Category Archives: Off the Rails

Democracy, Off the Rails, Tribalism

Worlds collide, truth fractures — the Lesson on Day One of the public impeachment hearings

The nation is divided. The opposing sides cannot even agree on plain as day, garden variety, eyes wide open facts. Yesterday, from my vantage point, the evidence presented by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent and Ambassador William Taylor was devastating for President Donald Trump.

Rank and file Republicans, who buy into the world according to Fox News Channel, didn’t see the same thing. Meanwhile even Republican Congressmen who don’t push unhinged conspiracy theories, fail to push back against them. And this (as Ronald Brownstein points out) suggests that the rule of law across party lines is endangered.

Screenshots by Danielle Misiak via Mother Jones.

“The larger question the hearings may raise, then, is whether the partisan divide has widened to the point where Republican voters and elected officials alike will not consider valid any process controlled by Democrats, no matter how powerful the evidence it produces. If that’s the case, it points toward a future in which partisan loyalties eclipse, to a growing extent, any shared national commitment to applying the rule of law across party lines. Even given the decades-long rise in political polarization, such a rejection of common standards would constitute an ominous threshold for the nation to cross. . . .

The willingness of rank-and-file Republican voters to dismiss the concerns of such nonpartisan voices underscores the extent to which the party has grown resistant to outside information that challenges its ideological preferences…. [argument attributed to Alan Abramowitz, political scientist at Emory University] . . .

A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that the roughly 45 percent of Republicans who identified Fox as their primary news source expressed nearly unbroken opposition to impeachment. Just 2 percent of Fox-dependent Republicans said they back Trump’s removal, compared with 10 percent of those who don’t rely on the network, the poll found. The indifferent response to the evidence against Trump on Ukraine “is maybe the best example so far of how the Fox News bubble just totally consumes a different reality—which, of course, is not actually reality….” [quotation from Andrew Baumann, Democratic pollster] . . .

In that environment, it’s easy for Trump to convince much of his base that any charge against him—even allegations from nonpartisan diplomats and national-security professionals—is inherently a liberal plot to silence him and his supporters. Very few Republican elected officials have challenged that conspiratorial argument.” — Ronald Brownstein, “Just How Far Will Republicans Go for Trump?“

Conservatives with convictions that don’t budge because the political winds change direction, who have been loyal Republicans but can’t deny Donald Trump’s unfitness as a leader, are horrified by their party’s opportunistic embrace of the man. Peter Wehner served in the Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations. He couldn’t bear the thought of voting for Hillary Clinton; he laments the “increasingly radicalized” Democratic Party. But he sees with clear eyes the GOP circa 2019:

“What makes the Trump era so unusual isn’t partisanship and political tribalism, which have been around for much of human existence. It is the degree to which the transgressive nature of Trump—his willingness to go places no other president has gone, to say and do things that no president before him has done—has exposed the Republican Party. There is hardly a pretense any more regarding what the party, and the right-wing media complex, are doing. They are driven by a single, all-consuming commitment: Defend Donald Trump at all costs. That is the end they seek, and they will pursue virtually any means necessary to achieve it. This from the party that once said it stood for objective truth, for honor and integrity, and against moral relativism.

We are facing a profound political crisis. What the Republican Party is saying and signaling isn’t simply that rationality and truth are subordinate to partisanship; it is that they have to be obliterated for the sake of partisanship and the survival of the Trump presidency. As best I can tell, based on some fairly intense interactions with Trump supporters, there is no limiting principle—almost nothing he can do—that will forfeit their support. Members of Congress clearly believe Trump is all that stands between them and the loss of power, while many Trump voters believe the president is all that stands between them and national ruin. In either case, it has led them into the shadowlands.” . . .

“The Republican Party under Donald Trump is a party built largely on lies, and it is now maintained by politicians and supporters who are willing to “live within the lie,” to quote the great Czech dissident (and later president) Vaclav Havel. Many congressional Republicans privately admit this but, with very rare exceptions—Utah Senator Mitt Romney is the most conspicuous example—refuse to publicly acknowledge it.

