Leaked Emails Confirm a White Nationalist is Driving Immigration Policy

The ongoing impeachment inquiry has muffled the public impact of a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center detailing White House aide Steven Miller’s communications with Breitbart News in the 2015-16 time frame.  Based on emails leaked to the SPLC, the article describes how Miller passed on all manner of white supremacist ideas and story suggestions to a contact at Breitbart.  The communications leave no doubt that Miller is steeped in and inspired by the most hateful and pernicious ideas oozing out of the far right today.  From his praise for the Coolidge-era immigration restrictions admired by Adolf Hitler, to his treatment of the “white genocide” theory (in which non-whites are alleged to have formed a conscious and insidious strategy of breeding whiteness into oblivion), to his ready use of the everyday lingo of white supremacists, we now have evidentiary proof that Miller represents the worst of America.  

The direct line that we can draw from Miller’s race hatred to his key role in the Trump’s immigration policies means that, for all practical purposes, this administration’s immigration policy may as well have been dictated by the KKK itself.  This evidence also clarifies that the Trump administration has drawn an unambiguous line through the American polity: on one side are those who believe non-whites are racially and “culturally” inferior, and on the other are those who believe in a 21st century America where the color of your skin or your country of origin have nothing to do with your Americanness.

The SPLC report crystallized for me a basic fact that’s been hidden in plain view.  In the far-right’s hateful and unfounded claims that non-white immigrants, and indeed non-whites in general, are somehow unfit for or incompatible with American culture, they display the very moral and cultural inferiority they ascribe to non-whites.  Deranged by phantom fears, rotted by racial panic, they hold themselves up as model citizens even as their irrational hatred offers proof of the opposite: that they are everything that America should denounce and work to transcend.  They claim cultural irreconcilability between whites and non-whites, when the actual cultural chasm is between those who believe in our democracy and the common good, regardless of skin color, race, or religious creed, and those who think the Confederate flag represents freedom, racial apartheid equals justice, and being eaten alive by racism and hate is a reasonable way to live your life.

Why has Trump appointed a verified white nationalist as his immigration czar, and why does Stephen Miller still have a job in this administration?  The Democrats need to press this question and its obvious answer now and as long as this immoral and intellectually bankrupt man remains in the White House.  Beyond this, calling out and repudiating the white supremacist agenda of the president needs to be central to the 2020 election, including against the broader GOP that daily signals through silence or active support its complicity in this deranged vision for America.  The racist core of Trumpism is central to its assault on our democracy, as it identifies not only non-white immigrants but non-white Americans as somehow illegitimate members of our society.  Defending America and our fellow Americans means delegitimizing and defeating these modern-day manifestations of the Klan and the Confederacy, whether they’re coming from the sewers of Breitbart or the White House.

Sexual Misconduct Allegations Strengthen Case That Gordon Sondland Is Trump’s Mini-Me

Let’s be honest, the story of Mr. Sondland Goes to Washington has been a real roller coaster ride for a lot of Portlanders.  On the one hand, who doesn’t feel a surge of hometown pride when a local gains national notoriety?  Like I’ve said before, does it really hurt to remind America that despite the idealizing portraits in shows such as Portlandia season 1, Portlandia season 2, and really all the other seasons of Portlandia, and the great deal of truth in those glowing representations of our fundamental goodness, the city contains as they say multitudes, including the full range of human sins both mortal and venial?  

On the other hand, the guy was a key player in the president’s corrupt plan to subvert the 2020 election, so there’s that.  Intriguingly or possibly just annoyingly, Sondland’s appearance before Congress has fed two contradictory takes on his present role in the impeachment inquiry.  On the one hand, his repeated insistence that multiple White House officials, including the vice president and the secretary of state, were “in the loop” on the plan to pressure Ukraine to slime Joe Biden, has raised the possibility that he’s turning on the president he serves and breaking this whole impeachment thing wide open.  On the other, various contradictions in his testimony suggest he’s still not being honest with his questioners.  The latest story to support this take came out a couple days ago: apparently, the September 9 call on which the president supposedly told Sondland “no quid pro quo” . . . may not have actually happened?  Instead, according to the testimony of other witnesses, the EU ambassador may have omitted discussing another call a few days earlier that was far more incriminating for the president, “in which the president made clear that he wanted his Ukrainian counterpart to personally announce investigations into Trump’s political opponents,” as the Washington Post summarizes.

