It’s one thing to shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue; it’s another thing entirely to slice and dice Republican donors.
This realization is apparently lost on Donald Trump, who nevertheless faces the consequences of cutting off the GOP’s lifeblood: campaign contributions. You’d think someone as transactional as Donald Trump would understand how these things work.
And so in an abrupt about-face for the ages, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested Tuesday he would consider voting to convict the president. This is the same guy who wouldn’t call a single witness or consider a shred of evidence in Trump’s first impeachment trial one year ago.
What a difference a few big-dollar donations make.
Numerous corporations have begun suspending political gifts, some to both parties but many to Republicans in general or specifically to those GOP’ers who voted not to recognize President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College win. These include behemoths Comcast, Verizon and Amazon.
The Walt Disney Company is also among those who will not donate to EC deniers, telling Axios: “The insurrection at our nation’s Capitol was a direct assault on one of our country’s most revered tenets: the peaceful transition of power.”
And for those donors who haven’t yet seen the error of their ways, the Lincoln Project is up with a new strategy to pressure them, some targeting specific politicians. Project co-founder Steve Schmidt tweeted:
To add insult to Trump’s self-inflicted injuries, talk-radio giant Cumulus Media has ordered its on-air talent to stop spreading the Big Lie that the election was stolen. Paul Farhi at The Washington Post reported:
“The new policy is a stunning corporate clampdown on the kind of provocative and even inflammatory talk that has long driven the business model for Cumulus and other talk show broadcasters. And it came as Apple, Google and Amazon cut off essential business services to Parler, the pro-Trump social media network where users have promoted falsehoods about election fraud and praised the mob that assaulted the Capitol.”
Earlier this week, social media platforms Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others took steps to ban or limit the president’s access to their sites. Late Tuesday NBC reported that YouTube will block Trump for at least seven days and has indefinitely suspended comments.
Monday, NBC reported two banks, Signature and Deutsche, have halted business with Trump.
“They’re not alone,” Steve Bennen blogged. “In the wake of the deadly riot, Shopify closed its online stores affiliated with Trump; New York City is eying an end to all contracts with Trump’s company; and the PGA of America pulled the 2022 PGA Championship tournament from Trump’s Bedminster golf club.” According to The New York Times, the PGA decision “gutted” the president.
Even before the postmortems have begun, McConnell, among the worst of Trump’s enablers these past four years, is sharpening the blades, seeking to excise the lame duck presidency in advance of Biden’s Inauguration.
From a strictly business standpoint, he realizes what a profitable bottom line impeachment offers: Trump rendered impotent, irrelevant, and unable to seek public office again. That’s a helluva return on investment.
And maybe, just maybe, a way to stop the bleeding.