“For what purpose?” they respond point-blank when asked why they don’t speak out with moral urgency against the president’s moral transgressions, his cruelty, his daily assault on reality, and his ongoing destruction of our civic and political culture. Trump is more powerful and more popular than they are, they will say, and they will be targeted by him and his supporters and perhaps even voted out of office.” — Peter Wehner, “The Exposure of the Republican Party“

(Image above headline: CNN on YouTube.)

Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Can there be any doubt of Donald Trump’s unfitness to protect and defend our Constitution?

A linchpin of U.S. and Western security has been keeping Vladimir Putin’s Russia in check. Time and again Trump has acted to sabotage this goal and undermine our allies. That’s the subject of the impeachment inquiry.

“Mr. Trump had a choice between executing his administration’s own strategy for containing Russia or pursuing a political obsession at home.

He chose the obsession.

In an otherwise divided Washington, one of the few issues of bipartisan agreement for the past six years has been countering Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s broad plan of disruption. That effort starts in Ukraine, where there has been a hot war underway in the east for five years, and a cyber war underway in the capital, Kiev.

It is exactly that policy that Mr. Trump appears to have been discarding when he made clear, in the haunting words attributed to Gordon D. Sondland, who parlayed political donations into the ambassadorship to the European Union, that “President Trump cares more about the investigation of Biden” than about Ukraine’s confrontation with Mr. Putin’s forces.” — David E. Sanger, “Trump’s Choice: National Security or Political Obsession.”

(Image: AP Photo/Evan Vucci via 8Red Current Events.)

Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans

Never-Trumper Steve Schmidt is back — and still spinning for the (pre-Trump) GOP

Steve Schmidt returned to MSNBC last week, having spent eight months consulting with Howard Schultz regarding a presidential campaign by the billionaire, and his criticism of Donald Trump is as sharp and on target as ever. It is great fun to read (or listen to) this never-Trumper, who left the Republican Party last year (“Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump.“). He has Trump’s number.

But he is still whitewashing the complicity — pre-Trump — of the Republican Party in what it has become.

“Voting in America for a substantial part of the population is no longer about affirming a belief in the future, it’s an act of aggression. It’s an action taken to choose someone to punish their enemies. And that more than anything is how Trump has redefined American politics. Not even the pretense of unity.“

And:

“My perspective is that the Republican party is profoundly corrupted by Donald Trump and it has been corrupted by a tolerance for all and any type of amoral and immoral behavior. Tolerance for astounding levels of corruption and exposure of hypocrisy from the religious far-right leaders like Falwell, to everybody who screamed and shouted about some perfidious act that Obama or the Clintons allegedly committed. Trump has remade the Republican party into an isolationist, grievance-driven, resentment-driven political party. The party looks like what it might have looked like if George Wallace had captured its nomination and become president.”

Strike the word ‘isolationist’ from Schmidt’s indictment. While individual Republicans — John McCain, whom Schmidt advised, stands out — might have stood for more than grievance-driven and resentment-driven politics, these strands were deeply embedded in the contemporary Republican Party long before Trump’s ride down the escalator.

I’ll grant that George W. Bush (whom Schmidt also advised) gave us a bit more than “the pretense of unity.” But the GOP establishment in Washington repudiated Bush’s outreach to ethnic and religious minorities (which was the most significant element of Bush’s electoral strategy that made unity more than a pretense). This Republican pushback came years before Trump became a candidate. To put it bluntly: the party resisted unity.

And Schmidt’s post-Trump indictment doesn’t even make sense on its own terms: “Tolerance for astounding levels of corruption and exposure of hypocrisy from the religious far-right leaders like Falwell, to everybody who screamed and shouted about some perfidious act that Obama or the Clintons allegedly committed.”

The unhinged screaming and shouting about Obama and the Clintons cannot possibly be placed at the feet of Donald Trump. George W. Bush couldn’t have come close enough to steal the 2000 election (even granting Bill Clinton’s sleazy behavior) without the far right’s bizarre tales of murder and more. And Donald Trump didn’t found the Tea Party or advise Mitch McConnell on his scorched earth opposition to Barack Obama.

So, I’m with Schmidt on his repudiation of Trump and the post-Trump Republican Party. But the GOP’s corruption and hypocrisy have been flourishing for more than a generation. Trump didn’t remake the Republican Party. He is just the most recent step in an ugly evolution.

(Image: MSNBC.)