For opponents of the president, of course, the problem with all these contradictions and omissions is that they are steadily chipping away at Sondland’s credibility as a witness, so that even if his testimony is harmful to Trump, it may not count for much (though this can be mitigated through corroborating evidence from others).  Questions as to Sondland’s character and veracity have only been amplified in the last 48 hours with the release of an article jointly reported by Portland Monthly magazine and the investigative journalism outfit ProPublica.  In it, three women allege that they experienced sexual misconduct by Sondland, including incidents of unwanted groping and kissing, during the 2003-2010 time frame.  The three women also contend that Sondland retaliated against them afterward, such as by not going forward with business deals he had previously indicated interest in:

In one case, a potential business partner recalls that Sondland took her to tour a room in a hotel he owns, only to then grab her face and try to kiss her. After she rejected him, she says, Sondland backtracked on investing in her business. 

Another woman, a work associate at the time, says Sondland exposed himself to her during a business interaction. She also recalls falling over the back of a couch trying to get away from him. After she made her lack of interest clear, she says Sondland called her, screaming about her job performance. 

A third woman, 27 years Sondland’s junior, met him to discuss a potential job. She says he pushed himself against her and kissed her. She shoved him away. His job help stopped. 

Significantly, all three women were willing to go on the record and have their identities made known to the public (the first of the women noted above is Nicole Vogel, who is actually the founder and publisher of Portland Monthly (though she had no input into the story’s writing or editing)).  I note this because of the familiar denials and counter-allegations that have been issued by Sondland and his lawyers.  The ambassador denies the women’s accounts, and claims that they are a coordinated political attack on him.  As we have seen so many times before, including with the president himself, we are to believe that all women are simply liars and pawns, and spitefully make up stories of powerful men’s sexual misconduct to move forward sinister political agendas that seek to tear down the righteous.

Unfortunately for Team Sondland, this reasoning leads them to put forth counter-allegations that make no sense.  In a letter, Sondland’s attorney writes to the Portland Monthly and ProPublica that, “[G]iven the timing of your intended story, a reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that you are attempting to affect Ambassador Sondland’s credibility as a fact witness in the pending impeachment inquiry.”  The problem with this assertion, though, is that it is very much in the interest of opponents of Sondland and the president not to undermine his credibility, since they are relying on his incriminating remarks about Trump to move their case forward.  Sondland’s attorney then proceeds to jump the shark by writing, “Given the politically charged climate in which current events are unfolding, some might consider this to be veiled witness tampering.”  Yes, “some” people might consider this to be witness tampering — but those people would be idiots.

What Sondland and his attorney choose not to address is the actual stated purpose Nicole Vogel gives for being the first of the women to come forward with her story: to shed light on Gordon Sondland’s character.  And all three women’s stories, in which Sondland appears to be a man who feels entitled to do as he pleases without regard to morality or good sense, flesh out the picture of a man who wouldn’t think twice about assisting the president of the United States in the biggest attempted ratfucking of his political opponents since Watergate, or maybe ever.  Vogel notes how she related the “transactional” thinking described by Sondland regarding Ukraine to her own experience with the man, in which he clearly thought his interest in financially backing her launch of Portland Monthly entitled him to personal benefits beyond monetary ones.

Vogel also recounts how Sondland told her, when she was seeking his support for her magazine project, that “Portland needed people like her” and that “he was more interested in investing in me, because he felt as if Portland didn’t keep people of high ambition and talent.”  In light of subsequent events, including Sondland’s alleged misconduct toward Vogel and his decision to help the president commit impeachable acts, the idea that Gordon Sondland saw himself as an arbiter of who might be good for Portland is laughable and grotesque.  Vogel was only good for Portland while she was a potential conquest for Sondland; once that was no longer the case, she was no longer worth backing to run a business in the city. 

It doesn’t seem much of a stretch to imagine that the president and the ambassador have found their bonds strengthened not only by shared experiences as hotel owners and profanity-spewing ostentatious rich dudes, but also through swapping tales of their shared contempt for women’s bodily autonomy, equality, and dignity.  

