Watch Live – Protesters Demand Impeachment Outside U.S. Capitol
0:56
A few hundred protesters are gathered outside of the United States Capitol Wednesday to voice their support for the impeachment of President Donald Trump ahead of an expected House vote on the matter.
The nationwide protest, dubbed “Nobody is Above the Law, kicked off Tuesday with more than 600 protests nationwide.
Partners for the events include Need to Impeach, Women’s March, MoveOn, By the People, Center for American Progress, NextGen America, Voto Latino, Equal Justice Society, Progressive Democrats of America, Indivisible, and many others.
“Nobody Is Above the Law,” the event website stated. “That’s why we’re calling on Congress to Impeach & Remove Donald Trump.”
The Lessons of Theodore Roosevelt
Library of
Congress/Wikimedia Commons
This Is No Ordinary Impeachment
By Andrew Sullivan
This is
not just an impeachment. It’s the endgame for Trump’s relentless assault
on the institutions, norms, and practices of America’s liberal democracy for
the past three years. It’s also a deeper reckoning. It’s about whether the
legitimacy of our entire system can last much longer without this man being
removed from office.
I’m
talking about what political scientists call “regime cleavage” — a decline in
democratic life so severe the country’s very institutions could lose legitimacy
as a result of it. It is described by one political scientist as follows: “a
division within the population marked by conflict about the foundations of the
governing system itself — in the American case, our constitutional democracy.
In societies facing a regime cleavage, a growing number of citizens and
officials believe that norms, institutions, and laws may be ignored, subverted,
or replaced.” A full-on regime cleavage is, indeed, an extinction-level event
for our liberal democratic system. And it is one precipitated by the man who is
supposed to be the guardian of that system, the president.
Let us
count the ways in which Trump has attacked and undermined the core legitimacy
of our democracy. He is the only candidate in American history who refused to
say that he would abide by the results of the vote. Even after winning the 2016
election, he still claimed that “millions” of voters — undocumented aliens —
perpetrated massive electoral fraud in the last election, and voted for his
opponent. He has repeatedly and publicly toyed with the idea that he could
violate the 22nd Amendment, and get elected for three terms, or more.
He
consistently described a perfectly defensible inquiry into Russia’s role in the
2016 election as a “witch hunt” and a “hoax,” demonizing Robert Mueller, even
as Mueller, in the end, couldn’t find evidence to support the idea of a
conspiracy with Russia (perhaps in part because Trump ordered no cooperation,
and refused to testify under oath). Trump then withheld release of the full
report, while his pliant attorney general distorted its content and wrongly
proclaimed that Trump had been entirely exonerated.
In
the current scandal over Ukraine, Trump is insisting that he did “nothing
wrong” in demanding that Ukraine announce investigations into Joe and Hunter
Biden, or forfeit desperately needed military aid. If that is the president’s
position — that he can constitutionally ask any other country to intervene on
his behalf in a U.S. election — it represents a view of executive power that is
the equivalent of a mob boss’s. It is best summed up in Trump’s own words:
Article 2 of the Constitution permits him to do “anything I want.”
We have become
so used to these attacks on our constitutional order that we fail to be shocked
by Trump’s insistence that a constitutional impeachment inquiry is a “coup.” By
any measure, this is an extraordinary statement, and itself an impeachable
offense as a form of “contempt for Congress.” We barely blink anymore when a
president refuses to cooperate in any way, demands his underlings refuse to
testify and break the law by flouting subpoenas, threatens to out the first
whistle-blower’s identity (in violation of the law), or assaults and tries to
intimidate witnesses, like Colonel Alexander Vindman.
He seems
to think in the Ukraine context that “l’état c’est moi” is the core American
truth, rather than a French monarch’s claims to absolute power. He believes in the
kind of executive power the Founders designed the U.S. Constitution to prevent.
It therefore did not occur to Trump that blackmailing a foreign country to
investigate his political opponents is a classic abuse of power, because he is
incapable of viewing his own interests and the interests of the United States
as in any way distinct. But it is a core premise of our liberal democracy that
the powers of the presidency are merely on loan, and that using them to advance
a personal interest is a definition of an abuse of power.
There
are valid criticisms and defenses of Trump’s policy choices, but his policies
are irrelevant for an impeachment. I actually support a humane crackdown on
undocumented immigration, a tougher trade stance toward China, and an attempt,
at least, to end America’s endless wars. But what matters, and what makes this
such a vital moment in American history, is that it has nothing to do with
policy. This is simply about Trump’s abuse of power.
He
lies and misleads the American public constantly, in an outright attempt to so
confuse Americans that they forget or reject the concept of truth altogether.
Lies are part of politics, but we have never before seen such a fire hose of
often contradictory or inflammatory bald-faced lies from the Oval Office. He
has obstructed justice countless times, by witness tampering, forbidding his
subordinates from complying with legal subpoenas, and by “using the powers of
his high office, engaged personally and through his close subordinates and
agents, in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede, and obstruct”
both the Mueller and now the Ukraine investigations. (I quote from Article 1 of
Nixon’s impeachment.) Trump has also “failed without lawful cause or excuse to
produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas issued by
the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives … and willfully
disobeyed such subpoenas.” (I quote from Article III of Nixon’s impeachment.)
He has declared legal processes illegitimate if they interfere with or
constrain his whims and impulses.
This
is not just another kind of presidency; it is a rolling and potentially
irreversible assault on the legitimacy of the American regime. If the CIA finds
something that could reflect poorly on him, then the CIA is part of the “deep
state coup.” Ditto the FBI and the State Department. These are not
old-fashioned battles with a bureaucracy over policy; that’s fine. They are
assaults on the legitimacy of the bureaucracy, and the laws they are required to
uphold. These are definitional impeachable offenses, and they are part and
parcel of Trump’s abuse of power from the day he was elected.
And
most important of all, Trump has turned the GOP — one of our two major parties
with a long and distinguished history — into an accomplice in his crimes.
Senator Lindsey Graham, perhaps the most contemptible figure of the last couple
of years, even says he will not read witness transcripts or follow the
proceedings in the House or consider the evidence in a legal impeachment
inquiry, because he regards the whole impeachment process as “BS” and a “sham.”
This is a senator calling the constitutional right of the House of
Representatives to impeach a president illegitimate.
And the
GOP as a whole has consistently backed Trump rather than the Constitution.
Sixty-two percent of Republican supporters have said that there is nothing
Trump could do, no crime or war crime, no high crime or misdemeanor, that would
lead them to vote against him in 2020. There is only one way to describe this,
and that is a cult, completely resistant to reason or debate. The tribalism is
so deep that Trump seems incapable of dropping below 40 percent in the national
polls, and is competitive in many swing states. The cult is so strong that
Trump feels invulnerable. If Trump survives impeachment, and loses the 2020
election, he may declare it another coup, rigged, and illegitimate. He may
refuse to concede. And it is possible the GOP will follow his lead. That this
is even thinkable reveals the full extent of our constitutional rot.
Trump
has fast-forwarded “regime cleavage.” He is appealing to the people to render
him immune from constitutional constraints imposed by the representatives of
the people. He has opened up not a divide between right and left so much as a
divide over whether the American system of government is legitimate or
illegitimate. And that is why I don’t want to defeat Trump in an election,
because that would suggest that his assault on the truth, on the Constitution,
and on the rule of law is just a set of policy decisions that we can, in time,
reject. It creates a precedent for future presidents to assault the legitimacy
of the American government, constrained only by their ability to win the next
election. In fact, the only proper constitutional response to this abuse of
executive power is impeachment. I know I’ve said this before. But on the eve of
public hearings, it is vital to remember it.
None
of this presidential behavior is tolerable. If the Senate exonerates Trump, it
will not just enable the most lawless president in our history to even greater
abuses. It will deepen the regime cleavage even further. It will cast into
doubt the fairness of the upcoming election. It will foment the conspiracy
theory that our current laws and institutions are manifestations of a “deep
state” engineering a “coup.” It will prove that a president can indeed abuse
his power for his personal advantage without consequence; and it will set a
precedent that fundamentally changes the American system from a liberal
democracy to a form of elected monarchy, above the other two branches of
government.
I wish
there were another way forward. But there isn’t. And this, though a moment of
great danger, also contains the glimmers of renewal. Removing this petty,
shabby tyrant from office goes a long way to restoring and resetting the
Constitution as a limit on power and a guarantee against its wanton future
abuse. It must be done. With speed, with vigor, and with determination.
Is Trump the Worst President in History?
by Richard Striner
Field of
Anonymous Trump Donors Getting Crowded
The Kitchen-Table Case for Impeaching Trump
I. Abusing Power for
Political Gain
II. Mishandling
Classified Information
III. Undermining Duly
Enacted Federal Law
IV. Obstruction of
Congress
V. Obstruction of Justice
VI. Profiting From Office
VII. Fomenting Violence
“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
ANN
COULTER EXPOSES TRUMP’S “WALL” HOAX
Mark
Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors are uniting with the Koch network’s
consumer and industrial investors to demand a huge DACA amnesty
*
A handful of
Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives
amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of
funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico
border.
"During the same month that
Schlafly had backed Trump for his “America First”
agenda, Nielsen’s committee
released an ideologically-globalist report, promoting
the European migrant crisis
as a win for big business who would profit greatly
from a never-ending stream
of cheap, foreign
migrants."
"The tax overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the
super-rich, on top
of the fact that virtually all income gains during the period of
the supposed
recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have gone to the top 1
percent income
bracket."
TRUMPS INFORMS NARCOMEX:
THE PACT BETWEEN MEXICO AND TRUMP… NO WALL, NO REAL
ENFORCEMENT.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/08/did-trump-promise-mexico-no-pardon-for.html
Fox News host Tucker
Carlson said in an interview Thursday that President Donald Trump has succeeded
as a conversation starter but has failed to keep his most important campaign
promises.
“Truthfully, It Is Tough To Ignore Some Of The Gross Immoral
Behavior By The President” WASHINGTON POST
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified before the House Oversight Committee
Wednesday that the “whole Trump family” was potentially comprised by a
foreign power ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Banks
Give Congress Documents on Possible Trump Dealings with Russians
A group of
banks has turned over documents on Russians who may have done business with
President Donald Trump following a request from Congress, a Thursday report
states.
Millennials lose it when
the guy who owns their favorite companies fundraises for Trump
I. HE DISDAINS
EXPERTISE
Illustration: Paul Spella; Nicholas Kamm; Olivier Douliery / AFP /
Getty; Erik S. Lesser / AP; Kevin LaMarque / Reuters
II. HE TRUSTS ONLY
HIS OWN INSTINCTS
III. HE RESISTS
COHERENT STRATEGY
Illustration: Paul Spella; Eric Thayer / Reuters
IV. “HE IS
REFLEXIVELY CONTRARY”
V. HE HAS A
SIMPLISTIC AND ANTIQUATED NOTION OF SOLDIERING
The Lessons of Theodore Roosevelt
To get out of our Second Gilded Age, look no
further than how we got out of the first one.
September 6, 2019
We’ve been rocked by scandals over the past year involving the
nation’s most wealthy and powerful. We’ve learned that a twisted
multimillionaire allegedly procured and raped girls in his Manhattan mansion
and on his private Caribbean Island; entitled celebrities and corporate
plutocrats paid millions of dollars in bribes to get their kids into elite
universities; pillars of the Hollywood and media establishments have used their
stature to sexually prey upon underlings; and, yes, our president was caught
lying about possibly violating campaign finance laws with hush money payoffs to
a porn star and Playboy bunny.