Off the Rails, Republicans

House Republicans, lacking a viable defense of the President, throw a tantrum

Quote of the day:

“But none of the 13 Republicans who spoke defended Trump on the central allegation that he had pushed Ukraine to investigate Democrats while blocking military aid that had been approved for Kyiv.” — “Republicans storm closed-door impeachment hearing as escalating Ukraine scandal threatens Trump,” Washington Post

A group of Republican Congressmen, led by Matt Gaetz (“I led over 30 of my colleagues into the SCIF where Adam Schiff is holding secret impeachment depositions. Still inside — more details to come.”), put on a “dramatic protest,” made “process arguments,” “sidestepped the substance” of the case against Trump, and complained about “the private nature” of the hearings.

But “none of the 13 Republicans who spoke defended Trump on the central allegation ….”

After Ambassador William Taylor’s testimony at yesterday’s hearing confirmed Trump’s demand to Ukrainian President Zelensky of a quid pro quo before release of military funds, a diversionary circus was the best ‘defense’ Republicans could offer. Reminiscent of the Brooks Brothers riot (the inspiration for the spectacle perhaps?), today’s performance piece may please the President, but — though it generated a 5 hour delay (and offered an occasion for the restive Congressmen to order out for pizza) — it is unlikely to derail the impeachment inquiry. And what do Republicans, unable to embrace Trump’s treachery, do tomorrow?

(Image: Fox News video.)

Democracy, Donald Trump, Off the Rails

Disconcerting, dispiriting, and scary quotations and headlines of the day

▪ “The country is entering a new and precarious phase, in which the central question about President Donald Trump is not whether he is coming unstrung, but rather just how unstrung he is going to get.” — Peter Nicholas, “The Unraveling of Donald Trump: As the impeachment inquiry intensifies, some associates of the president predict that his already erratic behavior is going to get worse.”

▪ We’re in an astonishing situation. Mr. Trump seems to have single-handedly and unilaterally precipitated a national security crisis in the middle east.

You know, at the end of the day, he green-lighted the Turkish invasion. The five-day pause is probably a good thing. Maybe it will reduce the number of people murdered by Arab militias that are following the Turkish army. Give the Kurds time to run for their lives. Where they’re supposed to go is beyond me. 

But, you know, the instant take on this is: You allow Assad to reenter the Kurdish areas. You allow Iranian dominance in the region. And you let the Russian military occupy abandoned, hastily abandoned U.S. military outposts. It’s an astonishing outcome. What did Mr. Trump think he was getting out of all this? — General Barry McCaffrey, retired — “Gen. Barry McCaffrey blasts Trump’s ‘inexplicable’ policy in Syria.”

▪ Trump has publicly sided with Putin over U.S. intelligence in dismissing the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and suggested this year it would be “appropriate” for Russia to rejoin the Group of Seven richest countries — reversing the 2014 expulsion after Russia invaded Ukraine.

No Trump foreign policy move, however, has redounded so directly to Russia’s benefit as the Syrian pullout, with the Kurdish forces striking a deal with Russia. — Mike DeBonis and Seung Min Kim, “‘All roads lead to Putin’: Pelosi questions Trump’s loyalty in White House clash.”

▪ At one point during one of his most unpresidential of days, President Trump insisted that he knew how to be presidential.

“It’s much easier being presidential, it’s easy,” he told a stadium full of more than 20,000 boisterous supporters in MAGA hats and T-shirts cheering his every word on Thursday night. “All you have to do is act like a stiff.”

He buttoned his suit coat, pursed his lips, squared his shoulders and dropped his arms rigidly at his sides. “Ladies and gentlemen of Texas,” he then droned in a sleep-inducing staccato monotone the way he imagined most of the other 44 presidents had done. “It is a great honor to be with you this evening.”

The crowd loved it, roaring with laughter. Transforming back into the unpresidential president America has come to know, Mr. Trump added, “And everybody would be out of here so fast! You wouldn’t come in in the first place!” Being presidential, he was saying, is so boring. Who wants that? — Peter Baker, “On Day 1001, Trump Made It Clear: Being ‘Presidential’ is Boring.”