Let the Cleansing Impeachment Waters Keep on Flowing

By some measures, the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry would seem to be fated for failure, if the end goal is to remove the president from office via a two-thirds votes in the Senate.  A CNN poll out a few days ago shows the same percentage of respondents backing the president’s removal as a month ago, even after hearings that included numerous damning details as to the president’s unfitness for office.  Crucially, not a single Republican senator has voiced willingness to countenance the president’s removal from office.

Yet not a day goes by when we don’t hear new revelations of the crooked dealings of Donald Trump and his cronies.  In the last few days, there have been two particularly important ones.  First, we’ve learned that the president was aware of the whistleblower complaint that ended up sparking the impeachment effort well before he released the Ukrainian aid that had been held back under his orders.  The importance here is that it hardens our understanding that Trump reversed his hold on the funds because he knew his corrupt plan to subvert the 2020 election had been exposed; as numerous observers have put it, “he got caught.” Second, Donald Trump has begun to deny that Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer and second only to the president in the Ukraine extortion scheme, ever did anything Ukraine-related at his orders, an assertion belied by enormous amounts of evidence.

While neither of these recent developments may seem game-changing in and of itself, they demonstrate two basic realities of the impeachment inquiry that argue for keeping the investigation going rather than prematurely wrapping it up.  The fact that new evidence badly undercutting the president’s lies and misdirection is burbling up on a daily basis means that, as a matter of basic logic, it would be silly to end the fact-finding phase in the next couple weeks.  If we were talking about insignificant details, that would be one thing — but that the president only released the aid because he had been caught is a major blow to his defense, and we should have a decent amount of confidence that more such revelations will arrive in coming days.  

The other fundamental these examples show is that the president is being forced by the weight of the facts to make increasingly implausible assertions to defend his innocence.  Yes, he lies all the time — but now his lies are reaching a point of absurdity.  If he now finds he must deny any connection to Rudy Giuliani — a falsehood contradicted by his own prior words — then we must count this as a win for the impeachment process.  There is little risk and great upside to Democrats to push him further and further into such tremendous contradictions. 

Continuing to squeeze out vital information and pushing the president to further contradict and undermine himself are two compelling reasons to not let up on the investigatory phase of the impeachment inquiry.  But there’s a third reason related to both of these: the impeachment process is getting under Trump’s skin, making him more unhinged than ever, and, I believe, making him prone to more unforced errors that can further the impeachment case against him.  Even if removal from office is unlikely, clearing a path for him to inflict serious political damage on himself through rash and self-defeating maneuvers has at least some hope of limiting his power and scope of maneuver in a post-impeachment Washington.

Which gets us to what may be the overriding reason to keep impeachment going for a whole lot longer: if and when this process fails to remove the president from office, only the most deluded would think that the president won’t redouble his lawless efforts to undermine the 2020 election.  After all, this is a man who personally pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate Joe Biden and his son the very next day after the Mueller hearings ended, when it was clear that the Democrats had failed in their effort to hold Trump accountable for his collusion with Russian in the 2016 election.  If it’s 99% certain the Senate will never convict Trump, due to GOP senators refusing to put country over party, then impeachment’s purpose must be to debilitate the president to the maximum extent possible.

This is also a powerful argument for expanding the scope of the impeachment inquiry, preferably to include the related territory of Trump’s self-enrichment through benefitting his personal businesses via the power of the presidency.  That there is really not a single area of policy where we can trust that he has made decisions in the nation’s interest rather than in his personal interest is the key corruption of this presidency.  As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz write in To End a Presidency, their timely treatise on the impeachment power, establishing a pattern of bad behavior is a legitimate and sometimes necessary approach to capturing the true scope of a chief executive’s malfeasance.  This seems an accurate prescription for our present situation.

Months ago, I read somewhere that the Democrats should pursue impeachment at least to demonstrate that even impeachment has been broken by our current political state, as a sort of existentially clarifying maneuver.  This felt chilling and true at the time, and perhaps even more so now that the process is underway and we see how the GOP strategy is not so much to refute the facts as to convince us that the facts either don’t exist or are the opposite of what they are.  But if impeachment cannot function as the founders exactly intended, on account of the corruption of the president’s own party holding the crucial balance of power in the Senate, this doesn’t mean that the Democrats cannot try to deploy it in the spirit in which it was designed: to stop a chief executive who poses an existential threat to the constitutional order.

