Politics
The Case for Impeaching Donald Trump
Yoni Appelbaum, in The Atlantic, lays out the case for starting impeachment proceedings against President Donald J. Trump. I’m a bit surprised this is being suggested because the process is fraught with political landmines. He does make a lot of sense though.
The oath of office is a president’s promise to subordinate his private desires to the public interest, to serve the nation as a whole rather than any faction within it. Trump displays no evidence that he understands these obligations. To the contrary, he has routinely privileged his self-interest above the responsibilities of the presidency. He has failed to disclose or divest himself from his extensive financial interests, instead using the platform of the presidency to promote them. This has encouraged a wide array of actors, domestic and foreign, to seek to influence his decisions by funneling cash to properties such as Mar-a-Lago (the “Winter White House,” as Trump has branded it) and his hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. Courts are now considering whether some of those payments violate the Constitution.The whole piece is damning. Trump is a con man who never wanted to be president in the first place and now, because he won, he’s under a giant magnifying glass that has been exposing his criminality and that may ultimately burn him to a crisp.More troubling still, Trump has demanded that public officials put their loyalty to him ahead of their duty to the public. On his first full day in office, he ordered his press secretary to lie about the size of his inaugural crowd. He never forgave his first attorney general for failing to shut down investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and ultimately forced his resignation. “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty,” Trump told his first FBI director, and then fired him when he refused to pledge it.
Trump has evinced little respect for the rule of law, attempting to have the Department of Justice launch criminal probes into his critics and political adversaries. He has repeatedly attacked both Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Special Counsel Robert Mueller. His efforts to mislead, impede, and shut down Mueller’s investigation have now led the special counsel to consider whether the president obstructed justice.
Trump is Compromised and is a Useful Idiot
Garrett Graff in Wired doesn’t mince words―
In short, we’ve reached a point in the Mueller probe where there are only two scenarios left: Either the president is compromised by the Russian government and has been working covertly to cooperate with Vladimir Putin after Russia helped win him the 2016 election — or Trump will go down in history as the world’s most famous “useful idiot,” as communists used to call those who could be co-opted to the cause without realizing it.
At least the former scenario — that the president of the United States is actively working to advance the interests of our country’s foremost, long-standing, traditional foreign adversary — would make him seem smarter and wilier. The latter scenario is simply a tragic farce for everyone involved.
From what I’ve read and watched, it seems like there’s something to the “compromised by Putin” accusation (money and quid pro quo) and “useful idiot” (shutting down the government).
I don’t see how Trump can leave office and not be charged with multiple Federal and State crimes. A President Pence or a President (pick your Democratic darling) could pardon him for the Federal crimes, but I don’t see a scenario where Trump is not charged with State crimes and that pardon doesn’t work for those particular criminal acts.
Of course, I’m predicating this with the caveat that he doesn’t win reelection in 2020.
Not Normal
Tom Nichols has a pretty damning piece in USA Today about all the recent news regarding Trump and Russia.
This is not normal, in any way. As things stand, more people in the Kremlin than in Washington know what Trump said to Putin. It is almost certain that there are readouts and analyses of Trump’s discussions with Putin — but that for now, they are in Russian.
Finally, it is exhausting but nonetheless necessary to point out again the titanic hypocrisy of the Republican Party and of Trump’s apologists in the conservative media. If President Barack Obama had shredded his notes of a meeting with the Iranian president, or if Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager were sitting in jail for lying about meeting a Chinese business associate — and alleged intelligence officer — to share polling data, that alone would have been enough for the GOP to impeach everyone from the president to the White House chef.
This entire sordid affair is the worst scandal in recent American history. It surely eclipses Watergate and Iran-Contra.
Trump is compromised. It’s as simple as that. He should be removed from office.
And here’s the thing… his 30% cult following of the American people? They aren’t going anywhere after he leaves office by impeachment, indictment or electoral college in 2020. In fact, if he does lose in 2020 (the most likely way he will no longer be President) I expect him to actively not leave the White House until forcible removed by the Secret Service.
