The Impeach-O-Meter is a wildly subjective and speculative daily estimate of the likelihood that Donald Trump leaves office before his term ends, whether by being impeached (and convicted) or by resigning under threat of same.
Sometimes the Trump administration’s combination of careening ineptitude and confident self-promotion is straightforwardly funny, like when Anthony Scaramucci was hired to great fanfare as White House communications director only to be fired ten days later after using the phrase “suck my own cock” in an on-the-record interview. Sometimes it’s more of a bleak, dark comedy, like when a Cabinet secretary who’s spent his entire political career complaining about Big Government Spending turns out to have spent literally a million dollars in taxpayer money on luxury charter-jet flights in less than a year. And sometimes it’s not funny at all. From Politico:
President Donald Trump overrode his own advisers when he promised to deliver an emergency declaration next week to combat the nation’s worsening opioid crisis.
“That is a very, very big statement,” he said Monday. “It’s a very important step. … We’re going to be doing it in the next week.”
Blindsided officials are now scrambling to develop such a plan, but it is unclear when it will be announced, how or if it will be done, and whether the administration has the permanent leadership to execute it, said two administration officials.
While his promise to attack opioid addiction was a central part of Trump’s campaign pitch to working-class voters, as president the his efforts on the issue had involved nothing more than holding a few photo-ops with Chris Christie until he spontaneously announced this week that he’ll be formally labeling the crisis a federal emergency. What Politico found, though, is that the administration has no plan ready to back up the announcement—and doesn’t have the staff in place to create a plan even if it wanted to. Meanwhile, opioid-related deaths in the United States continue to rise.
Eventually, this kind of thing will have to catch up to the president—right?
Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, Win McNamee/Getty Images, Chris Kleponis-Pool/Getty Images, Drew Angerer/Getty Images, and Peter Parks-Pool/Getty Images.
