yeah, yeah everyone’s already shared this link.
I thought “I bet this doesnt tell me anything new” but then I read it and it made one thing clearer to me:
Back in 80s and 90s Britain, a sex scandal was career OVER. And I could never figure out why. “So he has a mistress, maybe even some kinks” I thought, “does that mean he can’t do a good job?”
Now it occurs to me that the scandal itself wasn’t what prompted the resignation of one Tory minister after another. It was that the scandal signaled that the establishment had withdrawn its favour. What the public thought was unimportant – there was another, closer gatekeeper. The scandal was (ironically) a fig leaf.
Putin seems to operate the same way. Trump is not vulnerable in the same way because he has already made an enemy of the party establishment. The question is, how much pain, embarrassment and annoyance will Congress put up with before they impeach him?
Just how much is the status quo worth?
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/01/kompromat-trump-dossier/512891///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js
Tattered Remains of Tartary 
The thing which a lot of people don’t seem to understand is this – Even if it’s true that Donald isn’t as vulnerable to a sex scandal in the same way as other people, this is something that has only been demonstrated in the last few months.
The intelligence agencies who had recorded this footage for potential future use would have had no magical way to see into this future and know for sure that this footage would not turn out to ultimately be as useful as they had hoped.
A lot of people dismissing this report’s claims are using magical thinking that because Donald has already been caught on camera claiming far worse (sexual assault), there’s nothing to this. They don’t seem to understand how time works and how cause/effect work.
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And Don’s defense – that he’s an autocratic demagogue – really isn’t any use to us.
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with this dude kompromat seems basically interchangeable with a bunch of pundits red-facedly sputtering this is not normal!
as i understand it, congress has little incentive to impeach trump because, while they’d much, much rather have pence in the chair, they would be ceding elections indefinitely as they lose the potent blue pill of trump’s base. this at a time when, otherwise, their electoral windfalls in recent years allows them to shore up their structural advantages vs. future elections in powerful ways
so i think the question becomes do relatively nonpartisan, unelected segments of the government, like, i guess, the CIA, have the will and ability to brute force trump out and scuttle the republicans the way centrist talking heads were daydreaming they’d do to themselves all year, or are they just another bloc repeatedly pushing a red cartoon button saying ‘but he’s bad’ and scratching their heads why it isn’t working
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cole long it seems to me scuppering Trump himself might not be the best way, but taking out the people around him could work, because ultimately his own impunity will be more important to him than any loyalty.
Isolation is very nearly equivalent to death in politics.
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Richard G can you elaborate on that?
(the part before “isolation is…”, which is straightforward)
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just lost a long comment. Grrr comments pane!
So – Trump can dictate what he wants to do at a high level, but in order to implement any actual plans he needs the cabinet members and their political networks, right? Now his cabinet seems to be half novices (who can’t do much until they build networks) and half Republican insiders/sponsors, who have networks and a direct line to the party establishment.
I reckon those insiders are very important for getting anything done, getting Congress’s support, talking to civil service departments. And they are still vulnerable to kompromat – it’s taken a long time to build their empires, they have goals that extend past the next 4-8 years: they have a lot to lose.
So if you can hit them with a scandal – especially one that can blow back onto Trump – then I reckon you can count on his old habits to just fire the insider. Which will:
(a) reduce the effectiveness of the cabinet
(b) discourage other insiders from joining.
If you can replace all Trump’s insiders with novices AND keep a short cycle of firings/hirings for the novices, then you can probably effectively neutralize the executive branch – just delay everything they want to do indefinitely.
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i don’t think anyone handling the kompromat so to speak on the US side has much interest in neutralizing anything other than divergence from foreign policy orthodoxy. trump’s cabinet is brutally pure kleptocracy but does anyone care?
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I could see the Republicans in Congress impeaching Donald if Putin invades Ukraine and he does nothing (proving himself a complete Putin puppet and far too dangerous for national security). They’re in safe districts so they really don’t have to worry about Trump-Putin die hards voting them out. OTOH, quickly replacing Donald with President Pence would be their only way to prevent Putin from invading the Baltics after he finishes off the Ukraine.
With a Putin puppet as POTUS, it’ll make your head spin how quickly Putin retakes the former Soviet Union. The military deterrent without the US Military just isn’t there.
But Putin might somehow be deterred from invading Ukraine by the fact that the punishing sanctions against him are controlled by Congress, not President Trump. Maybe.