Nothing Like a Wall
Another parody by Randy Rainbow has hit the interwebs. With this one, I’m ashamed to admit, I had no idea what musical song was being parodied. Doing a bit of research I realized it’s “Nothing Like a Dame” from South Pacific.
Quoting Alan Moore
It’s super amusing to me to watch how newly elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez understands pop culture and social media. Apparently, some House members are irritated with the fact that she’s a young, beautiful, smart, extremely progressive rising star in the party.
So, in response, she tweeted out a quote from Watchmen, the award-winning 12-part maxiseries by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
I’m impressed she knows Watchmen, and with that tweet, she might’ve secured the nerd vote forever. However, don’t forget, she’s quoting Rorschach, an extreme right-wing character who gets blown to smithereens by an all-powerful, naked, Smurf-man. If any Republicans understood that, they might be able to fire back, but they don’t because they are bereft of any culture except Dennis Miller, Jon Voight, Ted Nugent, and Kid Rock.
How to Pick a President
Judd Legum asked some incredibly smart people a smart question. With a likely large and diverse field of Democrat contenders vying for the Presidency in 2020, how should primary voters decide who to vote for?
There is an abundance of good ideas presented. I was especially taken with what Ron Klain, former Chief of Staff to Vice President Joe Biden had to say.
First, the most important quality in any potential nominee is his/her ability to defeat Trump, who poses a profound threat to our country and our democracy. The problem is that it may not be entirely obvious, ex ante, which candidate is best suited for that task. Pundit analysis and theater-criticism-style reviews of the candidates is a poor way to sort this out. Watching the candidates perform over the long and trying process of the primary campaign is much more likely to be a reliable indicator.
While I understand his view of theater-criticism-style reviews is poor, these reviews helped Donald Trump win over Hilary Clinton.
What Do You Know?
Alan Jacobs wrote an incredible post about the state of our politics. He echoes a lot of what I believe to be not only the failings of our political body, but how to even describe it.
If you’re running for office, I couldn’t care less how old you are — unless you’re over 80, in which case actuarial issues kick in. What I care about is this: What do you know? Can you summon to mind the general outlines of the Constitution of the United States? Are you aware of any distinctive, or especially controversial, laws of the state you live in? If you were to be elected to office, can you make a reasonable guess at the legal and political issues that are likely to confront you, and how they are affected by existing laws? Do you understand that there’s no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment? Do you understand how Facebook makes money? Do you grasp why a rogue employee can’t tinker with Google’s algorithms to punish conservatives? Have you seen, and do you comprehend, the evidence for anthropogenic climate change? What do you know?People sometimes refer to the Trump administration as an idiocracy: rule by the idiotic. I don’t think that’s quite right, first because Trump has a certain serpentine cunning, but also because the idiot, etymologically, is the private person, the person in his own world. Idiots don’t run for office, neither do they vote.
Others call the current regime a kakistocracy: rule by the worst. It’s a reasonable designation. The more I have thought about it the more convinced I have become that Americans elected as their President the single most comprehensively disqualified public figure for the job: a man disqualified by temperament, by character, by inexperience, by vulnerability to blackmail — and by sheer ignorance.
And it’s that last point that makes me want to call the current regime by a different name: it is, I think, an agnoiocracy — rule by the ignorant. Rule by know-nothings. Most of the people who voted for Trump are not as crassly venal as he is, but they tend to be equally ignorant. It was their ignorance (or denial — it amounts to the same thing) of the facts of our political order that made them think that Trump could be a successful president, and their ignorance of Trump’s non-televised history that made them think that he could be trusted to keep any promise that is not in his direct interest to keep.
When children are small they make messes, and they do so because they’re ignorant. It’s not their fault: they haven’t been around very long, they don’t have a lot of experience with cause and effect. So they pour orange juice on the carpet, and take Sharpies to the walls — leaving messes for their parents and other guardians to clean up.
Our infantile agnoiocracy — and I include in it the legislative as well as the executive branch, and Democrats as well as Republicans — is making enormous messes that later on we’ll all have to clean up, if we can. And that’s why, from now on, when I’m looking at people running for office, the chief question I’ll be asking will not involve their positions on issues. I’ll ask: What do you know? Have you sufficiently remedied your natural ignorance that you are unlikely to make messes as big as the ones we’re now faced with?
