It's not just Trump. The conservative movement has been actively discrediting all sources of information but themselves for many years.
During the election, some of the conservative opinionators (bloggers, radio, etc.) who opposed Trump observed that they had no way to credibly contradict Trump in the eyes of their readers, as they had delegitimatized all other sources of information.
It's not just the Republicans that are eager to cut scientists off from the media and the public. The Conservative party in Canada did exactly the same thing, much to the dismay of scientists and the public: http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/when-science-goes-silent/
There are ways to get rid of him, but are we sure the vice president would be better?
As it stands now all the Democrats and many of the republicans in the House and Senate will be against anything he does. He has uphill battles to win to make lasting changes.
I confess that I find Pence very scary as well, but he's not obviously mentally ill. [1]
I assume the good old GOP will throw Trump under a bus when he has outlived his usefulness. However, as a non-American, I don't have a good understanding of how the House and Senate actually work.
The US is basically under 1 party rule at the moment.
The minority party has virtually no power to initiate action or legislation, and very little power to block actions by the majority party.
The right wing base of the Republican party just picked Trump over all the standard establishment candidates they put forward, so the establishment leaders in Washington are not going to want to risk alienating their voters in order to take down Trump.
The house has to vote to impeach anyone in the Executive branch, such as the president. The act of impeachment is not "firing them", but the trial to determine if they are guilty and need to be removed or not. The senate then listens to the case and votes with a simply yay or nay on if they are guilty or not.
Realistically, this means you'll need support from both the Senate AND House of Representatives to impeach a sitting president. It would also meant they'd likely not win the re-election in four years and as a result would be somewhat political suicide.
Since the Republicans control both the house and senate majorities along with the president... They're unlikely to do anything other than sit back eating popcorn while Trump wrecks things.
Well, don't shoot the messenger here, I'm going to be honest...
A lot of this probably boils down to partisanship. Pence is as generic a Republican as you can get. He'll make transsexuals use the wrong bathrooms, he'll roll back abortion protections, he'll crack down on marijuana legalization, he'll push military conflicts overseas, etc. But he'll be a boring corporate Republican all the while.
Trump, on the other hand, is a manbaby who is psychologically incapable of accepting that he doesn't have the yugest, the biggliest, the greatestest everything. If Obama's inauguration was more attended, he'll send the press secretary out to attack the press. If Obama had a cool cake, he'll have an identical one (even if it's made of Styrofoam). If you haven't picked this up from his nightly rants on Twitter, the man is psychologically incapable of letting anything go. He's not even capable of letting an insult from a D-list celebrity go.
And that's even before we get into the whole "with every moment in office he's violating the Emoluments Clause" thing. He honestly, legitimately, doesn't give a rat's ass about rule of law, as long as he wins, and gets to face a roaring crowd. And the truth is Republicans are 100% ideologically driven right now and will not do anything to police their own if it means they win. Frankly at this point I wouldn't be surprised if he just blatantly violated the law however he felt and then pardoned himself on the way out of office (or Pence does). Our system is not built to handle a leader who literally doesn't feel shame in this fashion, especially with the backing of a party that doesn't either.
Honestly it would be better for the nation if Trump was cut loose. At this point, it's a perfectly legitimate question what happens if he comes into real conflict with another world leader. That kind of baby isn't going to back down, he's going to throw a tantrum, and the US can throw a hell of a tantrum when it comes down to it. Literally the Navy alone could beat every single other military power on Earth combined, even before we bring nuclear weapons into it.
Pence will be generic evil dude, and he will be a lot more successful at pushing his agenda, all of which I disagree with. So in a purely partisan sense, it's better to have Trump in office. But Trump is fucking nuts, so in terms of what's better for the country I have to say Pence.
The question is when Republican congresspeople are going to realize that Trump is a millstone around their necks in many respects. I think many of them do already, but the problem is that Trump wields immense populist favor right now - much more than they do. Republicans overall are a minority, and they are only getting deeper into that hole, but Trump represents a majority of Republican voters and he's only going to keep pushing ahead.
