Watching the Downfall of a Presidency in Real Ti

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Watching the Downfall of a Presidency in Real Time - By Frank Rich

There will be no single smoking gun that will bring down this White House. It will be death by firing squad — or perhaps a sequence of firing squads — as the whole story inexorably pours out of the administration’s smoldering ruins.

This week’s bombshell has the feel of gallows humor. Trump Jr.’s panicked release of the self-incriminating emails is tantamount to picking up a loaded gun and shooting himself in the head.

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For all we know, the released email chain may be only a small and relatively minor part of a much larger criminal web that stretches from Donald Trump’s tax returns to his and the Kushner family’s respective real-estate dealings in Russia and beyond.

The authorities who matter — the investigators at the special counsel’s office and the FBI — are not telling us what they are up to. They may already know — or may soon know — of evidence far more incriminating than the revelations of the past 72 hours.


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Q: Republicans in Congress have been slow to respond to this story, if they’ve commented at all. Is silence an effective strategy?


Rich: It’s not a strategy. It’s desperation. Much like their predecessors in the Nixon era, they keep hoping somehow it will all go away so they can get back to business as usual.

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After all, it was less than a month ago that David Brooks, writing in the Times, reassured them that there was “little evidence” of “any actual collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and the Russians” and that “most voters don’t really care” anyway.

Prominent Republicans continued to use this script after the release of the Trump Jr. emails, with Orrin Hatch calling the story “overblown,” Peter King characterizing the campaign-hierarchy meeting with the Kremlin-connected lawyer as “a one-off, inadvertent mistake,” and Bob Corker dismissing the whole affair as “politics.”


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The closer we get to the 2018 midterms, the faster Republicans in the House — and some of those up for reelection in the Senate — will scramble for the lifeboats. But by the time they wake up and see the looming iceberg, it may be too late to save their careers.

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For all of us, a little perspective is in order. Little Donald is not the story here any more than G. Gordon Liddy and those third-rate burglars were the story in Watergate.

We are likely to reach a point when this week’s firestorm will be remembered mainly as a warm-up for conflagrations yet to come

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MORE:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/...-time.html

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