"President Pelosi" trending on Twitter after report that Trump ordered Cohen to lie to Congress

With nearly 270,000 tweets in a short amount of time as I start to write this blog post at 7:10 A.M. U.S. Central Standard Time on January 18, 2019, "President Pelosi", referencing U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) being second in the official line of succession to the presidency, is officially a trending topic on Twitter right now.

President Pelosi began trending on Twitter in response to a bombshell BuzzFeed report that the actual U.S. President, Donald Trump, directed former Trump attorney and convicted felon Michael Cohen to lie to Congress regarding negotiations between the Vladimir Putin regime in Russia and The Trump Organization regarding a proposed Trump Tower in Moscow:

President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.

Trump also supported a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential campaign, in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations. “Make it happen,” the sources said Trump told Cohen.

[...]

Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying about the deal in testimony and in a two-page statement to the Senate and House intelligence committees. Special counsel Robert Mueller noted that Cohen’s false claim that the project ended in January 2016 was an attempt to “minimize links between the Moscow Project and Individual 1” — widely understood to be Trump — “in hopes of limiting the ongoing Russia investigations.”

Now the two sources have told BuzzFeed News that Cohen also told the special counsel that after the election, the president personally instructed him to lie — by claiming that negotiations ended months earlier than they actually did — in order to obscure Trump’s involvement.

Before I begin discussing my thoughts about seeing President Pelosi trend on Twitter, I'll share this partial screenshot of BuzzFeed's main page that was taken by me at approximately 7:15 A.M. U.S. Central Standard Time today:

I will note that Pelosi, as U.S. House Speaker, is officially second in the line of succession to the presidency, and she is currently the only Democrat who is anywhere in the line of succession to the presidency. There are two scenarios in which Pelosi could become President without having to be elected either president or vice president:

1. If Trump were to leave the office of the presidency (resignation, removal from office in an impeachment trial, etc.), and Vice President Mike Pence, who would become president in that scenario, were to leave the office of the presidency after having ascended to it, but before a replacement vice-president were to be confirmed by both houses of Congress (unlike most presidential appointments, an appointment to fill a vacancy of the vice-presidency requires confirmation by both the Senate and the House instead of only the Senate), Pelosi would become president.
2. If Pence were to leave the vice-presidency (resignation, removal from office in an impeachment trial, etc.), and Trump were to leave the office of the presidency before Trump was able to get an appointed vice president confirmed by both houses of Congress, Pelosi would become president.

Obviously, it would require both Trump and Pence to become implicated in scandal so seriously that neither of them could continue in office without either being removed from office in an impeachment trial or being forced to resign, and without either Trump or Pence being able to get an appointed vice-president confirmed, for Pelosi to become president. I'm not sure if Pelosi would really want to become president in either of the above scenarios (I seriously doubt it), although this is what will probably the only time in my entire life that I've actually wondered what the U.S. House Speaker's thoughts about possibly ascending to the presidency are.