Right, so one of the enduring questions of Donald Trump’s young presidency is this: why on earth, if you were a Republican, would you risk your own reputation to defend a clearly indefensible commander-in-chief when you know full well that because you control the government, you could get more done with far less reputational risk under a President Mike Pence?
It’s a question that no GOP‘er has been able to answer and we can only assume that’s because the only plausible excuse is that Republicans simply haven’t been able to muster the nerve to get rid of someone who they all know is unfit for office.
Actually there’s another possible answer. Namely this: “well, impeaching this miserable son of a bitch amounts to overturning the will of the people.”
We would gently remind any Republican who serves up that excuse that in reality, impeaching Trump would in fact conform to the will of the people because after all, the only place where he won the popular vote is in his own mind.
Recently, we suggested that the most worrying numbers of all for Trump may be those circled in red in the table shown below:
In short, his support among white voters with no college degree is falling fast (those figures you see compare to an approval rating of 57% a month ago among that same constituency and a disapproval rating of just 38%).
Well, it could be that the only thing keeping the GOP from doing what they know is the right thing, is Trump’s still elevated support among Republican voters. As you can see from the RCP chart below, Trump’s numbers are God awful in aggregate, but as Gallup’s figures reveal, his support among Republicans is still quite strong:
All of the above leads The New Yorker’s satirist Andy Borowitz to imagine that Paul Ryan might have set a Google alert to let him know the exact moment when it’s safe to remove Trump from the throne once and for all…
Via The New Yorker
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)–House Speaker Paul Ryan has set a Google News alert to notify him of the instant that Donald Trump becomes unpopular enough to turn against, Ryan revealed on Thursday.
The news alert, which Ryan said was set to the phrase “Trump approval rating falls below fifty per cent among Republican voters,” will inform the House Speaker of the precise moment “that I can bail on President Trump at no political cost to me,” Ryan explained.
“There’s this sense out there in the media that Washington is consumed by drama and nothing is getting done,” Ryan told reporters. “I think it’s important for people to know that important things are, in fact, getting done, and setting this Google News alert is one of those things.”
Asked by a reporter when he anticipated turning on Trump, Ryan dismissed that as a hypothetical question, adding, “There is no timetable for my inevitable betrayal of him. Once I receive that Google News alert, it will most likely happen a split second after that.”
Ryan ended his press conference by reassuring the American people that he is hard at work for them. “I am checking my phone every ten–and sometimes every five–minutes,” he said.