▪ “This is unquestionably the most outstanding nomination that I’ve ever recommended to Presidents to serve on the bench in Kentucky,” Mitch McConnell tweeted in July, when Walker’s name first came up. However, the Senate Majority Leader made his endorsement to the detriment of the nonpartisan American Bar Association, which gave Walker a rare “not qualified rating.” The ABA suggests that “a nominee to the federal bench ordinarily should have at least 12 years’ experience in the practice of law” — not zero cases in court under their belt. In addition, Paul T. Moxley, chair of the ABA committee on the federal judiciary, issued the closest thing to an I Don’t Know Her that a lawyer can physically emit: “Based on review of his biographical information and conversations with Mr. Walker, it was challenging to determine how much of his ten years since graduation from law school has been spent in the practice of law. — Matt Steib, “As Trump Fumes, GOP Advances Real Party Goal of Making the Federal Judiciary Great Again.”

▪ “I don’t believe I’m leading a wing of the party. Because there’s no wing that’s very large that is aligned with me.” — Senator Mitt Romney, “Mitt Romney Marches Alone: ‘I don’t believe I’m leading a wing of the party.’“

▪ And, yes, among the unsettling items in today’s news, is one about the Democrats:

Democrats aren’t comfortable with the brutal language of unvarnished national interest. They aren’t comfortable acknowledging tragic tradeoffs between the welfare of ordinary Americans and the welfare of vulnerable people overseas. Donald Trump is. He genuinely doesn’t care what happens to the Kurds or the Afghans—or any other group of people who can’t offer him votes or money or project his image onto the side of a luxury hotel. Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Joe Biden do care, which is why they found it so easy to offer ferocious moral denunciations of Trump’s Syria policy at this week’s debate. They just don’t care enough to ask Americans to sacrifice to reduce the chances that Syria’s horrors repeat themselves in Afghanistan. — Peter Beinart, “Democrats are Hypocrites for Condemning Trump Over Syria: Presidential hopefuls blasted Trump for abandoning the Kurds — but want the U.S. to pull out of Afghanistan under similar conditions.“

Democracy, Donald Trump, Off the Rails

Quid Pro Quo? “Absolutely. No question about that….That’s why we held up the money.” — Mick Mulvaney

Exchange of the day as White House Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney renders inoperative weeks of denials of a quid pro quo — Congressionally-approved military aid would go to Ukraine only if Ukraine agreed to dig up dirt on Trump’s political opponents — first revealed in a ‘transcript’ released by the White House.

Mulvaney: “Did he also mention to me in the past the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about that.

But that’s it. That’s why we held up the money.”

. . .

Reporter: But to be clear, what you just described is a quid pro quo. Funding will not flow unless the investigation into the Democratic server happens as well.

Mulvaney: “We do that all the time with foreign policy.”

Video from C-Span. Exchange begins at 21:07.

Two days ago the Washington Post reported on Mulvaney’s central role in this scheme. Each day, in spite of the White House’s blanket refusal to provide witnesses or documents to Congress, the testimony of witness after witness for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has been filling in additional details on the hijacking of American foreign policy to undermine free and fair elections in the United States and politically benefit Donald Trump.

But — so says Mulvaney — Trump’s concern in directing this quid pro quo wasn’t to implicate the Bidens! It was to prove (contra the Mueller report) that it was Ukraine, not Putin’s Russia, that interfered with the 2016 election and that a Ukrainian company had absconded with the Democratic National Committee server containing Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. (Check out Vox’s explainers regarding Ukraine conspiracy theories.)

So there, Nancy Pelosi, all roads don’t lead to Putin (or so the Trump White House wished to ‘prove’). And ignore the White House memo on Trump’s call to Zalensky, wherein Trump says: ” The other thing, There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.“

Donald Trump, Off the Rails

Reality TV POTUS revels in his election as “one of the greatest nights in the history of television”

Quote of the day wherein Donald Trump relives the night he bested Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College:

“We won incredible states. We won Wisconsin. We won Michigan. We won Pennsylvania. We won North Carolina. We won South Carolina. We won Florida. What a run. You remember the evening that we won?
… That was one of the greatest nights in the history of television.
 … It was one of the highest rated evenings in the history of television. You add up all those networks.” – Donald Trump at Minneapolis campaign rally

Jonathan Chait observed that Trump, an indefatigable TV-watcher, always bored with his prepared remarks, delights in going off script to talk about himself as mediated through coverage in the media, especially on television. In Minneapolis yesterday, Trump name-checked many Fox News on-air personalities who flatter him and raved about high TV ratings for his 2016 election victory.