The Agnew Way Out
Chris Matthews on Hardball suggested a way Trump could save himself and his family. His idea is for Donald Trump to resign the presidency in exchange for Mueller’s team not indicting him and his adult children for Federal crimes.
The president’s children stand right in the line of Mueller’s investigative progress — they stand as the next dominos to fall. But therein lies the problem, where earlier Mueller subjects have given Trump up, these two lack the option to do that. They can hardly testify against their father, which brings the country to the reckoning. If the prosecutor will not be stopped and the kids will not fall to him, we see the president’s adult children heading to prison.The “Agnew way out” is in reference to the resigning of Spiro Agnew, President Nixon’s vice president, who had to resign due to tax evasion. It’s why we had a President Gerald Ford instead of a President Agnew after Nixon resigned.But what if the prosecutor were to offer the president an alternative, what if he were to say he would let the children walk if the old man does the same? They get to go scot-free if he’s willing to take the Agnew way out. That would mean giving up the presidency in exchange for acquittals all around, not just for himself, but for all his kids.
This concept might work for Federal crimes, but I don’t see how the State of New York would agree not to bring indictments on the whole Trump family as they are deep into investigating the Trump Foundation and Organization. In any case, Trump would never take a deal like that because if indictments did fall on his kids, he would immediately pardon them, probably attempt to fire Mueller, and we’d have a massive constitutional crisis facing the country. Of course, a pardon is also an admission of guilt and it would add fuel to the State of New York’s case against the family.
I’m sure we will see how this all plays out in the first few weeks of 2019. I still believe the only way out of this “everyday crazy” is by voters relieving Trump of his hold on the presidency in 2020.
We are in dangerous territory. I expect all three of Trump’s children and his son-in-law to be indicted at any time. When that happens all hell is going to break loose.
The Crime and the Cover-up
Natasha Bertrand in The Atlantic has the full account of Friday’s sentencing memos for Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. The memos “offer the clearest indication yet of how investigators are encircling the president and perhaps reaching the climax of the 19-month probe into a potential conspiracy between Trump and Russia in 2016.”
She goes on to explain how this involves not only Cohen and Flynn, but Trump and his family as well.
It isn’t just Trump who may be in legal danger now that Cohen is cooperating—it’s also his family members, who Cohen admitted to briefing on the Trump Tower Moscow deal in 2016. According to Mueller, Cohen discussed the Moscow deal with Trump’s family members “within” the Trump Organization. Donald Trump Jr., an executive vice president of the Trump Organization, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last year that he was only “peripherally aware” of the Moscow deal in 2016.
Trump said last week that he was free to pursue business deals while he was running for president. But he never disclosed the deal publicly, and Cohen’s guilty plea clearly shows how he lied in the written statement to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to conceal the Trump Organization’s ongoing involvement in the Moscow project from January through June 2016, with the campaign under way.
The saying goes, “it isn’t so much the crime as it is the cover-up.” I’m beginning to believe in this situation it’s not only the crime, but also the cover-up.
It will be interesting to see what happens once Don Jr. and Jared are indicted. None of this is normal. None. Of. This.
Running
Recently, through one of my newsletters, I found a link to Beto O’Rourke’s Medium collection. He has a couple of essays up, but the first one about running is tremendous. He writes of a time running in Washington passing by the Mall, seeing other runners, feeling the winds change, and being inspired by the Lincoln Memorial. It wasn’t so much a metaphor for him running for President as it was an open challenge to himself.
M. G. Siegler had a smart thought:
If Beto O’Rourke did this as a play on the “he’s running” meme, this is one of the most brilliant maneuvers ever. Either way, it’s great to see a high-profile would-be candidate writing like this. Just Beto Blogging.I can think of no other politician that has captured the imagination of the country like this since Obama. Even though he didn’t win his state Senate race, his campaign blossomed into one not just about Texas but the nation. Coming from out of relative obscurity and nearly beating an entrenched opponent in a state traditionally opposed to his point of view, he still feels like a winner.
