Building a Better Impeachment By No Longer Speaking in Latin

At this point, it feels safe to say that the Democrats will be able to lay out an airtight case that the president directed a secretive effort to subvert the 2020 elections by putting corrupt pressure on the government of Ukraine to gin up fake investigations about Joe Biden and his son.  Currently, the GOP’s defense and that of the president are somewhat at odds: the president and his most vociferous defenders in the House essentially deny the reality of the accusations, while some GOP senators are reeling under the blows of reality and are trying to spin the known facts into an exonerating narrative.

So the president has repeatedly tweeted that the transcript of his infamous July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zerensky is flawless and beautiful, and is all anyone needs to read in order to grasp his blinding innocence: this despite the fact that any plain reading of the document shows him exerting corrupt pressure on the Ukrainian president and making plentiful allusions to the larger scheme that led up to that conversation, and despite the fact that we learned last week that the transcript summary leaves out additional incriminating, if not game-changing, details.  That the president has expressed interest in doing a “fireside chat” in which he reads the conversation summary as a way to clear his name shows that his central strategy is to tell people not to believe the evidence of their own senses, and to be wowed and won over by his bold assertions of innocence.

At the same time, some Republican senators “are ready to acknowledge that President Trump used U.S. military aid as leverage to force Ukraine to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his family as the president repeatedly denies a quid pro quo,” but would argue that this is neither illegal nor impeachable, and that the president really was interested in ending actual corruption in Ukraine.

But by the time the House votes to impeach the president and the action moves to the Senate, the GOP will have to settle on one of these approaches.  In an impeachment trial, after all, they won’t be making an argument that nothing happened and also that everything actually did happen as described by witnesses but was totally good; this contradictory idea salad might be fine for now in a chaotic media environment, where mutually contradictory notions can live simultaneously, but not in a procedure that focuses the nation’s attention on a narrower clash of narratives.  I think it’s far likelier that the GOP will indeed admit the truth of the facts against Trump, but argue that the acts were not impeachable.  You will note that I’m leaving out another possibility — that they will attempt to refute the facts the Democrats put forth — because, to put it bluntly, the facts are not on their side.  They may attempt to discredit certain points, but to date we have not seen testimony that contradicts the picture of a plot to ratf*ck Joe Biden’s presidential campaign while undermining an ally.

The reason I’m gaming out what seems a likely trajectory of the GOP’s defense at this point is that it’s helping me think more clearly about what sort of impeachment the Democrats should be pursuing.  First, the likelihood that Republicans will argue that the president did what he’s accused of, but that it wasn’t really bad, is a powerful argument for broadening the impeachment articles beyond just the (in itself impeachable and far-reaching) Ukraine affair.  Trump’s handling of Ukraine shows a pattern of corruption, but if the GOP intends to claim that this corruption isn’t so bad, then that becomes a powerful argument for supersizing the indictment to show that his behavior in this one important area is in fact echoed across his administration.  More and varied indictments of wrong-doing can reinforce each other, and undermine arguments that this was one isolated incident that should be forgiven.

Second, the Democrats need to figure out a way to talk about Trump’s actions that goes beyond the solemn, powerful, but deeply abstract notions of abuse of power, corruption, and the like.  These are an extremely important, indeed, central part of their case, but the abstraction enables the GOP in turn to counter with more abstractions.  The more Democrats allow this battle to be fought literally in Latin (was there a quid pro quo? Well, then, ipso facto and QED!), then it’s likelier that impeachment will be one big veni vidi vici for Donald Trump.  But the more they can make their case with vivid and grounded details of what the corruption entails, the stronger it will be.

In relation to Ukraine, it’s accurate and necessary to say that the president abused the power of his office, but both the details and the real-world way this affects ordinary Americans — what this actually looked like — both need to be kept in focus.  The secretive diplomatic blackmail effort undertaken by the likes of gonzo Trump lawyer Rudy Guiliani, hapless EU Ambasssador Gordon Sondland, and others are damning and easy to describe as the skullduggery it was.  As for the impact on Americans — well, the goal was to make sure that the majority of Americans who oppose Trump would be deprived of a free election and the power of the vote in 2020, by allowing the president to kneecap a strong contender for the Democratic nomination.  The president wants to make sure he gets re-elected by any means necessary, which means screwing the majority of Americans out of their voting rights.  The president was acting like authoritarian garbage, and this should be part of the indictment, but I don’t think Democrats would go wrong in emphasizing the personal assault on millions of Americans: one day, the idea was that we would all see an interview with the Ukrainian president talking about how corrupt Joe Biden and his son are, not realizing that this was something he had been pressured to say in order to stay on the American president’s good side.  It would have been Trumpist propaganda, but none of us would have known.

Finally, so long as Ukraine is central to the impeachment, Democrats need to make the plight of Ukraine visceral and urgent for Americans.  It is still not sufficiently understood by Americans that Ukraine was invaded by and is currently at war with Russia.  Ukrainians continue to die in combat.  Support of Ukraine is a commonly held bipartisan position; the president’s willingness to screw Ukraine for personal ends is an impeachable act in and of itself, even separated from the pressure campaign to screw Joe Biden.  The fact that Trump’s actions have all been to the benefit of Russia, from undermining President Volodymyr Zelensky by embroiling him in scandal, to withholding weapons from a country that, again, has literally been invaded by Russia, is of a piece with other pro-Russian actions by Trump, and the Democrats are well-served by keeping the larger Putin-Trump entanglement in the mix.  Overall, making Ukraine’s struggle and importance to the U.S. as real as possible will serve the impeachment effort.  Trump’s corrupt acts were over matters of life and death, and he should never be allowed to weasel out of this basic fact.  (A recent letter from Speaker Nancy Pelosi to House members with an impeachment update highlighted Ukraine’s vulnerability, which gives optimism that the Democrats have a good idea of how important this angle is in making the case for impeachment).  

The Democrats can’t let an overemphasis on solemnity detract from presenting a narrative of the shocking and scandalous nature of the Ukraine story.  In his opening statement to congressional investigators, the U.S. chargé d’affaires to Ukraine, William Taylor, described going to the front lines of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and his strong feelings knowing that the weapons the Ukrainians were expecting had been put on hold by the White House for reasons he did not yet fully understand.  At the most basic level, this is a riveting tale, and the Democrats should not hold back from highlighting the patriotic efforts of Americans like Taylor who tried to do the right thing in the face of presidential conspiracy.  From an ambassador peering into enemy territory, to how close Americans came to being inundated with Trumpist propaganda about Joe Biden had the plot come to fruition, the vivid details of Trump’s corruption will help persuade more and more Americans that the president needs to go.

Building a Better Impeachment By Deconstructing the President's Fake Populism

Two pieces by TPM faves Jamelle Bouie and Greg Sargent are essential reading for impeachment supporters, as the president and his defenders attack the proceedings as undemocratic and illegitimate.  Bouie gets the ball rolling with a column affirming the constitutional legitimacy of impeachment (i.e., it is not a coup, as the GOP would have us believe), and that hits back against claims that it’s an overturning of the 2016 election and that those who oppose Trump can only look to the 2020 elections for recourse.  These are all important points in combatting the propaganda that takes the place of reasoned argument coming from the president’s defenders, but Bouie goes on to make an observation that goes to the heart of how weak these arguments are: the president has been acting and talking as if he represents the will of the voters, but this is purely a fiction.  In the first place, he was elected by a minority of those who cast their votes in 2016; in the second, the Democrats won a majority of votes in the 2018 elections (and seized control of the House of Representatives despite odds stacked against them by GOP gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts).  The degree to which only votes for the president, and not votes for members of Congress, count in the mind of the president and his defenders is truly remarkable, and fits neatly into their belief that the presidency is the “real” power in our system of government.

At a moment when the Democrats need to be hitting this president with every tool at their disposal, pointing out the illogic of his majoritarian pretensions seems a pretty good way to chisel at his defenses.  Everyone knows he lost the popular vote, and the Democrats shouldn’t shy away from capitalizing on this fact, not when they face a president willing to lie and cheat his way to re-election.  The fact of the House victory in 2018 should be kept front and center — it was a clear repudiation of this president, and is obviously why there can even be an impeachment effort now.  

But keeping the truth of his minority status in the public mind is also an antidote to Trump’s “right-wing populist logic” in which those who don’t support him are, by definition, illegitimate actors in American politics.  Bouie writes:

Trump has not tried to represent the nation as a whole and does not pretend to govern on everyone’s behalf.  Instead, he casts himself as a representative of “the people,” narrowly defined as his supporters, who are themselves — in a sort of circular logic — the essence of the nation. In the Trumpist vision, the 2016 election stands apart from all others. It’s no longer a grant of constitutionally-bounded authority. It becomes a kind of coronation, in which Trump is sanctified as the embodiment of a “real America,” the actual size of which is irrelevant.

This is the first time it’s really clicked for me that Trump, and many of his supporters, view 2016 as a sort of “Year Zero,” when a celestial countdown ticked over and the elect were separated from the damned, and when, as far as they’re concerned, the rules all changed.  This goes hand-in-fascist-glove, of course, with the idea that their opponents are illegitimate, either in wanting to hold power or in opposing this presidency — not exactly a vision of American politics compatible with contested elections or the peaceful transition of power.

