Donald Trump promised that, if elected president, he would “drain the swamp.” The politicians and Beltway pundits threatened by shaking up their cozy little status quo have become more and more unhinged.
Since his inauguration, the establishment has fought Trump every inch of the way. But it’s “conservative” columnist Kathleen Parker who may have won the award for the single craziest column written by the anti-Trump movement so far.
President Trump will be impeached, or declare martial law, or be declared mentally ill within the next two years, she warns.
In a bizarre column for The Washington Post, Parker described what she saw as “Trump’s two-year presidency.”
President Trump is so incompetent, as far as she’s concerned, that Democrats will win in a “tsunami” election in 2018, taking back “House and Senate.”
About “30 seconds” later, they’ll begin impeachment hearings, she writes (and hopes).
“That is, assuming Trump hasn’t already been shown the exit,” Parker writes. “Or that he hasn’t declared martial law.”
Parker actually believes that the president has “effectively silenced dissent” by describing false media stories as “fake news,” and all of America’s freedoms are dangling by a thread.
In Parker’s fantasy-land, there is one other option for Trump being thrown out the White House window: He could be declared mentally unfit for office.
Trump, Parker writes, is “not-quite-right.”
That’s why “wiser minds added Section 4 to the 25th Amendment, which removes the president if a majority of the Cabinet and the vice president think it necessary.”
Just like the old Soviet Union, Parker wants to have her political opponents declared enemies of the state and sent off to a mental hospital. But when reading Parker’s columns, one wonders who really needs therapy.
Her extreme hatred of the president, real conservatives, and middle America in general is the only reason Parker’s “conservative” ramblings get top billing in a liberal paper like The Washington Post.
After the election, she said that the members of the Electoral College should vote against Trump, even though he won the election.
She called the Tea Party “foolish,” “naive,” and said its “heated rhetoric” posed a “danger” to American safety. Then she said that internet journalism – sites like The Horn News – are “sort of like terrorism.”
She bragged to her tiny audience during her run as a CNN co-host that she “led” the charge against Sarah Palin in 2008. The governor of Alaska was “out of her league” and should quit the race, she said.
But she’s always tried to keep her rich and powerful friends in power.
She threw her support behind a third party movement called “No Labels,” which would have been well to the left of the Republicans but only slightly to Obama’s right. It was run by liberal Republicans and Washington functionaries who didn’t want the Tea Party to take over the GOP.
Of course, Parker isn’t the only essayist dreaming up Trump’s impeachment or removal from office.
“I still have trouble seeing how the Trump administration survives a full term,” David Brooks, the New York Times’ “conservative,” wrote on Friday. Among his complaints, he adds, “There is no longer a single media establishment that shapes how the country sees the president.”
These Establishment writers have support from high-powered Republican politicians eager to knife the president in the back – and keep the swamp full.
E.J. Dionne revealed that “John McCain and Lindsey Graham seem to know it is only a matter of time before the GOP will have to confront Trump’s unfitness.”
Sen. Graham of South Carolina – who ran against Trump for president and ranked one percent in the polls – called for a “special investigation” into Trump’s ties with Russia, because “the accusations regarding the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia are creating a cloud over the White House.”
Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker may be on board with these efforts, as well.
The odds for Trump to be impeached are about even, 11-10 according to the British betting firm Ladbrokes. (Their Irish competitors, Paddy Power, place the odds at 4-to-1.)
He’ll have no support from the establishment, whether it goes by the name “Republican” or “Democrat.”
He’ll only have you, the American voter.
Of course, that’s all he’s needed in the past.
— The Horn editorial team