And when that chief executive is aided and abetted by the lockstep unity of his fellow party members in Congress, in ways foreseen but feared by the architects of the constitution, then the Democrats act in the national interest to the extent they are able to use impeachment not just as a weapon against the president, but as a tool to expose and publicize the truth about his co-conspirators in the GOP.  The capacity to use impeachment creatively in defense of our democratic order is at a maximum so long as investigations are still underway in the House.  Once the process moves to the Senate, Mitch McConnell will not skip a beat in turning the trial phase into a war on Democrats.  The Democrats will be failing the country, and kneecapping themselves, if they don’t use their time of peak power to full advantage, or adjust the impeachment process to reflect the very slim likelihood of actually removing the president.

Everyone's Invited to the Billionaires' Bawl

So you’ve probably been seeing stories these last few weeks about how billionaires across the U.S. are discovering a vibrant new class consciousness, as the possibility grows that Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders might be the next president of the United States.  It’s a sort of grotesque parody of the #MeToo movement, in which the wealthiest people in literally all of human history use their privileged status to confess personal trauma due to taxation that has not even happened yet.  

At the surface level, of course, it’s easy to see this is a straightforward phenomenon: people for whom money (and the power that attends it) is the most precious thing in the world are yowling because some of their most precious thing might be taken away (see: Gollum).  They got rich because they wanted to be rich, and the way they stay rich is to swat away any and all attempts at taxation; and so the big billionaire pushback currently underway can be viewed as the most self-interested and predictable thing imaginable. 

But even as it’s easy to make fun of all the solipsistic whingeing and whining, not all the specific arguments these fired-up plutocrats are making are equally specious, even as they’re tainted and rendered various degrees of insincere by their obvious self-interest in keeping every last penny.  In fact, the power of some of their counterpoints can be seen in the fact that the ideas behind them have held sway in our society for decades now.  For instance, in recent weeks we’ve seen Great Men such as Bill Gates claim that a wealth tax would drain needed investment capital out of the economic system; that such a tax would destroy people’s incentive to work hard to make money; that the government would never invest the money as efficiently as they do; and that a wealth tax would obliterate innovation.

These aren’t claims that are on their face dismissible, and anyone interested in the cause of equality and a healthy economy should try to understand and evaluate the powerful arguments against these points for themselves.  But beyond the fact that reality is not on the billionaires‘ side regarding their specific beefs with higher taxation on the wealthy, we shouldn’t miss our unbelievable good luck that the least sympathetic proponents in America are so clearly articulating these ideas so that they can be soundly refuted.  The fact that the billionaires have been drawn into presenting arguments in their favor, rather than simply proclaiming from on high that greed is good, is progress.

And taking another step back, we can see that their specific arguments against paying higher taxes all have a unifying theme: that the size of the economy, abstracted from any human values, is the ultimate accurate measure of things.  Even on the economic level, this makes no sense: for example, they defend how important it is that vast sums of money be available for “innovation” and “investment” at their wise discretion, while failing to note what a lack of money at the bottom of the income scale is doing to both the economy and to the life prospects of citizens who are being screwed out of their fair share of their labors.  The Washington Post notes that “the richest 400 Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 60 percent of the wealth distribution,” and that “the poorest 60 percent of America has seen its share of the national wealth fall from 5.7 percent in 1987 to 2.1 percent in 2014.”  What’s the point of creating all this wealth if only the upper reaches are getting it?  

There is also the small point that their arguments entirely ignore social needs like health care, education, and protection of the environment.

I’m running through this high-level overview of how weak these pro-billionaire arguments really are because they’re only going to grow more strident as the 2020 election approaches, and so more in need of refutation.  The fact that billionaires themselves are entering the public debate also portends a darker development, in which the wealthy go all-in on keeping Donald Trump in the White House for the sake of protecting their bottom lines.  The Democrats will then face not only a united right-wing opposition, but one supported by more or less limitless amounts of cash, as the GOP attempts to convince middle- and working-class voters that the only way to prevent economic armageddon is to embrace the failing status quo of billionaire hegemony.  This seems to be a credible path to Donald Trump retaining power: an alliance with the ultra-wealthy to protect their mutual interests, in which voters are urged to choose fear over forward progress. 

