GOP SUPPORT FOR PRESIDENT TRUMP IS STRONG…….FOR NOW

… House Intelligence Committee Chairman, Adam Schiff (D-CA)

Republican lawmakers push-back because they perceive Trump’s like Rasputin, and has magical powers.

Both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) at a news conference, made it clear that they were going along with their other GOP lawmakers.

Those lawmakers that have responded to questions about Trump’s conduct with varying degrees of silence, shrugged shoulders or pained defenses.  For now, their collective strategy is simply to survive and not make waves..

An additional list of the Democrat’s impeachment developments has triggered the Republican Party to cause many of its officeholders to weigh their political futures.  Future actions will effect their legacies and will ultimately cause them to make decision on their allegiance to a president who is holding them hostage.

President Trump’s efforts to pressure a foreign power to target a domestic political rival has driven his party into a virtual bunker.  The lawmakers are expecting for an extended battle led by their general [Trump] whose orders are often confusing and contradictory.

If the House should actually impeach Trump, his trial would be in the Senate, where the Republican majority would decide his fate.  While GOP senators have engaged in hushed conversations about constitutional and moral issues, their calculations at this point are entirely political and partisan.  The GOP lawmakers are totally ignoring the fact that their president has gone against the rules set down in the US Constitution by our forefathers.

This account of what is gripping the Republican Party is based on anonymous interviews with 21 GOP lawmakers, aides and advisers.  These individuals would only speak candidly on the condition of anonymity. They are all aware that without that anonymity, they would all be attacked by this president, and his cronies on Twitter.

Trump has been totally defiant in his defense, falsely insisting his conduct with foreign leaders has been “perfect” and claiming a broad conspiracy by the Democratic Party and the “Deep State”.  He also believes that his own intelligence community and the national media are trying to remove him from office.  In fact, they are just doing their duty as a co-equal branch of the government, just like the US Constitution states.

With all of the evidence presented against the president, only a few Republican lawmakers have been willing to parrot the White House talking points.  This is because they believe that they are sure that they could or would be totally contradicted by new discoveries against the president.

According to Brendan Buck, who was a counselor to former House Speaker, Paul D. Ryan (R-WI), everyone is getting a little shaky at this point. “Members have gotten out on a limb with this president many times only to have it cut off by the president. They know he’s erratic, and this is a completely unsteady and developing situation.”

Republican officials are feeling acute pressure beyond Trump.  That includes the president’s allies on talk radio, the Fox News Channel and elsewhere in conservative media have been abuzz with conspiratorial talk of a “deep state” coup attempt.  There are even accusations that House Intelligence Committee Chairman, Adam B. Schiff (D-CA) and House Democrats are corrupting the impeachment process.

At an event in Templeton, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) was confronted by her constituent over her response to the whistleblower complaint that sparked impeachment.

“Where is the line?” Iowa resident Amy Haskins asked in frustration. “When are you guys going to say, ‘Enough,’ and stand up and say, ‘You know what? I’m not backing any of this.’ ”

“I can say, ‘Yea, Nay, whatever,’ ” Ernst replied. “The president is going to say what the president is going to do.”

Ernst’s reply sums up the GOP’s dilemma with the president.

Trump’s extraordinary public request that China investigate 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, this has added to his previous pressure campaign on Ukraine.  It has also sparked confusing reactions among other Republican senators, including over whether the president was joking when he delivered his plea to China.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), the most outspoken of his colleagues, tweeted Friday: “By all appearances, the President’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling.”

By contrast, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) dismissed it as probably being that “joke”. “I don’t know if that’s a real request or him just needling the press, knowing that you guys were going to get outraged by it,” Rubio told reporters.

Trump on Twitter swatted back at Romney calling him “a pompous ‘ass’ who has been fighting me from the beginning”.  This was a flashing signal to other Republicans that there would be serious  consequences to anyone speaking out against the president.

Colin Powell, who served as secretary of state under George W. Bush, said during a panel sponsored by the New Albany Community Foundation in Ohio that, “The Republican Party has got to get a grip on itself. Republican leaders and members of the Congress . . . are holding back because they’re terrified of what will happen [to] any one of them if they speak out [against Trump].”

Some House Republicans have tried to offer a more forceful defense than their Senate compatriots.  But House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy’s shaky appearance last weekend on CBS’s “60 Minutes” was widely panned, even among senor GOP aides, and it raised questions about whether he was up to the task of protecting Trump.

This California Republican McCarthy falsely accused his interviewer, Scott Pelley, of misrepresenting a key phrase in the transcript of Trump’s July 25 call with the Ukrainian president.

But some Trump aides privately said the president likes the messages sent by surrogates such as McCarthy and White House policy adviser Stephen Miller, who are willing to sit for a grilling and disparage the media.  (This is according to two Republicans close to the president.)

Former Republican Senator Jeff Flake, a true Trump antagonist, said his former colleagues believe the foreign leader interactions with Trump under investigation in the House represent a whole “new territory” compared with past challenges, including the Russia investigation.  “There is a concern that he’ll get through it and he’ll exact revenge on those who didn’t stand with him,” Flake said. “There is no love for the president among Senate Republicans, and they aspire to do more than answer questions about his every tweet and issue. But they know this is the president’s party and the bargain’s been made.”

The responses from most Republicans have infuriated and distressed Democrats, who consider Trump’s conduct a total unconstitutional abuse of power.

“My Republican colleagues’ silence seems unsustainable and inexcusable, given the threat to our national security as well as the integrity of our democratic institutions,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

These serious reactions underscore how the Republicans are dealing with this moment on their own, without direction from the White House or any clear guidance from the congressional leadership.

Many Republicans also said in interviews last week that Trump’s ability to nominate and confirm dozens of conservative federal judicial nominees and pass an overhaul of the tax code makes it harder to argue to their voters that he is now a problem on the party’s policy agenda.

“There just hasn’t been Republican pushback in part because there’s a perception that he’s like Rasputin with his base, and that he has some kind of magical powers,” said GOP consultant Mike Murphy, who is a serious Trump critic.

Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, who is admired by Trump and occasionally speaks with him, co-wrote an article in the Daily Caller offering a road map for Republicans.  He wrote that, “there’s no way to spin” Trump’s request that a foreign leader investigate one of his domestic opponents as being proper, and that it did not rise to the level of an impeachable offense.”

Carlson properly came to that conclusion, plus you can add the ten issues from the Mueller Report where Trump’s “obstruction of justice” was shown.

“Nobody wants to be the zebra that strays from the pack and gets gobbled up by the lion [Trump],” a former senior administration official said in assessing the current consensus among Senate Republicans. “They have to hold hands and jump simultaneously … Then Trump is immediately no longer president and the power he can exert over them and the punishment he can inflict is, in the snap of a finger, almost completely erased.”

Yet with Washington as polarized as at any time in recent history, political winds may not be blowing strong enough.  As long as impeachment is a Democratic priority driven by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), it will be difficult, if not impossible, for Senate Republicans to get on board, argued Alex Castellanos, a longtime GOP strategist.

“The more passions swell in Pelosi’s world, the more McConnell will deflate them,” Castellanos said. Impeachment proceedings, he predicted, will be “an over-hyped movie with an unsatisfying end.”

Let’s hope Mr. Castellanos, who has been wrong many times before, is wrong again.

Copyright G. Ater 2019