Christianity Today Betrays the Truth
In a December 19, 2019 editorial, Mark Galli, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, opines that President Trump should be “removed from office.” This conclusion by Christianity Today’s editorial board is disheartening and, in profound ways, does a disservice both to the Christian community and the nation as a whole.
Let’s be clear from the beginning. One does not have to support President Trump or the Republican party to be a Christian. One does not have to be an American to be a Christian. These truths ought to go without saying, but I think they need to be stated. Why? Because the truth matters. This editorial position is wrong, not because it is anti-Trump, but because it is anti-truth.
In the editorial, Galli acknowledges, “The Democrats have had it out for him from day one, and therefore nearly everything they do is under a cloud of partisan suspicion. This has led many to suspect not only motives but facts in these recent impeachment hearings. And, no, Mr. Trump did not have a serious opportunity to offer his side of the story in the House hearings on impeachment.”
These facts, cited by Galli, ought to matter. Yes, there is good reason to seriously doubt anything the Democrats throw up against this president and his administration. Yes, their motives may certainly be questioned. Furthermore, there wasn’t due process during any part of the so-called “hearings.” Galli acknowledges these truths. However, it’s at this point, that he and the editorial board abandon the truth.
The next line in the editorial shows CT’s betrayal of truth. Galli writes, “But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.”
No, Mr. Galli, that is not a fact. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has said there was no blackmail involved during a telephone call with President Trump. The Ukrainian president himself denied there was a “quid pro quo.” Furthermore, there is no evidence that President Trump sought to have the Ukraine harass or discredit Joe Biden. In fact, Zelensky has gone on record asserting the opposite. He says he was not pressured to investigate the Biden family during their now-controversial phone call over the summer and, when asked about it replied, “Nobody pushed me.”
Again, you don’t have to like the president or agree with this defense, but to assert that the facts are “unambiguous” is a lie.
In the next paragraph, Galli launches into a personal attack against the president. He’s certainly entitled to his opinion, as is the editorial board of CT. He then notes that much of the evangelical world supports what the president has done regarding the Supreme Court, the economy, and religious liberty.
His next two lines, once again, show CT’s abandonment of truth. “We believe the impeachment hearings have made it absolutely clear, in a way the Mueller investigation did not, that President Trump has abused his authority for personal gain and betrayed his constitutional oath. The impeachment hearings have illuminated the president’s moral deficiencies for all to see.”
Unless you just accept the Democrat talking points line for line, these two statements make no sense. The Mueller investigation revealed nothing because there was nothing to reveal. The impeachment hearings revealed moral deficiencies, but not of the president.
Galli attempts to justify this editorial based on what CT wrote about Bill Clinton in 1998. The key phrase written in the 1998 CT editorial is “live by the law.” What law, Mr. Galli, did President Trump break? He doesn’t address it, because he can’t. There were no laws broken.
Galli then self-righteously derides evangelicals who support Trump and bemoans how anyone who claims to live for the gospel can support such a person. And, with that, elitism rears its head in evangelical Christianity.
Here’s the bottom line. Galli and the editorial board of CT can support whomever they want. As Christian Americans, we can, too. To not like President Trump is their right. To write about it in their magazine is their prerogative. It is also our prerogative to not like what they write. It is obvious that CT has abandoned the truth in an attempt to curry favor with the elitist left. They do so under a guise of winning them to the Gospel, but with what? The Gospel is based on truth. This editorial is not. It betrays the truth for popularity. Perhaps Galli and the members of the CT editorial board can go to their Christmas parties proud of how they told off the ignorant evangelicals. I don’t know. I don’t know what is gained by this foray into political spin, but somewhere a rooster must be crowing.
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.
Trump: New York AG ‘Deliberately
Mischaracterizing’ $2 Million Settlement ‘For Political Purposes’
BULLSHIT! TRUMP AND HIS PARASITE
CHILDREN
HAVE SCREWED EVERY CONTRACTOR AND
PERSON
THEY’VE DONE BUSINESS WITH FROM DAY ONE!