Sadly, we seem to have slipped into the Actual Fascist Timeline.
Well-written and insightful. But I think it overlooks one important fact:
> The question is when Republican congresspeople are going to realize that Trump is a millstone around their necks in many respects
The GOP has been pursuing this ideological war for at least 16 years, but probably going back to Gingrich or longer. Trump didn't come out of nowhere; the GOP spend all that time laying the groundwork.
He's not a millstone, he's just another step along the same path for them.
He may eventually be a millstone, but right now he's a vehicle. They're on the mechanical bull.
The focus of many congressional Republicans is narrow. This is owing primarily to the specificity of their remit from heavily gerrymandered districts, and the undisguised requirements of the small but extremely wealthy cohort that directly and indirectly funds their presence in office.
Trump himself is a non-ideological wildcard with no coherent governance or policy desires. Had the cards fallen only slightly differently, he could have won the Presidency as a loose-canon Democrat and spent the last few days initiating policies completely opposite those we've seen so far. He would enjoy the squirming of frustrated Republicans under the heel of his boot just as much as he's now enjoying the garment rending on the Democratic side.
But things worked out as they did, and he found his emotional affinity and path to power with the Republican base. They became the vehicle for the satisfaction of his peculiar needs, and now that he's in power, he can binge on victory scenarios queued up for him by his GOP courtiers. Does anyone really think Donald Trump has some deep ideological need to implement the "Global Gag Order", something he very likely never heard of before running?
As long as the GOP can stay on the bull, they'll keep squeezing off shots at their personal targets and not worrying about the rest unless something goes terribly, horribly wrong. They can check longstanding empty boxes, and Trump won't care, since the dance itself satisfies him.
> Had the cards fallen only slightly differently, he could have won the Presidency as a loose-canon Democrat
I agree that he is non-ideological. IMHO he does have some political ideas that meet his business needs, for example being strongly pro-big business, anti-tax, and anti-regulation. I'm not sure how he would square that with the Dems, but he I agree that he doesn't care about GOP ideology.
My point in the GP was that the GOP has been following this course since 2000, 1994, or longer; they started a populist fire that now burns way out of control. The Democrats have not; there is no way they would support him simply for competency and rationality reasons, much less policy.
> Does anyone really think Donald Trump has some deep ideological need to implement the "Global Gag Order", something he very likely never heard of before running?
Certainly he has a strong reaction to people criticizing or disagreeing with him; he wouldn't tolerate that from within the executive branch.
> there is no way they would support him simply for competency and rationality reasons
It's disappointing, to say the least, that this turns out to be untrue for the Republicans. The staid, rational, methodical, conservative Republicans are gone. The nihilists and paperclip maximizers have moved in.
>> the "Global Gag Order"
> Certainly he has a strong reaction to people criticizing or disagreeing with him; he wouldn't tolerate that from within the executive branch.
Definitely, and it's his biggest exposed lever. But while "global gag order" colloquially describes what he's doing right now (silencing workers, ordering facts, data, inconvenient policy "disappeared"), "Global Gag Order" is actually a specific thing: a policy that projects the GOP's abortion stance onto the rest of the world's NGOs by conditioning the receipt of $9.5 Billion in aid on policy alignment.
Trump was a longtime pro-choice New York Democrat with no religious or moral framework. There's no way he cares about this; nor does he care enough to not sign it, as it doesn't affect him. He's indifferent, a blank page on which his outer circle of attendants, each the honed tip of the sharpest ideological spears, can write policy that Trump will sign with a "whatever" and a dour glare.
Even more dangerous, once signed, he integrates these policies as his own -- because he now has skin in the game. If his name is on a policy, he'll relentlessly hammer it home. Writ large, this means the Trumpist policy stance will be a bag of the loudest and most radical initiatives -- for him, a set of weak opinions strongly held. Virulently held, as we see from his redoubling on the voter fraud conspiracy theory and crowd size hobbyhorse.
That is absolutely required if he is to lie with impunity, and Donald Trump has been a pathological liar for years.
It's sad to see the USA in this state, but it's what a sufficient number of citizens voted for....