This moral corruption
is accompanied by the regressive government policies of a scandal-stained
administration. President Donald Trump is rolling back programs that protect
consumers, voting rights, the environment, and competitive commerce faster than
Congress can issue subpoenas. His cabinet includes 17 millionaires, two
centimillionaires, and one billionaire with a combined worth of $3.2
billion, according to Forbes. He
presides over the most corrupt administration in American history, one marked
by nepotism and self-dealing. His so-called “A Team” of senior officials has
undergone a record 75 percent turnover since he took
office—most of whom resigned under pressure, often caught up in
scandal.
Commerce Secretary
Wilbur Ross, whose net worth is estimated at $600 million,
reflected the arrogance and empathy deficit that typifies the Trump White House
during last winter’s record-long government shutdown. He suggested that federal
workers just take out loans until they got paid.
But nobody tops the
swamp king, Trump himself. Forget the sleaze, forget the obstruction of
justice, forget the constant dissing of Congress. His defying the
Constitution’s emoluments clause alone would, in a normally functioning
American democracy, make him the subject of impeachment. Instead, he flouts the
rules as if they don’t apply to him. If he gets his way and hosts next year’s
G-7 summit at Mar-a-Lago, we may as well send the Constitution to the shredder.
And yet, as more recent controversies have shown us, including the Varsity
Blues college admissions scandal and Jeffery Epstein’s sex trafficking racket,
this kind of indifference to moral values is not confined to government
grandees.
So, what gives? Is
America drowning in a marsh of unchecked corruption and entitlement brought on
by latter-day Louis XVI’s and Marie Antoinettes? Are the uber-wealthy out of
control? There’s something rotten in America and, if we don’t fix it soon, we
invite a new wave of national decline and social disintegration.
The good news is that
we have faced similar challenges before. Some prescriptions from a previous era
may provide a lodestar for a future Democratic president to steer the country
in the right direction. As Mark Twain, who coined the term “the Gilded Age,”
once said, “The external glitter of wealth conceals a corrupt political core
that reflects the growing gap between the very few rich and the very many
poor.” He was talking about the original Gilded Age, but that diagnosis could
just as easily apply to our current American condition.
The first Gilded Age
was marked by rapid economic growth, massive immigration, political corruption,
and a high concentration of wealth in which the richest one percent owned 51 percent of
property, while the bottom 44 percent had a mere one percent. The oligarchs at
the top were popularly known as “robber barons.”
Theodore Roosevelt, who
was president at the time, understood that economic inequality itself becomes a
driver of a dysfunctional political system that benefits the wealthy but few
others. As he once famously warned, “There can be no real
political democracy unless there is something approaching economic democracy.”
His response to the
inequities of his times, which came to define the Progressive Era, have much to
teach us now about how to sensibly tackle economic inequality. It’s worthwhile
to closely examine the Rooseveltian playbook. For instance, his “Square Deal”
made bold changes in the American workplace, government regulation of industry,
and consumer protection. These reforms included mandating safer conditions for
miners and eliminating the spoils system in federal hiring; bringing forty-four
antitrust suits against big business, resulting in the breakup of the largest
railroad monopoly, and regulation of the nation’s largest oil company; and
passing the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act, which created the
FDA. He prosecuted more than twice
as many antitrust suits against monopolistic businesses than his three predecessors
combined, curbing the robber barons’ power. And he relentlessly cleaned up
corruption in the federal government. One-hundred-forty-six indictments were
brought against a bribery ring involving public timberlands, culminating in the
conviction and imprisonment of a U.S. senator, and forty-four Postal Department
employees were charged with fraud and bribery.
Now, we are in a Second
Gilded Age, facing many of the same problems, and, in some ways, to an even
greater degree. The gap between the rich and everyone else is even greater than
it was during the late 19th Century, when the richest two percent of Americans
owned more than a third of the nation’s wealth. Today, the top one percent owns
almost 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, or more than the bottom 90 percent
combined, according to the
nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research. The first Gilded Age saw the
rise of hyper-rich dynastic families, such as the Rockefellers, Mellons,
Carnegies, and DuPonts. Today, three individuals—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and
Warren Buffett—own more wealth than the bottom half of the country combined.
And three families—the Waltons, the Kochs, and the Mars—have enjoyed a nearly
6,000 percent rise in wealth since Ronald Reagan took the oath as president,
while median U.S. household wealth over the same period has declined by three percent.
The consequences of
this wealth gap are dire. Steve Brill explains in his book Tailspin that,
by manipulating the tax and legal systems to their benefit, America’s most
educated elite, the so-called meritocracy, have built a moat that excludes the
working poor, limiting their upward mobility and increasing their sense of
alienation, which then gives rise to the populist streak that allowed
politicians like Trump to captivate enough of the American electorate.
Similarly, psychologist
Dacher Keltner’s research shows that power in and of itself is a corrupting
force. As he documents in The
Power Paradox, powerful people lie more, drive more aggressively, are more
likely to cheat on their spouses, act abusively toward subordinates, and even
take candy from children. Too often, they simply do not respect the rules.
For example, in
monitoring an urban traffic intersection, Keltner found that drivers of the
least expensive vehicles virtually always yielded to
pedestrians, whereas drivers of luxury cars yielded only about half of the
time. He cites surveys covering 27
countries that show that rich people are more likely to admit that it’s
acceptable to engage in unethical behavior, such as accepting bribes or
cheating on taxes.“The experience of power might be thought of as having
someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy
and socially appropriate behavior,” says Keltner.
That’s why we need to
reform our political system if we are to survive the rampant amorality and
lawlessness of the Second Gilded Age. Simply put, so very few should not wield
so much sway over so many.
One of the first
priorities of an incoming administration should be to narrow the wealth and
income gap. French economist Thomas Picketty favors a progressive annual wealth
tax of up to two percent, along with a progressive income tax as high as 80
percent on the biggest earners to reduce inequality and avoid reverting to “patrimonial capitalism” in which inherited
wealth controls much of the economy and could lead essentially to oligarchy.
The leading 2020
Democratic candidates favor raising taxes, as well. Elizabeth Warren has
proposed something commensurate to Picketty’s two percent wealth tax for those
worth more than $50 million, and a three percent annual tax on individuals with
a net worth higher than $1 billion. She has also proposed closing corporate tax
loopholes. Joe Biden wants to restore the top individual income tax rate to a
pre-Trump 39.6 percent and raise capital gains taxes. Bernie Sanders has
proposed an estate tax on the wealth of the top 0.2 percent of Americans.
Following Theodore
Roosevelt’s example, we need to aggressively root out the tangle of corruption
brought on by Trump and his minions. This has already begun with multiple and
expanding investigations led by House Democrats into the metastasizing
malfeasance within the Trump administration. Trump’s successor, however, should
work with Congress to appoint a bipartisan anti-corruption task force to
oversee prosecutions and draw up reform legislation to prevent future abuses.
“Of all forms of tyranny, the least attractive and the most
vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy,” Roosevelt once
warned. The free market has made America the great success it is today. But
history has shown that unconstrained capitalism and a growing wealth gap leads
to an unhealthy concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. When the gap
between the haves and the have-nots goes unchecked, populism takes hold,
leading to the election of dangerous demagogues like Trump, and the disastrous
politics they bring with them. It is not too late to reverse course. But first,
we need to re-learn the lessons from our first Gilded Age if we are going to
get out of the current one.
This Is No Ordinary Impeachment
By Andrew Sullivan
This is
not just an impeachment. It’s the endgame for Trump’s relentless assault
on the institutions, norms, and practices of America’s liberal democracy for
the past three years. It’s also a deeper reckoning. It’s about whether the
legitimacy of our entire system can last much longer without this man being
removed from office.
I’m
talking about what political scientists call “regime cleavage” — a decline in
democratic life so severe the country’s very institutions could lose legitimacy
as a result of it. It is described by one political scientist as follows: “a
division within the population marked by conflict about the foundations of the
governing system itself — in the American case, our constitutional democracy.
In societies facing a regime cleavage, a growing number of citizens and
officials believe that norms, institutions, and laws may be ignored, subverted,
or replaced.” A full-on regime cleavage is, indeed, an extinction-level event
for our liberal democratic system. And it is one precipitated by the man who is
supposed to be the guardian of that system, the president.
Let us
count the ways in which Trump has attacked and undermined the core legitimacy
of our democracy. He is the only candidate in American history who refused to
say that he would abide by the results of the vote. Even after winning the 2016
election, he still claimed that “millions” of voters — undocumented aliens —
perpetrated massive electoral fraud in the last election, and voted for his
opponent. He has repeatedly and publicly toyed with the idea that he could
violate the 22nd Amendment, and get elected for three terms, or more.
He
consistently described a perfectly defensible inquiry into Russia’s role in the
2016 election as a “witch hunt” and a “hoax,” demonizing Robert Mueller, even
as Mueller, in the end, couldn’t find evidence to support the idea of a
conspiracy with Russia (perhaps in part because Trump ordered no cooperation,
and refused to testify under oath). Trump then withheld release of the full
report, while his pliant attorney general distorted its content and wrongly
proclaimed that Trump had been entirely exonerated.
In
the current scandal over Ukraine, Trump is insisting that he did “nothing
wrong” in demanding that Ukraine announce investigations into Joe and Hunter
Biden, or forfeit desperately needed military aid. If that is the president’s
position — that he can constitutionally ask any other country to intervene on
his behalf in a U.S. election — it represents a view of executive power that is
the equivalent of a mob boss’s. It is best summed up in Trump’s own words:
Article 2 of the Constitution permits him to do “anything I want.”
We have become
so used to these attacks on our constitutional order that we fail to be shocked
by Trump’s insistence that a constitutional impeachment inquiry is a “coup.” By
any measure, this is an extraordinary statement, and itself an impeachable
offense as a form of “contempt for Congress.” We barely blink anymore when a
president refuses to cooperate in any way, demands his underlings refuse to
testify and break the law by flouting subpoenas, threatens to out the first
whistle-blower’s identity (in violation of the law), or assaults and tries to
intimidate witnesses, like Colonel Alexander Vindman.
He seems
to think in the Ukraine context that “l’état c’est moi” is the core American
truth, rather than a French monarch’s claims to absolute power. He believes in the
kind of executive power the Founders designed the U.S. Constitution to prevent.
It therefore did not occur to Trump that blackmailing a foreign country to
investigate his political opponents is a classic abuse of power, because he is
incapable of viewing his own interests and the interests of the United States
as in any way distinct. But it is a core premise of our liberal democracy that
the powers of the presidency are merely on loan, and that using them to advance
a personal interest is a definition of an abuse of power.
There
are valid criticisms and defenses of Trump’s policy choices, but his policies
are irrelevant for an impeachment. I actually support a humane crackdown on
undocumented immigration, a tougher trade stance toward China, and an attempt,
at least, to end America’s endless wars. But what matters, and what makes this
such a vital moment in American history, is that it has nothing to do with
policy. This is simply about Trump’s abuse of power.
He
lies and misleads the American public constantly, in an outright attempt to so
confuse Americans that they forget or reject the concept of truth altogether.