Eric Trump on paying contractors: We pay ‘people when they do
great jobs’
Opinion: Trump’s
emoluments transgressions don’t stop with the Doral fiasco
ANN COULTER
“Truthfully, It Is Tough To Ignore Some Of The Gross
Immoral Behavior By The President” WASHINGTON POST
Trump's sister quits as a federal judge 10
days into formal probe of her possible role in massive family tax scam that
could have ended in her impeachment
Morning Joe: Trump Is ‘Owned by Putin,’ Head of ‘Criminal
Organization’
The GOP Is Escalating a Historic Constitutional Crisis Over Impeachment
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.
This
is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” --- Karen
McQuillan
President
Donald Trump speaks to the press before departing the White House in Washington
on Nov. 8, 2019. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump: New York AG ‘Deliberately
Mischaracterizing’ $2 Million Settlement ‘For Political Purposes’
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President Donald Trump accused New York Attorney General Letitia James of
“deliberately mischaracterizing” the details of a $2 million settlement reached
on Thursday.
New York Judge Saliann Scarpulla ruled that Trump must pay $2 million as part of a settlement he, the Trump Foundation, and James’s
office reached in a lawsuit alleging Trump misused his charitable foundation
during the 2016 campaign.
Scarpulla said
Trump let his campaign hold a foundation fundraiser in January 2016 and used it
“to further Mr. Trump’s political campaign.”
The foundation
received $2.8 million from the fundraiser and the money “did ultimately reach
their intended destinations, i.e., charitable organizations supporting
veterans,” Scarpulla ruled.
Instead of
the entire $2.8 million that James’s office pushed for, Scarpulla ordered
Trump to pay $2 million. She also declined a statutory penalty of $5.2 million
that James’s office wanted the president to pay.
James
celebrated the ruling on Wednesday.
“We’ve secured
a court order forcing President Trump to pay $2M in damages after admitting to
illegally using the Trump Foundation to help him intervene in the 2016
presidential election and further his own political interests. No one is above
the law,” she said in a statement.
In another
statement, she wrote, “The court’s decision, together with the settlements we
negotiated, are a major victory in our efforts to protect charitable assets and
hold accountable those who would abuse charities for personal gain. My office
will continue to fight for accountability because no one is above the law—not a
businessman, not a candidate for office, and not even the President of the
United States.”
Scarborough then launched
into his own conspiracy theory:
But I think we all will be absolutely fascinated when we finally
figure out what Vladimir Putin has on Donald Trump and why Donald Trump has surrendered the Middle East,
helped ISIS, helped Iran, helped Russia, helped Turkey, helped all of our
enemies and betrayed all of our allies. You know, a lot of people think that it’s – he has
compromising pictures or something happened in a hotel in Russia years ago. No.
It goes back to money. It’s always about money.
GET THIS BOOK!
Peter Schweizer, author
of “Secret Empires: How the
American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,”
BULLSHIT! TRUMP AND HIS PARASITE
CHILDREN
HAVE SCREWED EVERY CONTRACTOR AND
PERSON
THEY’VE DONE BUSINESS WITH FROM DAY ONE!
Eric Trump on paying contractors: We pay ‘people when they do
great jobs’
The Trump
Organization has been criticized for stiffing contractors. Contractors have
filed hundreds of
complaints, which date back to the 1980s, alleging that the real estate company
did not pay them.
“We
believe in paying people when they do great jobs. And we get people paid
incredibly quickly. And we pay contractors,” said Eric Trump, executive vice
president of The Trump Organization at Yahoo Finance’s All Market
Summit, adding that the organization only refuses to pay contractors
who fail to complete a job.
“Yeah,
well, they [the unpaid contractors] didn't finish a job. And they didn't do a
good job. And they flaked out. And they were two months behind schedule. And so
you had to let go of them. And you had to bring somebody else in to do the job
that they otherwise would have. And it's called the real world,” he said,
referring to the allegations. “People like to take cheap shots at us.”
Opinion: Trump’s
emoluments transgressions don’t stop with the Doral fiasco
By NORMAN J. ORNSTEIN
When the White House announced that Donald Trump
would host the 2020 Group of Seven meeting at his Doral golf resort in Florida
— an in-your-face bit
of self-dealing and a blatant violation of the Constitution’s foreign
emoluments clause — Republicans and Democrats howled. Reporters had only just
begun to tally the ways awarding himself a government contract could enrich
Trump and the Trump Organization when the president backed down, but not before
he publicly decried the “phony” emoluments clause.