Earlier this week, George Conway reviewed episode after episode of Trump’s erratic and abnormal behavior that renders him incapable of fulfilling the duties of the presidency. The Constitution anticipated that the president would act as a fiduciary on behalf of the country. Based on what we’ve seen, this hasn’t occurred to Trump, who can’t avert his gaze from himself.

While Conway places (as an organizing device) Trump’s observable behavior within the diagnostic criteria for narcissism and sociopathy, he sets aside the issue of a medical diagnosis. What we – the public, not mental health professionals – have witnessed in plain sight demonstrates Trump’s unfitness to serve as president.

Trump is obsessed with sustaining a self-image as exceedingly superior others, who in turn – he is convinced – conspicuously admire him. He perceives every occasion, every decision, everything that comes before him as important only insofar as it casts him in a special light.

While I’m not on board with Conway’s insistence the Congress must call on psychologists and psychiatrists to affirm Trump’s incapacity, I credit him with making the case that Trump can’t safeguard the public interest, because he is impaired by an inescapable self-regard:

“From the evidence, it appears that he simply can’t stop himself from putting his own interests above the nation’s.”

(Image: @realDonaldTrump on Twitter.)

Democracy, Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans

As Trump amps up abuses of power, most Republican Senators shelter in place

October 7, 2019 update: Cable news anchors can’t get Repubicans to come on the air to defend Trump.

Michael Calderone of Politico on Twitter.

But when the NBA makes the wrong geopolitical call, watch out.

“The idea of China interfering in the sanctity of the NBA is somehow incredibly offensive to them, whereas the same standard for American elections results in the sound of crickets.” — Jake Tapper in an interview with Politico

Original post:

“This president doesn’t appear to know or care much about the Constitution, especially the limits it puts on his power.

. . .

Trump took an oath to defend the Constitution. Instead, he’s attacking it — by inflating and abusing his powers, ignoring laws he swore to protect and demanding unconstitutional reprisals against anyone who opposes him.” — Doyle McManus, in Sunday morning’s Los Angeles Times

The headline and sub head in Sunday’s print edition conveys the gist of the column — “A constitutional blind eye: Trump neither knows nor respects how our basic law limits his power” — which contrasts the President’s view of his power under Article II with the view of the founders.

McManus doesn’t mention checks and balances — which are referenced throughout the Federalist Papers (including Madison’s No. 51, “The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments“). It turns out that among the most important checks on a president is the Congress, established in Article I of the Constitution.

An ELECTIVE DESPOTISM was not the government we fought for; but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others. (Madison, Federalist No. 48.)

As Trump approaches 1,000 days in office (on October 17, 10 days from now), a recurring question has been, When will Congress step up and check the President? An Iowan put the question to Senator Joni Ernst last weekend:

“Where is the line? When are you guys going to say, ‘Enough,’ and stand up and say, ‘You know what? I’m not backing any of this.’ ”

That’s a question for every Republican in the U.S. Senate, almost all of whom — while Mitch McConnell campaigns on a promise not to hold Trump accountable — have responded (as Mara Liasson reported) by “sheltering in place.”

Charlie Cook (who also used the expression, shelter in place) had an answer in July:

“Those who can’t understand why elected Republicans and party officials don’t stand up to Trump seem to miss a point. The survival instinct in humans is a powerful one. In anticipating human behavior, it should always be kept in mind. The track record of what happened to those who did is pretty clear. They lost primaries or chose retirement. Instead, for many pre-tea-party Republicans, the strategy has been to shelter in place. The thinking goes that there is nothing that can be done to stop Hurricane Donald. The key is to survive the storm and be in a position to put the pieces back together and rebuild the party after it has passed. They know that the final edition of Profiles in Courage has already gone to the printer.

Cook references pre-tea-party Republicans, those who (mostly in silence) still embrace conservative principles (who hope to put the pieces back together and rebuild the party post-Trump). That’s not everyone in the Senate, of course:

Ron Johnson exasperated Chuck Todd with his conspiracy-propaganda defense that has found support only in the conservative media bubble and Trump’s tweets. (“Senator Johnson–Senator Johnson, please! Can we please answer the question I asked you instead of trying to make Donald Trump feel better here that you are not criticizing him?!”)

