By Buck Sexton
President Donald Trump has been embattled every day since his 2016 election win.
There was never a honeymoon period when the media pretended to give him a chance. The Democrats made no head fake at bipartisan unity. From the beginning, Trump has had to govern while under a withering assault from the political establishment, the mainstream media, and every apparatus and institution of the Left.
Add to this, as we recently found out, a certain Twitter account operating under the name “Pierre Delecto”…
There was never a honeymoon period when the media pretended to give him a chance.
In case you missed it last month, the Internet went wild with the revelation that Mitt Romney – former 2012 GOP presidential candidate and current senator from Utah – had been lurking under the pseudonym Pierre Delecto on Twitter in order to anonymously engage in online political discussion without anyone knowing who he was.
It’s fair to question the wisdom of a man worth hundreds of millions of dollars with national name recognition spending his time taking anonymous shots at political opponents online from an account with mere hundreds of followers. The real Mitt Romney has 2 million followers on his verified Twitter account. So what’s with hiding behind a sock puppet social media account that sounds like it’s run by a Parisian mime?
It’s not rational… But Trump has that effect on people. Romney is a Republican who really, really doesn’t like the president. That alone may be the reason for his strange habit of engaging with a mere handful of strangers online to generally bash Trump and pump up his own name. And he’s not alone in this Trump derangement…
Last month also saw the return of the anonymous “Trump resistance” op-ed writer. Remember that fiasco? It all started with a column in the New York Times in the summer of 2018 about those senior officials who, like its author, actively thwart the president’s will.
Well, that guy (or is it a gal?) is back in the headlines, and apparently is about to drop a tell-all book on just how dysfunctional the Trump White House really is… (What could be worse than what has already been written? I guess we’ll see.)
There are further rumblings reported in multiple outlets – so far, all secondhand and anonymous – that some Republicans in Congress are just fed up with following behind the Trump parade bearing a shovel and a wastebasket. Sure, the polls show that Republican support for Trump is at 95%. But that’s among voters. It’s Congress running the impeachment show, and there is a real effort underway to get some GOP members to defect against Trump.
Is that really something the president should worry about?
Up to this point, the conventional wisdom inside the Beltway has been that Trump could very well be impeached, but it would be an entirely party-line partisan vote in the House of Representatives. The Senate – where Republicans hold a narrow majority – is even safe ground for Trump, as a two-thirds majority would be needed to remove the president from office after a House vote to impeach. It has been considered largely unthinkable that any GOP senators would make common cause with the Democrats to remove a sitting Republican president.
However, there’s a pressure campaign underway right now to change that. Many of the biggest newspapers and cable news channels are breathlessly reporting on the willingness of unnamed Republicans to turn on Trump. It all depends on what Congress learns about “Ukrainegate,” we’re told.
With each passing day, there are more “revelations” of selectively leaked information from the impeachment inquiry that U.S. Representative Adam Schiff is leading.
Supposedly damning information about the alleged “quid pro quo” of Trump’s Ukraine policy is being released in pieces to cause maximum damage to the president.
The optics, as they say inside the Beltway, are not good.
So could the Republican party turn on President Trump in an election year because of the Ukraine investigation debacle?
Almost certainly not, unless a true bombshell drops that would actually merit impeachment and removal from office. Despite what the media is saying, we are a world away from that right now.
It wouldn’t take many anti-Trump Republicans to do real damage to the president’s reelection prospects… And there are plenty of them.
But it wouldn’t take many anti-Trump Republicans to do real damage to the president’s reelection prospects… And there are plenty of them. They may not go on record as supporting Democrats during the impeachment vote – or maybe they will.
Either way, some Republicans who miss the old order of things will be working against Trump out in public and behind the scenes. Just ask Romney.
Fifth columnist “Never Trumpers” will have plenty of opportunities to take their revenge against Trump between now, Trump’s looming impeachment, and Election Day. There’s plenty of reason to believe they will.
Perhaps Pierre Delecto will have the last laugh after all…
Buck Sexton is host of the nationally syndicated talk radio program, The Buck Sexton Show, heard more than 100 stations across the country. He’s also a former CIA and NYC police department intelligence officer.
