Time to plan for a post Trump future. Success or Failure.

Man alive, there's a lot going on in the world of politics in the US.  It's too much to keep up with.

Or at least its numbing.

It's almost has hard as keeping up with the latest media or Hollywood figure to be caught with their pants down, after they've been down for some time, it seems.

Starting the week before last, with Gen. Flynn's acceptance of criminal guilt, we have now entered into a situation in which it is increasingly possible, possible, not probable, that President Trump will be impeached.

Note, I said possible, not probable.

I'm not alone in this view, however.  If you listen to the Democrats in Congress there are clear rumblings of this.  And one of the round table folks on Meet the Press, from the conservative side, flat out declared that if the Democrats take the house in 2018, and it looks increasingly likely that hey stand a pretty good chance, the result will be an impeachment.

That latter opinion I'll note is disturbing as it comes close to predicting what would amount to a coup.  Simply removing a President as you don't like him isn't an impeachment.  At best its a weird way around to what in a Parliament is a vote of no confidence.  In our system we dont' have that, of course.  In our system, it'd border on being a coup.

But not everyone who is edging up on an impeachment is doing it as they feel that Trump simply needs to go. Some are as there are now pretty clear rumblings that Trump's close inner circle may have been involved in criminal activity prior to his election and prior to his taking  the oath of office. Clearly Flynn was.

Indeed, it's hard not to feel like we're back in 1973 again, which leaves anyone who remembers any of that with a sick feeling in their stomach.  Rumblings and news come out in leaks that start to resemble a flood. ..  the White House denies any wrongdoing. .. .but some of the things we know about are hard to ignore.

It makes a person feel icky.

Now, I"m not venturing an opinion on illegality, and I don't think that any layman is in a position to do that at this time.

What I am saying is that something I thought totally impossible now is looking pretty possible.

So, let's say it happens.

And let's say Trump is removed.

I think we, and by that the nation . . . and more particularly the political part of the nation,  needs to prepare for that.

And not in the way, to be sure, that hardcore members of the political left currently are.

First we better revisit how a President is actually removed from office through impeachment.

How is a President Impeached?

Not very easily, that's for sure.

In order to be removed by the process, the House must vote to impeach the President.  Then it goes to the Senate where 2/3s of the Senate must vote for removal in order for that to occur.

That's never happened.

It likely would have happened with Nixon, and he knew it, which is partially why he resigned.  He also may have genuinely resigned in order to spare the country the agony of going through an impeachment.  Trump wouldn't do that.

In order for it to happen now, with the Senate nearly evenly split, all the Democrats would hvae to vote for removal.  That's can't be taken as a given, as its such a drastic thing to occur.  And then Republicans would have to join in.

I think some Republicans would join in.

Now, that's right now.

But let's keep in mind that Trump is deeply unpopular with some Republicans in the Senate (and the House).

And let's also keep in mind that there are plenty of highly savvy Republicans in the Senate who are really upset about the direction of things right now.  They don't like Trump as President and they live in fear of what a Moore victory in Alabama means for the reputation of the GOP.

If they could remove Trump, or Trump and Moore, they'd likely do it.

Or they'd like to do it.

But let's also keep in mind that the process of impeachment itself is damaging to the country every time it occurs. The impeachment of Andrew Johnson effectively rendered the remainder of his term ineffectual for everyone.  The impeachment of Bill Clinton, which was extremely political and extremely ill advised, has had negative political ripples down to the current era.  Indeed, it dumbed down American politics in a way that has just kept on keeping on.

So quite a few from the right and the left would fear to impeach the President unless they feel it absolutely necessary.

So, while the House may get there after the 2018 election, one year from now (which is a really long time in politics).  The Senate may very well never get there.  If if they took on a Bill of Impeachment and didn't impeach Trump, the remainder of his term would be insufferable in a way that we can hardly imagine, given that he acts in ways we've never seen before. For that reason alone I hope we don't get there.

But let's say we do.

How we got here

But before we imagine that, let's recall how we got a President Trump in the first place.

It's not as if there was a massive ground swell of support, ever, for Trump. Rather, the rank and file of the GOP and the old hard hat element of the Democratic Party grew flat out disgusted with both parties, and that disgust remains.

