Mad King Trump

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. – While House Speaker Nanci Pelosi recently came out for a quick, short impeachment investigation focusing only on President Donald Trump’s abuse of power with regard to withholding military aid to Ukraine in exchange for a “favor” of an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden, I strongly agree with Elizabeth Drew, a political journalist who for many years covered Washington for The New Yorker, author of Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s Downfall.

She published a piece this week in the New York Times making the case for a longer and more thorough impeachment investigation.

“House Democratic leaders, following frustrated efforts to hold President Trump to account, understandably want to strike quickly to impeach him on the grounds of one extremely serious issue: his pressuring the president of Ukraine to get the goods on his Democratic rival Joe Biden. But they’re risking making their target too narrow and moving too fast,” she wrote.

I agree.

“To limit the impeachment process to the most blatant presidential misdeed yet discovered would leave in the dust — unresolved for history, setting dangerous precedents — the possibility of holding accountable a president who routinely enriches himself at the expense of the taxpayers and flouts the Constitution’s emoluments clause,” she continues, “lies so persistently that we’re far from the democratic concept of transparent government, usurps the role of Congress by unilaterally holding up funds or using them for other purposes than it has approved, bullies private businesses by threatening a tax increase or a significant raise in postal rates (as Mr. Trump did to Amazon, whose owner also owns The Washington Post), tells intelligence alumni who openly criticize him that he’ll suspend their security clearances and fights the law that allows Congress to obtain his tax returns.”

Speaker Pelosi, who Drew calls “a master strategist” — I’m not as convinced of that — “has said that these issues can be taken up later,” she writes. “With respect, if a president were to be impeached more than once, what is the meaning of impeachment? Will Republican senators be willing to vote to eject Mr. Trump from the presidency, which is what the Senate trial is about, on the basis of one issue, no matter how repellent?”

She and I suggest taking other issues into account. A second article of impeachment that would accompany the one centering on Ukraine might resemble the second of the three articles against Richard Nixon drawn up in 1974 by the House Judiciary Committee.

“Article II held Nixon accountable for a collection of abuses of power and also, significantly, for the acts of his subordinates in pursuit of his untoward goals,” she writes. “A third article could cover Mr. Trump’s serial obstructions of legitimate attempts to investigate his administration’s alleged misdeeds.”

She also suggests looking into the role of Russia in this affair.

“It was also in Russia’s interest that Mr. Trump hold up military assistance to Ukraine for its war against Mr. Trump’s friend President Vladimir Putin.”

“Another,” she says, “is the extent to which Mr. Trump’s foreign policy has been guided by favoritism toward the leaders of other countries (several of them autocrats) where his private company has been able to do business, putting up hotels and such.”

Speaker Pelosi and her allies argue that a narrow, Ukraine-based impeachment agenda is more likely to attract wider public support than a collection of grievances because it “is easier for the public to understand,” she points out.

“They’re spooked by the failure of the report by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, to galvanize public opinion, but there are several reasons for that, including that Mr. Mueller, bogged down in legalisms, didn’t try,” she says, seemingly agreeing with my own analysis at the time, which many Democrats disagreed with, but holds up now.

“In fact,” she said, “a speedily adopted Ukraine-based impeachment might repel possible Republican supporters.”

Yes, and according to other stories out there, it could make it easy for the Republican majority in the Senate to take a quick up or down vote and immediately exonerate Trump. That would just give him another victory lap, like he ran after the Mueller report came out with no charges against him or members of his family, to claim “total exoneration.”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, urges that the drafters of even just a Ukraine article take their time.

“Speed is less important than professional thoroughness,” he says. “A well-prepared case could assure all Democratic votes and get Republican votes in the Senate. The atmosphere there now is too partisan for that.”

“The almost universally held assumption that Senate Republicans will never vote to convict Mr. Trump is subject to question,” Drew writes. “It’s based on the same kind of thinking that has accompanied the question of holding Mr. Trump to account all along: projecting from stasis — that is, assuming that how the public and the politicians respond to an issue at the moment is how they always will.”

“But most Republicans remain silent,” she said. “Many of them know that Mr. Trump’s behavior toward Ukraine is indefensible. And they’re aware that damning new disclosures can burst upon them anytime.”

A Senate Democrat with friends across the aisle (it happens) described his Republican colleagues as “nervous as hell,” she says.

And as I write in an open letter to Alabama’s Republican Senator Richard Shelby, Republicans are afraid of being treated like former Senator and Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions, also of Alabama, on TV and Twitter.

“If two-thirds of the senators, which would require 20 Republicans, voted to convict, Mr. Trump would have to surrender the presidency,” Drew writes. “When Nixon saw this coming, he resigned. If the articles of impeachment are carefully and thoughtfully drawn, if they indicate the comprehensiveness of Mr. Trump’s disregard for the Constitution, it would be unwise to rule out anything.”

Of late Trump has being calling this investigation just a continuation of the “witch hunt” against him, and saying things like there’s no way out, no way to stop it.

But there is one way to end at least some of the investigations against him. He could see the writing on the wall like Nixon and resign. This is a bit of a catch-22 for him, since it would open him up to several criminal investigations he seems to be immune from as president. As long as he can hold on to power in the White House, he can prevent going to jail.

I wonder if he would be open to a negotiation to simply step down as president, in exchange for no jail time?

That’s how we finally got rid of the terrible LovGov of Alabama a couple of years ago.

Alabama Governor Robert Bentley Resigns Rather Than Face Impeachment, Jail Time

Personally I would like to see Trump sent into exile, like some of the tin pot dictators he so admires. Maybe Putin would let him finally build a Trump Hotel in Moscow, and he could live out his days there.

But I am willing to settle for less. If he would just step down as president, end this crazy chaos and let us get on with building the economy and combating climate change, and take his Vice President and cabinet with him, I don’t care where he goes to live. I think he belongs in prison, or to be sentenced to death as a traitor, but we don’t do that to former presidents in this country. At least not yet.

But if he persists in his mad behavior in office, I agree with a statement just put out by Joe Biden.

“We don’t just need to beat Trump,” he said. “We need to beat him like a drum.”

If Trump remains in office and continues to run for reelection, he risks going to jail after we beat him like a drum.

Can we take a lesson from another TV show?

What do you say, Mr. Trump? Let’s make a deal.