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If Trump can deal with this arithmetic over his tax bill, most of the rest of his program, a radically anti-political correctness series of moderate measures, will flow through after the tax log-jam is broken. If he does not, the battle will move to the mid-term elections next year between the Democratic claim that Trump is ineffectual and reactionary, and his claim that he only needs a few senators to enact his mandate against the crooks of both parties clinging to the official furniture between immersions of their snouts in the public trough. The Democrats have 25 senators up for re-election next year, against only 10 Republicans, and under either scenario, Trump should win, and 30 years of gridlock between the Congress and the White House should end.

The media fiction about a chance of impeaching the president has vanished

At that point, as Lawrence Martin must know, since all politics works this way, everybody scrambles aboard the winning side. As for the claim of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in the 2015 election, even I, inured as I am to this nonsense, could scarcely credit my senses when I saw the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee say on Wednesday that it depended on the Steele dossier. This, some readers may recall, was the origin of the “Golden Shower” — no, not the fixtures in the Trump Tower — the allegation that Trump had orchestrated a group of prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room to urinate on a bed because the Obamas had once slept in it. The dossier was commissioned by a Democratic provider of campaign services, Fusion Inc., and there is increasing evidence that the FBI had a hand in it. Steele himself, an Englishman, has told the U.S. Senate to stuff its summons to appear. The media fiction about a chance of impeaching the president has vanished, except perhaps in Lawrence Martin’s mind, because the Democrats are staring down the barrel of much more serious legal problems than Trump is. Special counsel Robert Mueller is now busier trying to keep FBI witnesses from testifying before Congressional committees, and in shakedowns on people over actions long before there was any Trump campaign, than in anything near the president.

What will happen, in Mr. Lincoln’s phrase, will be “less fundamental and astounding” than Lawrence foresees. Trump will complete his ambitious takeover of the Republicans, enact most of his program; American decline will stop, and the squalor and grandeur of American politics will continue as it has since the only time a major U.S. political party (the Whigs) actually vanished, 165 years ago.

National Post

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