From the moment Trump set foot in the White House the mantra of much of the media, many Democrats, and Trump loathers of all stripes, is that he likely will not finish his term. He will, take your pick: be impeached, indicted, resign under pressure and in disgrace, get so fed up with the attacks, infighting and backbiting, he’ll call it quits, or bail out due to health problems. This is the third year of his administration and every one of these predictions has proven to be nothing more than a hope, prayer, fantasy and delusion.
Trump will serve out his term, and maybe a second one. Let’s go down the checklist of reasons why.
The Mueller investigation and report. There will be nothing in the report that will directly implicate Trump in collusion with Russian operatives to sabotage the 2020 presidential election. There will be nothing in the report that will directly finger-point him for obstruction of justice or any other illegal activity directly connected with the election. The report will detail much circumstantial evidence of tampering and collusion and various types of wrongdoing. But the finger point will be at Trump associates for their roles in criminal activities. There will be no hard evidence that Trump was directly involved.
If Attorney General William Barr has his way, the report the public and House Democrats see will be butchered, exorcised and redacted. So, even if there is anything there to suggest direct Trump involvement in criminal wrongdoing, it will be excised.
Impeachment. This was a pipe dream from day one. The bar is simply too high. Even if the plausible case can be made that Trump committed an offense that meets the fuzzy Constitutional standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” House Democratic leaders, mainly Nancy Pelosi have dropped long and loud hints that an impeachment move is not going to happen. In part because it’s simply too politically risky and could backfire on the Democrats, and in any event the GOP controlled Senate would instantly kill it. The other part is because it’s just an empty political exercise.
His popularity. Much has been made that Trump’s popularity consistently hovers under 50 percent and that his bread and butter base of white, male, rural, blue collar, less educated voters are way too narrow for him to win again. However, it’s not his popularity number or his base’s alleged small numbers. It’s where those numbers are.
They are in the five states, Michigan, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that will again determine who sits in the Oval Office. He banks on them to deliver for him in 2020.Those five states either have GOP governors or GOP controlled legislatures, or a strong GOP legislative bloc.
The Democratic presidential contenders. They all will handily win California, New York, and the handful of other lockdown Democratic states. This again could pose the same conundrum that it did for Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. They won the popular vote, but still were out in the cold when it came to the White House. The Electoral College insures that. The only Democratic presidential contender who can either compete with Trump for his crucial demographic or at best neutralize him with them will likely be a centrist, moderate, Democrat from a heartland type state.
The economy. Trump’s mantra will continue to be that he put America back to work. It’s a lie. But the brutal reality is that when there’s perceived economic good times, the man who sits in the White House benefits. Presidential election history shows that it’s still pretty much the economy that drives voter perceptions of whether a sitting president deserves to remain sitting in the White House or not.
Trump will have a united, nasty, manipulative, pit bull attack, GOP behind him, a king’s ransom campaign war chest, and the continued slavish infatuation of the mass media with any and every silly, insipid, inflammatory tweet and crack from and by him. He’ll again have millions in free air time that could overwhelm anything the Democrats can counter with.
This is not to say that Trump is a shoo-in for another White House go-round. Much can happen in the months in the run-up to November 2020. It is to say, though, that Trump for now at least isn’t going anywhere this term, and maybe another.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst.
