Maverick's World

This Immigration/Separation Craziness - what is most likely going on.

After reading Trump's latest tweet storm and Melania's bizarre visit to Texas, I think I finally have a bead on what may really be going on with this immigration stuff.

Let's briefly recap where we are right now. The 2018 election is coming up, and the GOP wants to make sure that it make a crap ton of money regardless IMHO of whether it actually wins. This 2018 election is basically a shakedown of all the traditional GOP voters. The GOP boomer brass knows the pickings will be slim but in order to ensure legal bulwarks against all the criminal stuff they have pulled, they *have* to squeeze as much juice as possible out of their own voters.

The immigration policy shift - i.e. separating kids from parents at the borders - was a calculated move towards that end. It was designed to shore up faltering support in its base while ensuring that the GOP still looked like it was a competent group of people. For this stunt to work - the whole racket had to have an "off" switch something that would reset the problem - i.e. re-unite the parents and the kids.

But this appears to be where everything has fallen apart. Between the incompetence of the DHS (if I am reading Secy Nielsen's words correctly), and Donald Trump's own agenda's the reset/off switch is completely broken. And the GOP is now taking massive hits for a poorly implemented policy.

No one in their right mind would want illegal immigration but there are sensible ways of implementing a policy that protects the interests of all human beings involved. The way this shit show has been run - there are simply no winners here... that is apart from Trump himself.

It appears that while the GOP was scheming up ways to shakedown its constituents in 2018, the Trump was trying to find ways of protecting himself from the OSC Mueller after the 2018 elections.

Trump's approach appears to have been simple, he basically created a situation where the GOP's traditional funding sources would run for the hills due to the complete mishandling of the separations issue. The objective here was to asymmetrically suppress the GOP's independent sources of funding and to make it more dependent on him personally for funds.

This part is critical if Trump is to survive in power till 2020 and stay out of jail beyond that.

If the GOP wins in 2018, they will have no need of him in 2020. They might seek to impeach him in order to secure 2020. Russia might find a different engagement point inside the GOP - all sorts of stuff could go on. After the impeachment the GOP might try to convict Trump - who knows.

If the GOP loses badly in 2018, unless the GOP lays down the tracks (like McConnell did during Obama years) to save Trump - Democrats will impeach & convict Trump before 2020.

So in either scenario having the GOP hogtied in Trump's basement in a gimp suit is the only option that works for Trump.

Unfortunately I don't think that works for the GOP.

So I am not sure where this will lead us going forward. I did not see this part coming. I knew that the GOP and Trump would have a show-down after 2018 - but I thought they would remain aligned on the idea of looting their supporters.

This is a different dynamic than what I had anticipated.

posted by maverick @ 4:54 AM