It goes like this. In a reference to a famous article written at the time of the last presidential election, Klaus poses the question ” “What happens if it’s a ‘Flight 93 Election’ and your side is corkscrewing down into the earth?
“…It is time to bail.”
With Donald Trump out of the race he paints a picture of a situation in which passengers rush at the cockpit, and (here the Flight 93 analogy rather fails, but stick with it) eject Trump, thus transforming the election entirely in favour of the Republican party. With Trump gone, the intensity level of the Dem campaign will instantly drop. Millions who might turn out to get rid of Trump will stay at home. The lightning rod having wandered off with all the electricity, everything will probably become very boring very quickly. The Democrats’ nominee is so weak that Republicans, depending on whom they picked, might still have a chance at retaining the White House.
There are of course plenty of Republicans who have wanted Trump to go during the course of his presidency. But I cannot stress enough that Kraus and those who agree with him are not ‘never Trumper’ Republicans opposed to the President and seeking now to bring the party back into the mainstream.
They are the opposite. They want to secure Trumpism, which they see as an aggressively pro-immigration restrictions, pro-American jobs, anti-China and anti-foreign entanglements agenda. Proper populism. And they fear (rightly probably) that a big defeat will lead to a situation where Mr Trump booby traps the White House and jets off into the sunset and the Republican party clears its throat and moves on, moves Left.
How do they stop this? They act NOW. Perhaps with Mike Pence, the vice president or perhaps with some other character sprung from a TV studio in time for the party Convention at the end of August. There is already a name in the frame: step forward Tucker Carlson, the host of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News (of course).
Mr Carlson has veered in recent months into a fascinating area of political space: attacking Donald Trump from the populist Right. Specifically, he called out the White House for failing to clamp down more vigorously (with troops perhaps?) on the Black Lives Matter protests and the riots in some cities.
There’s even gossip — via the Politico website — that Carlson is pally with a man who has the ear of the President but a scratchy relationship with his advisors: “Carlson has established a friendship,” Politico says, “ with Donald Trump, Jr., according to a source familiar with their relationship.”
Whoever it is, the first item on their agenda is a no-brainer. They must find a way to pardon Trump senior or make it plain that they will. As Robert Kuttner of Brandeis University put it recently: “Mar-a-Lago isn’t Elba, much less Saint Helena, but it sure beats the Oval Office.” In other words this Napoleon needs an exile plan. He needs his lawyers to buy into these arrangements in order that he can be sure of living out his days in relative freedom.
That is not as easy to sort out as it might seem because the US federal system makes it nigh on impossible to stop individual states prosecuting crimes they believe were committed on their territory. Vice president Spiro Agnew is a case in point: when he was forced out of office in 1973 and did a deal in lieu of prison it was all sorted out with the federal authorities because his offences were federal not state crimes. Donald Trump has New York to contend with: property deals, loans, tax issues.
Worse: quite a few of the things he might need sorting date from before he was President, so his people cannot even be sure of a presidential get-out clause in an off-to-Elba scenario.
Hang on though, is this really a serious scenario? One Senior correspondent on Fox News, Charles Gasparino, claims to have talked to people who think it may be: “Over the weekend I spoke to a sample of major players; one described Trumps current psyche as “fragile”. Gasparino tweeted a few days ago. “I’ve heard the talk but I doubt it’s true,” another said. “My bet is, he drops if he believes there’s no way to win.”
There is still a way to win. There are new Trump voters to be found among the huge numbers of Americans who do not vote. It is possible, too, that ‘shy Trump support’ — un-noticed by the opinion pollsters — is a thing. And, of course, Joe Biden is no superman. But these are febrile times.
And in the modern world political movements gather pace fast. Mickey Klaus makes a telling point:
“I admit,” he says, “ I also called in Newsweek for Michael Dukakis to drop out in 1988, long after the convention, on the grounds that he was losing and his running mate, Lloyd Bentsen, would do better.
“Was I wrong?”
He was not wrong. Dukakis went down to historic defeat to George W Bush. Bentsen could have won. This is why the ‘will Trump resign’ question is more than a gossip line for bored political nerds: it is plainly possible, but with what impact? If he walks he throws the nation into a new and even more unpredicatable tumult.
He might like the sound of that.
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