Lies are part of politics, but we have never before seen such a fire hose of
often contradictory or inflammatory bald-faced lies from the Oval Office. He
has obstructed justice countless times, by witness tampering, forbidding his
subordinates from complying with legal subpoenas, and by “using the powers of
his high office, engaged personally and through his close subordinates and
agents, in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede, and obstruct”
both the Mueller and now the Ukraine investigations. (I quote from Article 1 of
Nixon’s impeachment.) Trump has also “failed without lawful cause or excuse to
produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas issued by
the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives … and willfully
disobeyed such subpoenas.” (I quote from Article III of Nixon’s impeachment.)
He has declared legal processes illegitimate if they interfere with or
constrain his whims and impulses.
This
is not just another kind of presidency; it is a rolling and potentially
irreversible assault on the legitimacy of the American regime. If the CIA finds
something that could reflect poorly on him, then the CIA is part of the “deep
state coup.” Ditto the FBI and the State Department. These are not
old-fashioned battles with a bureaucracy over policy; that’s fine. They are
assaults on the legitimacy of the bureaucracy, and the laws they are required to
uphold. These are definitional impeachable offenses, and they are part and
parcel of Trump’s abuse of power from the day he was elected.
And
most important of all, Trump has turned the GOP — one of our two major parties
with a long and distinguished history — into an accomplice in his crimes.
Senator Lindsey Graham, perhaps the most contemptible figure of the last couple
of years, even says he will not read witness transcripts or follow the
proceedings in the House or consider the evidence in a legal impeachment
inquiry, because he regards the whole impeachment process as “BS” and a “sham.”
This is a senator calling the constitutional right of the House of
Representatives to impeach a president illegitimate.
And the
GOP as a whole has consistently backed Trump rather than the Constitution.
Sixty-two percent of Republican supporters have said that there is nothing
Trump could do, no crime or war crime, no high crime or misdemeanor, that would
lead them to vote against him in 2020. There is only one way to describe this,
and that is a cult, completely resistant to reason or debate. The tribalism is
so deep that Trump seems incapable of dropping below 40 percent in the national
polls, and is competitive in many swing states. The cult is so strong that
Trump feels invulnerable. If Trump survives impeachment, and loses the 2020
election, he may declare it another coup, rigged, and illegitimate. He may
refuse to concede. And it is possible the GOP will follow his lead. That this
is even thinkable reveals the full extent of our constitutional rot.
Trump
has fast-forwarded “regime cleavage.” He is appealing to the people to render
him immune from constitutional constraints imposed by the representatives of
the people. He has opened up not a divide between right and left so much as a
divide over whether the American system of government is legitimate or
illegitimate. And that is why I don’t want to defeat Trump in an election,
because that would suggest that his assault on the truth, on the Constitution,
and on the rule of law is just a set of policy decisions that we can, in time,
reject. It creates a precedent for future presidents to assault the legitimacy
of the American government, constrained only by their ability to win the next
election. In fact, the only proper constitutional response to this abuse of
executive power is impeachment. I know I’ve said this before. But on the eve of
public hearings, it is vital to remember it.
None
of this presidential behavior is tolerable. If the Senate exonerates Trump, it
will not just enable the most lawless president in our history to even greater
abuses. It will deepen the regime cleavage even further. It will cast into
doubt the fairness of the upcoming election. It will foment the conspiracy
theory that our current laws and institutions are manifestations of a “deep
state” engineering a “coup.” It will prove that a president can indeed abuse
his power for his personal advantage without consequence; and it will set a
precedent that fundamentally changes the American system from a liberal
democracy to a form of elected monarchy, above the other two branches of
government.
I wish
there were another way forward. But there isn’t. And this, though a moment of
great danger, also contains the glimmers of renewal. Removing this petty,
shabby tyrant from office goes a long way to restoring and resetting the
Constitution as a limit on power and a guarantee against its wanton future
abuse. It must be done. With speed, with vigor, and with determination.
Is Trump the Worst President in History?
by Richard Striner
Richard Striner, a professor of history at Washington College, is
the author of many books including Father
Abraham: Lincoln’s Relentless Struggle to End Slavery and Lincoln’s
Way: How Six Great Presidents Created American Power.
As the
chance of getting rid of Donald Trump — through impeachment or by voting him
out — continues to dominate the headlines, the historical challenge
is compelling. No president has been a greater threat to the
qualities that make the United States of America worthy (at its best) of our
allegiance.
The rise of
Trump and his movement was so freakish that historians will analyze its nature
for a long time. From his origins as a real estate hustler, this
exhibitionist sought attention as a TV vulgarian. Susceptible
television viewers found his coarse behavior amusing. Then he announced that he
was running for the presidency and it looked for a while like just another
cheap publicity stunt.
But
his name-calling tactics struck a chord with a certain group of
voters. Our American scene began to darken. Before
long, he was hurling such vicious abuse that it ushered in a politics of
rage. As his egomania developed into full megalomania, the “alt-right”
gravitated toward him.
The
“movement” had started.
More
and more, to the horror of everyone with power to see and understand, he showed
a proto-fascist mentality. So alarms began to spread: mental health
professionals warned that he exemplifies “malignant narcissism.”
Never
before in American history has the presidential office passed into the hands of
a seditionist. And the use of this term is
appropriate. With no conception of principles or limits — “I want”
is his political creed —he mocks the rule of law at every turn.
At a
police convention in 2017, he urged the officers in attendance to ignore their
own regulations and brutalize the people they arrest. He pardoned
ex-Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt of
court. He appointed Scott Pruitt to head the EPA so he could wreck
the agency and let polluters have the spree of their lives.
Trump
is fascinated by powerful dictators with little regard to human rights or
democracy. He compliments Vladimir Putin and hopes to invite that murderer
to stay in the White House. He likes Rodrigo Duterte of the
Philippines, a tyrant who subverts that nation’s democracy.
So,
Trump certainly has the personality of a fascist. But he is not
quite as dangerous as other authoritarians in history.
In the
first place, he lacks the fanatical vision that drove the great tyrants like
Hitler and Stalin to pursue their sick versions of utopia. He is
nothing but a grubby opportunist. He has no ideas, only
appetites. The themes that pass for ideas in the mind of
Donald Trump begin as prompts that are fed to him by others — Stephen Miller,
Sean Hannity, and (once upon a time) Steve Bannon. To be sure, he would fit
right in among the despots who tyrannize banana-republics. But that
sort of a political outcome in America is hard to envision at the moment.
Second, American
traditions — though our current crisis shows some very deep flaws in our
constitutional system — are strong enough to place a limit on the damage Trump
can do. If he ordered troops to occupy the Capitol, disperse the
members of Congress, and impose martial law, the chance that commanders or
troops would carry out such orders is nil.
Third,
Americans have faced challenges before. Many say he is our very worst
president — bar none. And how tempting it is to
agree. But a short while ago, people said the same thing about
George W. Bush, who of course looks exemplary now when compared to our presidential
incumbent.
The
“worst president.”
“Worst,”
of course, is a value judgment that is totally dependent on our standards for
determining “badness.” And any number of our presidents were very
bad indeed — or so it could be argued.
Take
Andrew Jackson, with his belligerence, his simple-mindedness, his racism as
reflected in the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Take all the
pro-slavery presidents before the Civil War who tried to make the enslavement
of American blacks perpetual: John Tyler, Franklin Pierce, James
Buchanan. Take James K. Polk and his squalid war of aggression against
Mexico. Take Andrew Johnson, who did everything he could to ruin the
lives of the newly-freed blacks after Lincoln’s murder.
The
list could go on indefinitely, depending on our individual standards for
identifying “badness.” Shall we continue? Consider
Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding, so clueless in regard to the
comparatively easy challenge of preventing corruption among their
associates. Or consider Grover Cleveland and Herbert Hoover, who blinded
themselves to the desperation of millions in economic
depressions. And Richard Nixon, the only president to date who has
resigned the office in disgrace.
Which
brings us to Trump.
However
incompetent or even malevolent some previous American presidents were, this one
is unique. The Trump presidency is a singular aberration, a defacement of norms
and ideals without precedent. However bad some other presidents were
all of them felt a certain basic obligation to maintain at least a semblance of
dignity and propriety in their actions.
Not
Trump.
Foul
beyond words, he lurches from one brutal whim to another, seeking gratification
in his never-ending quest to humiliate others. He spews insults in every
direction all day. He makes fun of the handicapped. He
discredits journalists in order to boost the credibility of crackpots and
psychopathic bigots. He accuses reporters of creating “fake news” so
he can generate fake news himself: spew a daily torrent of hallucinatory
lies to his gullible followers.
He
amuses himself — with the help of his money and the shyster lawyers that it
pays for — in getting away with a lifetime’s worth of compulsive frauds that
might very well lead to prosecutions (later) if the evidence has not been
destroyed and if the statute of limitations has not expired.
So
far, however, he is always too brazen to get what he deserves, too slippery for
anyone to foil.
Anyone
with half of ounce of decency can see this wretched man for what he
is. They know what’s going on, and yet there’s nothing they can do
to make it stop. And that adds to Trump’s dirty
satisfaction. Any chance to out-maneuver the decent — to infuriate them —
quickens his glee. It makes his victory all the more rotten, incites
him to keep on taunting his victims.
It’s
all a big joke to Donald Trump, and he can never, ever, get enough of
it.
The
question must be asked: when in our lifetimes — when in all the
years that our once-inspiring Republic has existed — have American institutions
been subjected to such treatment? How long can American morale and
cohesion survive this?
Nancy
Pelosi has said that in preference to seeing Trump impeached, she would like to
see him in jail. Current Justice Department policy — which forbids
the indictment of presidents — makes it possible for Trump to break our
nation’s laws with impunity. Impeachment is useless if the Senate’s
Republicans, united in their ruthlessness and denial, take the coward’s way
out.
So the
prospect of locking him up may have to wait. But the day of
reckoning for this fake — this imposter who will never have a glimmer of clue
as to how to measure up to his office — may come in due time. Then
the presidential fake who accuses his victims of fakery will live with some
things that are real: stone walls, iron bars, a nice prison haircut,
and the consequences of his actions.
Field of
Anonymous Trump Donors Getting Crowded
|
WASHINGTON
-- Last year, when a "senior administration official" wrote an
anonymous New York Times opinion piece -- "I Am Part of the Resistance
Inside the Trump Administration" -- the unknown author's essay prompted
praise and approbation.
Now, we
learn, it has spawned a book.
"The
dilemma -- which (Trump) does not fully grasp," Anonymous wrote in
September 2018, "is that many of the senior officials in his own
administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his
agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them."
Critics
on the right called the author a coward for penning a piece under the cloak of
anonymity. Critics on the left pounced on the author's failure to openly
denounce Trump -- the only act that they would consider courageous.
Trump
branded the piece "TREASON" and urged then-Attorney General Jeff
Sessions to find the dirty rat.
Journalists
did not miss the irony in the author's identification as a "senior
administration official." The Trump White House was indignant, even though
the press office routinely conducts briefings after directing reporters to
identify the briefers as "senior administration officials." Then Team
Trump denounced the press for relying on unnamed sources.
I saw
the piece as confirmation that good people worked in the administration out of
a sense of public service -- and that some stayed because they felt a duty to
curb Trump's worst instincts. The book deal, alas, suggests the unknown civil servant has
a hunger for self-promotion, as well as a poor sense of timing.