It is without question I’m going to be utterly exhausted with the next presidential campaign. Still, it would be nice to feel inspired again.
Today is the First Day
CNN analyst Jeffrey Toobin:
“Today is the first day I thought Donald Trump might not finish his term in office.”I want to believe Republicans will reach that point. I really want to. I just can’t see it. Not yet.“When do Republicans start to turn on Trump? Because that’s the only thing that is going to get Trump out of office. It’s not going to be Democrats. And it’s certainly not now, but there may be a point where it’s too much.”
With Trump’s longtime personal lawyer (read: fixer) Michael Cohen pleading guilty to lying to Congress about Trump Tower Moscow negotiations we now can see how the conspiracy is taking shape. It has been obvious for a while that Trump is compromised somehow by Vladimir Putin and Russia. It isn’t going to be the infamous pee tape. It’s going to be money. That’s the motive. Trump and the Trump family saw a way to make money in Russia. The way to make money in Russia is through Putin and it explains why he’s been so congenial to Putin. The leverage that Putin and Russia has over Trump and his associates is going to come to light.
It ties in with Kushner wanting some sort of secret way to communicate with Russia that was found out early in the investigation. It ties in with the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians. It ties to the possible coordination between Russia, Wikileaks/Julian Assange, and the Trump Campaign.
Maybe, just maybe, if this all comes to light in a comprehensive report that can be summed up in a headline/tagline/bumper sticker that Democrats hammer the media with… something like, “Trump is a Crook,” it might motivate the 30 or 40 or so Senators to come in a bipartisan fashion to ask Trump to resign or be impeached a la Nixon.
Honestly, I don’t see it happening. It’s far more likely Trump is the Republican nominee for President in 2020, loses, and then has to be forcibly removed in January 2021.
Watching this unfold in real time is maddeningly slow.
The Art of the Spectacle
Matt Ford in The New Republic writes of Donald Trump’s one skill―marketing himself and, in turn, defining himself in the context of a made-up reality. Trump is quite Orwellian in his truth are lies bit, but really, “obscuring truth with theater” is his bread and butter.
Trump, like many authoritarian figures, understands the value of spectacle. In some ways, this is the defining trait of the president’s life. Trump captured the presidency by casting himself as a successful businessman whose vast personal fortune would insulate him from Washington’s corruption. His career, however, displays no extraordinary business acumen or particular skill at dealmaking. An exhaustive New York Times investigation earlier this year found that Fred Trump, the president’s father, used his own wealth to keep his son afloat as Donald bounced from one failed venture to the next throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
What the president truly excels at is marketing himself. Even as his father kept open a spigot of cash to prop up his son’s enterprises, Donald Trump cultivated a public image of wealth, extravagance, and success. In recent years, his image became an asset of sorts that he burnished with a reality-TV show and leased to hotel properties owned by savvier entrepreneurs around the world. Trump University, his defunct business seminar program, was the ultimate expression of this strategy. While it promised to reveal Trump’s unique insights into real-estate investing, the program often amounted to a predatory scheme to extract tens of thousands of dollars from financially troubled “students.” In a way, they learned the secrets to his success better than most.
Don’t be distracted. Don’t be a rube.
The Case for Beto O’Rourke
Dan Pfeiffer of Crooked Media advocates in an essay that failed Senate hopeful Beto O’Rourke should be considered as a legitimate presidential candidate.
I’m not sure. It’s hard to say with any certainty who will run and who the American people might rally around. I do think he’s going to test the waters, though, and he might be charismatic enough to take out the field.
Nothing on the Page is Real
There are a lot of stories about fake news. Eli Saslow writing for The Washington Post has one worth your time.
Christopher Blair created a Facebook page during the 2016 presidential campaign. The page was political satire making fun of the far right. Of course, people didn’t get that it was satire; they thought it was real and the outrage would begin.
What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. “No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”
They don’t want reality. They want a reality show.
