Category: Fuck This Entire Goddamned Administration

From Palmer Report:

Last month I wrote that by the time we got to the hundred day mark in Donald Trump's presidency, if he was unpopular enough, House and Senate Republicans would begin selfishly prioritizing their own reelection prospects over their support of Trump. You can almost never count on Republicans to do the honest thing, but you can nearly always count on them to do the self interested thing.

We're still only sixty-seven days into this debacle, which means that in theory Trump should still have some more time to get his act together. But the funny thing about political scandals – real scandals, the ones that move the ground under everyone's feet – is that they can throw all the timetables out the window.

This brings us to Donald Trump's Signal-gate scandal (it's going to need a better name than that). Half of Trump's top handpicked people, including Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, Mike Waltz, John Ratcliffe, and Tulsi Gabbard, are now embroiled in a scandal that keeps getting worse by the hour. It was bad enough that they all committed a felony just by discussing military attack plans in Signal. They've since all blown the coverup entirely. They can't get their stories straight, it's top headline news every day, and it's just not going away. Trump's refusal to fire anyone over it is making it an even bigger scandal.

Suddenly it no longer appears to matter that Trump is still in his first hundred days. He had his chance to make this scandal go away by firing people, and he missed his window. Now he's at a point where he'll probably end up having to fire people over this in the end, and it still won't make the scandal go away.

How do we know this? Because House and Senate Republicans are now making it very clear (not with their words but with their actions) that they know this scandal is toxic and isn't going away. On Thursday the Republican House forced Trump to pull the plug on his cabinet nomination of Elise Stefanik, for fear the Democrats could win the resulting special election and take control of the House. That's a Republican plus-nine district. But things are just that ugly for Trump and his Republican Party right now.

The Republican Senate is also taking its own first steps toward insulating itself from Trump's Signal-gate implosion. The Republican Chair and the Democratic Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee have jointly asked the Department of Defense Inspector General to investigate this scandal. We know that Trump and Hegseth aren't going to allow the DOD to investigate this. But this letter is the Senate's precursor to launching its own investigation into the matter, likely complete with public hearings where all of these Trump buffoons will have to testify (or make the headlines even worse for themselves by fighting the subpoenas in court).

We all know that the Republican House and Senate won't go one inch further in this direction than they think is necessary to protect their own reelection prospects. But they are indeed going in this direction. As has been said many times, ignore their words and instead focus on their actions. House and Senate Republicans are afraid that this Trump scandal will cost them their seats and majorities unless they selfishly do something to distance themselves from it. Whether you trust them or not – and you shouldn't – this does tell you just how damaging and long lasting this scandal is going to be.