Sunday, July 17, 2016

President Mike Pence? De facto President Corey Lewandowski?

If Trump wins, he might not play president for four years. Much more so than in the case of other candidates, we have multiple reasons why:

  • He might quit, getting bored with doing actual work and angry at the criticism dished at him while Rome burns. I'm sure he could find multiple parties to blame for his quitting.
  • Even if he doesn't officially quit, he may withdraw from day-to-day presidenting and let someone else do all the work. He's already decided he'd act more like a Board Chairman than a CEO, suggesting a lighter workload, and he might take it farther. It's also not hard to imagine him getting mad at how his businesses are being run by his kids and reinsert himself in the latest Trump University And Steakhouse dustup, despite promises to stay away from the businesses.
  • The 70-year-old candidate has refused to release any medical records beyond a sycophantic half-page letter from his doctor claiming he'd be "the healthiest individual elected to the presidency." That's an obvious lie (c.f. both Bushes and Obama) which puts the letter's brief assertions of good health in question. For all we know, he could keel over at any time.
  • He could get impeached and removed, or quit to avoid the inevitable. It's hard but not impossible to imagine a Republican House doing this (Trump may not have thought through the implications of making Pence his Veep). Alternatively, two years of chaos leads to a change election in 2018 like the 2006 wave, and then he's gone. Most likely series of events leading to impeachment, btw: Trump gets someone to do something illegal for him on the promise of a pardon, Trump tries to get out issuing the pardon but is manipulated to issue it, and the world finds out the real reason for the pardon.
  • He may trust his judgment of security over that of the Secret Service, and get himself shot.

The risk of someone else running the show is yet another factor in the dumpster fire that is the Trump candidacy. As hard as it is to realize that someone worse than George Bush may become president, we don't know who may actually run the country instead of Trump at some point in the next four years. It could be someone worse yet.

8 comments:

John McCormick said...

Brian, you called it first.

As we Americans show our true selves to the world he is either defeated or destined to resign because the 1% will get Pence in the White House for a meer $1 billion pay off to the struggling businessman forced to live off his government pension.

JohnMashey said...

See tweet, which links to stories: pence family $ ~ oil+tobacco.

Wombat said...

You are a little unfair to the good doctor. The claim that trump would be the healthiest individual elected to the presidency is preceded by the condition if elected. The doctor is obviously a student of formal logic and presumably assumes that the condition is impossible. In that case the statement is true.

cRR Kampen said...

Neoconpolitburo will rule. Those would basically comprise the signatories to the PNAC.

John Farley said...

Michael Moore thinks that Trump will win. Moore is famously from the rustbelt state of Michigan.
Both parties have supported "free trade" agreements that have devastated union jobs in the US.
If trump can tap into this populist protectionist sentiment, he might win.

-John

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

"As hard as it is to realize that someone worse than George Bush may become president, we don't know who may actually run the country instead of Trump at some point in the next four years. It could be someone worse yet."

Barring the election of Governors Johnson & Weld, it could well come to that .


http://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2016/05/making-america-great-means-finding-vice.html

Kevin O'Neill said...

John Farley writes: "Both parties have supported "free trade" agreements that have devastated union jobs in the US. "

History repeats itself. After the American civil war, many northern states learned that economic forces controlled wages as many factories relocated to the low-wage south. I.e., employers could find a better bargain in another location and had to relocate out of necessity (to stay in business), rather than desire.

In the 1960s the USA was the richest country in the world. Anyone that thought even briefly about the future and increased globalization realized there were predictable outcomes; chief among them was that US workers wages relative to the rest of the world would decline.

In the 1950s more than 90 American companies made television sets. By the year 2000 there were none. At the same time the number of TVs in the country grew from 50 million in 1960 to more than 300 million today. Each of those TVs sold over the past 20 years is supporting jobs overseas. The lament for the loss of domestic jobs is equivalent to wanting to deny jobs to workers overseas. I consider this a very poor argument.

Barriers to free trade are economically inefficient. And while efficiency should not be the sine qua non of economic policy, it should carry considerable weight. What we should be lamenting is the lack of worker's rights in many of these foreign countries and working to ensure that our trade agreements require these rights be guaranteed.

To make a long story short, in the end a discussion of workers, free trade, and globalization will inevitably reduce down to the question of whether we are first citizens of the world or first citizens of our country of residence (nationalists).

Hank Roberts said...

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Rd997TraBbU/V5Pb83yq4yI/AAAAAAAAOuI/fY19L7RVjwMJdw4ZaNjZ0efTdCbCeiHJgCLcB/s1600/zWall.jpg

Thank you Russell.

P.S.: http://morgenstern.jeffreykegler.com/