The Trouble Awaiting Trump’s Second Term
Someday, in the not-so-very-distant future, Robert Mueller’s probe into allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to disrupt the 2016 presidential election will come to an end, and with it will go the attendant allegations that President Donald Trump obstructed justice when he fired FBI Director James Comey in May of 2016.
Eventually, time and circumstance will run out on Mueller, primarily because there was, is and never will be any “there” there. The costly investigation (approaching $20 million as of mid-August, 2018) has substantiated neither collusion nor obstruction, primarily because the former was based upon a bogus dossier paid for by Trump’s opponent and the latter is based on the erroneous precept that a president hasn’t the power to fire an FBI Director.
Setting aside a possible, but not probable Democrat takeover of the House of Representatives, President Trump will not be impeached for the simple lack of an impeachable offense. Try as they might, bad actors from both political parties will find that they cannot impeach a president merely because they find that president detestable, and there is not even a mathematical chance of Republicans losing enough seats in the Senate to enable 67 votes to convict the President in the event he is impeached.
So, moving beyond the juvenile fantasies of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) to “impeach 45,” the United States of America will emerge from the 2018 mid-term election with a Trump presidency intact, and the next political struggle will be the 2020 presidential election with a whole new set of challenges facing our sorely divided nation.
If the last nineteen months are any indication, the President will continue to check off the many promises he made during his election campaign while his opponents within and outside government will do all they can to besmirch his good name, obstruct his initiatives and oppose his every move in an effort to bring him down. That said, the American people will tire of the libelous and slanderous news coverage he has been getting from across the media, and easily reelect him by once again defying all of the pundits and pollsters who will attempt to convince them that his reelection is impossible, based on polling not worth spit in the wind.
Beyond 2020, the President will face the enormous burden of re-uniting a divided country in a way that no president has ever had to do, since the end of the American Civil War. It will be no small task considering the venom and animus that has filled our airwaves and internet with a level of visceral hatred unseen at any time in the lifetime of anyone living, today. Since the media gave his predecessor a pass on the divisiveness concocted by Barack Obama, President Trump will have the dual duties of piecing back together an American society divided by identity in the wake of the last three presidencies, along with a polarized political polemic made possible by a media fixation on a scandal that, in the end, wasn’t (Trump/Russia). Never mind the fact that real criminal activities perpetrated by Hillary Clinton and her campaign, those of the Obama administration, and a cross-current of governmental departments during Obama’s presidency will largely go unpunished for the time being, thanks to the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. If he is not replaced early next year, the President will continue to find no friends in a Justice Department opposed to his very presidency.
However, none of that inside-the-beltway blather will mean much to the American people who are quietly coming to the regrettable conclusion that peaceful political discourse, in the cities and towns where they live, is going the way of the telegraph. In short, when the people become so divided on intractable issues that are at once irreconcilable, and yet fundamental in their scope and substance, the desire to seek compromise and consensus becomes impossible. When that happens, conflict in all its ugly forms becomes inevitable.
President Trump will likely cruise to re-election on the strength of the American economy, and the fact that no Democrat can prevail against him- that’s the good news. However, the America that will follow his re-election will be an America that no president would ever wish to govern, given the stridency of a people so divided in party and purpose that interpersonal communication can no longer fix what ails it. While it is possible that a President Trump- unfettered by the distraction attendant to the Mueller investigation- can find a way to bring his country together, doing so would require the Congress, the Senate, the “deep state” and the media to give him the benefit of doubt- something that won’t happen as long as their hatred of a president transcends their presumed love of a country.
God help him…and us.
-Drew Nickell, 13 August 2018
© 2018 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
now available at Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Bending-Your-Ear-Collection-Essays/dp/1633932907?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc
Signed and personalized editions now available at my website:
Follow my postings on the RSS feed: http://www.drewnickell.com/?feed=rss2