POLITICO
Can Donald Trump Survive ‘Virtual Impeachment’?
Stripped of his most powerful social media weapons, the president faces an existential crisis at a moment of maximum peril.
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POLITICO Magazine.
On the defining day of his tempestuous reign, Donald Trump, typically so incorrigibly noisy, was rendered all but muzzled.
Due to Wednesday’s shameful, world-watched putsch at the Capitol, Twitter and Facebook locked the outgoing president’s powerful accounts, stripping him of some of his most important weaponry and leading to a nearly unprecedented day-long stretch of silence. For the first time in his tweet-driven presidency, Trump wasn’t able to employ his preferred method of communication to stoke or incite supporters. He wasn’t able to launch at leaders of his party his usual mob-boss loyalty tests. And he wasn’t able to distract and divert and defend himself in the telltale ways to which Americans have grown so accustomed.
Twenty-eight days before Inauguration Day, a presidency like no other has morphed into a transition like no other.
President Donald Trump still insists he won the Nov. 3 election, and has been meeting with conspiracy theorists and other allies promoting unrealistic and in some cases seditious ideas aimed at overturning the results. On Wednesday, he vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act â which had passed the House and Senate with veto-proof majorities. Yesterday, after announcing 20 pardons and commutations, he upended a bipartisan congressional agreement on pandemic relief payments, demanding in a tweeted video that they be raised from $600 a person to $2,000.
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religious right wing white evangelicals? cult is a big word. actually only four letters, but it is a heavy word. but i think that what he taps into with people is almost everybody, me included, but i wouldn t speak for you, there s like a jealous part of you, a part of you that s angry that maybe isn t your best part. a negative part. he like taps into that, harnesses it, recognizes it, says, i m one of you. yeah. he uses that royal we. you know, we don t feel like we ve been impeached, do we? we ve been impeached. he uses that. and then people feel complicit. that s right. and they have to save him because that s all he cares about. they ve drunk the kool aid and have to fess up and then can t get out of it. gwenda blair, really appreciate you being here to be our trump whisperer of the day. up next, how impeachment plays a role in the 2020 race.
even if they re his own cabinet member. the other day. he s constantly undercutting what people say. so whatever cohen says, he s going to point to him as a liar. we know of course trump s track record for lying is remarkably long. but he ll do that. and he ll do his best to talk about what he s doing in north korea to get that to get the headline, to have that to be what people are paying attention to. that to be the big news. and to have cohen come across as a has-been reject, doesn t have his law license anymore. those things will all come up too. the cohen testimony starts tomorrow morning. we ll take it live here at cnn and we ll talk about it through the day. gwenda blair, thank you very much. appreciate having your voice through all of this. thank you. coming up next president trump, as we mentioned, arrives in vietnam for this critical second summit with kim jong un. we will take you live to hanoi with new details we have learned about the relationship between these two l
sims who just wrote a tell-all book wrote we got these schedules e-mailed to us every morning. consider the sheer amount of time and effort it would take to compile two months worth of schedules. this was premeditated murder. i m joined by jonathan lemire and gwenda blair. why is this president so incapable of having loyalty upward toward him that they at least wouldn t try to openly sabotage him, which is what this leak does? back at trump tower when he was a real estate developer from the whole time forward, his m.o. was to have people at each other s throats. his throat? each other s throats, to make them feel completely uncertain about their jobs, whether they were going to have them, to avoid any kind of horizontal loyalty and have them have to be loyal to him. but in the white house there s no loyalty at all because they