The Doral reversal dimmed the spotlight on
emoluments, but that should not lead us to drop the focus on the rest of
Trump’s self-dealing and conflicts of interest. For strategic reasons, the
House of Representatives may not include emoluments transgressions among
potential impeachment charges. Nonetheless, the number of Trump’s violations
are staggering, and growing by the day.
There are two separate emoluments sections in
the Constitution; neither are phony, and
both reflect the deep concern the Framers had about possible corruption in the
highest offices in the land.
“Emoluments” are anything of value. The first
constitutional clause, forbidding any officer of the United States from taking
“any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever” from a foreign
government, is in Article I. It has no loopholes; the Framers feared that a
rich foreign government could influence or sway American policy by giving
something of value to a policy-maker. It is not limited to the president or
vice president, but to all holding an office of trust in the U.S. government.
The second emoluments clause is in Article II and
is limited to the president. It reads, “The President shall, at stated Times,
receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be increased nor
diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall
not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or
any of them.” Here, the fear was that Congress could shake down the
president by withholding his salary or bribe him by increasing it, and that a
president could use the leverage of his office with states or the federal
government to enrich himself.
We have never had occasion in our history to be
deeply concerned about violations of these constitutional clauses. Most
previous presidents have scrupulously adhered to them in spirit and letter.
Jimmy Carter, to pick one example, put his peanut farm in a blind trust to
avoid any appearance of conflict or attempt to profit via his office.
Trump, whose chief of staff on Sunday said the
president still thought of himself as an innkeeper, has kept ownership of all
his properties and has lied about not participating in their operations. He
pushed officials at the General Services Administration to allow him to keep
his federal lease for his Washington hotel while pressuring the District of
Columbia to lower his property taxes. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, holding an
office in his administration, has taken valuable trademarks, including, staggeringly,
one on voting machines, from China. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, holding
an office of trust in the administration, has promoted Trump and Kushner
properties and solicited loans from foreign governments.
In other words, the president is unique in his
corruption in American history. The watchdog group Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has regularly compiled a tally of
Trump’s conflicts of interest and violations of the emoluments clauses. The
latest numbers are stark: 1,493 trips to Trump properties by government
officials, usually spending taxpayer money that will enrich the president; 292
promotions of Trump properties by White House officials; 63 foreign trademarks
awarded to Trump brands, mostly from China and Brazil, while he has been
president.
The president himself had made 387 trips to his
properties, 240 of them to play golf. He regularly does semi-official
infomercials for his properties, and he’s told couples considering staging a
wedding reception at Mar-a-Lago in Florida or the Trump country club in
Bedminster, N.H., that, if they do, he might be available for a photo op. He
famously doubled the initiation
fee at
Mar-a-Lago, to $200,000, when he became president, enabling foreign figures
(and others) to gain entrée to the president for a price his businesses
collect.
The message has been received: Foreign
governments, including Romania, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, moved events from
other venues to Trump properties, and foreign countries or other
foreign-connected entities have held 13 events at his properties, surely
enriching him along the way. (He claims profits from foreigners are repaid to
the Treasury; without his tax records, this can’t be checked). One hundred and
twenty-one foreign officials from 71 foreign governments have visited his
properties; lobbyists of all stripes have scheduled events there. Trump has
openly talked about his ventures in places like Saudi Arabia and Turkey even as
he has bent American foreign policy in ways that benefit those countries’
autocrats.
The president likes to pretend that there is no
such thing as a conflict of interest, that his actions are ”perfect” and
“innocent.” But we should not let his lies obscure what are ongoing, direct and
outrageous abuses of the Constitution for financial gain by the president and
his cronies. The House impeachment hearings are concentrating on other abuses
of power, but there is no doubt our Framers would see the emoluments violations
as a long series of impeachable and unconscionable offenses.
Norman
J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His
latest book, with Thomas E. Mann and E.J. Dionne Jr., is “One Nation After
Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate and the
Not-Yet-Deported.”
Eric Trump’s defense echoes his father’s status quo response.
During the
2016 presidential debate,
President Donald Trump said something very similar. “Maybe he didn’t do a good
job and I was unsatisfied with his work,” he said in response to nonpayment
accusations.
