various colors of U.S. politics. After two years, I decided to integrate it to my regular column, “PerryScope.” But recently, with the number of issues confronting the American people, I decided to revive “Kaleidoscope” to provide an opinion on issues that affect Americans.