Roger Stone has been a fixture in Republican politics since the Nixon years, usually behind the scenes and always suspected of pulling one dirty trick or another.
Stone is a former adviser to Donald Trump, worked on his campaign, fought for him in the trenches when it appeared forces were gearing up to deny him the nomination, and has been an excellent source for the media whenever they want a controversial quote.
Today, Stone did not disappoint.
President Trump’s former campaign adviser Roger Stone told TMZ that any politician who votes to impeach Trump “would be endangering their own life.”
“Try to impeach him. Just try it,” Stone said. “You will have a spasm of violence, an insurrection in this country like you have never seen before. Both sides are heavily armed, my friend.”
Stone said members of Congress who are advocating for Trump’s impeachment need to “get over it.”
“The people who are calling for impeachment are the people who didn’t vote for him,” Stone said. “They lose. Their candidate had every advantage.”
“Sorry, we whipped their ass,” he continued. “It’s over. You lost.”
A small coalition of House Democrats has led the charge in pushing to impeach Trump. In July, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) formally introduced articles of impeachment against Trump over his firing of former FBI Director James Comey, arguing the move amounted to obstruction of justice.
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) announced last week that he would introduce articles of impeachment against Trump over his comments following the violence at a white supremacist rally in Virginia.
Democratic leadership have pushed back on the impeachment efforts. House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement that Congress should set up an independent commission to investigate Trump’s potential ties to Russia.
Only the most rabid, fanatical Democrats in Congress are already trying to impeach Trump and that effort is geared at ginning up the liberal base of the party. Most Democrats, not surprisingly, know that in order to impeach Trump they need something to charge him with. Calling him a racist and white supremacist and hinting that he’s a traitor for colluding with Russia may be emotionally satisfying to the losers of the 2016 election but it comes nowhere near to making a legal case for removing the duly elected chief executive of the United States.
However, the bar for impeachment is low. A simple majority vote in the House would send the case to the Senate for trial. Only a vote of 66 senators would remove Trump from office — a very high bar, indeed.
For that reason, if there is a successful vote to remove Trump from office, you’d have to believe his wrongdoing is so obvious and so significant that the vast majority of Americans would agree with the decision. If that were the case, Stone’s “civil war” would not be a mass movement of tens of thousands of armed Americans but more likely a few hundred racists and Nazis along with some disgruntled Trump bitter enders.
Individual lawmakers may find themselves threatened by lone gunmen if they vote to remove the president, but the notion that masses of armed citizens would go up against the United States Army if Trump were removed is too absurd for words.
Stone must have felt he had been out of the news too long and longed to see his name in print for him to make such a silly statement.
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