Eric Trump
also noted to Yahoo Finance that The Trump Organization has developed
institutional knowledge about getting the best deals with contractors. “In New
York, we know what contractors are going to be incredible, what contractors are
going to — I won't use a word, but — take advantage of you,” he said. “And, you
know, you have that institutional knowledge. You know your way around. You know
the language. You know the laws. You know how things are built. You know what
kind of foundations work in the ground.”
ANN COULTER
TRUMP’S PARASITIC FAMILY
Jared’s BFF, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman (MBS), and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Muhammad bin Zayed (MBZ),
refer to Jared as “the clown prince.” Bone-cutter MBS assured those around him
that he had Jared “in my pocket.”
Following meetings at the White House and also with the Kushners over
their 666 Fifth Avenue property, former Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin
Jassim reported back to the emir that “the people atop the new administration
were heavily motivated by personal financial interest.”
“Truthfully, It Is Tough To Ignore Some Of The Gross
Immoral Behavior By The President” WASHINGTON POST
Trump's sister quits as a federal judge 10
days into formal probe of her possible role in massive family tax scam that
could have ended in her impeachment
· Trump's older sister resigned as an appellate court judge shortly
after a probe opened into her involvement in a family tax scheme
·
· 10 days ago an investigation into whether Maryanne Trump Barry violated
judicial conduct rules launched
·
· The case was closed after Barry resigned because retired judges are not
subject to the rules
·
· Barry had not heard a case in two years after transitioning to inactive
shortly after Trump's inauguration
·
· The Trump siblings were probed after an investigation found they were
involved in a tax scheme related to the transfer of their father's real estate
empire
President Donald Trump’s older sister
Maryanne Trump Barry, 82, retired as a federal judge just days after an
investigation opened into her possible role in family tax fraud scheme.
Barry was a federal appellate judge in the third district, which
includes Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, and the investigation could
have led to her impeachment.
She had not presided over a case in more than two years, but was still
listed as an inactive senior judge in the third district – usually the step
taken before full retirement.
Barry did not give any reasons for her retirement.
The probe into the Trumps was first opened last fall, after a New York
Times investigation found the Trump siblings engaged in tax schemes in the
1990s, including fraud, that increased their inherited wealth.
+4
Maryanne Trump Barry resigned as a federal appellate judge 10 days into
an investigation into whether she violated judicial conduct rules
An investigation into the Trump siblings opened after the New York Times
reported that they transferred their father's real estate assets improperly in
the 1990s
PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES DONALD TRUMP: Pathological liar,
swindler, con man, huckster, golfing cheat, charity foundation fraudster, tax
evader, adulterer, porn whore chaser and servant of the Saudis dictators
THE TRUMP FAMILY FOUNDATION SLUSH FUND…. Will they see jail?
VISUALIZE REVOLUTION!.... We know where they live!
“Underwood is a Democrat and is seeking millions of dollars in
penalties. She wants Trump and his eldest children barred from running other
charities.”
WHO IS
FINANCING ALL THE TRUMP AND SON-IN-LAW’S REFINANCING SCAMS???
FOLLOW THE
MONEY!
"I
doubt that Trump understands -- or cares about -- what message he's sending.
Wealthy Saudis, including members of the extended royal family, have been his
patrons for years, buying his distressed properties when he needed money. In
the early 1990s, a Saudi prince purchased Trump's flashy yacht so that the
then-struggling businessman could come up with cash to stave off personal
bankruptcy, and later, the prince bought a share of the Plaza Hotel, one of
Trump's many business deals gone bad. Trump also sold an entire floor of his
landmark Trump Tower condominium to the Saudi government in 2001."
“The Wahhabis
finance thousands of madrassahs
throughout the
world where young boys are
brainwashed into
becoming fanatical foot-soldiers
for the
petrodollar-flush Saudis and other emirs of
the Persian
Gulf.” AMIL IMANI
I recommend that Ignatius read Raymond Ibrahim's outstanding
book Sword and Scimitar, which
contains accounts of dynastic succession in the Muslim monarchies of the Middle
East, where standard operating procedure for a new monarch on the death of his
father was to strangle all his brothers. Yes, it's
awful. But it has been happening for a very long
time. And it's not going to change quickly, no matter how outraged
we pretend to be. MONICA SHOWALTER
WHAT WILL TRUMP AND HIS PARASITIC FAMILY DO FOR MONEY???