The GOP seemed, to their average rank and file, to lie about all of its goals and to never act on them. They never acted on immigration.  They didn't do anything about an increasingly statist left wing bureaucracy coming to influence daily life and social policy.  They did nothing, they felt.

And for he hard hat element of the Democratic Party, it became impossible for them to recognize their own party.  A party which was once the party of the working man had become the party of identity politics and gender confusion.

In short, you couldn't be a Republican worried about immigration, worried about social policy, or worried about an increasingly Statist American nation and take the GOP politicians seriously.  And you couldn't be a Democrat who opposed abortion, or opposed radical gun control, or who worried about his job on the factory floor, and take the Democrats seriously.

And those people came to hate  their own parties.

That's how we got here.

And they still hate their own parties.

Going forward

And that's what we need to recall.

If the radical left feels removing Trump today means a gender neutral Trotsky tomorrow, a Trump impeachment will make the situation much worse, not any better.  The political civil war would go nuclear thereafter.

If the GOP feels that removing Trump just takes the party back to the good old days of George Bush II, or I, they're not going to get it.

You can lance the boil, to be sure, but the infection that's causing it is really deep.

And that's what needs to both give us pause, and cause us to need to use that pause for some pondering and planning.

And part of that planning and pondering should lead to the conclusion that Trump came about because of a massive Democratic and Republican failure, but not the same failure.

The Democrats have become a party run by a hard left, ossified, ancient elite.  They formed their political views in the very early 1970s and they believe that politics can lead people to a bright shiny secular urban tea sipping gender neutral city on a hill.

Whatever the views are of younger people, they aren't what Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuckles Schumer think they are.  Nor are they what Debbie Wasserman Schultz or Donna Brazille think they are.  The Democrats have to dump the crazy left and relocate the center, even their own center.

And the GOP elite has to quit lying.  It's made it a long ways on promising to do increasingly unlikely things and their bluff was called in the form of Trump.  Going from just conservative during the Reagan era to far right in an increasing lock step every year, in their pronouncements if not their actions, voters finally abandoned them in favor of a candidate who would actually attempt to do the increasingly hard right things promised.  For example, moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem was never a sound idea, but GOP candidates promised it, and then (wisely) backed out.  It was never a good idea, but they kept tossing it out there.  Now voters who kept hearing that promise voted in a guy who actually did it, no matter how unsound that idea was.

So, if Trump is removed, unless things are to go from extreme to even more extreme, both sides nearly need to take Trump as an example of how extreme things could get and back off a whole lot.

What would that mean?

Both sides have to dump the disgruntled crazies in their ranks for one thing.  Everyone sees them, but nobody feels that they can silence them.  University professors who think they are Marxist revolutionaries. . .judges who can't tell men from women and want to force everyone else into gender neutrality. . . individuals who have their own secret copy of a constitution which provides that the United States was to be a Protestant theocracy. . . people who hate the government because it is a government . . people who hate other people because of their race, gender, or proclivities or who hate other people as they won't acknowledge that their own race has a special place as its special, or specially oppressed, or that their proclivities are deserving of forced public accolades.  People who would write science out of science text books or history out of history text books.  

It won't be easy.

And, moreover, for the Democrats it likely means that they need to discovery actual nature and working people a bit.  Democrats sound like they really truly hate human nature and would prefer a nation of Greenwich Village dwelling castrati if at all possible.   That's not going to happen.  And they need to find a sense of philosophical values that's not based on complete nonsensical hot air.

For the GOP, it means that they have to decide which of their right wing promises they really mean and stick to them and explain them in a cogent fashion.  And they need to rediscover science and education in a major and serious way.  They need, quite frankly, to abandon the gadfly fruit loops that they let run amok in the political hinterlands suggesting that the FBI is right over the top of the hill and they need to be resisted.

Put more bluntly, the GOP needs to kick out Roy Moore and cheerleaders for the Bundys, and most of the delegation from Utah that hates public lands.  The Democrats need to loose Chuckles Schumer, anyone named Clinton, and Wasserman Schultz.

If they don't, we'll be headed to a series of presidents, right and left, which will make Trump look like a model of calm behavior and middle ground positions.  And we'll suffer greatly as a result.