And of course Lindsey Graham is determined not to be outdone on any given day by anyone else in the caucus. “If the whistleblower’s allegations are turned into an impeachment article, it’s imperative that the whistleblower be interviewed in public, under oath and cross-examined.”

Most Senate Republicans, however, are in a bunker, because when allies back up Trump, he often pulls the rug out from under them. As Robert Costa and Philip Rucker report, “…few Republican lawmakers have been willing to fully parrot White House talking points because they believe they lack credibility or fret they could be contradicted by new discoveries.”

“Everyone is getting a little shaky at this point,” said Brendan Buck, who was counselor to former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). “Members have gotten out on a limb with this president many times only to have it be cut off by the president. They know he’s erratic, and this is a completely unsteady and developing situation.”

The few who might harbor thoughts of opposing Trump are even less likely to speak out. As former Senator Jeff Flake put it, “There is a concern that he’ll get through it and he’ll exact revenge on those who didn’t stand with him.”

The founders didn’t expect Profiles in Courage. They anticipated men acting badly, but believed that institutional checks would hold. Personal ambition and rival interests, both good motives and bad, were all part of the equation:

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public.“

They expected personal ambition, “opposite and rival interests,” and perhaps even institutional pride (or, in less positive terms, institutional jealousy) to be incentive enough to check an errant president.

But when Trump holds sway over Republican primary voters, and is ready to exact revenge for disloyalty, personal ambition requires sheltering in place.

Marco Rubio was ambitious. (“And two weeks from tonight, right here in Florida, we are going to send a message loud and clear.  We are going to send a message that the party of Lincoln and Reagan and the presidency of the United States will never be held by a con artist.” Trump beat Rubio by 18 points in the Florida primary.

“Lil’ Marco” is now pretending that Trump’s soliciting foreign help in an American election is just a joke, “just needling the press.”

Ted Cruz, (initially) declined to endorse Donald Trump in 2016 remarking, “History isn’t kind to the man who holds Mussolini’s jacket,” but has come back into the fold of Trump’s Republican Party.

Given this environment, could Republicans break from Trump?

“Nobody wants to be the zebra that strays from the pack and gets gobbled up by the lion,” a former senior administration official said in assessing the current consensus among Senate Republicans. “They have to hold hands and jump simultaneously … Then Trump is immediately no longer president and the power he can exert over them and the punishment he can inflict is, in the snap of a finger, almost completely erased.”

Expecting Republican Senators to “hold hands and jump simultaneously,” between now and November 3, 2020, even as we learn more about Trump’s extortion of Ukraine, is far fetched.

If the story metastasizes far beyond where we are now, might 3 or 4 Republican Senators vote for impeachment? I would regard that as a victory.

Meanwhile, Republican Senators can be expected to fall into 3 camps. From the first camp, we’ll see an avalanche of lies, diversions, attacks on Democrats and the media, and a bottomless narrative of grievance.

From the second camp, we’ll hear tut-tutting and murmurs of disapproval, but the conduct will not rise to the level of impeachment.

And, a third possibility, 1 or 2 or 3 (or …?) Republican Senators will acknowledge that Trump’s misconduct is undeniable and renders him unfit to serve. At least we can hope that this category is not a null set by the time the Senate votes on impeachment.

(Image: the Capitol via wikipedia.)

Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans

GOP response to facts damning to Trump: denial, diversion, accusations & embrace of victimhood

When the facts are damning, do anything you can to detract attention from those facts. Three experienced Republican leaders — House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Freedom Caucus-founder Jim Jordan, and Senator Lindsey Graham, always ready to flatter the President with contortions and contrivances — demonstrate how to avoid offering a simple, straightforward answer to an inconvenient question.

Watching the videos (linked to the tweets) is a lesson in subterfuge as practiced by a Republican Party too fearful of the President to acknowledge wrongdoing. Observe Congress’s most vocal defenders of Trump in action on mainstream television:

1. Leader McCarthy listens to Scott Pelley read one of the most talked about exchanges from the memo on Trump’s phone call to President Zelensky.