Greg Sargent elaborates on some of Bouie’s points, referring to Trump’s actual position as “minoritarian populism" or “counter-majoritarian populism.”  In particular, he zeroes in on how the president and his defenders have combined the idea that the president alone represents the will of the majority with their attacks on the federal bureaucracy, which they call “the deep state” and decry as undemocratically opposed to the president’s will.  Here, Sargent makes a point that needs to be put into wider circulation:

The whole legal scaffolding of whistleblower protections that arose in legislative stages after Watergate reflects the recognition that you want government insiders to be able to sound the alarm about wrongdoing without fear of retaliation from agency heads who serve at the executive’s pleasure. You want this to protect the people [. . .]  [T]he bottom line is that when Trump attacks this as a sham process — as an effort to flout some fictitious people’s will — he’s actually trying to undermine the very sort of protections that evolved to deal with precisely the sort of corruption Trump is engaged in. These processes were created and built upon by democratically elected Congresses and previous presidents.

In other words, while Trump is trying to convince us that he’s the victim of a “deep state” coup, the impeachment inquiry was set off by a member of the government following the rules put in place by democratically-elected congressmen and senators (and signed into law by a democratically-elected president!).  And I would add that apart from the whistleblower in the Ukraine scandal, the behavior of those members of the diplomatic and national security bureaucracy troubled by Donald Trump’s corrupt backchannel efforts to pressure Ukraine and subvert the 2020 elections is remarkable for the degree to which they played by internal rules and procedures; if anything, we can see how the president was for a long time able to benefit from many people’s good faith belief in a system where the president is assumed not be a corrupt actor.

The logical, fact-based analysis and democratic appeals of Bouie and Sargent’s arguments could not contrast more strongly with the feral, anti-democratic animus of President Trump’s ugly populism, which is inseparable from his white supremacism and authoritarianism.  Trump’s assertions of a unique rectitude and knowledge of what’s best for America are laughable, but also necessary given the weak hand he has always held.  With impeachment, Democrats and the rest of America have called his bluff; part of the process of undoing this presidency will be to dissect his absurd pretensions to be the only democratic figure in government.

Sondland in Dangerland After New Testimony by National Security Council Ukraine Expert

Among other reasons why today’s testimony by Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman in the impeachment proceedings is a big deal is the fact that his is the first I’ve seen that directly contradicts Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s assertion that he did not know that targeting Joe and Hunter Biden was the purpose of the back-channel diplomacy that President Trump charged him with carrying out.  This would mean that the hapless hotelier turned diplomatic lackey up and perjured himself before Congress — not a good look for a man who’s hoping to stave off a boycott of his Portland, Oregon-based hotel empire on the grounds that he’s just an honest businessman trying to serve his president.  Vindman’s opening statement, published by various media sources last night, also includes an account of Vindman telling Sondland about the appropriateness of a demand that Ukraine investigate the president’s political rival, which again contradicts Sondland’s testimony that no one raised concerns to him about the pressure campaign on the Ukrainians.

I mentioned this weekend that Sondland interests me in part because he’s a test case for how public pressure might be brought to bear on Trump’s co-conspirators and enablers to ensure that this presidency is stopped in its tracks.  He’s also fascinating as he represents a clear departure from the liberal aspirations of Portland (if not from the upper-class myopia of even avowedly liberal Portland elites).  It’s somewhat gratifying to see others catching the Sondland dengue fever; Josh Marshall has just proclaimed him the “best character in this drama,” noting how fucked Sondland is at this point, and observing:

Entitlement, cluelessness, wanting desperately to be a player but not actually being one – it all makes for a perfect comedic awkwardness. Through texts and transcripts he manages to be cliched in his attempts to avoid paper trails and yet somehow fatally indiscrete. Sondland apparently thought he could thread the needle, remaining largely loyal to Trump while also keeping on the right side of the law and out of legal jeopardy. I doubt he’ll be the last. But he looks almost certain to be the first to be chewed up by this storm.

And lest you still think I’ve been too harsh on Sondland these past weeks, I refer you as well to this eviscerating piece by Oregonian columnist Steve Duin.  Duin talked with Sondland several years ago as the latter was looking at renting some Portland property he owned to a strip club, over the protests of people who lived nearby.  Sondland’s profession to Duin of his lack of reciprocal obligations towards his fellow citizens echoes his amoral service to Trump over the past year:

“You’re implying that because I serve on the art museum board, which is something I’m doing for the community, that somehow carries the responsibility to encumber my real estate,” Sondland said. “I don’t understand the connection. That doesn’t make any sense to me.”

[Sondland] couldn’t fathom a reason to “put an artificial restriction on our property. Why would we do that?”

The health and well-being of the erotic dancers on the poles? The families down the street? The property values in the shadow of Lottery Row?

That collateral damage didn’t register on his transactional balance sheet.

One final note on the Sondland front — it’s been reported that Sondland returned to Capitol Hill yesterday to review the transcript of his testimony, an exercise that we can assume is totally unrelated to newfound ambivalence about any self-incrimination in which he may have engaged. . .

Conflicting GOP Responses to Impeachment Make Case for Full Speed Ahead

“It feels like a horror movie.”

As reported by The Washington Post today, this is how an anonymous “veteran” Republican senator expressed his or her experience of the impeachment inquiry, the difficulty of defending President Trump, and worries over still more damning revelations to come.

To which the rest of America replies, “Welcome to our world.”  

There is a sweet, if superficial, justice in seeing some GOP politicians squirm as they watch in helplessness the reckoning that is slowly but certainly approaching them at the speed of impeachment, like expendable necking teens about to be axed in the opening sequence of a low-budget slasher flick.  Especially delicious is the way in which the vast extent of the Trump’s lawlessness means that they’re constantly braced for news that might undermine prior defenses of the president; as one Republican strategist told the Post,  “If they say something in defense of the president or against the impeachment inquiry now, will they be pouring cement around their ankles?”  The mob imagery feels particularly apt.

Such reports of ongoing senatorial discomfort vindicate those who have advocated impeachment as a way to force Republican senators to make hard choices around their defense of Trump, particularly those from swing states, who risk alienating either the Republican base or other voters depending on whether they vote to convict or acquit the president.  

Meanwhile, the GOP caucus in the House appears far less ambivalent about defending a corrupt president. But in continuing to stand by Trump, and repeating his slander and lies, those representatives are making themselves party to the very acts for which the Democrats are seeking to impeach him.  In fact, when their appeal is not to exonerating truths but to the same deceit in which the president has engaged, it’s misleading to describe them as “defending” the president.  More accurate would be to say that they are “acting as co-conspirators in a plot against the 2020 elections.”  

The disarray among GOP senators, and the feral complicity of Republican representatives, both argue in different ways for the continued prosecution of an impeachment effort that is aimed as much as possible at making the maximal case for removing Donald Trump from office.  We have no way of knowing whether or not enough (twenty) GOP senators would vote to remove Trump; but we do know that there is already much heartburn about the damage the president is doing to some senators’ electoral prospects, and about senators being forced to defend indefensible conduct.  This should encourage Democrats that impeachment is not just a way to damage the president short of removal from office, but a mechanism with slim but very real odds of ending this waking nightmare of a presidency.  The tenacity of House GOP members offers a complementary case for proceeding with impeachment:  if Republican representatives are willing to make themselves part of the plot against America, then it highlights even more the necessity of removing Donald Trump from office and stopping this corruption of the rule of law at its source.  It also highlights the basic indefensibility of Trump’s actions, which should encourage Democrats that they can win the public over to their side: if House Republicans have no argument but to repeat the president’s lies, they are tacitly admitting that he should be impeached, whether or not they realize it.

Impeach It Like You Mean It, Part II

As the impeachment inquiry chugs along, stirring up fresh and damning revelations of wrongdoing on a daily basis, there is no harm in every opponent of Trump taking a moment to feel some satisfaction in this necessary escalation against the president.  Whether you’ve supported his removal from office since the earliest days of his term, or have come around to it in the wake of the Ukraine scandal, impeachment is a step in the right direction.  Whether it was always going to catalyze support for the president’s removal, or needed the Ukraine shenanigans to provide the perfect summation of his unfitness for office, we’re also discovering that impeachment is, after all, serving to weaken and panic the president, forcing the GOP to defend the indefensible, and emboldening witnesses to his high crimes and misdemeanors to tell their stories.

But some observers are starting to point out that the impeachment proceedings alone will not be sufficient to maximize the damage to Trump and the odds that some Republican senators will turn against him and vote for his removal from office.  A spate of heavy-hitting liberal commentators have been calling for mass protests to up the pressure on Congress to do the right thing.  Matthew Yglesias, Michelle Goldberg, and Brian Beutler have all written persuasively about the efficacy of mass demonstrations to push impeachment forward.  They point to how marches and protests early in the administration played a role in stiffening opposition to Trump, as well as in fighting back against the Muslim travel ban and repeal of the Affordable Care Act.  And as Goldberg points out, activism proved a gateway to electoral politicking for many, building to the 2018 Democratic wave that took back the House of Representatives.

Beutler and Yglesias make indisputable points about how opponents of Trump can’t simply rely on Congress to pursue impeachment.  Beutler reminds us that the Democrats in Congress lack “the kind of supportive artillery Trump enjoys in the form of relentless right-wing propaganda, a weaponized Justice Department, and a Twitter feed he now deploys routinely to incite his supporters to violence.”  Meanwhile, Yglesias warns against relying too much on the model of Watergate to see us through, touching on how changes in the media and political landscape have made the elite-level resolution of that crisis inapplicable to today’s political environment.  And for anyone wondering about the efficacy of mass protests, Yglesias’ argues that they can have profound catalyzing effects on public perceptions:

The mechanisms through which protest works seem multifaceted, with some of the impact driven by direct personal participation, some driven by witnessing the protest themselves, and some driven by media coverage which serves to rebroadcast key elements of the protest message. The key to it all, however, is that bothering to show up to a march is a moderately costly investment of time and energy. When a bunch of people do that, it serves as a powerful signal to the rest of society that something extraordinary is happening.