JUST ASK THE SAUDIS!
JOHN DEAN: Not so far. This has been right by the letter of
the special counsel’s charter. He’s released the document. What I’m
looking for is relief and understanding that there’s no witting or unwitting
likelihood that the President is an agent of Russia. That’s when I’ll feel
comfortable, and no evidence even hints at that. We don’t have that yet. We’re
still in the process of unfolding the report to look at it. And its, as I say,
if [Attornery General William Barr] honors his word, we’ll know more soon.
Morning Joe: Trump Is ‘Owned by Putin,’ Head of ‘Criminal
Organization’
Listen to
the Article!
Following a discussion of President
Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, on Thursday, MSNBC’s Morning
Joe went far beyond standard criticism of the controversial foreign
policy move and wildly claimed it was proof that Trump was “owned by Putin” and
heading up a “criminal organization” that had been “laundering money” for the
Russian autocrat for decades.
As the 6:00 a.m. ET hour segment
about Syria was wrapping up and co-host Mika Brzezinski was starting to go to a
commercial break, left-wing pundit Donny Deutsch interrupted to squeeze in an
unfounded conspiratorial rant in which he accused the President of multiple
crimes: “Let’s not forget it. This is all about failed casinos. He is
owned by Putin because he’s been laundering money, Russian money for the last
20, 30 years. He’s owned by him. That’s what this is.”
Brzezinski voiced her agreement with
irresponsible and unsubstantiated attack: “Oh, my lord....Yeah.”
Deutsch continued his tirade
unchallenged:
You talk to any banker in New York,
any business person in New York, any real estate person in New York, we
have a president that’s selling out our military, that’s costing lives because
he is owned by our geopolitical enemy because he’s been laundering money for
him as a criminal organization for the last 30 years. That will come out in
time.
Co-host Joe Scarborough seemed to offer
a small dose of sanity in response: “That is – that is speculation and only
speculation right now.” However, he quickly added: “I will say that it is
speculation among New York bankers who have loaned Donald Trump money in the
past and who have been following his business career for 30, 40 years.”
Brzezinski chimed in: “Who know a lot.”
Scarborough then launched into his
own conspiracy theory:
But I think we all will be absolutely
fascinated when we finally figure out what Vladimir Putin has on Donald Trump and why Donald Trump has
surrendered the Middle East, helped ISIS, helped Iran, helped Russia, helped
Turkey, helped all of our enemies and betrayed all of our allies. You
know, a lot of people think that it’s – he has compromising pictures or something
happened in a hotel in Russia years ago. No. It goes back to money. It’s always
about money.
He concluded the unhinged discussion
by asserting: “And this president is selling not only America, but its
most important allies, down the river for money he wants to make either while
in office or when he leaves office, period, end of story.”
It’s never enough for the liberal
media to simply express a policy disagreement with Trump and say that the U.S.
abandoning its Kurdish allies in northern Syria would have a negative outcome.
Instead, journalists and pundits must always try to outdo each other to make
the most outrageous declarations imaginable to prove their bona fides as
members of the resistance.
Here is a full transcript of the
October 24 exchange:
6:48 AM ET
DONNY DEUTSCH: Make no mistake,
because it’s easy to forget. Let’s not forget it. This is all about failed
casinos. He is owned by Putin...
The GOP Is Escalating a Historic Constitutional Crisis Over Impeachment
Gage Skidmore/flickr
As headlines and news hosts proclaim the historic weight of Wednesday’s impeachment of an American president, there’s a barely spoken murmur of malaise that few are willing to state out loud: it just doesn’t feel that historic. For conservatives, it’s a barely registered bump on the road to either Trump’s re-election or some version of a Second Civil War. For liberals and progressives, Trump’s impeachment provides less an exclamation of justice than a notice of strategic defiance. This act may ultimately be designed less for immediate accountability than to ensure the opposition party acted appropriately against this lawless president in the eyes of history.
This is not the Democrats’ fault. Impeachment feels less historic than it should because the Republican Party has utterly abandoned its sense of shame and responsibility to the country. The unprecedented event Wednesday was less about the impeachment itself than the Republican Party’s unanimous refusal to hold to account a corrupt tyrant clearly unfit for office. If it feels like our democracy is slowly spiraling out of control, that’s because it’s true.