For one
thing, the Mueller report tells voters everything they need to know about
Trump. To wit: There was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. And
Trump frequently pushed those around him to do his dirty work, and they often
failed to do his bidding.
Former
campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, for example, chose not to tell Sessions to
"unrecuse" himself from the Russian probe, lest Trump fire him.
Instead, Lewandowski passed on the assignment to a White House aide, who also
chose not to act.
In
words that echoed the New York Times piece, special counsel Robert Mueller
wrote, "The president's efforts to influence the investigation were mostly
unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the
president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests."
Trump
voters don't care. They believe the Russian probe was a witch hunt. Who can
blame them? Mueller allowed the investigation to slog on long past any
reasonable suspicion that Moscow was pulling Trump's strings. Federal officials
throwing everything they've got at Trump isn't really a good look right now.
The field
of anonymous Trump accusers is getting crowded. In August, an identity-shielded
whistleblower came forward with a complaint that "the president of the
United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a
foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election." It was in reference to a July
25 phone call during which Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky
to look for political dirt that could be used in next year's presidential race.
The
unidentified whistleblower's lawyer said he represents another unidentified
whistleblower. Democrats argue these individuals must be shielded for their own
protection, but everyone knows they'll be feted as heroes when their identities
-- predictably -- are revealed.
Book
deals? You know it.
Perhaps
the anonymous New York Times author decided to cut a deal to beat the pack of
Ukraine scolds.
House
Democrats have even been holding impeachment hearings behind closed doors to
question known individuals. After releasing damning tidbits, they've yet to
release full testimony. In contrast, Trump made public a rough transcript of
the July 25 conversation.
If
there's something voters don't know that Anonymous thinks they need to, he or
she could pen another op-ed, not a bestseller -- or better yet, with an
election a year away, come forward and face the wrath of the right in the light
of day.
Of
course, Anonymous has an agent. Matt Latimer told CNN that the author of the 272-page
"A Warning," published by Twelve, a division of Hachette,
"refused the chance at a seven-figure advance and intends to donate a
substantial amount of any royalties to the White House Correspondents
Association and other organizations that fight for a press that seeks the
truth."
As a
member of the association, I suppose I should be grateful and not at all
curious about how much of the proceeds will go to worthy causes. If only I knew
whom to thank.
Contact
Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com or 202-662-7391. Follow
@DebraJSaunders on Twitter.
The Kitchen-Table Case for Impeaching Trump
The president’s abuses of power are
materially hurting regular people.
After months of waiting,
the House Judiciary Committee has finally voted to open an impeachment inquiry
into President Donald Trump. With that tedious “will-they-or-won’t-they”
question out of the way, the logical next question is: can impeachment succeed?
The answer is a resounding yes. But getting there will require a strategic
reorientation away from a sluggish and legalistic examination of Trump’s
offenses via recalcitrant witnesses and toward a broader consideration of how
his systemic abuses of power have materially hurt regular people.
The
continued reticence of so many Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to
support impeachment is based on two premises. The first is that impeachment is
modestly unpopular, which is true, so far as it goes. The second is the conventional wisdom that
impeaching President Clinton backfired on House Republicans.
Look
a little closer at the second contention, however, and it quickly falls apart.
The case against Trump is vastly stronger than that against Clinton. While Clinton’s alleged crimes were largely
committed in the interest of avoiding embarrassment, Trump’s represent clear
abuses of power with malignant implications. The second flank of the
argument—that impeaching Clinton “backfired” on Republicans—is more myth than reality.
Republicans may have lost the House in the next election cycle, but Clinton’s
impeachment was a nontrivial factor in Al Gore’s 2000 loss. Therefore, we join
other observers in choosing to view this “example” as evidence in
support of impeaching Trump.
But
the polling argument is particularly short-sighted. Voters take cues from
political leaders about how to react to political events. For months, the
overwhelming cue on impeachment from Democratic leaders like Pelosi, Chuck
Schumer, and Joe Biden has been to stand down. This inhibition has created a negative
feedback loop in which impeachment-phobic lawmakers convince voters not to
support impeachment, and then point to lukewarm public support to justify their
passivity. Rinse and repeat.
Five
months after the release of the Mueller report, this message has pretty well
stuck. After all, if the special counsel’s findings were so serious, they
should have been acted on immediately, right? Much as a gourmet meal is never
as good reheated, Democrats cannot expect to ignore evidence of impeachable
conduct in the spring and have it be as fresh and tasty when zapped in the
autumn. Just take a gander at this week’s House Judiciary hearing with Corey
Lewandowski to see how unappetizing this fare has become.
While
the Mueller report surely provided enough evidence to justify impeaching Trump
on substantive grounds, hesitant lawmakers have largely drained it of much of
its political force (and impeachment is an inherently political process).
To
overcome this damage, impeachment backers will have to make opposition to
impeachment untenable with voters, thereby short-circuiting the aforementioned
negative feedback loop. That means focusing on the ways in which Trump’s
corruption has made life harder and more dangerous for millions of Americans.
In other words, impeachment should focus above all on his failure to carry out
his constitutional duty under Article II,
Section 1 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully
executed.” By emphasizing how impeachment is relevant to the “kitchen-table”
issues that keep regular people up at night—like low wages or exorbitant
healthcare premiums—the House Judiciary Committee can inspire a swell of
grassroots pressure that will give reluctant legislators no choice but to back
the effort.
The issues tackled in
Mueller’s report, like obstruction of justice, are removed from people’s
day-to-day lives. Of course, there is nothing inherently insufficient with such
a basis for impeachment; were it not for the Democratic leadership’s
opposition, impeachment proceedings would have begun in April. Still, more
Americans agonize over how to pay back their student loans, or whether to incur
the costs of seeing a doctor when uninsured, than discuss “the role of law.”
The Mueller report, therefore. likely strikes most Americans as “political” and
is less likely to inspire new broad-based support for
impeachment.
The
same goes for the proposed lines of inquiry in Judiciary’s newly expanded investigations. The committee will reportedly examine
Trump’s alleged abuse of presidential pardons, hush-money payments, and use of
office for personal enrichment. While these scandals are undoubtedly important,
they don’t penetrate the lives of ordinary people.
That
doesn’t mean that Democrats should not pursue any of these alleged crimes; the
public deserves to know as much as possible about any president’s corruption,
and Congress is best suited to furnish those answers. But these matters should
not sit alone at the center of the Democrats’ case for impeachment. An
impeachment inquiry is a way to control the national conversation. While bills
passed by House Democrats predictably get little attention from most of the
media, an impeachment hearing is guaranteed to achieve the scarcest political
resource in 2019—the attention of voters.
Given
that platform, lawmakers have a lot to choose from. In light of recent
revelations that the number of uninsured people has risen for the first
time since 2009, lawmakers might want to start by investigating how
Trump has undermined the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
You
might say that Trump’s health care moves are reprehensible, but are they really
impeachable? Ask Thaddeus Stevens, the Pennsylvania representative who was the
catalyst behind Andrew Johnson’s impeachment and the author of an article of impeachment accusing Johnson of failing
to “take care” that the Tenure of Office Act be faithfully executed. Other
articles accused Johnson of offenses including insulting Congress and
unlawfully firing his Secretary of War, but this one got at his most serious
transgression: failing to honor and enforce the laws as Congress had
intended.
Trump
has made no secret of his disdain for Obama’s healthcare law, but whether he
likes it or not, it’s his duty to administer it unless and until Congress
passes a new one or repeals it. Rather than faithfully carrying out that
responsibility, Trump has sought to destroy the law. On his first day in
office, he signed an executive order directing agencies to use all of
the tools at their disposal to undermine the statute—and they have faithfully
complied. His administration also shortened the open enrollment period, cut ACA’s advertising budget, and slashed tax credits for enrollees. Trump is not coy about his
intentions. “I have just about ended Obamacare,” he once said. Congress should demonstrate its commitment
to improving Americans’ health care access by nailing Trump for his
considerable efforts to “end” a lawful program by executive action that he
could not repeal legislatively.
There
are other matters that need a deeper probe. Lawmakers should investigate
whether Trump’s administration has intentionally slowed the allocation of aid
to Puerto Rico. Last week, as Puerto Ricans braced for Hurricane Dorian’s
potential landfall, many did so without a proper
roof over
their heads, surrounded by many other reminders of Hurricane Maria’s
destruction. This hardly seems like an accident: two years after Maria,
the scandal-riddled Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA) has only approved funding for nine projects out of 10,000 applications.
Meanwhile, in an unprecedented move, the executive branch is holding up a
Community Development Block Grant for Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) headed for
the U.S. territory. The administration’s refusal to effectively administer this
recovery aid is not some distant problem. Puerto Ricans (including the diaspora
living in Florida and elsewhere on the U.S. mainland) feel it every day in the
way of destroyed roads, damaged schools, the lack of a proper roof over many of
their heads, or having been forced to leave the island altogether.
It
seems impossible to imagine that Trump’s failure “to take care” is unrelated to the animus he has
shown toward Latinx communities since the day he announced his presidential campaign. More broadly, it is even
harder to argue that a president can faithfully execute the law under our
Constitution when he openly views the government’s obligations to people as
dependent on their race or religion—as his “Muslim ban” makes evidently clear.
Lawmakers
should also look into Trump’s decision to allow three unconfirmed, unqualified,
Mar-a-Lago members to essentially run the Department of Veterans’ Affairs from the resort. Has
Trump’s reliance on his paying customers to run the VA in any way hurt the
millions of veterans who rely on the department’s services each year? The
public has a right to know. The House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs opened an investigation into these puppeteers last winter, but
the administration’s stonewalling appears to have hindered meaningful progress.
Trump’s
appointees have harmed regular people in myriad other ways. Take, for example,
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ failure to administer loan forgiveness
programs, even after having been ordered by a court to do so. That has left thousands of people suffering
under the crushing yoke of student loans they were promised would be
discharged. At the same time, her department’s laughable oversight of loan servicers is delaying forgiveness for hundreds of thousands more. Given her
absolute disregard for her responsibilities as Education Secretary, why has she
not been removed? Quite clearly, Trump feels no compunction about running afoul
of his obligation to “take care” to execute the law, even if that means flat
out ignoring court orders.
House members must not
only persuade voters to embrace impeachment with the righteousness of their
case, but also with the urgency of their actions. That means issuing subpoenas
far more liberally—and suing when necessary to enforce them without delay.
Indeed, the fact that Trump admits “we are fighting all the subpoenas” reflects
acknowledgement that he is undermining Congressional oversight, which was
itself a key element of the third article of impeachment against Richard
Nixon.
Basic
political horse sense suggests that investigating how Trump’s team is hiding
evidence of their alleged lawlessness would help generate attention to the
actions they are covering up. If pursued effectively, such a probe can impose a
steep political cost.
Ultimately,
Congress should view its investigatory scope broadly. It should vigorously
examine as many instances of Trump’s corruption as possible. But his crimes
against the American people should sit at the center of their effort.
To
treat them as secondary, as lawmakers have done thus far, misses the larger
point. The intentional harm Trump has inflicted on Americans, whom he is tasked
with protecting, represents by far his most egregious violation of his
Constitutional oath of office. Lawmakers should respond accordingly.
The (Full) Case for
Impeachment
A menu of high crimes and misdemeanors.