I couldn’t agree more with the call for mass protests, but the fact that none have happened yet is an intriguing question.  Goldberg wonders if it’s because so many people have channeled their efforts into electoral politics, and that the fact that the system seems to be working (at least for the moment) is siphoning off some of the impetus to rally.  More chillingly, Yglesias observes how the Democratic leadership saw the popular activism in response to Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court as ultimately a bad thing, causing the Democrats to lose some Senate races in 2018, and that this has led some to downplay the necessity of protest at this crucial hour.

But I also think that opponents of Trump face a challenge in that the specifics of the Ukraine scandal are, while impeachable, somewhat abstract.  Will Americans really hit the streets in the name of national security, abuse of power, and the betrayal of an ally?  These aren’t issues that are felt to directly impact our individual lives, though a good case could be made that they indeed do.  Contrast this with the motives behind the Women’s March, where women were compelled by concerns for their bodily integrity, men marched in solidarity, and all were driven by overall outrage about Trump’s election.

Somewhat paradoxically, the epic scope of the specific acts currently under investigation, the very things that merit impeachment, also mean they lack a visceral impact for most Americans; they can persuade people to support his removal from office, but make people feel like they have a personal stake?  Not so much.

At the same time, we all have more personal reasons for wanting Trump removed from office, and if ever there was a time to get in touch with those feelings, it’s now.  Whether or not impeachment addresses everything he deserves to be impeached for, we are reaching a point of maximum leverage to start setting things to right, and to punish this monster for what he’s inflicted on our country: the incitement of hatred against minorities and promotion of white supremacism; the infliction of cruelties on immigrants; the use of the presidency to supercharge his businesses; an unswerving dedication to undermining our relations with democratic nations around the world while kissing up to authoritarian leaders everywhere; and a clear subservience to the Russians that leaves little doubt that the Kremlin exerts some sort of leverage over him.

But this is hardly all.  It’s not just the bad acts Trump has committed and enabled; it’s also that he’s stood in the way of the necessary democratic and democratizing efforts we badly need to roll back income inequality, the horrors of climate change, and so many other challenges to our collective prosperity.  At a time when we’ve needed nothing more than a renewed sense of collective purpose and solidarity, Donald Trump has called out and cultivated the darkest impulses of his supporters, and drawn political sustenance from the worst aspects of American history and culture, whether it’s white nationalism, selfish individualism, anti-intellectualism, misogyny, or a know-nothing America first-ism.

So marches would be great; but there are things short of mass protests that American interested in ending this presidency can also do.  Calling your representative and senators to express support for impeachment is a good place to start; this is great if your elected officials already support impeachment or removal from office, but also necessary to let Republicans know that they’ve got constituents who want them to do the right thing.  Particularly if you’re in a state with one of the more moderate GOP senators, raising a fuss is crucial. 

It’s also time to re-open discussions with friends and relatives who’ve backed Trump up to now.  While the issues around Ukraine are abstract compared to more kitchen table issues, the fact that they go to matters of American patriotism and leadership in the world means that traditional conservatives may be open to persuasion that Trump committed impeachable offenses.  (As a side note, I am flabbergasted that anyone in the armed forces would still support the president, after he directed his lackeys to withhold military aid from a U.S. ally that has literally been invaded by Russia, and has done everything he can do disparage our allies and undermine the alliances that help keep our country safe.)

We also need to think beyond strictly political acts, and get more serious about using economic boycotts and the like to unnerve and punish Trump and his ilk.  The involvement of hotelier Gordon Sondland in the scheme to attack American democracy is instructive; already, we’re seeing indications that Sondland is worried about the future of his hotel empire, though it’s hard to say if boycott threats have specifically played a role in moving him to testify before Congress.  Surely there are other members of the Trump administration with vulnerable financial holdings (not to mention the president himself).

As I’ve said before, impeachment may provide a specific governmental mechanism for countering a corrupt president, but its presence in the Constitution doesn’t mean that it’s the only means at our disposal — far from it.  Rather, it’s also a reminder that none of us need simply accept the authority of unaccountable and overreaching power.  If there is something legal, collective, and effective that we can do to end this administration, then we are not only free but I would argue morally compelled to do it.  It is telling that the bad acts that Trump and his minions took toward Ukraine, in their effort to hobble Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, were the very opposite of democratic: conducted in secret, with the goal of inflicting propaganda and confusion on the American people, in the service of subverting the 2020 elections.  How fitting, then, to oppose such skullduggery with open, mass opposition, in which ordinary Americans band together as a counter to the cabal of lickspittles, incompetent millionaires, and addled former New York mayors who serve the selfish ends of one corrupt man?

GOP's Choice Is Between Trump and Democracy

Last Friday, The Washington Post published an article based on interviews with 20 Republican elected officials and congressional staffers who “expressed exasperation over over what they view as President Trump’s indefensible behavior, a sign that the president’s stranglehold on his party is starting to weaken as Congress hurtles toward a historic impeachment vote.”  It’s reporting that directly addresses a central political question of our time: will Republicans representatives and senators ever turn on Trump?  While the article suggests rumblings in Congress, there is tremendous ambiguity as to whether they’re seismic or merely hapless warning shots to the president that others in his party don’t appreciate the hard spot in which he’s put them, and would he please stop, sir, please?

Apart from a solitary representative, Francis Rooney of Florida, voicing openness to impeachment, the other criticism is focused less on the president’s bad acts and more on the “optics” of what he’s done.  The article states that, “There’s now a growing sense among a quiet group of Republicans that the president is playing with fire, taking their loyalty for granted as they’re forced to ‘defend the indefensible,’ as a senior House Republican said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly” — yet the article notes that only a few GOPers are actually saying that they’re hitting their limit.  And the second attributed quote to this effect, from Representative Mike Simpson of Idaho, inspires little confidence in a break-out of patriotism: “‘I have no doubt that Doral is a really good place — I’ve been there, I know,’ says the congressman. But it is politically insensitive. They should have known what the kickback is going to be on this, that politically he’s doing it for his own benefit.”  Absent is the sense that what the president is doing is actually corrupt, even impeachably so; instead, it’s all about making the GOP look bad. 

So while this apparent inability to grasp obviously corrupt acts as corrupt hardly inspires confidence in the GOP’s moral vision, the article does raise a basic issue: even if elected officials don’t care about Trump’s inherent corruption, will they eventually care when it starts to threaten their re-election chances?  Yet, looking at the Senate, a sufficient number of lawmakers hold safe red seats that it is hard to see an electoral threat ever emerging to make them change their minds.  It seems to me a likelier scenario is that matters reach the point where individual representatives and senators, even if not personally threatened by the turning of the tide against the president, begin to see a real possibility of the GOP being reduced to a long-term minority status due to its continued alignment with Trump, and so begin to see their personal power threatened. 

But this sort of speculation obscures a point that I’ve been hitting repeatedly over time, and that’s implicit in the inability of Republican lawmakers to oppose the president on the basis of his clearly evidenced multiple bad acts: we don’t just have a Trump problem, we have a GOP problem.  The fact that the success or failure of the impeachment process, and arguably the survival of the U.S. as a democracy, depends on the votes of the very party members who have enabled the president’s corruption from day one, is a conundrum that is insufficiently discussed and analyzed.  Nothing in this Post article suggests that a major break with the president is yet under way.  Disturbingly, as has been pointed out by others long before our present crisis, the longer the president maintains the loyalty of the GOP base, and the longer GOP members stick by him, the more implicated they are in the president’s corrupt acts, and the more incentive they have to stick by him.

To deal with this conundrum of their own making, it would seem GOP elected officials have two options: keep doubling down as Trump essentially defies the rule of law, or at some point break with Trump in a way that seeks to cleanse their prior complicity in the beatific waters of saving the republic from the authoritarian clown in the White House.  Again, though, evidence such as that presented in the Post backs the first possibility as much as, or even more than, the second: that the GOP will follow Trump into the authoritarian abyss, out of self-preservation, and also, chillingly, out of basic agreement with his anti-democratic means and ends.  Stories like the one in the Post frame the story as if GOPers have a binary choice: either support the president and go down, or break with him and survive.  But what if enough GOP representatives and senators see another way — stick with Trump even if it means upending the rule of law in our country, and setting the stage for further, escalated corrupt attacks on American democracy, such as a doubling-down on conscripting foreign governments to sway the 2020 elections in his (and the GOP’s) favor?  It’s difficult to overstate the historical calamity the GOP faces: impeachment of a Republican president for unprecedented corruption that unites Trump’s personal venality with what can accurately be described as an attack on American democracy via collusion with foreign powers.  This is an American nightmare, and we would not be where we are without the complicity of the GOP in supporting this president’s lawlessness since his inauguration, from his obstruction of justice during the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, through the party’s failure to police the bottomless graft of the president and his family as they’ve used the presidency to supercharge the Trump business empire.  The public is not well-served by either the media or Democratic politicians eliding this dangerous perspective.

It's Way Too Soon to Bemoan the Democratic Presidential Primary

A Washington Post analysis by Dan Balz last Friday argues that “there’s been little that has given Democrats the confidence that their nomination process will produce a challenger strong enough, appealing enough and politically skilled enough to withstand what will be a brutal general election against a weakened and vulnerable president,” and that the Democrats should be worried that no clear front runner has emerged in the race at a time when Trump is both reeling and loaded with campaign cash to pummel his potential rivals.  But while Balz is not wrong in the abstract that most Democrats would feel some relief if they had already settled on their nominee, a state of tension and even anxiety while debates are had, minds made up, and votes are taken is a feature, not a bug, of this thing we call democracy.  A variety of gargantuan moving political parts form the whirring existential stage of the Democratic primary, including a debate over the relative liberalism of the party and the prioritization of a candidate who can beat Donald Trump.  But these political puzzles needs to be resolved by discussion and consideration, not by diktat from a non-existent authority on high. For Balz to be sounding the alarm when we are still months away from the first primary feels extreme.

It does absolutely suck that Trump and the GOP are able to hit Biden, Warren, and others while Democrats hash out their differences and settle on a nominee, but this is the nature of the game under any primary campaign where a president is up for re-election.  At the same time, one could argue that as Trump besets our democracy with the threat of authoritarianism, the Democrats are providing a powerful lesson to the country through their deliberate, open, and yes, sometimes agonizing, nomination process. Practicing democracy in the face of its enemies is always a show of strength, not weakness.

By the same token, the settled race on the GOP side is a sign of the degraded state of the Republican Party, in which no significant challenger has had the guts to challenge the authoritarian monster in their midst.  That the Republican Party and base is united behind Trump so solidly at this point may be a strength versus the Democrats, but it’s equally a sign of the very political bankruptcy on the part of the GOP — a bankruptcy rooted in white identity politics, authoritarianism, and corruption — that the Democrats must diagnose for the public and defeat in 2020, up and down the ballot.

Balz’s logic that the Democrats’ alleged disarray is somehow accentuated by how weak the president appears right now is also peculiar; as Balz puts it, everything that happened last week, i.e. Trump’s stumbles and revelations of lawlessness, “was grounds for optimism for Democrats,” before he turns to the Democratic debate as an example of something that is NOT grounds for optimism.  Yet Balz’s framing of a corrupt and authoritarian president as somehow a net win for Democrats isn’t entirely logical.  Donald Trump has shown an escalating strategy of holding himself above the law, willing to collude with foreign powers to sway the 2020 election and incite violence against those oppose him.  These are reasons the Democrats need to defeat Trump, and reasons people should vote for them, but you can hardly call them grounds for optimism, except in the most superficial sense, in the same way that a burning house is grounds for optimism that citizens will vote for a tax hike to fund their fire department next year.

Balz’s closing observation pushes his attempt to frame this as a normal election to the breaking point.  “Trump might look like a weakened candidate, but he will be a tenacious campaigner, willing to do anything he can to demonize and defeat his challenger. Democrats have many choices but are anxiously wondering which one of them will get the party to the White House in 2021.”  “A tenacious campaigner” who will “do anything he can to demonize and defeat his challenger” is an awfully polite way to describe someone who has literally committed high crimes and misdemeanors in a corrupt scheme to subvert American democracy.  Attempting to handicap the race, Balz provides a description of the president’s election strategy that downplays the actual crisis we’re all in.  There’s not a credible Democratic candidate for president who doesn’t realize the unique circumstances of this race, which is the first in American history when the survival of our democracy is on the ballot.  The reality is that there is no single person who, as a presidential candidate, would be able to defeat a president who considers himself beyond the rule of law.  Beating Trump will take a movement, a tidal wave of democracy in which the right candidate is necessary but hardly sufficient in and of itself. 

Sondlandia, Season I(mpeachment)

Disclosures and leaks as to what ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland testified in response to congressional questioning on Thursday have been scant, but he did release prepared remarks prior to his testimony.  They demonstrate a man clearly concerned with covering his ass while not pissing off the president, which appears to have led to a strategy of professing ignorance of the president’s plan to pressure Ukraine in order to subvert the 2020 election.  At multiple points, Sondland emphasizes that prior to the release of the between the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and the fact that Hunter Biden sat on the company’s board, and by extension his ignorance of the fact that when the president pressed for investigation of Burisma, this meant creating dirt to sully the Biden family’s reputation.

But as Jonathan Chait effectively demonstrates, there is no realistic way Sondland could have been unaware of the Burisma-Biden connection as he worked to follow the president’s directions on Ukraine.  Chait notes that The New York Times ran multiple stories on Trump’s strategy of using Ukraine to bludgeon Joe Biden; the first of the articles ran on the front page, and included the word “Burisma” some three dozen times!  Even if the ambassador was unaware of this mainstream coverage about a country that Sondland proudly testified was within his portfolio, Chait continues, the right-wing media was even more ablaze with stories linking Biden and Burisma.  He concludes:

There is no way Sondland believed Trump was taking a personal interest in withholding diplomatic recognition of an important ally out of some idiosyncratic obsession with tighter regulatory scrutiny of one particular energy company. If Sondland is trying to maintain that he was handling American policy toward Ukraine over a period of months, during which he failed even to peruse a single headline pertaining to the president’s obsessive interest in that very country, then he should be charged with criminal stupidity.

With this reality check in mind, Sondland’s testimony reads like a house of cards, ready to blow over at the first irrefutable evidence that he was aware of the Biden connection to Burisma. As Chait reminds us, testimony earlier in the week from Fiona Hill, former senior director for European and Russian affairs at the White House, revealed that “when [then-National Security Advisor John] Bolton told Ukrainian officials in July that Trump would not meet with Ukrainian president Zelensky, Sondland contradicted him to say that Trump would hold the meeting if Ukraine investigated Burisma, the Ukrainian firm that had employed Joe Biden’s son.”  Sondland was deep into enforcing the quid pro quo of an investigation in exchange for a meeting; his knowledge that the investigation was meant to attack Joe Biden would mean he was a full co-conspirator in the president’s scheme, and not just a witless participant as he’d have us believe.

The idea that Sondland was ignorant of the true ends of the policies he was charged with implementing is further undermined by testimony by another State Department employee. According to George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state responsible for Ukraine, Sondland, along with Energy Secretary Rick Perry and special U.S. envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, were tasked with pushing Ukraine policy outside of normal diplomatic and internal channels.  Kent also testified that acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney headed up a meeting last spring in which the three men were given this role.  To echo Chait’s line of criticism, Sondland would ask us to believe that he was the least inquisitive, most naive diplomatic in the history of the republic, not knowing why he was being tasked with such a special role outside the usual lines of communication.

Without a fuller picture of how he answered Democrats’ questions on Thursday, it’s difficult to know what Sondland’s role will be in the impeachment proceedings going forward, particularly as to whether he will be willing to turn on the president if caught out in a lie about his involvement.  By my reading, his prepared testimony passes the blame to other actors - including Guiliani and perhaps even Secretary of State Mike Pompeo - without offering much new evidence of the Ukraine plot. But this last week also brought more reporting on Sondland’s record as EU ambassador, and it provides some clues as to his willingness to expose himself to legal and political harm in service of the president. 

First, according to The New York Times, Fiona Hill had harsh words about Sondland’s professionalism, testifying about

her fears that Mr. Sondland represented a counterintelligence risk because his actions made him vulnerable to foreign governments who could exploit his inexperience. She said Mr. Sondland extensively used a personal cellphone for official diplomatic business and repeatedly told foreign officials they were welcome to come to the White House whenever they liked.

Ms. Hill said that his invitations, which were highly unusual and not communicated to others at the White House, prompted one instance in which Romanian officials arrived at the White House without appointments, citing Mr. Sondland.

Ms. Hill also testified that Mr. Sondland held himself out to foreign officials as someone who could deliver meetings at the White House while also providing the cellphone numbers of American officials to foreigners, the people said. Those actions created additional counterintelligence risks, she said.

Hill also testified about Sondland’s involvement with Ukraine issues, including the explicit statement Chait noted as to Trump’s willingness to meet with the Ukrainian president being contingent on Ukraine investigating Burisma.  Suggestively, Hill’s boss, national security advisor John Bolton, appeared to have no reservations about Sondland’s complicity in an off-the-books plot; Bolton indicated that he did not want to be part of the “drug deal” that Sondland and White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney were working on.  To those interacting with Sondland and trying to suss out what he and others were up to, the idea that going after the Bidens was at the center of it was quite clear, again raising the unlikeliness that Sondland, a direct participant in the plot, did not know the plot’s actual point.

Unconnected to the Ukraine scheme, but going to questions of Sondland’s character, The Washington Post reported on the nearly $1 million in renovations Sondland has been making to his ambassador’s residence in Brussels on the taxpayers‘ dime, including “more than $400,000 in kitchen renovations, nearly $30,000 for a new sound system and $95,000 for an outdoor “living pod” with a pergola and electric heating, LED lighting strips and a remote-control system.”  (The “remote-control system” reminds me of an earlier story of how, as ambassador, Sondland carries a buzzer with which he can request that staff bring him refreshments during meetings, like magic!). Sondland has argued that the residence was badly in need of updates, but the details suggest he has taken advantage of the situation: 

The renovations at the E.U. ambassador’s residence, which include $33,000 for handmade furniture from Italy, appeared driven by Sondland’s lavish tastes rather than practical needs, people familiar with the matter said.

Two former U.S. officials said Sondland delighted in the trappings of being an American ambassador in Brussels.

“He got addicted,” one former official said. “The way you’re treated as a senior U.S. official, there’s nothing like it in terms of adrenaline and ego boost.”

Also troubling is the fact that some of the renovations are intended not for diplomatic purposes, such as entertaining, but for the particular comfort of the ambassador:

The records show $82,000 was spent on a bathroom renovation labeled “backside office.” Renovation of a restroom in a vestibule, a more public space, cost about $54,000, the records show.

Sondland has also tried to upgrade the offices where he and the staff of the U.S. mission to the E.U. work, former officials and colleagues said.

“He had a weird obsession with creating a snack room after he visited Uber headquarters in the Bay Area,” a former U.S. official said, referring to the ride-hail service headquartered in San Francisco.

“He was often trying to use his own money for renovations that weren’t allowed,” the former official said.

It is difficult to read such details and retain much sense that Gordon Sondland sees his ambassadorship as an act of public service, rather than an act of self-service.  Someone who’s rich enough to throw in his own money once he’s fleeced the public sufficiently would seem to have broken loose of the basic sense of mission and purpose involved in diplomatic service.  To my mind, this small-scale corruption, conducted out of view of the public eye but at the public expense, makes his conscious involvement in the president’s plot against the United States more plausible.

This sense is only strengthened by what we already know about Sondland’s willingness to embrace Donald Trump in order to advance his long-standing interest in being an ambassador: recall that Sondland had backed out of a fundraiser for candidate Trump in 2016 based on Trump’s disparaging remarks about the Muslim parents of an American soldier killed in Iraq, yet then funneled $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.  The ambassadorship soon followed (talk about a qui pro quo!).  But now we have reporting that Sondland has set his sights higher; as The Washington Post reports, “Current and former U.S. officials and foreign diplomats say Sondland seemed to believe that if he delivered for Trump in Ukraine, he could ascend in the ranks of government. A person close to Sondland disputed that notion, but other officials said Sondland had been talked about in the administration as a possible successor to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.”  Once again, public service seems the farthest thing from Sondland’s mind; service to Trump seems all-important, as a means to self-aggrandizement.  Having made himself so pliable to Trump’s ends, let us hope that this has, in turn, made him vulnerable to congressional and public pressure as the impeachment seeks to lay bare the details and mechanisms of the president’s plot against the 2020 election.

Did Bleak Future of Boycotts and Social Shunning Lead Portland-Hotelier-Turned-Trump-Lackey to Say “Cacao”?

Since The Hot Screen dove deep into the tale of Portland boutique hotel maven turned Trump co-conspirator Gordon Sondland a few days ago, the story has seen some dramatic developments.  First, Democratic Representative Early Blumenauer, whose congressional district includes Portland, released a statement calling for a boycott of Provenance Hotels, the boutique hotel chain Sondland founded and of which he was CEO until he became the U.S. ambassador to the European Union last year. Sondland’s attorney quickly hit back against Blumenauer’s boycott recommendation, calling it an "irresponsible attempt to hurt a homegrown business that supports hundreds of jobs in our local economy."

Next, on Friday, came news that Sondland had reversed his position, and was now willing to testify to Congress, going against the State Department’s instructions not to appear (though he still intends not to produce any documents, in line with the State Department’s directions).  Given Sondland’s central role in implementing Donald Trump’s scheme to pressure Ukraine into manufacturing dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden, this reversal does not bode well for the president.  Just as the ambassador’s original decision not to testify signaled his willingness to abet the conspiracy of which he’d been a part, his reversal means he may be able to put on the public record damning evidence about the plot that’s at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.  Beyond this, the fact that a man who has served the president loyally for the past year seems willing to go against him in order to save his own skin speaks to the limits of Trump’s power to intimidate or otherwise block witness testimony.  In turn, this suggests a potential breaking of the dam in terms of administration officials willing to defy the president.

Then last night, The Washington Post published a preview of some of Sondland’s planned testimony, based on information from an unnamed source familiar with the ambassador’s intentions.  It seems likely that this source was acting at the behest of Sondland, as it paints a picture of the ambassador as naive and even somewhat clueless as to the scope of the scheme he was so busily enacting.  Yet, while self-serving, his planned testimony does not look good for the president at all.

First, Sondland intends to provide vital information around a text he sent to acting ambassador to Ukraine William B. Taylor that Trump’s defenders, and indeed the president himself, have been holding up as clearing the president of wrongdoing.  In response to Taylor’s texting him that “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” Sondland replied several hours later, “Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions. The President has been crystal clear: no quid pro quo’s of any kind.”  Sondland will testify that this reply “was relayed to him directly by President Trump in a phone call,” and that he does not know whether the president was actually telling him the truth.  This is significant because the administration has pointed to Sondland’s text as some sort of objective verification that there was no plan to withhold military aid in exchange for a smear campaign against Joe and Hunter Biden; the fact that Sondland was merely relaying the president’s own words mean this defense is now meaningless, based simply on the president’s assertion.

Perhaps equally significant is the fact that Sondland appears unwilling to simply take the president’s side.  According to the Post’s source, “Sondland’s testimony will raise the possibility that Trump wasn’t truthful in his denial of a quid pro quo as well as an alternative scenario in which the president’s interest in the scheme soured at a time when his administration faced mounting scrutiny over why it was withholding about $400 million in security assistance to Ukraine and delaying a leader-level visit with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.”  The first possibility is of course the one all current evidence says is correct; the second seems to be a distinction without a difference, since even if the president abandoned the scheme, his having pursued it is in itself impeachable.  In either case, it seems that Sondland is willing to acknowledge the existence of a presidential scheme to pressure Ukraine.

But what follows in the Post account demonstrates the degree to which Sondland is attempting to tell a story that excuses his own participation even as he appears ready to provide evidence to House investigators.  Sondland seems to admit the possibility of a plot to smear the Bidens, while absolving himself of knowledge of that scheme: “Sondland appears poised to say that he and other diplomats did not know that the request to mention Burisma was really an effort to impugn the reputations of Biden and his son Hunter, who had served as a Burisma board member. Sondland contends that he didn’t know about the Biden connection until a whistleblower complaint and transcript surfaced in late September.”  As the Post points out, though, Trump’s attorney Rudy Guiliani spoke in media appearances about Hunter Biden’s role as a board member at Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company.

Yet, seemingly torpedoing Sondland’s assertion of obliviousness, Sondland is apparently prepared to testify that he worked at the direction of Guiliani to secure a public statement from the Ukrainian government that it would investigate corruption, including at Burisma, in exchange for an invitation for Ukrainian President Zelensky to visit the White House.  Sondland’s mysterious interlocutor tells the Post that “If people find that [Sondland’s ignorance of Hunter Biden being the target] incredulous, it strikes me that the incredulity is hindsight bias. The things that seem so clear to people now didn’t seem so clear in real time.”  This seems an incredibly weak defense, and more evidence that the Post’s source is working to put the best possible spin on Sondland’s role.  The flimsiness of the ambassador’s position also comes out in his apparent attempt to thread the needle of appearances when the Post source relates Sondland’s understanding that “It was a quid pro quo, but not a corrupt one.”  Again, for this to be true, we have to believe that Sondland thought that all his work on the pressure campaign against Ukraine had nothing to do with smearing Joe Biden.

This sense is only reinforced by further details that minimize Sondland’s role and accentuate his discomfort; the Post is told how Sondland “describes an assignment that begins with excitement and enthusiasm and ends with concern about how the Trump administration was pressing Ukraine, a country fending off Russian-backed separatists that relies heavily on the United States for economic and military support.”  Yet, from everything we know, Sondland nonetheless continued to be a central figure in “how the Trump administration was pressing Ukraine”; and so he clearly sees his path to exculpation running through a defense that he knew nothing about the president’s effort to pressure Ukraine to assist his re-election campaign.  The Post’s source goes on to make an even more explicit pitch as to Sondland’s innocence; as the newspaper summarizes, “By Sept. 9, Sondland, however, had grown increasingly concerned, as military funding for Ukraine now appeared tied to the statement as well. The person said Sondland was never briefed about Biden being part of the issue and was not aware of it until the transcript of the phone call was released. ‘If he had known earlier, he never would have touched this.’”

Sondland’s almost comically rantic efforts to get out from under the falling impeachment anvil don’t appear limited to the EU ambassador alone. The Post suggests that some of the main conspirators, including Giuliani, Sondland, and special envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker, may be starting to form something of a circular firing squad that speaks to their desire to escape accountability.  Sondland refers both to acting at Guiliani’s direction and having a “very limited role over the summer”; meanwhile, the Post, referencing conversations between the paper and Guiliani, indicates Guilani “described Sondland’s role as more expansive” and that “He seemed to be in charge. It just seemed like he was more decisive.”  The Post also notes that “Sondland, while acknowledging a close relationship with Trump, viewed Volker as more of a presence on the Ukraine issue.

(As some have been noting, the fact that Sondland, a State Department employee, was apparently acting at the direction of Guiliani, the president’s private lawyer, is an angle meriting scrutiny by the Democrats).

This lack of honor among thieves isn’t surprising, but it’s something of a relief to anyone who wants to see Trump impeached and removed from office for offenses already evidenced by things like the summary transcript of his shake-down call with the Ukrainian president.  They may have engaged in a conspiracy to undermine the 2020 elections, but now that they’ve been caught out, we are seeing decisive signs that the conspiracy did not cover what they’d do if they were discovered.

*

Sondland seems a particularly weak link in the president’s defense.  I’ve been reading some of the reporting about him out in the last week or two; the picture that emerges is of a man who hasn’t been particularly ideological (though he’s given far more money to Republicans than Democrats over the years, and is a big Ayn Rand fan, which in a just universe would have disqualified him from holding a position of public trust), who carefully built his reputation as a philanthropist in Oregon and elsewhere, and who badly wanted an ambassadorship and was willing to pay to get it, even at the risk of doing some damage to his reputation (he funneled $1 million to the Trump inauguration through limited liability companies rather than directly in his own name, which suggests he was aware of the dangers to his reputation and business).

Yet Sondland’s story is not without elements of pathos and sympathy; his parents were Jews who fled Nazi Germany and resettled in America, and he was, at least until now, an American success story.  The Seattle Times quotes David Nierenberg, an Oregon investment manager involved with Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, as saying that, “Sondland ‘was not reticent’ about his pursuit of a diplomatic post, preferring a German-speaking nation, which would have meant a son of Holocaust refugees ‘would have come full circle.  This is what he wanted and long sought.’”

Sondland may have been driven to become an ambassador, but nothing in his history suggests he took the role with the intention of participating in a plot to literally attack the American system of government.  Yet his cancellation of a planned fundraiser for Trump in 2016 in the midst of the candidate’s attacks on the Muslim parents of a slain U.S. soldier shows that Sondland was well aware of Trump’s depravity; and by the time he took the role of EU ambassador, he had been witness, along with his fellow Americans, to the racism, corruption, and authoritarianism of the Trump administration.  Even knowing this, though, he would not allow his dream to be deferred.  

Another intriguing bit of information as we try to assess Sondland’s character and what role he might play in the impeachment inquiry: The LA Times dug up a 2016 interview in which Sondland speaks about some of his limited political experience, in this case helping Democratic Governor Ted Kulongoski work with the George W. Bush administration.  As the Times summarizes:

[Sondland] portrayed himself as a master of the quid pro quo, the practice he would later deny in his text concerning the Ukraine matter. “We would make these requests and they were done quietly.  They were done with rifle precision and there was always a quid pro quo,” Sondland said in the interview. “The governor would help the president with something, and the president would help the governor with something. And it was very transactional.”

One gets an idea of Sondland as a person who wants to be in the mix, who wants to be important, suggesting he may have been a receptive vessel for carrying out plans that the president clearly held to be of the highest priority.  It’s also of note that Kulongoski’s former spokeswoman disputed the role that Sondland claimed for himself, saying, “If the governor needed to speak with the president or someone in the White House, he didn’t need an outside party to facilitate it.”  If Sondland exaggerated his role in order to seem important, this could provide a small clue to how he’s approaching his congressional testimony.  The question, of course, is whether he wants to be important in the eyes of the president, or in the eyes of the public.

If Ambassador Sondland is willing to testify truthfully, and in doing so plays some part in ending this presidency or at least moving impeachment forward, then he will have made up for some of the shame of participating in this parody of an administration.  The most important matter before us, after all, is to stop this president from doing any more harm to the country and the world.  But to the extent that Sondland was aware of the corrupt plot in which he played a key part, he needs to be held accountable, by the legal system for any laws he might have broken, and, particularly if that punishment does not occur, reputationally.  No charity, university, or politician should ever again accept his donations, and he should be shunned from polite society. 

*

Finally, to circle back to Representative Blumenauer’s call for a boycott of Sondland’s hotel chain: yesterday, Provenance Hotels itself filed a complaint against Blumenauer over his boycott recommendation.  A spokeswoman says that, “We believe Congressman Blumenauer’s actions constitute a potentially serious violation of Congressional ethics as outlined in multiple sections of the House Ethics Manual by threatening an administration official over a disagreement.” The hotel also alleges that donors to Blumenauer may benefit from his calls for a boycott.

I would note that I was somewhat surprised to read of Blumenauer’s boycott statement.  A boycott is completely justified, but outside of the ethics violations asserted by the hotel, it strikes me that this may be a case of the representative unnecessarily reaching beyond his powers and role as a congressmen involved with the impeachment inquiry.  Rather, the impetus for a boycott would be more effective and proper coming from members of the public; the public, after all, is who would be implementing the boycott, not Blumenauer.  Already, it seems that the congressman’s statement is creating an unnecessary (if minor) distraction from Sondland’s role and the best way to put pressure on him so that he ends up serving the public interest.  

At the same time, the assertions by Sondland’s attorney that a boycott will hurt the employees of the hotel chain is the same old argument used by the management of any company subject to a boycott.  If Gordon Sondland were truly concerned about his employees’ job prospects, then he should have thought twice before accepting a position with an administration as vile and venal as the one over which Donald Trump presides. Most Americans are obviously not millionaires like the ambassador and Trump’s other wealthy donors, and so we must make a virtue out of necessity, and choose to not spend our money in order that our collective voice be heard.

The Dream of Aiding and Abetting Impeachable Crimes is Alive in Portland

The television show Portlandia, along with supporting fire from bands like The Decemberists and basic undeniable facts of life in the city, have painted Portland in the nation’s eyes as a twee and self-parodying locale ultimately harmless in its navel-gazing.  So it has surely come as a shock to millions to have learned this week that a key player in President Trump’s plan to blackmail Ukraine into kneecapping Joe Biden’s presidential prospects is a millionaire Republican hotel owner from Portland named Gordon Sondland. Who would have guessed that Portland incubates treason as well as innovative tech firms, boutique donut chains, and CBD-infused IPA’s?

Following a long and grotesque tradition in which ambassadorships are awarded to wealthy donors, President Trump named Gordon Sondland as his ambassador to the European Union, a position to which he was confirmed in mid-2018.  He apparently made a great impression on his fellow diplomats; as the Wasington Post recounts:

In Brussels, Sondland garnered a reputation for his truculent manner and fondness for the trappings of privilege. He peppered closed-door negotiations with four-letter words. He carried a wireless buzzer into meetings at the U.S. Mission that enabled him to silently summon support staff to refill his teacup.

Sondland seemed to chafe at the constraints of his assignment. He traveled for meetings in Israel, Romania and other countries with little or no coordination with other officials. He acquired a reputation for being indiscreet, and was chastised for using his personal phone for state business, officials said.

But despite such humility and diplomatic savoir faire, things got real weird real fast, as our new ambassador to the European Union began to demonstrate a particular focus on the affairs of Ukraine — a country which is not actually part of the European Union.  A rush of revelations and news reports over the past two weeks have brought sinister color to an attention that had seemed merely puzzling to observers, as Sondland’s role in implementing the president’s scheme to pressure Ukraine into aiding his re-election campaign plan came into focus.  Sondland appears to have played the role of presidential fixer where Ukraine is concerned, working with other diplomats to convey a basic message to the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky: Ukraine would not receive an urgent delivery of weapons and other aid, as well as a coveted invitation to the White House, unless Zelensky authorized an investigation into discredited allegations against Joe Biden, and assisted with crackpot theories that Ukraine, not Russia, had hacked the 2016 election.

The key to understanding Sondland’s role, and the scorn I’m arguing that he merits, is that he appears to have been acting on the president’s orders in pursuing this corrupt path, acting as a conduit for a plot hidden from the view of other government officials; The New York Times notes that “Mr. Sondland interacted directly with Mr. Trump, speaking with the president several times around key moments that House Democrats are now investigating, including before and after Mr. Trump’s July 25 call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.”

Many of the details of his activities are damning, but there’s one that stands out.   According to the Times, “text messages provided to Congress [. . .] showed that Mr. Sondland and another senior diplomat worked with Mr. Giuliani on language for a statement for the Ukrainian president to put out in August that would have committed him to the investigations sought by Mr. Trump. The statement was seen as critical to getting Mr. Trump to agree to a coveted White House visit sought by Mr. Zelensky.”  Such a statement was never released by the Ukrainian government, but enough information has emerged to show how utterly corrupt this effort was.  Not only would it have been the illicit quid for the president’s quo, but the very nature of the statement itself would have run afoul of American laws.  As described by Asha Rangappa, a former FBI Special Agent and current CNN legal analyst, “The White House was attempting to employ an illegal, covert propaganda operation against the American public”:

A unilateral statement from Zelensky would manipulate the American public into believing that Ukraine had independently reached the conclusion that there was a basis to investigate the Bidens and the origins of the 2016 U.S. election interference. By cloaking his own role and motives behind the statement of a foreign country, Trump could corroborate his own claims and have “proof” that his views were not politically motivated, but instead grounded in real facts.

In short, the Trump administration was using a propaganda technique to covertly plant credible seeds of doubt about a political opponent and the Russia investigation in anticipation of the 2020 election so he could capitalize on it.

So it is no wonder Democrats had requested that Sondland testify to Congress this week, or that the Trump administration ordered him not to proceed with his testimony at the last minute, despite the assertion by Sondland’s attorney’s that the ambassador had been looking forward to testifying, and despite the president’s own tweets that Sondland’s appearance would have been great for him.  As Talking Points Memo notes, Sondland can easily testify (special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker testified last week after resigning from the State Department); doing otherwise “is simply choosing to make himself part of the cover up, presumably out of political loyalty to the President.”  

However, some degree of fear may be compounding the moral cowardice Sondland is displaying in his refusal to cooperate with the impeachment proceedings.  I would speculate that his prior experiences as a hotelier did not exactly prepare him for the catastrophic downside to the international man of democratic sabotage role he has so recently taken on.  The switch from manager of a line of boutique hotels in hot American cities to pivotal role in a plot to subvert the 2020 election, ratfuck the Democrats, and engage in black propaganda against the American people is not what most of us would consider a lateral move; it’s more like an express elevator to hell.  Such a sudden embrace of what any honest citizen rightly sees as anti-democratic depravity would make more sense if he were a long-time friend and supporter of Donald Trump; yet, back in 2015, Sondland canceled a fundraiser for the candidate because of Trump’s attacks on Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim soldier killed in the line of duty.

Like many other Republicans, Sondland came crawling back to kiss the ring of power once Trump had won the presidency, but in guarded fashion; he donated $1 million to the president’s inauguration, but hid the source of the money by donating through the use of shell companies.  This sense of the damage his association with Trump might do to his business continues through to the present; in recent days, his name has been removed from the website of the Provenance hotel chain he founded and manages.

And here is where Portlanders, joined by other Americans, might find an intriguing lever to make their displeasure felt at the ambassador’s anti-democratic hijinx.  New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has tweeted about the possibility of a boycott against Sondland’s hotel chain, as has Hot Screen fave Brian Beutler over at Crooked.com.  As a response to Sondland’s secretive work, a public boycott seems democratically empowering and karmically appropriate.  The Trump administration sees no legal limits beyond which it won’t go to advance the president’s re-election efforts, which should provide a wake-up call to anyone wondering what individual citizens can do as Congress and the president face off in an impeachment fight.

The plain fact is that Donald Trump has no intention of allowing a free and fair election to proceed in 2020 so long as he occupies the White House.  Impeachment is a powerful weapon to stop him, but we should not lose sight of the fact that nothing enjoins us from other collective action appropriate to the peril of our moment.  A key insight I’ve seen bandied about is that we have no idea what will finally turn the tide and send the Trump con crashing down.  It is hardly the wildest idea in the world to experiment with putting the fear of financial doom into his high-dollar supporters and lackeys.  Did Gordon Sondland really expect to endanger his hotel chain when he became a Trump appointee?  Perhaps not, but it would seem awfully generous for the public to continue to treat his businesses as respectable when he himself has been busy abetting the president’s high crimes and misdemeanors, and in so doing demonstrated not only disrespect but contempt for all of us little people who also happen to be potential customers.  

Understanding Ukraine Crisis is Key to Understanding Trump’s Impeachable Offenses

Yesterday, I touched on how the full damning scale of the president’s pressure campaign against Ukraine can’t be understood without being aware of what’s been happening in Ukraine over the last several years, the U.S.’s relationship to that country, and a larger Russian strategy to confront and diminish America’s role in the world.  Over at Politico, Molly McKew provides an excellent in-depth review of this vital context, which if anything made me think I had understated the importance of America’s support of Ukraine.  I suspect that support for impeachment will only increase as Americans come to collectively grasp that Ukraine has effectively been invaded by Russia, is effectively at war with that country, and that Trump’s pressure on the Ukrainian president is already yielding Russia benefits in its subversion of a democratic neighbor.  Americans don’t need to become experts on Ukrainian politics or Russia’s geopolitical ambitions, but to be unacquainted with these basic facts is to not grasp the full depth of the president’s betrayal.

Don't Miss the Big Picture of Democratic Upheaval Beyond America's Borders

I’m sure my political attention and yours will inevitably continue to revolve around the constitutional crisis we’re headed into or are up to our eyeballs in already, depending on your point of view — but it’s worth your time reading this piece by Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch about the widespread rebellion and unrest underway today in so many countries around the globe.  In Bunch’s estimation, this is the largest year of upheaval since 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and the Chinese government slaughtered protesters in Tiananmen Square. From Iraq to Bolivia to Hong Kong, he writes, millions of people are protesting against government corruption and ineptitude, mostly but not exclusively representing left or left-of-center movements.  He makes some intriguing points about the origins of the corruption that’s drawn their ire, as well as the U.S. role in creating and sustaining the current situation in countries like Iraq and Haiti.

Bunch doesn’t mention it explicitly, but the fact that the U.S. is facing its own crisis of corruption (and democracy) suggests that we’ve got more in common with these far-flung movements than might be readily apparent (particularly if we’re not even aware of them to begin with).  Not for the first time, I’m thinking that we badly need more international contacts among groups and movements involved in these struggles; it’s impossible not to be inspired by the hundreds of thousands of Bolivians marching to save their forests, and it seems that for Bolivians to know millions of Americans are on their side couldn’t hurt, either.  At the same time, as Bunch points out, several of the Democratic presidential candidates have highlighted the importance of fighting corruption on various fronts, reminding us of the positive sea change that U.S. power, properly directed, could bring about in worldwide prospects for democratic governance and economic justice.  It’s not like we needed more incentive than we already have to bring the Trump administration to justice and focus the nation on building a just and sustainable future for all Americans — but it should help to remember that we’re not alone in our struggles, and that how we resolve our current crisis will have repercussions far beyond our borders.

Washington Post Blockbuster on Diplomats Gone Bad Adds Visceral Detail to Abuse of Power Allegations

The Democratic House leadership’s decision that the Ukraine scandal merits an impeachment inquiry when all President’s Trump’s previous impeachable offenses did not was made for pragmatic as well as existential reasons: multiple representatives have indicated that the relative clarity of the scandal makes it easier to build public support than, say, the Russia-Trump campaign collusion nexus that Robert Mueller investigated.  Yet even this “simple” story has layers and layers, like the proverbial onion, and the Democrats may well run a different type of risk if they decide to narrow the articles of impeachment to too narrow a slice of the Ukraine scandal.  The basic and at this point clearly-evidenced political crime is that Donald Trump tried to use the power of the US government to bully a U.S. ally into investigating one of his political opponents, and to gin up a story that cleared Russia from its 2016 campaign interference.  But though this is one hell of a damning indictment, it’s really only by examining the layers of this rotten high crimes onion that you can viscerally understand the soul-sucking, democracy-crushing corruption in which the president has engaged.  While the Democrats will inevitably rest their case partly on high principle and appeals to abstractions like “national security” and “abuse of power,” the specific extent and details of the corruption need to be communicated and woven together with the high-falutin’ accusations as much as possible.

I’ve been thinking about this since reading last night’s Washington Post page-turner, “Holding Ukraine Hostage: How the President and His Allies, Chasing 2020 Ammunition, Fanned a Political Storm.”  The detailed title is an accurate summary, but also leaves for the reader’s personal discovery the real power of the article: the way it shows how part of the federal government — in this case, State Department officials — specifically enacted the the president’s corrupt intentions.  In relating its tale to strands that have already emerged into the public record (such as the the machinations of Rudy Giuliani), it helps us to understand the nitty-gritty of how the president’s self-serving pressure on Ukraine was implemented.  Just as the summary transcript of Donald Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president clearly documented Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to sully Joe Biden’s reputation, so the narrative pieced together from interviews and texted discussions among State Department officials damningly shows how U.S. government officials had for months been laying the groundwork for that conversation between the two leaders.  In doing so, it illustrates in grim detail what the broad allegations of abuse of power against the president involve: subversion of U.S. diplomacy for partisan ends; the way Trump political appointees are able to direct this subversion and bend non-partisan government officials to their purposes; and, last but not least, how Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors are not simply those he committed, but constitute a “multipronged political conspiracy” (in the article’s wording) that involves the complicity of many people beyond the Trump-Giuliani-Barr-Pompeo junta.  You also get a sense of how such a conspiracy might be able to proceed outside of public view, but in gross abuse of the public interest, by people who have been entrusted to do America’s business with discretion and privacy: a reasonable person might have thought America’s top diplomats charged with Ukraine affairs would be busy supporting that U.S. ally against Russia’s ongoing destabilization, but that person would have been wrong.

And this leads us to a point that’s not directly addressed by the Post article, but which gets to the way the president’s undermining of “national security” needs to be understood concretely and in context.  Ukraine is not simply some random U.S. ally like any other; it is a country that has literally be invaded and torn apart by Russia, as that country first annexed Crimea, and then has orchestrated secessionist movements and occupations of Ukraine itself.  Ukraine is literally ground zero for Russia’s efforts to destabilize Western Europe, advance its authoritarian agenda, and undermine U.S. power and ideals.   It is not an overstatement to say we are in a very hot Cold War with Russia; Donald Trump’s threats against Ukraine, unless it helps him take down Joe Biden and clear Russia of its attack on the 2016 elections, are unnervingly close to serving the ends of our adversary over those of the United States. 

While the Post article is a gripping look at one facet of the Ukraine scandal, it also communicates the kinetic quality of this constitutional crisis; the damning narrative it puts together would not have been possible mere days ago, and yet now we have a fairly nuts-and-bolts understanding of what Trump and friends have been cooking up vis-a-vis Ukraine. Impeachment may center on Ukraine for now, but given how congressional and media investigations have already laid bare the corruption of American diplomacy and the involvement of numerous accomplices to the president’s crimes, it’s hard to see how Democrats will be able to limit the storyline — or why they’d want to, at least this early on.

Finally, I want to emphasize how effectively this article lays out the big picture even as it describes the disturbing minutiae of the Ukraine scandal. It’s admirably clear in what Donald Trump wanted from the Ukrainians: not to investigate Joe Biden and his son, which would rest on the false idea that there’s anything to actually investigate, but to “deliver damaging information on former vice president Joe Biden and undermine the origins of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.” It also makes explicit both the fundamental wrongness of the American diplomats’ actions and the fact that the controversy involves not simply bad acts by the president, noting that, “The exchanges reveal the direct participation of State Department officials sworn to serve the country in events that increasingly bear the markings of a multipronged political conspiracy”; the assertion of conspiracy is well evidenced by the piece, and is crucial to understanding that the president’s schemes are quite deliberate and designed to evade constitutional accountability.

President's Conspiracy Theories Aim to Persuade GOP Politicos of Their Power, Not Their Truth

As the fate of the Republic is arguably coming down to the decisions Republican representatives and, especially, senators make in response to the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, I’ve been thinking about how the extensive propaganda effort at the heart of the Ukraine story — the effort by Trump and his henchmen to concoct a story that Joe Biden is hopelessly corrupt, and that it was actually Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election to help the Democrats — is clearly known by these same representatives and senators to be the fiction that it is.  They’re by and large not stupid people, and they’ve had access to all the same information that has led the Democrats to impeachment. Rather, Trump and company have been propagating this vast fiction, a fiction that reverses all the know facts we’ve learned over the past three-plus years, in order to persuade the Republican base and confuse other voters.

Yet it turns out that GOP politicians are also its intended audience, but in their case, the goal is not to persuade them of its truth, but of its exquisite workmanship: as a glory of 21st century propaganda, a vision of an authoritarian promised land where, through the miracle of Fox News, Twitter, the Internet, and the unmatched hissy-fits of a quite clearly deranged president, many millions of otherwise ordinary Americans are led to believe that up is down, down is up, and something is only true when the president says it is.  Republican senators and representatives are not meant to believe or accept it, but to be persuaded by the degree they think it will persuade the voters they purport to represent.  Donald Trump may be corrupting much of the federal government to help tell a through-the-looking-glass story to save his own ass (whether it be from the whupping he fears at the geriatric hands of Joe Biden or whatever kompromat Vladimir Putin holds over him), but he’s also effectively engineering a way forward for the GOP at large — a way for the party to avoid the justified democratic wrath and retribution that are its due for foisting this wanna-be dictator on us all.

What Donald Trump is attempting is merely a savagely mutated version of what the GOP has been playing at for a long time now: that in the face of a nation trending towards the Democratic Party, the GOP is justified in resorting to unconstitutional and anti-democratic means to maintain power.  Creating a tale in which Democrats have committed crimes of treason and electoral sabotage is in some ways the logical final step — a way to stigmatize the Democratic Party as outside the bounds of acceptability, and to justify any moves that limit the Democrats’ ability to gain office or wield power if elected.  The irony, which hardly needs stating but which I’ll spell out anyway because it’s so absurd you just need to see it in black and white every once in a while, is that the Republicans have enabled a president who himself is the one guilty of a disqualifying treason, and that GOP politicians are increasingly delegitimizing themselves (self-impeaching, if you will) as trustworthy to hold power by their continued defense of a man who is, let us no longer mince words, an authoritarian monster.

At any rate, it seems a cynicism bordering on nihilism that shouldn’t be allowed to slide by unremarked: the degree to which the GOP is willing to defend a president’s deranged conspiracy theories not because they believe in them, but because they admire their utility and the hope they offer for a fully-propagandized future that favors the party willing to rule by lies and ruthless power alone.

Impeach It Like You Mean It

If there’s a great deal of hope to be had from the last week of American politics, one big reason is that we’ve seen how even the most apparently intractable and foreboding crises can be upended by bold and righteous action.  In receipt of strong evidence, via the still-anonymous whistleblower, that Donald Trump tried to bribe and strong arm Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into drumming up false evidence against Joe Biden and his son, the Democratic House leadership was finally unable to resist long-standing calls to start an impeachment inquiry.  In the face of this assertion of power, the White House fumbled, and fumbled some more, as it released the damning summary of the Trump-Zelensky phone call and then the whistleblower complaint itself.  The two documents worked in catastrophic synergy, the call summary validating the basic accusations of the complaint.  The president and his defenders fell back to their familiar authoritarian responses, telling us that what we could read in plain English was actually the opposite of what the words said, and to attack both the whistleblower, his or her sources, and the Democrats as the real offenders.  It was not long before the president was attempting to intimidate the whistleblower and other leakers, and to suggest that execution should be their lot (as many were quick to note, in doing so, the president was adding to his roster of impeachable offenses).  Generally speaking, it was possible to see a pattern, witnessed before but perhaps never so dramatically, of the way the president tends to melt down and incriminate himself under pressure.

Of course, it wasn’t simply the sense that Trump and his enablers were on the defensive, but that they were being called to account for horrifying crimes against the United States.  This, above all, was why last week brought so many of us a sense of renewed hope: there was a feeling that we can stop this assault on our country.  The world suddenly felt a lot more unpredictable, but in a good way.  Elected Democrats, like most politicians, crave certainty, and this fundamentally conservative instinct has played a role in keeping them from use of the impeachment power, with its infrequent precedents and unknowable outcome.  After all, though it’s powerful, it’s circumscribed by what the Senate chooses to do afterwards; under even the best of circumstances, impeachment is a leap into the unknown.  But as Pelosi remarked (I think honestly), the president had left the House Democrats no choice, given the magnitude of the Ukraine scandal and how it goes to the heart of Americans’ ability to elect their leaders. 

But now we are at the point of necessary debates about what form impeachment should take — whether narrowly focused on the Ukraine scandal, or more of a kitchen-sink indictment of the president.  I am seeing strong arguments from both sides, which seem to boil down to making a case that is clear and easily grasped by the public, versus exposing as much of the president’s malfeasance as possible.  Those in favor of the former generally seem to think that time is not on the Democrats’ side, and that they shouldn’t appear to be going on a fishing expedition; those in favor of the latter generally think that the full scope of the president’s malfeasance needs to be made known, and that this broad disclosure of information will ultimately benefit the Democrats.

But what just about all advocates of impeachment seem to be agreed on, whether they say so explicitly or not, and what underlies both sides’ arguments, is that the commonly-understood point of impeachment — that it will lead to a conviction in the Senate, and the president’s removal from office — simply will not happen here, on account of the belief that GOP senators will never turn on Trump in sufficient numbers.  This outcome is presented as fact, based on hard-headed political realism.  In other words, everyone (at least everyone I have read to date) believes that impeachment has no chance of accomplishing its logical purpose: conviction of the president in the Senate and his removal from office.  And so discussions of the nature of impeachment revolve around protecting Congress’ credibility and using impeachment to damage the president with revelations of his wrongdoing, even if these revelations will not result in his removal from office.

But the past week has given us flashes of insight into what a distorting effect this realpolitik view of impeachment’s prospects has had on both the dangers in front of us and how they might be remedied.  The Democrats’ decision to pursue an impeachment inquiry has already helped produce damning evidence of the threat that the president poses to American democracy.  In this respect, the “it won’t work so why bother?” attitude up to now has proven not only to be self-defeating, but an actual enablement of the existential threat Trump embodies, helping him to keep hidden some of his anti-democratic machinations for this long.  The Democrats have basically been saying, “We already know we cannot stop the president, so we should not try to stop him.”  Yet, now that they have decided to go through the motions of stopping him, nearly all are still saying, “But of course we know that we can’t actually stop him.”  Even those who see impeachment as a way to damage Trump’s power and foil his re-election efforts (which, to be fair, is pretty much all supporters of impeachment) don’t actually think impeachment will lead to his conviction in the Senate.

In this combination of cynicism and political savvy, the Democrats are making the curious error of a too-literal interpretation of impeachment, as if the process and the guidance in the Constitution were all that mattered.  Like strict constructionists on the right, they risk mistaking the literal text for the spirit of the thing.  The founders didn’t just include the impeachment process as a mechanism for removing a president; the larger message of the power is that some presidents merit removal from office based on the threat they pose to the country.  So while a president damaged by an unsuccessful impeachment process is better than an undamaged one, it’s a mistake for the Democrats to view the Senate vote as the only way to end Trump’s reign.  Based on the chaos and ineptitude with which the White House has met the early impeachment effort, it’s well within the realm of possibility that an avalanche of damning revelations could force the president to resign, independent of a Senate vote — for example, if further revelations caused the president’s approval rating and support among Republican voters to crash downward.  That this is unlikely should not be confused with impossible.

Again, I think the events of the past week should be a wake-up call for anyone who thinks that our situation is set in stone with totally predictable parameters.  If the Democrats truly think Trump is unfit to hold office, shouldn’t they have faith that even some of the president’s current supporters may change their minds?  There may be massive amounts of tribalism and propaganda holding together the GOP, but will these really add up to continued unswerving support for a president shown to have committed treasonous crimes, and who responds in an undeniably anti-American and destructive manner?  In the face of Republican partisanship, it’s essential that the rest of us keep up the hope that our fellow Americans may yet find limits in their loyalty to a sick and broken man. 

I’m also arguing for what I’ll call “impeach it like you mean it” because I’ve so far seen zero discussion of what the Democrats’ next steps would be if they were to impeach Trump for his bribery/collusion/election subversion in the Ukraine scandal, fail to convince two-thirds of the Senate to convict him, and the next day President Trump held a press conference with the Ukrainian president at which Trump asked Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s treasonous war on America.  If the president is not removed from office, why should we expect mere impeachment to stop him from continuing to commit crimes against American democracy, including subversion of the 2020 election (which the last week has showed us has been his major preoccupation for months now)?   His conversation with Zelensky was literally the day after Mueller’s testimony, when it was made clear the Democrats would not impeach Trump for any of the crimes that Mueller uncovered; why would the result of impeachment without removal be any different in actually encouraging the president’s lawlessness?

The key here is that the crimes of which the Democrats are most likely to impeach Trump — those around the Ukraine scandal — are not just high crimes and misdemeanors, but the highest crimes and misdemeanors imaginable.  Though he deserves impeachment and removal from office for a plethora of offenses, actions he’s taken to assure his re-election — to essentially transform the U.S. into a one-party state — are arguably the worst of all.  This feels like a particularly damning strike against those arguing for a quick impeachment with the understanding that the Senate will acquit.  In that case, we absolutely need to hear the Democrats’ plan for what they’d do in the wake of what Trump would spin as a failed impeachment effort, and likely as a green light for even more aggressively criminal behavior than before.

But advocates of both narrow- and wide-scope impeachment inquiries also have a pressing responsibility to lay out their arguments right now for what impeachment is intended to accomplish in the face of public expectations that it will not result in the president’s removal from office.  Nearly every Democrat I’ve talked to over the last week is worried about impeachment because they think it’s not going to remove the president from office, and may strengthen his hand.  As I’ve been arguing, I don’t think it’s either logical or politically savvy for the Democrats to pursue impeachment without a real strategy for maximizing the chances that it removes him from office.  But short of this, they should be clear with the public about what the intention is, whether it’s to ensure the president doesn’t again commit the specific offenses of which he’s accused, or to make clear to the public that he doesn’t deserve re-election.

Beyond this, as I discussed in my last post, I think Democrats need to be explicit about putting not just Trump but the entire GOP on trial; in particular, they need to be transparent about forcing GOP senators to choose between party and country.  Even as Democrats need to appeal to independent and persuadable GOP voters when making the case for Trump’s impeachment, they need to assure their own base that impeachment will move the fight against Trump forward, not only to keep up morale going into 2020, but in the hope that this will build synergy between public pressure and the Democrats’ commitment to the impeachment effort.