As I write this, Jeff Sessions still has a job as America’s attorney general, though for all I know, he could be gone by the time you read this.
You can’t label Sessions as some kind of globalist, malcontent, swampy NeverTrumper. He’s an anti-establishment immigration hard-liner who seems to have signed on with Trump’s presidential bid because he believed that Donald Trump was the one candidate who would build The Wall to protect America’s southern border and put a stop to illegal immigration.
Now Sessions’ career is in tatters and, as Ann Coulter points out every day, the total number of Wall Miles built since Trump’s inauguration stands at a nice, round zero. Which is where it’s going to stay. Because The Wall was just another grift, like Trump University. (I’ve been saying for 18 months that the problem with Trump wasn’t that he wanted to build The Wall—the problem was that it was an obvious scam and there was almost no chance he’d do it. The undertaking would simply require too much political capital and too prolonged an effort.)
So with Sessions hanging on to his job by his fingernails, can we lay down some markers on whether or not it would be bad for Trump to fire Bob Mueller?
Last week my Twitter buddy Allahpundit asked what the polling split would be on the subject of Trump getting rid of Sessions and/or Mueller. My guess was that, if you had polled this question three weeks ago, Republicans would have broken somewhere around 80-20 against.
But now that Trump is publicly flirting with the idea, I’d guess that it’s closer to 50-50. And if Trump were to pull the trigger tomorrow, I’d bet that by Monday it would be 70-30 in favor of the proposition.
This is what I mean when I say that Trumpism corrupts.
Look, I get it. It starts out with your average Republican thinking that Trump will give them The Wall and kill Obamacare and put America First. But then they see how much liberals hate him, and that becomes Trump’s raison d’être. And now we’re at the point where it’s obvious to everyone including Ann Coulter and Mickey Kaus that there ain’t gonna be no Wall. And Obamacare probably survives, because Trump has no actual interest in crafting policy or moving legislation.
And what started out as a side benefit—look how much liberals and the media and the liberal media all hate him!—becomes his primary function.
At some point Republicans are going to have to ask themselves: Is that enough?
I mean, sure, you can always judge a man by his enemies. But on the other hand, there’s going to be a bill for all of this. We’re already paying part of it in opportunity cost. Republicans could have had Ted Cruz or Jeb! or Rubio or Gingrich or someone interested in governing as president. And one of those figures might have had the skill and willpower to maneuver the GOP caucus into repealing Obamacare whether they liked it or not.
This sort of herding can be done, by the way. This Republican Congress isn’t uniquely intransigent. Legislators never want to spend political capital. They hoard it. Remember: The Democrats were desperate not to pass the ACA. They knew it would hurt them. But Obama figured out a way to make them to walk the plank for the bill.
Any Republican president who can’t exercise political power in the same way is a failure, pure and simple. When you have unified control of the government, the entire definition of the executive job is “forcing your side to spend political capital in smart ways with long-term payoffs.”
So the GOP is already paying part of the bill for Trump in all of the things that aren’t getting done. But there may be more costs coming down the road in the form of the midterm elections.
Now, maybe that bill won’t be so high. The labor market is tightening. The economy looks pretty good. Illegal immigration is trending down. On the other hand, we’re only seven months into this clown show and we’re already at the point where we’re openly wondering if Trump will stage his very own Saturday Night Massacre.
