Ask A Genius 530 – The Political Contexts of Impeachment
December 20, 2019
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the political situation today?
Rick Rosner: What is going on in America, it is weird to me; that you don’t know everything going on in America since you touch America along a 3,000-mile border. The deal with impeachment is it is being conducted gingerly.
The democrats’ idea, what they’re trying to do, is to make everybody aware of how criminal and his associates are without making people who’ve liked Trump even more committed to Trump. The model that they want to follow is the Nixon model.
As more and more information came out about Nixon’s badness, Nixon lost followers. What they don’t want is the Clinton model, where Clinton was impeached for lying about blowjobs from his intern, people who liked Clinton or people who were democrats thought the process was such bullshit that a guy would be impeached for saying that he didn’t have sex when he got a few BJs.
They though the Republicans were over-reaching themselves. They probably felt a lot of sympathy for Monica Lewinsky who was fucked by who she thought was her friend, Linda Tripp, who seemed gross and vindictive, ugly inside and out.
Linda Tripp is the one who found the dress with the jizz on it and was the one to rat to Ken Starr who’d been after the Clintons for years. The thing he finally found was the blowjobs and the lying about the blowjobs.
The whole thing seemed so unfair to more than half the country that Clinton was even more popular after he was impeached. They voted him not guilty in the Senate. The democrats don’t want Trump to become more popular because people feel like he is being persecuted.
It is tricky. Because the Republicans now have a tame news media. In Nixon’s time and even somewhat in Clinton’s time, there was Fox New just being born while Clinton was president. It wasn’t as big or as insidious as it is now.
The conservative news media now continually pump out misinformation. So if you only listen o conservative news media, you can get a fairly consistent narrative that is not true but hangs together. It says everyone but this brave crusader, this shaker-upper, this swamp-drainer, Trump is corrupt.
Trump is the hero of all this and is being unfairly persecuted. What everybody agree will happen is even given the huge criminality of what Trump did, which is trying to extort stuff from the Ukrainians to fuck over Joe Biden, Trump thinks is likely to be his opponent in the election.
It is entirely criminal and worse than what Nixon did. But that doesn’t matter. Once the House votes to impeach Trump and there is a trial in the Senate, the Senate with a Republican majority will vote to not find Trump guilty.
Also, you need a 2/3rds vote for impeachment. You need 67 senators out of 100 to vote Trump guilty on at least one article of impeachment. People think it will be, at least, 2 or 3. But that there are 47 democratic senators, which means they’ll need 20 Republican senators voting to impeach Trump.
People think that is an impossibility. The fear is: everybody agrees on both sides; Trump will survive an impeachment vote. But what people don’t know or people disagree about and what can’t be anticipated, whether the impeachment trial will Trump more popular or less popular, although, my guess would be that his approval ratings will probably stay where they have been for the entire three years of his presidency, except for the very first week.
The very first week, we almost reached 50% approval. For the past almost 3 years, he’s been in the high 30s or low 30s. His approval rating has been the steadiest among presidents since they starting polling for approval.
His approval at the beginning of the impeachment process dropped by roughly 1% from 42% to 41%. Since then, they’ve had two weeks of hearings. It has crept back up to 41.9%. While approval for impeachment, a majority of Americans disapproved for the past year.
In the past three months, approval of impeachment climbed over 50%. In the past 2 weeks, it dropped to about 47%. It is less than a percent ahead of people who disapprove of impeachment. So, that’s what is going on.
Everybody on the left says Trump approval is a cult because people love him. The people who love him, love him regardless of what he does. It seems to be increasingly true as his people are increasingly desperate and shitty. It doesn’t matter.
My hope is, to wrap this up, that even if his approval stays steady; that it won’t be enough for him to get re-elected. That the 47% or 48% of people who are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt in the first week of his presidency, and then the percentage dropped to 41%.
I am hoping that losing the 7% of the people and the 15% of Trump voters who are now disgusted with him are now enough to make it so he doesn’t get re-elected. Even if that is so, the Republicans will fuck with the mechanics of our voting, even more than they did in 2016.
Everybody, our intelligence agencies know it, but the Republicans control the Senate. They have refused to do anything to protect us against Russian election interference. So, the fighting of the interference has to go on at the state level.
Then there are some states that welcome it. I believe that if votes were counted fairly; that Trump will not be re-elected, but votes may not be counted fairly.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
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