The crimes for which impeachment is the prescribed punishment are notoriously undefined. And
that’s for a reason: Presidential powers are vast, and it’s impossible to
design laws to cover every possible abuse of the office’s authority. House
Democrats have calculated that an impeachment focused narrowly on the Ukraine
scandal will make the strongest legal case against President Trump. But that’s
not Trump’s only impeachable offense. A full accounting would include a wide
array of dangerous and authoritarian acts — 82, to be precise. His violations
fall into seven broad categories of potentially impeachable misconduct that
should be weighed, if not by the House, then at least by history.
I. Abusing Power for
Political Gain
Explanation: The single most
dangerous threat to any democratic system is that the ruling party will use its
governing powers to entrench itself illegitimately.
Evidence: (1) The Ukraine scandal is fundamentally about the president abusing his authority
by wielding his power over foreign policy as a cudgel against his domestic opponents.
The president is both implicitly and explicitly trading the U.S. government’s
favor for investigations intended to create adverse publicity for Americans
whom Trump wishes to discredit. (2) During his campaign, he threatened to impose policies harmful to
Amazon in retribution for critical coverage in the Washington Post. (“If I become president, oh do they have problems.”) He has
since pushed the postmaster general to double rates on Amazon, and the Defense Department held
up a $10 billion contract with Amazon, almost certainly at
his behest. (3) He has ordered his officials to block the AT&T–Time
Warner merger as punishment for CNN’s coverage
of him. (4) He encouraged the NFL to blacklist Colin Kaepernick.
II. Mishandling
Classified Information
Explanation: As he does with
many other laws, the president enjoys broad immunity from regulations on the
proper handling of classified information, allowing him to take action that
would result in felony convictions for other federal employees. President
Trump’s mishandling of classified information is not merely careless but a
danger to national security.
Evidence: (5) Trump has habitually
communicated on a smartphone highly vulnerable to foreign espionage. (6–30) He has reversed 25
security-clearance denials (including for his
son-in-law, who has conducted potentially compromising business with foreign
interests). (31) He has turned Mar-a-Lago into an unsecured second White
House and even once handled news of North Korea’s
missile launch in public view. (32) He gave Russian
officials sensitive Israeli intelligence that blew “the most valuable source of
information on external plotting by [the] Islamic State,” the Wall Street Journal reported. (33) He tweeted a
high-resolution satellite image of an Iranian launch site for the sake of
boasting.
III. Undermining Duly
Enacted Federal Law
Explanation: President Trump has abused his authority either by distorting the
intent of laws passed by Congress or by flouting them. He has directly ordered
subordinates to violate the law and has promised pardons in advance, enabling
him and his staff to operate with impunity. In these actions, he has undermined
Congress’s constitutional authority to make laws.
Evidence: (34) Having failed to
secure funding authority for a border wall, President Trump unilaterally ordered funds to be moved from other budget accounts. (35) He has undermined regulations on health
insurance under the Affordable Care Act preventing
insurers from charging higher rates to customers with more expensive risk
profiles. (36) He has abused emergency powers to impose tariffs, intended to protect the supply chain in case of war, to seize
from Congress its authority to negotiate international trade agreements. (37–38) He has ordered border
agents to illegally block asylum seekers from
entering the country and has ordered other aides to
violate eminent-domain laws and contracting procedures in building the border wall, (39–40) both times promising
immunity from lawbreaking through presidential pardons.
IV. Obstruction of
Congress
Explanation: The executive branch
and Congress are co-equal, each intended to guard against usurpation of
authority by the other. Trump has refused to acknowledge any legitimate
oversight function of Congress, insisting that because Congress has political
motivations, it is disqualified from it. His actions and rationale strike at
the Constitution’s design of using the political ambitions of the elected
branches to check one another.
Evidence: (41) Trump has refused to abide by a
congressional demand to release his tax returns, despite an unambiguous law granting the House this authority.
His lawyers have flouted the law on the spurious grounds that subpoenas for his
tax returns “were issued to harass President Donald J. Trump, to rummage
through every aspect of his personal finances, his businesses and the private
information of the president and his family, and to ferret about for any
material that might be used to cause him political damage.” Trump’s lawyers
have argued that Congress cannot investigate potentially illegal behavior by
the president because the authority to do so belongs to prosecutors. In other
litigation, those lawyers have argued that prosecutors cannot investigate the
president. These contradictory positions support an underlying stance that no
authority can investigate his misconduct. (42) He has defended his refusal
to accept oversight on the grounds that members of Congress “aren’t, like,
impartial people. The Democrats are trying to win 2020.” (43) The president has
also declared that impeachment is
illegal and should be stopped in the courts (though,
unlike with his other obstructive acts, he has not yet taken any legal action
toward this end).
V. Obstruction of Justice
Explanation: By virtue of his control over the federal government’s
investigative apparatus, the president (along with the attorney general) is
uniquely well positioned to cover up his own misconduct. Impeachment is the
sole available remedy for a president who uses his powers of office to hold
himself immune from legal accountability. In particular, the pardon power gives
the president almost unlimited authority to obstruct investigations by
providing him with a means to induce the silence of co-conspirators.
Evidence: (44–53) The Mueller report contains ten instances of President Trump engaging in
obstructive acts. While none of those succeeded in stopping the probe, Trump
dangled pardons and induced his co-conspirators to lie or withhold evidence
from investigators. Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified to
Congress that Trump had directed him to lie to it
about his negotiations with the Russian government during the campaign to
secure a lucrative building contract in Moscow. And when Cohen stated his
willingness to lie, Robert Costello, an attorney who had worked with Rudy
Giuliani, emailed Cohen assuring him he could “sleep well tonight” because he
had “friends in high places.” Trump has publicly praised witnesses in the
Russia investigation for refusing to cooperate, and he sent a private message
to former national-security adviser Michael Flynn urging him to “stay strong.”
He has reinforced this signal by repeatedly denouncing witnesses who cooperate
with investigators as “flippers.” (54–61) He has exercised his pardon power for a series of Republican
loyalists, sending a message that at least some of his co-conspirators have
received. The president’s pardon of conservative pundit
Dinesh D’Souza “has to be a signal to Mike
Flynn and Paul Manafort and even Robert S. Mueller III: Indict people for
crimes that don’t pertain to Russian collusion and this is what could happen,”
Roger Stone told the Washington Post. “The special counsel has awesome powers, as you know, but the
president has even more awesome powers.”
VI. Profiting From Office
Explanation: Federal
employees must follow strict rules to prevent them from being influenced by any
financial conflict. Conflict-of-interest rules are less clear for a sitting
president because all presidential misconduct will be resolved by either
reelection or impeachment. If Trump held any position in the federal government
below the presidency, he would have been fired for his obvious conflicts. His violations are so gross
and blatant they merit impeachment.
Evidence: (62) He has
maintained a private business while holding office, (63) made decisions that
influence that business, (64) and accepted payments from parties both domestic and foreign who
have an interest in his policies. (65) He has openly signaled that these parties can gain his favor by
doing so. (66) He has refused even to disclose his interests, which would at
least make public which parties are paying him.
VII. Fomenting Violence
Explanation: One of the
unspoken roles of the president is to serve as a symbolic head of state.
Presidents have very wide latitude for their political rhetoric, but Trump has
violated its bounds, exceeding in his viciousness the rhetoric of Andrew
Johnson (who was impeached in part for
the same offense).
Evidence: (67) Trump called for locking up
his 2016 opponent after the election. (68–71) He has clamored for the deportation
of four women of color who are congressional
representatives of the opposite party. (72) He has described a wide
array of domestic political opponents as treasonous, including the news
media. (73–80) On at least eight occasions, he has encouraged his
supporters — including members of the armed forces — to attack his political
opponents. (“I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the
support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play
it tough until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very
bad.”) (81) He has threatened journalists with violence if they fail to
produce positive coverage. (“If the media would write correctly and write
accurately and write fairly, you’d have a lot less violence in the
country.”) (82) There have been 36 criminal cases nationwide in which the
defendant invoked Trump’s name in connection with violence; 29 of these cited
him as the inspiration for an attack.
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.”
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
The formal investigation into whether Barry
violated judicial conduct rules started ten days ago, but was closed after
Barry announced her retirement since retired judges are not subject to judicial
conduct rules.
These reviews could result in the censure or
reprimand of federal judges, but in some more extreme cases, the judge could be
referred to the House of Representatives for impeachment.
It appears Barry will receive somewhere
between $184,500 and $217,600 annually, the same salary she earned when she
last met certain workload requirements before changing her status to inactive.
The Times investigation into the Trump’s
alleged that Fred Trump transferred his real estate empire profits and
ownership to his four children, including the president, Barry, brother Robert
Trump, and their sister Elizabeth Trump Grau, in ways designed to dodge gift and
estate taxes.
+4
Barry, pictured above with sister Elizabeth
Trump Grau, was a senior inactive judge, which is the step taken usually before
full retirement, and had not heard a case in over two year.
Trump's lawyer Charles Hardner said that the
allegations made as a result of the Times' investigation is '100 per cent
false' and accused the newspaper of defamation
“The New York Times’s allegations of fraud
and tax evasion are 100 per cent false, and highly defamatory,” a lawyer for
Trump, Charles Hardner, said last October.
Barry was elevated to the United States Court
of Appeals for the Third Circuit by President Bill Clinton in 1999, and shortly
after Trump’s inauguration, in February 2017, she notified the court she would
stop hearing cases without citing a reason.
At this point she became a senior inactive
judge and gave up her staff and chambers.
ANN COULTER: WILL THE
GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR BANKSTERS AND BILLIONAIRES DESTROY AMERICA?
I would also go to all of the working class that are in America,
construction workers in particular. Their salaries have not just
stagnated, they have gone down in the last 20 years. These are the least among us. We are the only ones not speaking
out of self-interest. …
Most of the people who are advocating for open borders …
they have a vested in interest in having either the cheap labor or the
Democratic voters. Their neighborhoods aren’t the ones being
overwhelmed. They get the cheap maids, the cheap nannies,
and then they strut around like they’re Martin Luther King.
No, you are talking in your
self-interest, Chamber of Commerce, and Koch brothers, and Nancy Pelosi, and
Chuck Schumer. It’s Donald Trump and our side who are actually
caring about our fellow Americans — the kids who are getting addicted to black
tar heroin. …
The heroin problem in this country is 100 percent a problem of not
having a wall on the border. And 70,000 Americans are dying every year. That’s
more that died in the entire Vietnam War. That is a national emergency.
ANN COULTER
ANN
COULTER EXPOSES TRUMP’S “WALL” HOAX
In fact,
Trump is steadily moving in the precise opposite direction of what he promised.
Illegal immigration is on track to hit the highest levels in
more than a decade, and Trump has willfully decided to keep amnesty advocates
Jared, Ivanka, Mick Mulvaney, Marc Short, and Mercedes Schlapp in the White
House. For all his talk about immigration, did he ever consider hiring people
who share his MAGA vision?
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.”
TRUMP’S
CRAP ON BORDERS AND HIS PRETEND WALL IS ONLY ONE MORE TRUMP HOAX!
Only a
complete fool would believe that Trump is any more for American Legal workers
than the Democrat Party for Billionaires and Banksters!
“Trump
Administration Betrays Low-Skilled American Workers.”
The
latest ad from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) asks Trump
to reject the mass illegal and legal immigration policies supported by Wall
Street, corporate executives, and most specifically, the GOP mega-donor Koch
brothers.
