President Trump has made clear repeatedly over the last week that he is not only vindicated but wants payback meted out against his political opponents. Susan Collins lamely claimed Trump had learned his lesson by being impeached. Even she had to take that back and say she hoped he had. Numerous press reports from news organizations with strong sourcing inside the White House say that Trump not only feels vindicated and wants payback but feels something like invincible. All the ‘adults in the room’ told him not to do this and not to do that. He did all of it and more and what happened? He’s still President. He’s even reasonably well positioned for reelection. So, he reasons, he was right all along and he can in fact do anything he wants.
Along those lines I want to point out just two things we’ve learned in the last forty-eight hours.
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Exactly 21 years and six days ago, former President Bill Clinton took to the podium in the White House Rose Garden and delivered a stone-faced apology to the American people for “what I said and did.”
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Starting in December of 2004 and into the early months of 2005 TPM turned itself almost exclusively over to a focus on President Bush’s eventually failed effort to partially phase out Social Security and replace it with a system of private investment accounts. This got the attention of a Harvard Law Professor named Elizabeth Warren and her students and alerted them to the potential of online advocacy about key public policy issues affecting ordinary Americans’ lives. Warren and her students reached out to me and this led to our setting up a short-run blog exclusively focused on the federal bankruptcy bill then moving through Congress. Around the time that legislative battle had run its course we were launching TPMCafe. We decided to make that short-term effort permanent with Warren Reports, one of five sections of the original TPMCafe.
In 2005 Warren was far from an unknown figure. She had published widely read books on middle class squeeze and consumer debt issues and her public profile was growing. But she wasn’t an elected politician and I suspect (though obviously I can’t know) had little expectation of becoming one. Certainly she was far less well known than she is today and has been for going on a decade.
So today we’re republishing the posts she wrote for the TPM Bankruptcy Bill Blog (read them here) and Warren Reports (read them here) from mid-2005 through 2008, after which she went into the Obama administration.
If the President’s press secretary is to be believed the President’s post-impeachment ‘victory’ speech today will be a sort of weaponized Festivus, a mix of grievances, complaints and calls for vengeance against his political foes.
Trump's "going to talk about just how horribly he was treated and that may be people should pay for that." pic.twitter.com/8uUIqGbFck
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 6, 2020
It’s hardly surprising, but President Trump just used the National Prayer Breakfast to drag his impeachment foes, pointedly mocking Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) for his declaration of faith from the Senate floor and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
JoinAs we listen to the Senate vote to acquit President Trump, absolutely read these two big exclusives from Josh Kovensky, just published here at TPM. The first on how Trump and crew thought they had a collusion deal with the guy President Zelensky beat, former President Petro Poroshenko. Second, how Trump and Hannity’s plan to knock out impeachment with an exclusive interview was torpedoed by the FBI’s arrest of Parnas and Fruman.
I admit that Mitt Romney surprised me on this. Didn’t expect it. It’s easy to say that this is just a personal decision and it doesn’t matter. I don’t think that’s quite true. Obviously Trump will be acquitted. Almost certainly Romney will be the only Republican who votes to convict the President. But a couple days ago I noted how much Republicans gain by their unanimity. That has a profound, opinion-shaping, normalizing effect.
There’s one line that jumped out at me. Romney said about how history will record his vote that “they will note merely that I was among the senators who determined that what the president did was wrong, grievously wrong.”
A couple months ago I said that I was not surprised that Michael Bloomberg’s blanket television air war had ginned him up low single digit support. It’s sort of sad that a year of campaigning for an accomplished rising star Senator like Cory Booker couldn’t get that traction. But life isn’t fair. Running a lot of ads makes the first few points easy. There’s a decent number of floating voters. But once you get past 3% or 4% and try getting closer to 10% you need to start peeling away people with more fixed views and people who support other candidates. That’s much, much harder.
Well, I was wrong. It hasn’t been that hard.
The RCP average now has Bloomberg at 10.6% support nationally. That’s just a few percentage points behind Elizabeth Warren and rising rapidly.
Political scientist and statistician Andrew Gelman has more on the ‘differential response’ issue we discussed yesterday and whether it accounts for some of President Trump’s recent slope up in the polls.
President Trump will be acquitted today. We can’t talk around that fact.
But that doesn’t mean that the conduct that put him in this pinch in the first place will be swept under the rug. House Judiciary Committee Chair and impeachment manager Jerry Nadler (D-NY) reassured reporters this morning that it is “likely” his committee will issue that subpoena that former National Security Adviser John Bolton has been begging for for weeks.
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