Just a few weeks ago, 75 million people thought the country would be better off with four more years of this.
Some have changed their minds.
All many of you want to know right now is if the president will serve out his term.
It seems doubtful that the Congress would gear up to produce an impeachment and conviction soon enough — or ever — to matter.
If you are looking to the 25th Amendment, ask yourself:
1. Would Mike Pence go along with it?
2. Do half the names on this list jump out at you as folks who would vote to remove Donald Trump?
(Who could make it plausible through leading the effort? Chao, Pompeo, Scalia, Azur, Lighthizer.)
As a snapshot in time Thursday morning, here are the main reasons to think that circumstances have fundamentally changed for Mr. Trump and that he could be gone sooner than 1/20:
* There have been some top loyalists who have already resigned from the government and more are expected. The latest from Politico here.
* The president has picked a fight with top Pence aide Mark Short, who is one of the few people in the government whose combined fearlessness, intelligence, and mastery of the machinery of government could actually be the catalyst for change.
* This tweet thread from the president’s own former top communications aide:
* Much of the business community would like him gone, per CNBC.
* He has semi-lost Hugh Hewitt:
If [the president] did not foresee what the people in the outer fringes of his support were capable of, he ought to have seen it. As it unfolded, he ought to have been quick to condemn it. And he should have done so without any sort of mention of his own grievances.
His subsequent evening tweet (since taken down by Twitter) bordered on incomprehensible indifference to the mayhem of the day and the death that is a consequence of the violence. He ought to be filled with remorse.
* The on-the-record quotes are likely to continue along these lines:
House GOP Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who has carefully crafted her criticism of Trump over the past year, did not mince words: “There is no question that the president formed the mob, the president incited the mob, the president addressed the mob. He lit the flame,” Cheney said on Fox News, speaking from a secure location after being evacuated.
“Donald Trump caused this insurrection with lies and conspiracy theories about the election being rigged against him,” said Scott Jennings, a former aide to President George W. Bush who is close to the Trump White House. “The election was not stolen but this madness was fomented by the president and his top advisers.”
* The background quotes are likely to continue along these lines:
One administration official described Trump’s behavior Wednesday as that of “a total monster,” while another said the situation was “insane” and “beyond the pale.”
* Republican elites are PO’ed about the president’s role in losing the Georgia Senate seats and their majority.
* Elites of all sorts are genuinely concerned about any number of domestic and national security situations around which they are not comfortable with the president in charge.
* Trump without access to Twitter is not the same person, substantively or symbolically, as he was before.
* More of these images will be laid at his door:
* This will not be seen as enough for enough people, and it is hard to see him going further:
More soon on Georgia and what Senate control means to a Biden presidency, the expected Garland nomination, the catastrophic failure to secure the Capitol, the pandemic, and other aspects of our shared futures.
For now, let’s focus on how America can get the president under control or out of the way.
There can’t be any more days like Wednesday.
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