First, the obvious: President Trump is so clearly guilty of attempting to bribe and extort Ukraine that it hardly requires repeating here. His own doctored transcript states the case bluntly even as he declares it “perfect”; multiple witnesses that he appointed corroborated his guilt during Congressional testimony; and Trump’s own Chief of Staff openly admitted as much in a public press hearing—he likely thought it was so obvious that it was better to brazenly deny that Trump’s behavior was a problem than to attempt to deny it happened at all.
The President and his administration then stonewalled every attempt by Congress to gain documents and direct witness testimony, in a transparent act of obstruction designed to run out the clock. Having blocked all direct witness testimony through specious declarations of executive privilege, Republicans had the audacity to dismiss the evidence as a matter of hearsay.
Anyone who listened to the so-called “debate” over the articles of impeachment on the House floor could hear with unease the cracking of the pillars of democracy. Alternating side by side in 90-second presentations were a diverse set of Democratic representatives laying out the awful reality of what the president had done and the moral necessity for acting to save the country, followed in turn by angry old white men from gerrymandered and unrepresentative corners of the country yelling about a “sham” process. In one case, a GOP lawmaker compared Trump to Jesus on the cross and the witches at Salem.
If it felt surreal, that’s because it was. It was designed to. It was strategically calculated by Republicans to inflame the passions of partisans while annoying and befuddling the very few politically unaffiliated remaining. If a person tuned into the debate without a significant political allegiance and without prior knowledge of the facts, they would be utterly unable to sort fact from fiction. Most normal people assume that when two people argue, there is some sort of shared reality among them—an agreement over a certain baseline of facts. Or at least, an assumption of good faith and genuinely held perspectives from each side. It would not occur to these viewers that one side was engaged in a conspiracy to ignore obvious realities and shred the norms that hold democracy together, in a desperate attempt to hold onto a slipping partisan advantage at all costs. Republicans, in other words, fear of never again winning a fairly conducted national election.
And that’s the point: Republican tactics are predicated on the notion that an average observer would be unwilling to believe that an entire political party could be so willingly engaged in extreme depths of cynical malevolence. They also rely on entrapping a press corps dependent for its credibility on objective non-partisanship, knowing that traditional news organizations will be unwilling to raise the alarm and call them out for it, lest they be wrongly seen as the partisan propaganda organs like Fox News.
In this context, Trump’s ongoing crimes and bizarre screeds have become almost banal. He is what everyone, including his own supporters, know he is. He is the archetype of the carnival barker, the would-be tyrant buffoon, the loud-mouthed bully who survives only as long as no one successfully pulls back the curtain to lay out his inadequacies. On his own, he cannot succeed; he must be enabled by intransigent forces willing to look the other way for their own benefit. The response of the Democratic opposition seems almost perfunctory in its helplessness no matter which direction it takes: either ignore him and seem feckless, or respond with force and get dragged into Trump’s mud while distracting from the policy conversations that are both desperately needed.
What is historic here, then, is not Trump’s crimes or the act of impeaching him. It is the disturbing willingness of nearly every elected Republican in defending him when most of them know well that he is guilty and morally bankrupt. It isn’t the president’s extortion scheme that shocks the conscience so much as Senate Leader Mitch McConnell’s bemused enabling of him in exchange for a few judges and tax cuts designed to forestall the consequences of wedding the party to a dying coalition of bigots, fat cats, and cranks.
The culpable character in this shop of horrors isn’t the voraciously carnivorous president. It’s his enablers willing to condone and commit even greater atrocities to avoid the hard consequences of their past decisions.
Democrats now have an unenviable decision. Do they submit articles of impeachment in good faith to the Senate, knowing that Republicans will make a partisan mockery of the proceedings as they have already promised to do, in defiance of their oaths of office? Or do they withhold the articles as leverage, potentially accelerating a Constitutional crisis of the Republicans’ making while appearing themselves to be the instigators? As usual, there are no good choices here in the face of such unprecedented sabotage of our shared national interest by Republicans.
This crisis will only be headed off by a resounding rejection at the polls. Other crises will still remain due to structural injustices—gerrymandering, Senate apportionments, etc.—that prevent the majority of decent Americans from solving problems like healthcare and climate change, even with overwhelming popular majorities.
