Trump’s America: New American Journal graphic by Walter Simon

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

In any other democratic country where the underlying principle is that we are all about creating “a nation of laws, not men,” any president who committed as many atrocities as Donald J. Trump would have been long gone by now, piled on the trash heap of history like the garbage mouth he is.

But in this day and age, when the working classes have been brainwashed by television to value celebrity over substance, a classless low character like Trump can lie and manipulate his way into literally being “above the law.” He doesn’t have the human decency to simply resign, and spare the country any more damage and heart-wrenching pain.

We saw this coming, even back during the campaign in 2016 and in the first days of this so-called “presidency” — really a reality TV show parading as a presidency — and wrote about the dangers of electing Trump and putting up with his Twitter shenanigans. But many in the mainstream media let him get away with it, even profited from it, as he bashed them to their faces as the “enemy of the people.”

If it takes a “smoking gun” to bring down a president, as the White House tapes and the coverup of the Watergate break-in brought down Richard Nixon, the destructive testimony of Gordon D. Sondland, a Republican megadonor with no government experience appointed by Trump as ambassador to the European Union, should be the nuclear bomb that destroys Trump and brings down many of those around him, including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Energy Secretary Rick Perry.

If there were any honor left in the United States Senate, they would vote to remove Trump from office and take Pence with him — along with the rest of Trump’s corrupt cabinet – and restore order by making House Speaker Nancy Pelosi president. The women of this country should get their first American President, sweet revenge for the manipulated election of 2016, as least for a few months.

If the president is relieved of his duties, and the Vice President is also implicated in the scandal and has to go too, the line of succession dictates that the Speaker of the House would become president of the United States until the next election.

As a host of other credible witnesses have now testified before the House Intelligence Committee, Sondland made it clear that in this business with Ukraine, everyone involved in this scandal to abuse the power of the presidency to manipulate a foreign country to interfere in an American election was acting on direct orders from Trump.

He testified in unequivocal terms that there was in fact a quid pro quo demand by Trump to withhold favors and aid to Ukraine unless President Volodymyr Zelensky made a public announcement that they were investigating 2016 election interference and 2020 Democratic political rival Joe Biden’s son and his company, even though investigators there had already dismissed allegations against Burisma as an unfounded conspiracy theory.

Sondland said the tit for tat arrangement was about a meeting with the president and only learned of the threat to withhold aid late in the game. But he made it clear that the “Three Amigos” who were carrying out Trump’s wishes along with Trump’s personal TV attorney Rudi Giuliani were doing it “because the president directed us to do so.”

“Secretary Perry, Ambassador Volker and I worked with Mr. Rudy Giuliani on Ukraine matters at the express direction of the president of the United States,” Mr. Sondland testified. “We did not want to work with Mr. Giuliani. Simply put, we were playing the hand we were dealt … we followed the president’s orders.”

Sondland Says ‘We Followed the President’s Orders’ on Ukraine

While most Americans were not watching, just going about their desperate, daily lives trying to survive in this crazy world where some sectors of the economy are booming, while others are collapsing, Sondland confirmed what we have known for some time: Trump demanded a public announcement of an investigation in return for a presidential visit and $391 million in security aid to Ukraine. He in fact ordered the aid withheld, until a CIA whistleblower came out and pushed a memo up the chain of command raising red flags and alarms about high crimes against the country and the U.S. Constitution.

“Everyone was in the loop,” Sondland told the committee, including Pence, Pompeo and Perry.

“Not once do I recall encountering an objection,” he said.

Sondland rejected the idea that he was somehow part of a rogue, back channel foreign policy working outside routine national security protocols.

“The suggestion that we were engaged in some irregular or rogue diplomacy is absolutely false,” he said, citing emails and phone messages proving that White House and State Department staff were fully informed.

How a CIA analyst, alarmed by Trump’s shadow foreign policy, triggered an impeachment inquiry

Since the CIA agent sounded the alarm, Giuliani has largely disappeared from his daily appearances on cable TV shows, and he and some who worked with him are being investigated by prosecutors in New York.

In his closing statement on Wednesday, House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff made it clear that the House has no choice now but to send articles of impeachment to the Senate.

It is not clear that there is enough honor in Congress to do the right thing and remove Trump from office. The same media pundits who said Trump could never be elected president and predicted that Hillary Clinton was “a lock” to win the election in 2016 are saying over and over that Trump will never be removed from office, because “Moscow Mitch” McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, will save him from impeachment in the Senate.

Surely this seems to be the conventional wisdom, but the conventional wisdom has been wrong before, just like 2016.

All we need is 20 Republican votes to turn against Trump in the Senate and vote to remove him from the White House, and there is one Senator from Alabama who, if he has any honor, will sit on the jury on that and do the right thing. U.S. Senator Richard Shelby of Tuscaloosa has so far kept his powder dry on impeachment, which is the right thing to do.

Now if he could find the courage to stand against this mob-boss, dictator king and say enough is enough, he could influence other Senators and get us the 20 votes we need — just like he helped stop Roy Moore from getting elected to the Senate — and we might save this democracy yet.

U.S. Senator Richard Shelby Keeps His Powder Dry on Impeachment as House Republicans Vote With Democrats to Rebuke Trump for Syria Withdrawal