Let us try, as we always find ourselves doing in the age of Trump, to think about how Americans might react if this happened in any other administration. Imagine, for example, if Bill Clinton had called his friend, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, in 1996, and asked him to investigate Bob Dole. Or if George W. Bush had called, say, President Vicente Fox of Mexico in 2004 and asked him—indeed, asked him eight times, according to The Wall Street Journal—to open a case against John Kerry. Clinton, of course, was eventually impeached for far less than that. Is there any doubt that either man would have been put on trial in the Senate, and likely chased from office?
The Republicans, predictably, have decided to choose their party over their country, and the damage control and lying have begun. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, for one, has already floated the reliable “deep-state attack” nonsense that will play well on Fox and other conservative outlets. And while Giuliani did Trump no favors with his incoherent ranting on CNN, he did manage to hammer away at the idea that Biden, and not Trump, tried to shake down the Ukrainians while he was vice president.
The problem for Giuliani, the Republicans, and the president himself, however, is that Biden and his actions are now irrelevant to the offenses committed by Trump. The accusations against Joe Biden are false, as we know from multiple fact checks and from the Ukrainians themselves (which is why I won’t deign to repeat them here). But even to argue over this fable about Biden is to miss the point, because it changes nothing about Trump’s attempts to enmesh Biden in a foreign investigation for Trump’s own purposes.
There is no spin, no deflection, no alternative theory of the case that can get around the central fact that President Trump reportedly attempted to use his office for his own gain, and that he put the foreign policy and the national security of the United States at risk while doing so. He ignored his duty as the commander in chief by intentionally trying to place an American citizen in jeopardy with a foreign government. He abandoned his obligations to the Constitution by elevating his own interests over the national interest. By comparison, Watergate was a complicated judgment call.
In a better time and in a better country, Republicans would now join with Democrats and press for Trump’s impeachment. This won’t happen, of course; even many of Biden’s competitors for the presidency seem to be keeping their distance from this mess, perhaps in the hope that Biden and Trump will engage in a kind of mutually assured political destruction. (Elizabeth Warren, for one, renewed her call for impeachment—but without mentioning Biden.) This is to their shame. The Democratic candidates should now unite around a call for an impeachment investigation, not for Biden’s sake, but to protect the sanctity of our elections from a predatory president who has made it clear he will stop at nothing to stay in the White House.
I am speaking only for myself as an American citizen. I believe in our Constitution, and therefore I must accept that Donald Trump is the president and the commander in chief until the Congress or the people of the United States say otherwise. But if this kind of dangerous, unhinged hijacking of the powers of the presidency is not enough for either the citizens or their elected leaders to demand Trump’s removal, then we no longer have an accountable executive branch, and we might as well just admit that we have chosen to elect a monarch and be done with the illusion of constitutional order in the United States.
For all of Nichols's lofty rhetoric, it's already too late though. The goalposts were moved to Mars in just the last 24 hours because the Democrats, with the exclusion of Liz Warren, said nothing. Democrats are already walking back their attacks because reportedly, Trump didn't actually mention a quid pro quo on the call itself.
As Nichols points out, that's irrelevant. The pressure itself should be enough for impeachment if it happened, but that ship has already sailed.
It took 24 hours for news outlets to ‘both sides’ a president committing treason. pic.twitter.com/o91dHAyYUG— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) September 21, 2019
We can't know for sure without the call itself, but Trump will simply claim executive privilege and this will become Hillary's emails all over again, as I predicted Friday.
Can't wait until Monday's news cycle begins, which will herald approximately 13 minutes of "Trump admits to extortion of Ukraine leader in order to help his 2020 campaign" but 14 months of "But Joe Biden's emails!"— The Full Zandar Report (@ZandarVTS) September 20, 2019
Democrats should be howling at the moon over this. Republicans should be pissed off over this. But as always, the GOP has figured out that as long as they cover for Trump, America will refuse to make them pay any sort of price. But if they rat Trump out, they will be exterminated like Justin Amash, in a matter of days, if not hours.
That's how mobsters work.
We live under a mob crime family and Eliott Ness is nowhere to be found.
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