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New From Maestro Ry Cooder: "Everybody Ought to Treat a Stranger Right"

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Renaissance_Man4/19/2018 10:29:29 pm PDT

re: #55 Eclectic Cyborg

I am worried about two possible outcomes from the Mueller probe:

1. Trump somehow gets exonerated (terrible precedent and the gloating will be unbearable).

2. Mueller nails almost everyone in Trumps inner circle but can’t get enough on Trump himself to bring him down. Trump survives, throws everyone else under the bus and gets reelected in 2020.

If those scenarios have you worried, I think you should probably change your expectations a little.

Robert Mueller is not going to bring down a sitting president, not even this fake one. America is not willing to have a sitting president brought into court for a crime, especially not a white male one. American institutions, American centres of power, won’t allow that to happen. The American President has historically been a revered figure, much more akin to royalty than a democratically elected head of state, and even with this Caligula desecrating it, some people still think of the institution in that way. More importantly, though, this particular president represents the inner soul of millions of Americans, and specifically millions of Americans who have been the most important and privileged members of society for most of the nation’s history. To put him on trial, to ‘bring him down’, would require America’s institutions to consciously tear the hearts out of America’s most cherished and protected constituency. And even now, even with that constituency being so debased, America’s institutions simply are not willing to do that. Republicans won’t allow it. The US media won’t allow it.

The realistic best case scenario involves a weakened president Trump lashing out ineffectually for a couple more years, and hopefully being stopped in his madness from implementing nakedly fascist policies by a Democratic House. The best case scenario after that involves the US media deciding, hopefully, that they stand to gain more by salaciously tearing Trump down than getting him re-elected.