Latest Bolton revelations are no game-changer
This is yet one more Republican whom the president and his friends easily can redefine as a disgruntled former employee.
thehill.com
President
Donald Trump entered the fall’s impeachment hearings as an unstoppable force. Despite
siding with Russian President
Vladimir Putin in opposition to U.S. intelligence, or facing
sexual assault allegations from nearly 20 women, or getting caught
lying or misleading the public more than 15,000 times since taking office, Trump has effectively inoculated himself from political destruction. Statements and actions — any one of which might have ended anyone else's career — seem only to have hardened his support.
Gallup’s
final poll of 2019 encapsulates this narrative: 45 percent of respondents approved of his presidency, only one point below his all-time high. Meanwhile, only 51 percent disapproved the second-lowest mark since February 2017.
Ironically, this is all playing out amidst Republicans House members
retiring in droves. Meanwhile, in the past three years, 13 state legislators have
left the GOP; for context, only 17 state legislators left the GOP in the 21 years prior.
So despite becoming only the third impeached president, despite rarely reaching 50 percent approval in any poll, despite House Republicans losing a net of 50 seats since Trump’s election (247 in November 2016 to 197 today), and despite a record pace of defections—in addition to everything else that’s been thrown at him, or that he’s thrown at himself—Trump somehow entered last week’s Senate impeachment trial as emboldened as ever.
Collaborating with Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and promising swift and brutal
payback toward any GOP senator who crosses him, the president found himself in familiar territory: conceivably beleaguered, but in fact, empowered.
And now we have the 500th “Surely Trump can’t withstand this” revelation. On Sunday "The New York Times"
reported on
John Bolton’s unpublished manuscript, in which the former National Security Advisor claims, among other things, that the president knowingly withheld Ukraine funding until the country initiated an investigation into the Bidens.
Never mind that two months ago European Union Ambassador
Gordon Sondland made the
same assertion under oath. In today’s world, one party’s truth is another’s fiction. The only hope is to find more corroborators to bolster the case.
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