McConnell vs Trump

Mitch McConnell admitted that Donald Trump is responsible for the Capitol Riot. Why did he vote to acquit? Because McConnell made a deal with Trump: if you don’t declassify everything and don’t pardon Edward Snowden, then the Senate will acquit you. It was a tit-for-tat exchange. McConnell very reluctantly held up his end of the bargain. Trump no longer has the authority to declassify anything, but he likely remembers something particularly juicy from an intelligence briefing.

If Trump doesn’t get charged or arrested this year, it will likely be due to greymail: the act of blackmailing the government. Greymail is when a person threatens to release classified intel to the public if he is prosecuted for a crime. It’s also possible that a greymailer might still cause so much problems for a government that they try to find a way to deal with them anyway. On the other hand, Trump has very little credibility with most Americans. If he were to say “Oh by the way, here is a picture of an artifact found in orbit around Earth that definitely NOT created by humans,” most people will assume that the picture is fake. Suffice to say, if you don’t have a security clearance, you don’t know what Trump knows and what he might try to say or do. He might make something up. He might give out actual intel and the government will just say that this crazy old dude made it all up.

But now Trump and McConnell are engaged in a great political pissing contest. This goes to show that if you try to strattle the fence to keep Trump supporters happy, they’re still going to turn on you. They demand that you be as committed to Individual One as they are. If you won’t drink their Kool-Aid, don’t go to their party.