The Trump Doctrine
The president thinks America’s allies are the countries whose leaders will help him politically.
The White House/Flickr
At each step in the impeachment saga, President Trump’s defense has shifted as prior ones fell apart. At first, Democrats were dragging things out. Now they’re moving too quickly. For months, the Inspector General probe would prove the FBI acted out of political bias in opening an investigation into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia. Now that the IG concluded otherwise, the report is irrelevant.
Likewise, when all else fails and Republicans have had to defend the president’s conduct on substance, they inevitably seem to embrace Russian propaganda. GOP lawmakers now argue that Trump was justified in withholding military aid to Ukraine because it was actually Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered with the 2016 election, despite recent briefings from Trump’s own intelligence officials that this is a fabrication peddled by the Kremlin. Nevertheless,, the Republican House leadership put out what is essentially the Republicans’ pre-trial memo making that case.
It asserts that Trump’s “deep-seated, genuine, and reasonable skepticism of Ukraine” is justified by Ukrainian “sabotage” and “interven[tion], however indirectly,in a US election.” What “sabotage” and “indirect intervention” did Ukraine commit against our democracy? According to Republicans, it consists wholly of “statements made by senior Ukrainian government officials in 2016 that were critical of then-candidate Trump.”
The evidence they cite consists entirely of the following:
- An op-ed in the Hill by Ukraine’s ambassador to the US lamenting Trump’s support for Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory.
- A member of Ukraine’s parliament telling the Financial Times that most Ukrainian politicians were “on Hillary Clinton’s side.”
- A former prime minister criticizing Trump on Facebook.
- The internal affairs minister calling Trump a “clown” on Twitter and “a dangerous misfit” on Facebook.
- A Politico report claiming that unnamed Ukrainian government officials had questioned Trump’s “fitness for office.”
Apparently, a variety of people in Ukraine felt the same way many Americans felt during the 2016 campaign. That was enough, it seems, to merit turning U.S. defense posture 180-degrees from what virtually every professional specialist in our government recommends, including almost all of Trump’s own top advisers. If that’s the case, personal effrontery is now the determinant of national security.
And that means we’re in real danger: There’s only one country on earth whose leaders haven’t at some point evinced an antipathy toward our Dear Leader—and that’s Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
While it’s true that various Ukrainian officials expressed concerns about the possibility that Trump might become President of the United States, that isn’t exactly surprising: Trump repeatedly displayed his affinity for Putin and suggested that he should be allowed to take the Crimea region from Ukraine. It’s easy to see why Ukrainians might have been apprehensive that he could become the leader of the free world.
But they weren’t alone: You can find leaders and officials in almost every country who were worried about Trump, for many, obvious reasons. In fact, you don’t need to be a member of an intelligence service to have been aware of this. You only needed to have met almost anyone from anywhere outside the U.S.
I don’t claim to be a foreign policy expert. I’m just an average American. But in the run-up to the 2016 election, I had the opportunity to speak at a number of conferences around the world on global politics, including in South Africa, Copenhagen, Paris, and Brussels.
At all these events, the Europeans routinely expressed concern at the prospect of a Trump administration. Those who lived under repressive regimes elsewhere, such as Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela, went out of their way to warn of how authoritarians took over their own countries in terms that were eerily evocative of Trump’s rise.
The most striking contacts I had with foreigners in 2016, however, came on Election Day itself, when I moderated a panel of political experts from around the world in Washington, D.C. I had emailed the panelists in advance asking them to let me know what points they wanted to make. A Russian political consultant, described to me as close to Putin, emailed back to say that, “obviously,” Putin wanted Trump to win, because Clinton was a “globalist”—promoting international human rights that overrode state prerogatives—while Trump was “an American nationalist” more consistent with Putin’s worldview.
That evening, I watched the returns at the National Press Club with all the conference attendees from around the world. I realized very early that Trump was going to win and decided to leave before the reality hit everyone else: the foreign political insiders there were almost-uniformly rooting for Clinton.
While I was waiting for my wife outside the coatroom, the Russian suddenly emerged from the washroom. He was surprised to see me readying to leave. He looked perplexed and asked why I was going so early. As I described in detail why Trump was going to carry the Electoral College, his mouth kept turning up in a broad smile despite his repeated efforts to suppress it. When I concluded that it was a good night for his country, he swaggered away with a jaunty “Sure is!”