Efforts by the big business
lobby, Chamber of Commerce, Koch brothers, and George W. Bush Center include
increasing employment-based legal immigration that would likely crush the historic wage gains that Trump has delivered
for America’s blue collar and working class citizens.
Mark
Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors are uniting with the Koch network’s
consumer and industrial investors to demand a huge DACA amnesty
*
A handful of
Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives
amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of
funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico
border.
THE DEATH OF THE
AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS
THE ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN WORKER BY
PHONY POPULIST SWAMP KEEPER TRUMP
Companies say they often pay good
wages to their imported H-2B workers, often around $15 per hour. But that price
is below the wages sought by Americans for the seasonal work which leaves them
jobless in the off-season. The lower wages paid to H-2Bs also allows companies
to pay lower wages to their American supervisors. NEIL MUNRO
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.
“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 AMERICAN THINKER
ANN COULTER EXPOSES TRUMP’S “WALL” HOAX
In fact, Trump is steadily moving in the precise opposite
direction of what he promised.
Illegal immigration is on track to hit the highest levels in
more than a decade, and Trump has willfully decided to keep amnesty advocates
Jared, Ivanka, Mick Mulvaney, Marc Short, and Mercedes Schlapp in the White
House. For all his talk about immigration, did he ever consider hiring people
who share his MAGA vision?
TRUMP’S CATCH AND
RELEASE… all the “cheap” labor climbing our borders, jobs and welfare lines!
THE ENTIRE REASON TRUMP NOMINATED KIRSTJEN NIELSEN WAS
BECAUSE OF HER LONG HISTORY OF ADVOCATING OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!
In newly confirmed federal data from the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) agency, Breitbart News has learned the massive scale and
scope of DHS’s ramped up Catch and Release policy.
For months, DHS officials have said privately that the Catch and
Release program has been taken to new heights, while ICE
union officials declared this week that the program was
in “overdrive” under the direction of DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. JOHN BINDER
TRUMP AND THE MURDERING 9-11 MUSLIM SAUDIS…
Why is the Swamp Keeper and his family of parasites up their
ar$es??
TRUMP’S TAX BILL:
A massive tax cut for his plundering Goldman Sachs infested
administration.
TRUMP’S SECRET AMNESTY, WIDER OPEN BORDERS DOCTRINE TO KEEP
WAGES DEPRESSED.
"During the same month that
Schlafly had backed Trump for his “America First”
agenda, Nielsen’s committee
released an ideologically-globalist report, promoting
the European migrant crisis
as a win for big business who would profit greatly
from a never-ending stream
of cheap, foreign
migrants."
TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE
RICH…. and his parasitic family!
Report:
Trump Says He Doesn't Care About the National Debt Because the Crisis Will Hit
After He's Gone
"Trump's
alleged comment is maddening and disheartening,
but at least he's being straightforward about his indefensible
and self-serving neglect. I'll leave you with this reminder of the scope of the problem, not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing about it."
but at least he's being straightforward about his indefensible
and self-serving neglect. I'll leave you with this reminder of the scope of the problem, not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing about it."
TRUMPERNOMICS:
THE RICH APPLAUD TWITTER’S
TRUMP’S TAX CUTS FOR THE SUPER RICH!
"The tax overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the
super-rich, on top
of the fact that virtually all income gains during the period of
the supposed
recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have gone to the top 1
percent income
bracket."
TRUMPS INFORMS NARCOMEX:
THE PACT BETWEEN MEXICO AND TRUMP… NO WALL, NO REAL
ENFORCEMENT.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/08/did-trump-promise-mexico-no-pardon-for.html
Swamp Keeper Trump prepares
for the inevitable move to impeach him and ask for asylum in Scotland.
Fox News host Tucker
Carlson said in an interview Thursday that President Donald Trump has succeeded
as a conversation starter but has failed to keep his most important campaign
promises.
“His chief promises were
that he would build the wall, de-fund Planned Parenthood, and repeal Obamacare,
and he hasn’t done any of those things,” Carlson told Urs
Gehriger of the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche.
TRUMP POSITIONS
HIMSELF FOR IMPEACHMENT
MAY LEAVE
THE COUNTRY FOR HIS GOLF COURSE IN SCOTLAND
“Truthfully, It Is Tough To Ignore Some Of The Gross Immoral
Behavior By The President” WASHINGTON POST
“Mueller and the anti-Trump camp within the ruling elite know
very well that the billionaire New York real estate and gambling
speculator-turned president is mired in criminal activity, which is certain to
be reflected in the material seized from Cohen. They have Trump by the throat,
and Trump knows it.”
*
“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 AMERICAN THINKER
*
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified before the House Oversight Committee
Wednesday that the “whole Trump family” was potentially comprised by a
foreign power ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
"Trump's alleged comment is
maddening and disheartening, but at least he's being straightforward
about his indefensible and self-serving neglect. I'll leave you
with this
reminder of the scope of the problem,
not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing about it."
Banks
Give Congress Documents on Possible Trump Dealings with Russians
ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images
8 Aug 20195,146
2:41
A group of
banks has turned over documents on Russians who may have done business with
President Donald Trump following a request from Congress, a Thursday report
states.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Bank of
America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Deutsche Bank gave
lawmakers thousands of documents as part of a joint investigation
by the House Financial Services and Intelligence Committees into possible
foreign influence over President Trump and members of his family. The former committee is chaired by none other than impeachment
crusaders Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA). These financial institutions are expected
to transfer more documents to congressional investigators in the coming weeks,
the Journal said.
Lawmakers issued subpoenas for the information in April.
“Separately, Deutsche Bank, Mr.
Trump’s primary bank, has turned over emails, loan agreements and other
documents related to the Trump Organization to the office of New York Attorney
General Letitia James, in response to a civil subpoena sent earlier this year,
according to people familiar with the New York investigation,” the
newspaper reports.
In April, President Trump, his
three oldest children, and the Trump Organization sued Deutsche Bank
and Capital One to prevent them from handing over their financial records
to Congress. The president and his former real estate company also filed a
lawsuit to block a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee seeking
financial documents from Mazars, an accounting firm.
Last month,
President Trump filed a civil lawsuit to
prevent the House Ways and Means Committee from obtaining his tax returns
from New York state officials.
The lawsuit, which was filed July 23rd in Washington against the
House panel, New York State Attorney General Letitia James, and New
York State Department of Taxation and Finance commissioner Michael
Schmidt, seeks an injunction to block a new state law. The law would allow the
Democrat-controlled House and Ways Means Committee to obtain the president’s
tax returns.
“Once it became clear that Treasury
would not divulge the President’s federal tax returns, New York passed a law
allowing the Committee to get his state returns,” reads the court filing. “That
hyper-specific condition was, not coincidentally, already satisfied for the
intended target of the Act: President Trump.”
The committee sued the Treasury Department and IRS officials in
an attempt to enforce a law that allows its chairman, Rep. Richard Neal
(D-MA), to obtain any taxpayer’s returns.
Millennials lose it when
the guy who owns their favorite companies fundraises for Trump
While the multiple mass shootings and
stabbings in the U.S. in the past few weeks upset many, nothing exercised the
minds of wealthy fit liberals as learning that the investor of their favored,
elitist, expensive gyms, or as the wealthy fit liberals refer to them, fitness
centers, they attend was hosting a fundraiser last night for... President
Donald J. Trump (R). And hosting it, no less, in the exclusive,
elitist playground of the East Cost liberal and wealthy: the Hamptons.
Entrust it to Vox, to
ponder the dilemma of the oh, so self-labeled hip who exercise at, or work out
as they refer their imposed sweat inducing contortions at, Equinox and Soul
Cycle, to keep their butts tight and their minds closed.
But it can be
particularly surprising to consumers when brands that have cultivated
progressive and inclusive images are found to be associated with campaigns or
causes that stand for the opposite.
Stephen Ross
is a billionaire real estate developer (reported net worth: $7.7 billion) and
owner of a private investment firm that has backed many of the latter kind of
brands. He’s also hosting a fundraiser for the Trump 2020 campaign at his
Hamptons mansion on Friday, August 9, where tickets will range from $100,000
for a lunch and photo opp to $250,000 to attend a roundtable discussion,
according to the Washington Post.
Rich
people hosting fundraisers for Trump is not itself particularly notable,
but the fact that Ross’s firm has financed companies beloved in part for their
progressive images has caused many patrons to call for a boycott. Among the
brands Ross has invested in are Equinox, which has supported LGBTQ charities in
the past; the spinning behemoth SoulCycle; the organic tampon brand Lola; and
the budget gym Blink Fitness, as well as food chains like Momofuku and its
pastry offshoot Milk Bar, and the fast-casual pizza spot &pizza.
OMG! What to do?
New York Magazine to the rescue with additional information on those boycott targets for the
morally outraged, tight-bodied, and narrow-minded. And it is
extensive.
When the news
broke that Stephen Ross, a real-estate executive and venture capitalist, was
set to throw an extravagant fundraiser for Donald Trump in the Hamptons on
Friday, reverberations of shock and horror were felt in millennial communities
far and wide, from Brooklyn to downtown L.A. to Austin and Portland,
Oregon. Why? Because Ross is the chairman of the Related
Companies, a parent company of both Equinox and SoulCycle, where many a young
urban professional flocks daily to sweat out their existential dread. ...
Unfortunately
it gets even worse. Ross has a hand in so many millennial lifestyle
entities that there are probably a few influencers whose entire feeds must be
cleansed of products tied to Trump cash. If you think you’re
untouched, don’t be so sure[.] ... The giant, tangled rat king of capitalism
means that unless you live like my friend John, who still has a flip phone and
claims to have never ordered anything online, you’re part of a teeming network
of unsavory dealings.
But anyway,
here is a list of all the pertinent things Ross partly owns as you decide how
much of your life must be canceled[.]
Read the list to learn how those with
unfit morals will suffer. Then, exercising your rights, smile
and then go for a nice walk.
Top Military Officers
Unload on Trump
The commander in
chief is impulsive, disdains expertise, and gets his intelligence briefings
from Fox News. What does this mean for those on the front lines?
Illustration: Paul Spella; Michael Heiman / Getty
For
most of the past two decades, American troops have been
deployed all over the world—to about 150 countries. During that time, hundreds
of thousands of young men and women have experienced combat, and a generation
of officers have come of age dealing with the practical realities of war. They
possess a deep well of knowledge and experience. For the past three years,
these highly trained professionals have been commanded by Donald Trump.
To get a sense of
what serving Trump has been like, I interviewed officers up and down the ranks,
as well as several present and former civilian Pentagon employees. Among the
officers I spoke with were four of the highest ranks—three or four stars—all recently
retired. All but one served Trump directly; the other left the service shortly
before Trump was inaugurated. They come from different branches of the
military, but I’ll simply refer to them as “the generals.” Some spoke only off
the record, some allowed what they said to be quoted without attribution, and
some talked on the record.
Military officers are
sworn to serve whomever voters send to the White House. Cognizant of the
special authority they hold, high-level officers epitomize respect for the chain
of command, and are extremely reticent about criticizing their civilian
overseers. That those I spoke with made an exception in Trump’s case is
telling, and much of what they told me is deeply disturbing. In 20 years of
writing about the military, I have never heard officers in high positions
express such alarm about a president. Trump’s pronouncements and orders have
already risked catastrophic and unnecessary wars in the Middle East and Asia,
and have created severe problems for field commanders engaged in combat
operations. Frequently caught unawares by Trump’s statements, senior military
officers have scrambled, in their aftermath, to steer the country away from
tragedy. How many times can they successfully do that before faltering?
