Might Trump Survive a Blue Wave?
Published at 07:04 on 15 June 2018
The answer, I think, is yes. He might, if he follows exactly the right path after one happens.
At this point, one would naturally be tempted to say that therefore there’s no chance he could survive, because he utterly lacks the sort of discipline necessary to stay on any such path. In this case, however, I think his proclivities may just well allow him to naturally seek out and follow one.
Trump, after all, as Michael Moore once said, has no political ideology per se. Trump’s ideology is Donald J. Trump. His stated positions definitely do tilt to the right, but they are in fact all over the map. Trump aligns quite well with Democrat positions when it comes to health care (he’s come out in the past for single payer), public-works spending (strongly in favor of more of it), and social security (strongly supports the existing system).*
Of course, he’s thrown all those under the bus since he reached office. That merely goes back to what I stated at the start of the previous paragraph: overall, he has no real political ideology per se. He will do whatever he thinks most benefits him personally at the moment. It’s been easier for him to cow most of the rest of the GOP into following him if he forgets about health care and infrastructure spending, so that’s what he’s done.
His behavior is based, at all times, on the expedience of the moment, nothing more. That’s why most career national-security types have the willies about him being likely to give away the store to North Korea.
That also means this particular leopard may just well attempt to change his spots if faced with a blue wave. He may suddenly remember his old pronouncements on health care, infrastructure, and Social Security. Why not, particularly when more government spending always offers more opportunities for his corrupt business empire to profit from same?
If that happens, the majority of Democrats may well be motivated to go along with it. The Democratic Party is far less the party of clean and honest government than many imagine it to be. In fact, some of the most corrupt state and municipal governments over the decades have just happened to be Democratic Party machine governments. Local and state government is of course one of the prime sources for politicians who later move up and on to the Federal one. This means there is an ample stock of Democratic politicians with past prior experience of tolerating corruption already in place and ready to tolerate more.
That’s short-term thinking, of course, and makes Trump far more likely to politically survive his first term and be reelected to a second, which is not in the Democrats’ best interests. All political parties and movements want to take as many offices as they can, and the presidency is the plum of all offices.
However, the Democrats have hardly been immune to short-term thinking. I remember back in the middle of the Obama Era trying to talk some sense into a friend who is very intelligent, trying to point out that Obama’s embrace of the powers of an imperial presidency was dangerous.
He’d have none of it—obviously, demographics were destiny and there was a permanent Democratic majority, as everyone knew. Therefore there was approximately zero chance of the opposition getting power any time soon, and moreover obviously his own side could always be trusted not to abuse power badly. All that also made Harry Reid’s “nuclear senate” and the resulting loss of checks and balances there a non-concern.
So, both prerequisites are satisfied. The president has the lack of ideological commitment, and his erstwhile opposition has the lack of long-term thinking, to enable precisely the sort of ideological spot-changing that leopard Trump must attempt in order to have a chance at survival. It just might happen.
* This is less of a surprise than it might seem once you keep in mind the essentially fascist nature of Trumpism, because it actually fits perfectly with the pattern of fascism. Hitler and Mussolini advocated infrastructure and social spending, too. Fascism is not conservatism. It is a unique and distinct right-wing ideology that exists apart from (and historically often in opposition to) conservatism.