In such a scenario, it becomes more important than ever that Democrats make this race as much about the unaccountable power and economy-subverting concentration of great wealth as about the president’s corruption, in order to counter Donald Trump’s strategy of racist demagoguery and denouncing the Democrats as socialists.  Forced to choose between paying higher taxes and ceding some of their privilege, and backing the proto-fascist in the White House, I fear that many of the nation’s business leaders and wealthy will find themselves torn.  For the Democrats, winning will necessarily involve taking apart and discrediting their self-serving arguments.

Behind the Scenes, A Sinister Trump Plan for California's Homeless

Along with news that the executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness has been fired, The Washington Post is reporting that the Trump administration “plans a sweeping crackdown aimed at homelessness in California.”  The Post notes that President Trump has previously promised to take action against California’s homelessness problem, arguing that homelessness hurts the quality of life and the “prestige” of some of its largest cities.”  The paper also reports that, “[A]dministration officials have considered razing tent camps for the homeless, creating temporary facilities and refurbishing government facilities.”

As I wrote a few months ago when news of a White House initiative on homelessness was first reported, the president’s concern appears to have nothing to do with the humanity, suffering, and violated civil rights of the homeless population, and everything to do with his own aesthetic disgust at the dirtiness and poverty they represent, as well as a desire to embarrass California Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  Given these origins, and the hints of plans to tear down homeless camps and round these unfortunate souls into government facilities, we appear to be at the cusp of a campaign of dehumanization and superficial solutions with parallels to the human rights-violating actions the administration has undertaken at the border.  This time, though, it would be largely American citizens subject to federal abuse.

The idea that homelessness is something that requires a “crackdown,” as if homelessness were a crime, is a clue that we are far from seeking humane solutions to this crisis, and in the realm of targeting a vulnerable population for the sin of existing.  After all, the actual solution to homelessness is known, and can be found in the word itself: it would involve giving those without shelter homes, along with the employment, health care, and other support that would allow our fellow humans to live and thrive.  It is undeniable that at the federal, state, and local level to date, we Americans have collectively decided that we would rather not make these investments, whether due to cost, moral judgment that the homeless are each and every one deserving of their situation, or simple indifference.  Now this immoral verdict has left a gaping hole in our social fabric and in our mutual solidarity, through which a cruel and twisted authoritarian like Donald Trump can issue sinister solutions of his own to homelessness: solutions which have nothing to do with recognizing their fellow humanity and honestly correcting our own collective failures, and everything to do with dehumanizing them, placing them out of sight, and cleansing our collective guilt and anger at the problem we refuse to take responsibility for.

In this homelessness ploy, we can see the familiar elements of Donald Trump’s authoritarian urges.  Identify a certain group of people as the enemy and less than human; enact a solution that involves violating their civil and human rights; thrill his base with his willingness to enact their darkest impulses and prejudices.  What is truly frightening about the homelessness plan is that it’s entirely possible that many who don’t support the president might nonetheless feel grateful to be freed of the burden of guilt and repulsion that homeless people cruelly provoke.  This is a law-and-order play that invites good liberals to join the cruel calvacade of Trumpism, reassuring everyone that they have no responsibility for other Americans, that they are the true victims, that they deserve what they have and no one should be able to make them feel guilty about it.

It is shocking to me that this deeply sinister story is not getting more attention.