Dangerous Precedent
Andy Borowitz in The New Yorker pretty much nails what I think most Americans feel about this past election and getting it right. It’s too bad it has to be considered satire.
Calling for an “immediate end” to the recount in Florida, Donald J. Trump warned on Monday that it could set a dangerous precedent of the person with the most votes winning.
Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump said that those in favor of the recount had a “sick obsession with finding out which candidate got the most votes.”
“Democrats are going on and on about counting every last vote until they find out who got the most,” Trump said. “Since when does getting the most votes mean you win?”
This is well written overall, but I think I’d change Trump’s last quote to be, “The cheating Democrats are counting votes from people who voted. Why would they do that? SAD!”
All of Borwitz’s columns strike a chord with smart people. Of course, dumb people don’t read The New Yorker.
Post-Election
In the days after the 2016 election, I was mentally and physically exhausted. I was about two rungs above being curled up in a corner in the fetal position. A few days after the 2018 election, I feel… better? The results seemed disappointing because all the big national-profile races were losses: Andrew Gillum in Florida, possibly Stacey Abrams in Georgia, and Beto O’Rourke in Texas.
My wife reminded me good things happened all over the place — first openly gay governor, first Muslim women in Congress, a record number of women and women of color winning. And most importantly the House of Representatives is back in control of the Democrats.
I can breath. And Beto can drop F-Bombs.
What I’m waiting for now is for Nancy Pelosi, after winning the Speakership, to announce, “Our first priority is to make this president a one-term president” and for Mitch McConnell to say what a sleazy, unAmerican thing that is to say.
Lastly, I’m stepping away from politics as much as possible. The run up to the midterms were just as bad as the weeks directly after the 2016 election. It’s not good for my physical and mental health to follow everything so closely.
So, I’ll leave you with one simple thought… Kamala-Beto 2020.
The Walls Have Crumbled
Political scientist and journalist David Rothkopf says Trump’s days in the White House are numbered. Here are a few of the points he made in his Twitter thread:
No one knows the skeletons in Donald Trump’s closet better than Donald Trump. No one knows the crimes he has committed, aided or abetted so well. No one has such a firm grasp on the wrong-doing that was the daily bread of the Trump Organization, his children & close associates.It can’t happen soon enough.The world ridicules and rejects him. They have figured out his games. They see through his lies and his racism. He himself knows his base of bases is comprised not of America’s best but of its worst. He calls them the “super-elite” but he can smell his own BS.
He hides himself away as he does in the White House every day now, going out into public only into meetings where the crowds can be counted on to cheer. And that is fewer and fewer places these days.
Abraham Lincoln once said the only way America could be brought down is from within. Trump’s presidency has been cited frequently as the greatest example of such a threat in modern times. But Lincoln’s warning can be extended further.
Ultimately Trump too will be brought down from within, by the ghosts of his own past, by the secrets only he knows. The walls have crumbled. So too, very soon, will this weak, corrupted, cowardly, ignorant, racist, incompetent, pathetic excuse for a man.
Go Vote
Inspiring piece by Roger Angell in The New Yorker.
What we can all do at this moment is vote — get up, brush our teeth, go to the polling place, and get in line. I was never in combat as a soldier, but now I am. Those of you who haven’t quite been getting to your polling place lately, who want better candidates or a clearer system of making yourself heard, or who just aren’t in the habit, need to get it done this time around. If you stay home, count yourself among the hundreds of thousands now being disenfranchised by the relentless parade of restrictions that Republicans everywhere are imposing and enforcing. If you don’t vote, they have won, and you are a captive, one of their prizes.When you do go to vote on Tuesday, take a friend, a nephew, a neighbor, or a partner, and be patient when in line. Just up ahead of you, the old guy in a sailing cap, leaning on his cane and accompanied by his wife, is me, again not minding the wait, and again enthralled by the moment and its meaning.
Please vote.
Lest we Forget
A catalog of Trump’s worst cruelties, collusions, corruptions and crimes. The first in a series.
Private Audience
This story from Olivia Nuzzi about her experience in the Oval Office is the very definition of cray-cray.
I just don’t know what to think.