After he trotted off, a young man with a vaguely familiar accent approached me. “I heard what you told the Russian,” he said. “You are absolutely right.” He was with the Estonian embassy. His government, he told me, was worried that Trump would greenlight a Russian invasion of their country. The next morning I met with similarly shaken officials from across Sweden’s political spectrum, who were convinced as well that Trump would give Putin free-rein.
In retrospect, it’s striking how clear Trump’s subservience to Putin was for months in advance of the election to everyone but the American public. If Iwas picking this up in casual travels and meetings with foreign acquaintances, it it hard to believe that U.S. officials weren’t picking up far more.
Of course, they were—and not only in the FBI and CIA. The Republican congressional leadership was caught on tape discussing in early 2016 Trump’s apparent status as a Russian asset. Kevin McCarthy even said—jokingly, he now claims—that he believed Trump was on Putin’s payroll. When some of his colleagues laughed at this supposed “joke,” however, McCarthy responded, “Swear to God.”
So, everyone, except American voters, seems to have known before the election that Trump represented a golden opportunity for Putin. Prominent individuals in just about every country, including our own, were very concerned about it. Many expressed those concerns publicly; most Republicans did not. Those who did now deny they had those concerns at all. They pretend they don’t understand why the FBI would have opened an investigation into what they themselves suspected. They even claim that, because some Ukrainians publicly voiced some of the same reservations about Trump, they were engaged in “sabotage.”
If that logic were true, then almost every country on the planet engaged in “sabotage” against America. We should be withholding defense assistance from all of them. Only one country, then, is our ally in this foreign policy Fun House: the only one whose leader wanted Donald Trump to be president of the United States.
A Crack in Trump’s White Evangelical Base of Support
Christianity Today has called for the president’s removal from office.
The White House/Flickr
On Thursday, the editor in chief of Christianity Today, Mark Galli, wrote a piece calling for Donald Trump to be removed from office. Here is the crux of his argument.
[T]he facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone—with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.
News of this reverberated in the world of white evangelical Christians because this didn’t come from a publication that can be written off as part of the “secular left.” Christianity Today was founded by evangelist Billy Graham and has been a staple in evangelical circles for decades.
Whether a call like this opens up a fissure in Trump’s base of support among white evangelicals remains to be seen. But it represents a crack that, as Leonard Cohen wrote, allows some light to get in. It is precisely the kind of thing that can spread a bit of cognitive dissonance among those who have been attempting to avoid the difficult questions raised by blind support of a president who is clearly amoral.
Keep in mind that this news comes only a few weeks after Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, talked with radio host Eric Metaxas about how those who oppose Donald Trump are engaging with demonic forces. When a publication like Christianity Today joins the opposition, it becomes more difficult to literally “demonize” the other side.
In response to this call for Trump’s removal, Franklin Graham has weighed in to define the battle lines. In a post on Facebook, he begins by suggesting that his late father voted for Trump and would disagree with what Galli wrote. Graham doesn’t mount a defense of the president, but simply dismisses the charges against him as partisan.
This impeachment was politically motivated, 100% partisan. Why would Christianity Today choose to take the side of the Democrat left whose only goal is to discredit and smear the name of a sitting president? They want readers to believe the Democrat leadership rather than believe the President of the United States.
While I wouldn’t presume to speak for Galli, it seems rather clear from what he wrote that his intention was to ask readers to weigh the facts, which he described as “unambiguous.”
Here is how Graham ended his response.
Christianity Today has been used by the left for their political agenda. It’s obvious that Christianity Today has moved to the left and is representing the elitist liberal wing of evangelicalism.
At least he didn’t call them “demonic.” But the message is clear. As is always the case with authoritarianism, questions raised from within the ranks are dismissed and those who raise them are ejected from the fold. That is the message Graham sends to anyone who might find some merit in what Galli has written.
But while the battle lines have been clearly drawn, this episode highlights the weakness of every authoritarian system, including the one that undergirds Trump’s base of support among white evangelicals. Any question or challenge raised poses a major threat to the entire edifice. That is the crack that was just opened by the piece in Christianity Today.
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