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The real political test beyond the sputtering pundits and scandals will be the dismantling of ACA. Which will not only leave 20+ million people without healthcare but presumably spike premiums for most everyone as healthcare companies re-adjust rates to cover a smaller pool. And that doesn’t even get into the countless numbers of people with prior conditions who legally can now be denied coverage again.
We live in such a fluid dangerous period that either: a. there will be a mass wave of popular anger (keep in mind Trump is already starting in his honeymoon as the literally least popular modern president) or b. a terrifying quietude. It really feels that up in the air for the most time in my political life.
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Chris Kutalik sadly i have every confidence in their ability to pivot shit to “this is the inevitable result of a law that was bad to begin with.” and ACA, which still has helped a lot of people, was clearly flawed enough to give the pawn-off a politically salient whiff of truth
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cole long yeah thus option b. And who knows what kind of spectacles will be front and center in the next year. We shouldn’t totally discount though the fact that we also had the rise of a left populist moment in this election. It’s weaker than the far right but not inconsequential.
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cole long Does anyone care? Apparently enough people care that Trump’s popularity numbers have nosedived since the election. There were a lot of people evidently willing to give Trump a chance, but his actions and attitude since the election have turned them off.
You could say, accurately, that none of what Donald has done should surprise anyone. But the proof’s in the numbers. There were people who hoped for better, and have already been disappointed.
As for whether or not this deep unpopularity translates into sufficiently powerful action against Donald to save us from total ruinous disaster? I must admit that I share your pessimism on that.
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Isaac Kuo in principle the GOP loathe Russia but are they gonna want to fall on their sword over the fate of a bunch of warsaw pact alumni? i don’t think they think their constituency gives that much of a shit about russia, they are concerned primarily about their money train, and at the end of the day assume the trump/putin bromance is one short fingers joke away from an ugly breakup anyway
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i think it’s important to remember that republicans as a party are already extremely unpopular and keep in power by a combination of a) keeping the hardcore and dissafected hardcore and dissafected and b) purely gaming the system. i think they will see more advantage in shifting blame and appeasing trump true believes, world burners, and people whose wallets are actually fattened by their shit. people hate trump, but people hate pence and ryan too. but at least some people like trump
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cole long They wouldn’t be falling on their sword, though. They’re in safe districts, and also Donald’s base is going to shrink to a minimum if he supports Putin invading Eastern Europe.
Putin’s popularity numbers among Republicans are still negative – more Republican voters will be supportive of throwing out a Putin puppet than angered by it. Only hardcore Trump-Putin lovers will be upset, and it’s not like they’re going to vote for their Democratic opponents.
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i don’t think anyone really likes putin, other than trump for the moment, i just think russia is very low on most people’s priorities
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in terms of the US, i’m mostly horrified that Trump clearly thinks Putin is a good role model for how to govern correctly
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i mean obviously i don’t want a bunch of eastern european states to get annexed by russia, either, i just mean in terms of what happens here and what we do as the US
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Putin’s popularity among Republicans has risen in recent years. Mostly, I think it’s Obama Derangement Syndrome – knee-jerk opposite-ness to anything Obama. But there is also a kernel of some shared ideals, such as white racial purity/supremacy and brutal anti-LGBT oppression. Putin’s a good fit for the white supremacist movement here in the USA, where the only big departure is Putin’s lack of Christianism.
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yeah, and among republicans in government, there’s a lot of would be strongmen telling themselves “game recognize game”
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what a dilemma it must be, to want WWIII real bad on the one hand, and on the other to see shirtless putin on a horse and think “he must get all the ladies”
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The level of access to the inner circle and people in the know stipulated by the dossier does defy gravity a bit:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2017/0112/Why-Russia-s-Kremlin-watchers-are-taking-Trump-dossier-with-a-grain-of-salt
Some Russian nationalists are freaking out (and some Russian liberals are saying “I told you so”) in the wake of Trump’s acquiescence to the CIA’s charge that a Russian hack took place, and Tillerson’s testimony that he would have reacted more harshly to the Donbas invasion. Aleksei Venediktov, the head of Ekho Moskvy, Russia’s top liberal radio station, asserted on Wednesday that Trump’s administration will be a neocon one, and will put Russia in a tight vice. So everyone’s wrapped up in their own ideological preconceptions.
Also, on the question of whether Putin would use US paralysis to ‘retake’ the USSR: I wouldn’t rule it out, though I would note that the thing that deterred Putin from taking the whole of Ukraine was not the threat of a US attack (which was highly unlikely to have materialized), but the low level of support he has in most of Ukraine. So he took the one (two, counting Crimea) areas which he could control. The attitudes in the rest of Ukraine haven’t really changed.
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