McCarthy responds: “Well, you just added another word.” Pelley assures him that the word “is in the White House transcript.”

McCarthy pivots and begins a reply, “When I read the transcript …,” by repeating talking points that Republicans distributed last week to Members of Congress. While McCarthy denies having seen those talking points, it’s obvious from his comment about the “added” word that he hasn’t read the transcript — or hasn’t retained what he read. (Not ready for prime time.)

2. Jake Tapper interviews Congressman Jim Jordan, one of the most aggressive practitioners of deflection and whataboutism in the House.

Tapper: I understand you want to change the subject, but the President was pushing the president of Ukraine to investigate a political rival. I cannot believe that that is okay with you. I can’t believe it’s okay with you.

Jordan: It’s not okay because — but he didn’t do that.

Tapper: … It’s in the transcript. We all read it.

Jordan: I read the transcript.

But of course, if he has, he doesn’t want to talk about it. Instead, he throws out accusations against the Bidens, whines about Trump’s victimhood at the hands of the FBI, but — talking fast and loud — won’t acknowledge the simple facts related straightforwardly in the White House transcript. (Finally Tapper has had enough and concludes the interview.)

3. And, last but not least, the Senator from South Carolina: Among the highlights of the interview with Margaret Brennan, is Graham’s complaint about hearsay (“a second hand account,” as the GOP talking point puts it).

Bennan points out that the whistleblower’s account has been confirmed by the White House transcript of the call. The facts don’t matter to Graham. He invokes hearsay multiple times, makes the false claim that “they changed the rules” about hearsay and whistleblowers, and — like Jordan — offers a long diatribe about Trump being persecuted. (And nary a glance at the facts that have been confirmed already.)

(Image: Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic album cover.)

Donald Trump, Off the Rails

Memo that Justice Department suppressed places Bill Barr at center of Trump’s shakedown

Now I had a chance to review in detail the notes of the call between the President of the United States and the President of Ukraine, as well as the legal opinion drafted by the Department of Justice in an effort to prevent the whistleblower complaint from coming to our committee. And I have to say that I’m shocked by both.

The notes of the call reflect a conversation far more damning than I or many others had imagined. It is shocking at another level that the White House would release these notes and felt that somehow this would help the President’s case or cause. Because what those notes reflect is a classic mafia-like shakedown of a foreign leader.

They reflect a Ukrainian president who was desperate for U.S. support – for military support to help that country in a hot war with Putin’s Russia. A country that is still occupied by irregular Russian forces and in which people face a very dangerous and continuing and destabilizing action by their aggressive neighbor. And at the same time a President of the United States who, immediately after Ukraine’s president expresses the need for further weapons, tells the Ukraine president that he has a favor to ask.

The President communicates to his Ukrainian counterpart that the United States has done a lot for Ukraine. We’ve done an awful lot for Ukraine. More than the Europeans or anyone else has done for Ukraine. But there’s not much reciprocity here.

This is how a mafia boss talks. ‘What have you done for us? We’ve done so much for you. But there’s not much reciprocity. I have a favor I want to ask you.’

And what is that favor? Of course the favor is to investigate his political rival, to investigate the Bidens.

And it’s clear that the Ukraine president understands exactly what is expected of him. And is making every effort to mollify the President.  

What adds another layer of depravity to this conversation is the fact the President of the United States then invokes the Attorney General of the United States as well as his personal lawyer as emissaries. In the case of the Attorney General , as an official head of a U.S. department, the Department of Justice, that he says will be part and parcel of this.

Now I know that the Attorney General is denying involvement in this. But nonetheless you can see why the Department of Justice would want this transcript never to see the light of day. You can see why they have worked so hard to deprive our committee of the whistleblower complaint. And in fact the opinion by the justice department is startling in its own regard because in that opinion the Department of Justice advances the absurd claim that the Director of National Intelligence has no responsibility over efforts to prevent foreign interference in our elections.

Well, that will come as news – at least it should – to the Director of National Intelligence, who is charged, among other things, with detecting foreign interference in our elections and with reporting to Congress about foreign interference in our elections. But it is apparently the view of this justice department that the Director has no jurisdiction in this area. — Congressman Adam Schiff, Chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence