Dec. 2 Open Thread: All Over But the Whining

Filed in National, Open Thread by on December 2, 2018

It wasn’t hard to see that winning the presidency would be Trump’s ultimate undoing. His sleazy, corrupt business model can only exist in darkness, and Trump won an office that affords its occupants almost no privacy. That barely worked while the entire GOP colluded to keep an illegitimately elected president safe. Now that most of his lieutenants have been snared in a web of lies, and with Democrats in the House salivating like wolves circling a wounded buffalo, he’s abandoned his claims of innocence for the foxhole of “but it’s not a crime.”

So the punditry pages are full of speculation about the end game — essentially, will Trump pull a Nixon and resign in exchange for a pardon. Marcy Wheeler throws some cold water on that idea, pointing out that while President Pence could pardon Trump the person, the power to pardon does not extend to corporate entities like the Trump Company. She doubts Trump would be willing to walk away from that.

Perhaps Trump is preparing a dotard defense. That’s how it looked at the G20 meeting when he strolled onstage at what was supposed to be a group photo op, shook hands with the president of Argentina and promptly wandered off stage left.

Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir saw a flattering interview with outgoing House speaker Paul Ryan that certainly got his shorts in a knot, leading to this blistering takedown of the Ayn Rand fanboy and faux policy wonk. He even names the source of his ire:

“It’s the entire premise of that conversation, in which Paul Ryan is a sober and serious political leader whose ambiguous legacy is worthy of a deep ponder. He’s just not. He’s a second-rate grifter who came up short and got pimped out by a much better one.”

We haven’t heard much about the NFL’s head-injury problem lately, which has opened up the sports pages for a return of its previous major problem, the propensity of its players to batter women. The latest perpetrator is Kansas City Chiefs running back Kareem Hunt, who was involved in an altercation back in February with a woman who had been invited to his hotel room from a bar. (Just asking: When did people turn stupid about partying in a hotel room with someone they just met? And I say that to both parties in this dispute.) His side of the story was that he threw her out because she was just 19, and then called him the N-word and banged on his door for a half-hour. Unfortunately for him, the altercation was caught on hotel security cameras in the hallway, and it shows him shoving her into a wall, then kicking her when she was down, so it’s not about the n-word anymore.

General Motors has caught flack from every angle after announcing its plan to close five factories and lay off 15% of its work force. Some are heaping scorn on Trump’s empty promises to prevent plant closures — something that was never in his power to do — while others decry the “greed” of the corporation, as if this were the worst-ever example of that (and not, say, the crooked deal with the government that allows pharma companies a monopoly on manufacturing certain drugs, leading to enormous price hikes on life-saving medicines). In GM’s case, the reality is more complicated, as it so often turns out to be.

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  1. bamboozer says:

    Dementia never stops, Trump is fitting the pattern at this point, remember he did the same thing with a limo after leaving the plane and walked past it. As noted a pardon cannot be granted to a corporation, and Trump’s empire of lies would be a prime target, kind of kills the resignation scenario. Then again I have my heart set of a perp walk, maybe two.

  2. jason330 says:

    Trump’s last redoubt isn’t that it wasn’t a crime it is that it was a “process crime.” I’m hearing that suddenly being tossed around a lot. As if the Trump organization hasn’t been awash in crime, and as if obstruction of justice and perjury are not real crimes at all.