Amid threats spanning
the globe, from nuclear proliferation to mined tankers in the Persian Gulf to
terrorist attacks and cyberwarfare, those in command positions monitor the
president’s Twitter feed like field officers scanning the horizon for enemy
troop movements. A new front line in national defense has become the White
House Situation Room, where the military struggles to accommodate a commander
in chief who is both ignorant and capricious. In May, after months of threatening Iran, Trump ordered the carrier group led by the USS Abraham Lincoln to shift
from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. On June 20, after an American
drone was downed there, he ordered a retaliatory attack—and then called it off minutes before it was to be launched. The next day he said he was “not looking for war” and wanted to talk with Iran’s leaders, while also promising
them “obliteration like you’ve never seen before” if they crossed him. He threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” and dispatched a three-aircraft-carrier flotilla to waters
off the Korean peninsula—then he pivoted to friendly summits with Kim Jong Un, with whom he announced he was “in love”; canceled long-standing U.S. military exercises with South Korea;
and dangled the possibility of withdrawing American forces from the
country altogether. While the lovefest continues
for the cameras, the U.S. has quietly uncanceled the canceled military
exercises, and dropped any mention of a troop withdrawal.
Such rudderless
captaincy creates the headlines Trump craves. He revels when his tweets take
off. (“Boom!” he says. “Like a rocket!”) Out in the field, where combat is more
than wordplay, his tweets have consequences. He is not a president who thinks
through consequences—and this, the generals stressed, is not the way serious
nations behave.
The generals I spoke
with didn’t agree on everything, but they shared the following five
characterizations of Trump’s military leadership.
I. HE DISDAINS
EXPERTISE
Trump has little
interest in the details of policy. He makes up his mind about a thing, and
those who disagree with him—even those with manifestly more knowledge and
experience—are stupid, or slow, or crazy.
As a personal
quality, this can be trying; in a president, it is dangerous. Trump rejects the
careful process of decision making that has long guided commanders in chief. Disdain
for process might be the defining trait of
his leadership. Of course, no process can guarantee good decisions—history
makes that clear—but eschewing the tools available to a president is choosing
ignorance. What Trump’s supporters call “the deep state” is, in the world of
national security—hardly a bastion of progressive politics—a vast reservoir of
knowledge and global experience that presidents ignore at their peril. The
generals spoke nostalgically of the process followed by previous presidents,
who solicited advice from field commanders, foreign-service and intelligence
officers, and in some cases key allies before reaching decisions about military
action. As different as George W. Bush and Barack Obama were in temperament and
policy preferences, one general told me, they were remarkably alike in the
Situation Room: Both presidents asked hard questions, wanted prevailing views
challenged, insisted on a variety of options to consider, and weighed potential
outcomes against broader goals. Trump doesn’t do any of that. Despite
commanding the most sophisticated intelligence-gathering apparatus in the
world, this president prefers to be briefed by Fox News, and then arrives at
decisions without input from others.
One prominent example
came on December 19, 2018, when Trump announced, via Twitter, that he was
ordering all American forces in Syria home.
“We have defeated
ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump presidency,” he
tweeted. Later that day he said, “Our boys, our young women, our men, they are
all coming back, and they are coming back now.”
This satisfied one of
Trump’s campaign promises, and it appealed to the isolationist convictions of
his core supporters. Forget the experts, forget the chain of command—they were
the people who, after all, had kept American forces engaged in that part of the
world for 15 bloody years without noticeably improving things. Enough was
enough.
At that moment,
however, American troops were in the final stages of crushing the Islamic
State, which, contrary to Trump’s assertion, was collapsing but had not yet
been defeated. Its brutal caliphate, which had briefly stretched from eastern
Iraq to western Syria, had been painstakingly dismantled over the previous five
years by an American-led global coalition, which was close to finishing the
job. Now they were to stop and come home?
Here, several of the
generals felt, was a textbook example of ill-informed decision making. The
downsides of a withdrawal were obvious: It would create a power vacuum that
would effectively cede the fractured Syrian state to Russia and Iran; it would
abandon America’s local allies to an uncertain fate; and it would encourage a
diminished ISIS to keep fighting. The decision—which prompted the immediate
resignations of the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, and the U.S.
special envoy to the mission, Brett McGurk—blindsided not only Congress and
America’s allies but the person charged with actually waging the war, General
Joseph Votel, the commander of U.S. Central Command. He had not been consulted.
Trump’s tweet put General Votel in the position of telling our
allies, in effect, We’re screwing you, but we need you now more than
ever.
Trump’s tweet put Votel
in a difficult spot. Here was a sudden 180-degree turn in U.S. policy that
severely undercut an ongoing effort. The American contingent of about 2,000
soldiers, most of them Special Forces, was coordinating with the Iraqi army;
the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, consisting primarily of Kurdish militias
and Syrians opposed to President Bashar al-Assad; and representatives of NATO,
the Arab League, and dozens of countries. This alliance had reduced ISIS’s
territory to small pockets of resistance inside Syria. America’s troops were
deep in the Euphrates Valley, a long way from their original bases of
operation. An estimated 10,000 hard-core Islamist soldiers were fighting to the
death. Months of tough combat lay ahead.
Votel’s force in
Syria was relatively small, but it required a steady supply of food,
ammunition, parts, and medical supplies, and regular troop rotations. The
avenue for these vital conveyances—through hundreds of miles of hazardous Iraqi
desert—was truck convoys, protected almost exclusively by the SDF. To protect
its troops during a retreat, America could have brought in its own troops or
replaced those truck convoys with airlifts, but either step would have meant
suddenly escalating an engagement that the president had just pronounced finished.
For the American
commander, this was a terrible logistical challenge. An orderly withdrawal of
his forces would further stress supply lines, therefore necessitating the SDF’s
help even more. Votel found himself in the position of having to tell his
allies, in effect, We’re screwing you, but we need you now more than
ever.
Field commanders are
often given orders they don’t like. The military must bow to civilian rule. The
generals accept and embrace that. But they also say that no careful decision-making
process would have produced Trump’s abrupt about-face.
Votel decided to take
an exceedingly rare step: He publicly contradicted his commander in chief. In
an interview with CNN he said that no, ISIS was not yet defeated, and now was
not the time to retreat. Given his responsibility to his troops and the
mission, the general didn’t have much choice.
Votel held everything
together. He took advantage of the good relationship he had built with the SDF
to buy enough time for Trump to be confronted with the consequences of his
decision. A few days later, the president backed down—while predictably
refusing to admit that he had done so. American forces would stay in smaller
numbers (and France and the U.K. would eventually agree to commit more troops
to the effort). The 180-degree turn was converted into something more like a
90-degree one. In the end, the main effects of Trump’s tweet were bruising the
trust of allies and heartening both Assad and ISIS.
II. HE TRUSTS ONLY
HIS OWN INSTINCTS
Trump believes that
his gut feelings about things are excellent, if not genius. Those around him
encourage that belief, or they are fired. Winning the White House against all
odds may have made it unshakable.
Decisiveness is good,
the generals agreed. But making decisions without considering facts is not.
Trump has, on at
least one occasion, shown the swiftness and resolution commanders respect: On
April 7, 2017, he responded to a chemical-warfare attack by Assad with a
missile strike on Syria’s Shayrat Airbase. But this was not a hard call. It was
a onetime proportional retaliation unlikely to stir international controversy
or wider repercussions. Few international incidents can be cleanly resolved by
an air strike.
“How did we even get to that point?” one general asked me in
astonishment. What kind of commander in chief would risk war with Iran over a
drone?
A case in point is
the flare-up with Iran in June. The generals said Trump’s handling of it was
perilous, because it could have led to a shooting war. On June 20, Iran’s air
defenses shot down an American RQ-4A Global Hawk, a high-altitude surveillance drone the Iranians said had
violated their airspace. The U.S. said the drone was in international airspace.
(The disputed coordinates were about 12 miles apart—not a big difference for an
aircraft moving hundreds of miles an hour.) In retaliation, Trump ordered a military strike on Iran—and then abruptly called
it off after, he claimed, he’d been informed that
it would kill about 150 Iranians.
One general told me this explanation is highly improbable—any careful
discussion of the strike would have considered potential casualties at the
outset. But whatever his reasoning, the president’s reversal occasioned such
relief that it obscured the gravity of his original decision.
“How did we even get
to that point?” the general asked me in astonishment. Given what a tinderbox
that part of the world is, what kind of commander in chief would risk war with
Iran over a drone?
Not only would a
retaliatory strike have failed the litmus test of proportionality, this general
said, but it would have accomplished little, escalated the dispute with Iran,
and risked instigating a broad conflict. In an all-out war, the U.S. would
defeat Iran’s armed forces, but not without enormous bloodshed, and not just in
Iran. Iran and its proxies would launch terrorist strikes on American and
allied targets throughout the Middle East and beyond. If the regime were to
fall, what would come next? Who would step in to govern a Shiite Muslim nation
of 82 million steeped for generations in hatred of America? The mullahs owe
their power to the American overthrow of Iran’s elected government in 1953, an
event widely regarded in Iran (and elsewhere) as an outrage. Conquering
Americans would not be greeted by happy Persian crowds. The generals observed
that those who predicted such parades in Baghdad following the ouster of Saddam
Hussein instead got a decade-long bloodbath. Iran has more than twice Iraq’s
population, and is a far more developed nation. The Iraq War inspired the
creation of ISIS and gave renewed momentum to al‑Qaeda; imagine how war with
Iran might mobilize Hezbollah, the richest and best-trained terrorist
organization in the world.
Sometimes, of course,
war is necessary. That’s why we maintain the most expensive and professional
military in the world. But a fundamental reason to own such power is to avoid wars—especially
wars that are likely to create worse problems than they solve.
General Votel, who
commanded American forces in the region until he retired in March, told me that
if the U.S. had carried out a retaliatory strike, “the trick for the military
in this case would be to orchestrate some type of operation that would very quickly
try and get us to an off-ramp—give them an off-ramp or provide us with an
off-ramp—so we can get to some kind of discussion to resolve the situation.”
Trump’s attack might have targeted some of the Iranian navy’s vessels and
systems that threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, Votel said, or it might
have leveled a measured strike against the air defenses that struck the drone.
Ideally it would have been followed by a pause, so diplomatic processes could
kick in. The strike would have demonstrated to Iran that we have the capability
and willingness to strike back if provoked, and made clear that in a serious
fight, it could not prevail. But all of this presumes a sequence that would
unfold in an orderly, rational way—a preposterous notion.
“This is all
completely unpredictable,” Votel said. “It’s hard for me to see how it would
play out. We would be compelled to leave large numbers of forces in the region
as a deterrent. If you don’t have an off-ramp, you’re going to find yourself in
some kind of protracted conflict.” Which is precisely the kind of scenario
Trump has derided in the past. His eagerness to free the U.S. from long-term
military conflicts overseas was why he made his abrupt announcement about
pulling out of Syria. Evidently he didn’t fully consider where a military
strike against Iran was likely to lead.
The real reason Trump
reversed himself on the retaliatory strike, one general said, was not because
he suddenly learned of potential casualties, but because someone, most likely
General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, aggressively
confronted him with the extended implications of an attack.
“I know the chairman
very well,” the general said. “He’s about as fine an officer as I have ever
spent time around. I think if he felt the president was really heading in the
wrong direction, he would let the president know.” He added that Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo may have counseled against an attack as well. “Pompeo’s a
really bright guy. I’m sure he would intervene and give the president his best
advice.”
III. HE RESISTS
COHERENT STRATEGY
If there is any broad
logic to Trump’s behavior, it’s Keep ’em confused. He believes that
unpredictability itself is a virtue.
Keeping an enemy
off-balance can be a good thing, the generals agreed, so long as you are not
off-balance yourself. And it’s a tactic, not a strategy. Consider Trump’s
rhetorical dance with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. No president in
modern times has made progress with North Korea. Capable of destroying Seoul
within minutes of an outbreak of hostilities, Pyongyang has ignored every
effort by the U.S. and its allies to deter it from building a nuclear arsenal.
Trump has gone back
and forth dramatically on Kim. As a candidate in 2016, he said he would get China
to make the North Korean dictator “disappear in one form or another very
quickly.” Once in office, he taunted Kim, calling him “Little Rocket Man,” and
suggested that the U.S. might immolate Pyongyang. Then he switched directions
and orchestrated three personal meetings with Kim.
“That stuff is just
crazy enough to work,” one of the generals told me with a what-the-hell? chuckle.
“We’ll see what happens. If they can get back to some kind of discussion, if it
can avert something, it will have been worth it. The unconventional aspect of
that does have the opportunity to shake some things up.”
In the long run,
however, unpredictability is a problem. Without a coherent underlying strategy,
uncertainty creates confusion and increases the chance of miscalculation—and
miscalculation, the generals pointed out, is what starts most wars. John F.
Kennedy famously installed a direct hotline to the Kremlin in order to lower
the odds of blundering into a nuclear exchange. Invading Kuwait, Saddam Hussein
stumbled into a humiliating defeat in the first Gulf War—a conflict that killed
more than 100,000 people—after a cascading series of miscommunications and
miscalculations led to a crushing international response.
Unpredictability
becomes an impediment to success when it interferes with orderly process. “Say
you’re going to have an engagement with North Korea,” a general who served
under multiple presidents told me. “At some point you should have developed a
strategy that says, Here’s what we want the outcome to be. And then
somebody is developing talking points. Those talking points are shared with the
military, with the State Department, with the ambassador. Whatever the issue
might be, before the president ever says anything, everybody should
know what the talking points are going to be.” To avoid confusion and a sense
of aimlessness, “everybody should have at least a general understanding of what
the strategy is and what direction we’re heading in.”
Which is frequently
not the case now.
“If the president
says ‘Fire and brimstone’ and then two weeks later says ‘This is my best
friend,’ that’s not necessarily bad—but it’s bad if the rest of the relevant
people in the government responsible for executing the strategy aren’t aware
that that’s the strategy,” the general said. Having a process to figure out the
sequences of steps is essential. “The process tells the president what he
should say. When I was working with Obama and Bush,” he continued, “before we
took action, we would understand what that action was going to be, we’d have
done a Q&A on how we think the international community is going to respond
to that action, and we would have discussed how we’d deal with that response.”
To operate outside of
an organized process, as Trump tends to, is to reel from crisis to
rapprochement to crisis, generating little more than noise. This haphazard
approach could lead somewhere good—but it could just as easily start a very big
fire.
If the president
eschews the process, this general told me, then when a challenging
national-security issue arises, he won’t have information at hand about what
the cascading effects of pursuing different options might be. “He’s kind of
shooting blind.” Military commanders find that disconcerting.
“The process is not a
panacea—Bush and Obama sometimes made bad decisions even with all the options
in front of them—but it does help.”
IV. “HE IS
REFLEXIVELY CONTRARY”
General H. R.
McMaster, who left the White House on reasonably good terms in April 2018 after
only 14 months as national security adviser, is about as can-do a professional
as you will find. He appeared to take Trump seriously, and tailored his
briefings to accommodate the president’s famous impatience, in order to equip
him for the weighty decisions the office demands. But Trump resents advice and
instruction. He likes to be agreed with. Efforts to broaden his understanding
irritate him. McMaster’s tenure was bound to be short. Weeks before accepting
his resignation, the president let it be known that he found McMaster’s
briefings tedious and the man himself “gruff and condescending.”
Distrusting
expertise, Trump has contradicted and disparaged the intelligence community and
presided over a dismantling of the State Department. This has meant leaving
open ambassadorships around the world, including in countries vital to American
interests such as Brazil, Canada, Honduras, Japan, Jordan, Pakistan, Russia,
and Ukraine. High-level foreign officers, seeing no opportunities for
advancement, have been leaving.
“When you lose these
diplomats and ambassadors that have all this experience, this language
capability, this cultural understanding, that makes things very, very difficult
for us,” one of the generals said. “And it leads to poor decisions down the
line.”
Trump so resists
being led that his instinct is nearly always to upend prevailing opinion.
“He is reflexively
contrary,” another of the generals told me.
According to those
who worked with him, McMaster avoided giving the president a single consensus
option, even when one existed. He has said that he always tried to give the
president room to choose. After leaving the White House, he criticized others
in the national-security community for taking a different approach, accusing
them of withholding information in hopes of steering Trump in the direction
they preferred. McMaster has not named names, but he was most likely talking
about Mattis and General John Kelly, who, after serving as Trump’s
homeland-security secretary, became the president’s second chief of staff.
McMaster has said that he considered such an approach tantamount to subverting
the Constitution—but if his allegation is true, it shows how poorly equipped
those people felt Trump was for the job. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s
report records numerous instances of civilian advisers trying to manage the
president, or simply ignoring presidential directives they deemed ill-advised
or illegal.
During his brief
tenure on Trump’s staff, McMaster oversaw the production of a broad
national-security strategy that sought to codify Trump’s “America first”
worldview, placing immigration at the head of national-security concerns, right
alongside nuclear proliferation and terrorist attacks. The idea was to build a
coherent structure around the president’s scattershot diplomacy. Trump
rhapsodized about the document at its unveiling, according to someone who was
there, saying, “I love it! I love it! I want to use this all the time.”
He hasn’t. Like its
author, the document has been dismissed. Those who were involved in writing it
remain convinced, somewhat hopefully, that it is still helping guide policy,
but John Bolton, McMaster’s successor, said scornfully—a few months before he,
too, was ousted by Trump—that it is filed away somewhere, consulted by no one.
Trump is no more
likely to have read the thing than he is to have written his own books. (Years
ago, after he published The Art of the Deal, he asked me if I was
interested in writing his next book. I declined.) Trying to shape this
president’s approach to the world into a cogent philosophy is a fool’s errand.
For those commanding America’s armed forces, it’s best to keep binoculars
trained on his Twitter feed.
V. HE HAS A
SIMPLISTIC AND ANTIQUATED NOTION OF SOLDIERING
Though he disdains
expert advice, Trump reveres—perhaps fetishizes—the military. He began his
presidency by stacking his administration with generals: Mattis, McMaster,
Kelly, and, briefly, Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser.
Appointing them so soon after their retirement from the military was a mistake,
according to Don Bolduc, a retired brigadier general who is currently running
as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire. Early on, the biggest
difference Bolduc saw between the Trump administration and its predecessors,
and one he felt was “going to be disruptive in the long term,” was “the significant
reliance, in the Pentagon at least, on senior military leadership overriding
and making less relevant our civilian oversight. That was going to be a huge
problem. The secretary of defense pretty much surrounded himself with his
former Marine comrades, and there was, at least from that group, a distrust of
civilians that really negatively affected the Pentagon in terms of policy and
strategy in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, by following the same old failed
operational approaches.” Trump’s reliance on military solutions is problematic
because “there are limits to what the military can solve. I think initially the
Trump administration held this idea that general officers somehow have all the
answers to everything. I think the president discovered in short order that
that’s really not the case.”
Bolduc also pointed
out an unusual leadership challenge caused by having a general of McMaster’s
rank serve as national security adviser—he did not retire when he assumed the
post. “McMaster, for whom I have tremendous respect, came in as a three-star
general. Leaving him a three-star forces him on a daily basis to have to engage
with four-star generals who see his rank as beneath theirs, even though his
position is much more than that.”
The problems posed by
Trump’s skewed understanding of the military extend beyond bad decision making
to the very culture of our armed forces: He apparently doesn’t think American
soldiers accused of war crimes should be prosecuted and punished. In early May,
he pardoned former Army Lieutenant Michael Behenna, who had been convicted of
murdering an Iraqi prisoner. Two weeks later, he asked the Justice Department
to prepare pardon materials for a number of American servicemen and contractors
who were charged with murder and desecration of corpses, including Special
Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who stood accused by his own
team members of fatally stabbing a teenage ISIS prisoner and shooting unarmed
civilians. (He was ultimately acquitted of the murders but convicted of posing
for photos with the boy’s body.) Trump subsequently chastised the military
attorneys who had prosecuted Gallagher, and directed that medals awarded to
them be rescinded. All of the generals agreed that interfering with the
military’s efforts to police itself badly undermines command and control. When
thousands of young Americans are deployed overseas with heavy weaponry, crimes
and atrocities will sometimes occur. Failing to prosecute those who commit them
invites behavior that shames everyone in uniform and the nation they serve.
“He doesn’t
understand the warrior ethos,” one general said of the president. “The warrior
ethos is important because it’s sort of a sacred covenant not just among
members of the military profession, but between the profession and the society
in whose name we fight and serve. The warrior ethos transcends the laws of war;
it governs your behavior. The warrior ethos makes units effective because of
the values of trust and self-sacrifice associated with it—but the warrior ethos
also makes wars less inhumane and allows our profession to maintain our
self-respect and to be respected by others. Man, if the warrior ethos gets
misconstrued into ‘Kill them all …’ ” he said, trailing off. Teaching soldiers about ethical conduct in
war is not just about morality: “If you treat civilians disrespectfully, you’re working for the enemy! Trump doesn’t understand.”
Having never served
or been near a battlefield, several of the generals said, Trump exhibits a
simplistic, badly outdated notion of soldiers as supremely “tough”—hard men
asked to perform hard and sometimes ugly jobs. He also buys into a severely
outdated concept of leadership. The generals, all of whom have led troops in
combat, know better than most that war is hard and ugly, but their
understanding of “toughness” goes well beyond the gruff stoicism of a John
Wayne movie. Good judgment counts more than toughness.
Bolduc said he came
up in a military where it was accepted practice for senior leaders to blame
their subordinates, lose their temper, pound on desks, and threaten to throw
things, and the response to that behavior was “He’s a hard-ass.
Right? He’s tough. That is not leadership. You don’t get
optimal performance being that way. You get optimal performance by being
completely opposite of that.”
Bolduc worries that,
under Trump’s command, a return to these antiquated notions of “toughness” will
worsen the epidemic of PTSD plaguing soldiers who have served repeated combat
tours. Senior military officers have learned much from decades of war—lessons
Bolduc said are being discarded by a president whose closest brush with combat
has been a movie screen.
The military is hard
to change. This is bad, because it can be maddeningly slow to adapt, but also
good, because it can withstand poor leadership at the top. In the most crucial
areas, the generals said, the military’s experienced leaders have steered Trump
away from disaster. So far.
“The hard part,” one
general said, “is that he may be president for another five years.”
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