Will Impeachment Process Turn GOP Against Trump?: A Humble Reverie

As the Democrats continue to lay out the damning facts of the president’s corrupt scheme to subvert the 2020 election, now via the public testimony of witnesses in the ongoing impeachment inquiry, two irreconcilable realities spark and clash on a daily and escalating basis.  One is a world where facts and truth have an actual chance of persuading enough Republican senators to support removing Donald Trump from office in the name of the national good.  The other is a propagandized, Fox News-supported fantasyland in which the president has done no wrong and is being henpecked by a vast armada of, in the words of the immortal Republican Senator John “not that John Kennedy” Kennedy, “the ‘cultured,’ cosmopolitan, goat’s milk latte-drinking, avocado toast-eating insider’s elite.”  (Pro tip to the senator: throw that goat’s milk latte and avocado toast into a blender along with a manly handful of kale, and you’ve got yourself an absolutely delish (and nutrish!) breakfast treat, best served in an Elizabeth Warren-branded “Billionaire’s Tears” coffee mug.)  The GOP is doing everything it can to protect the president by promoting this alternate reality, from filling their questioning time with the propagation of the same discredited conspiracies that underly the president’s impeachable efforts (and so making themselves complicit with his offenses against the republic) to simply advising Republican voters not to watch the proceedings.

This underlying reality of clashing world views means that the question “What is the point of impeachment?” looms over the proceedings, unanswered by those Democrats with the power to do so.   If no matter what, a sufficient number of GOP senators are 99% likely to vote for acquittal, then the actual goal must obviously be something other than removal of the president.  In that case, the logical point of impeachment would be the full airing of facts in order to convince not GOP senators but persuadable members of the public, with an eye to the 2020 elections, of the president’s unfitness for office.  The other logical point would be to expose the GOP’s collective refuge in conspiracy, lies, and propaganda, again with the political goal of gathering a winning coalition behind the Democrats for 2020.

It is somewhat bothersome that no members of the Democratic leadership are acknowledging either of these practical impeachment goals.  Yet, as I’ve written before, whether you think impeachment has a chance of actually removing the president should strongly inform the nature of the proceedings.  If the Democrats’ real goal is not removal but a full airing of the president’s corruption with an eye to defeating him in 2020, then the refusal to expand the inquiry beyond the Ukraine scandal feels risky and self-defeating.  It would be more powerful to demonstrate a pattern of corruption beyond foreign policy, and to expose multiple upsetting offenses that can change minds for 2020.  Given the centrality to the GOP’s defense of painting Joe and Hunter Biden as corrupt, it feels as if Republicans are all but begging for the Democrats to turn the spotlight on Trump’s profiting off the presidency — and not just his personal aggrandizement, but that of his corrupt brood, with son-in-law Jared thrown in for completeness’ sake.  Likewise, nothing is stopping the Democrats from describing the basic insanity of the GOP’s defense of the president: not only in its distortions and refusals vis-a-vis reality, but also in its end goal of placing the president above all accountability.  A better way of saying the second part is that Republicans agree with the president’s authoritarian vision for America, where not only whatever the president does is legal and good, but where anyone or any institution that questions him is by definition an enemy of the state. The Democrats need to be hammering this home, as the proper context for understanding the GOP’s stance on impeachment.

Against all evidence, though, I still find myself hoping for another way forward, a way that I concede can feel almost as much of a fantasy as the GOP’s hermetically-sealed propaganda bubble: that rather than breaking America more firmly apart, impeachment will end up cracking the Republican authoritarian consensus just as it seems to be at its strongest.  Call it a faith in the power of actual reality, particularly its contingent and unpredictable aspects.  For instance, we have already seen the Republicans blindsided by the increasing number of witnesses to the president’s direct connection to the Ukraine scheme; a phone conversation between Trump and sad-sack EU ambassador Gordon Sondland the day after the president’s infamous July 25 phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky was overheard by as many as three U.S. officials (not to mention various foreign intelligence agencies, since it was conducted in public on an unsecure phone).  More such evidence will increasingly push the GOP into the cul-de-sac of acknowledging the president’s actions but defending his lawlessness as just fine.  This may be satisfying for GOP die-hards, but it will hamper their work of winning over centrist voters in 2020.

There’s also the matter of Republican congresspersons continuing to claim that they and their staff lawyers are not being allowed to question witnesses. . . . despite the fact that, on national TV, we are watching Republican congressmen and their lawyers questioning witnesses, and, in a meta-twist, making these very same claims that they are not being allowed to do so.  Designed to be played free of context on Fox News and the like, this line of mendacity may work for Republicans in safe red seats.  But for those like Representative Elise Stefanik of New York — who faces a credible Democratic opponent who has already raised nearly a million dollars in the last few days by calling out Stefanik’s untruths about not being allowed to speak at the inquiry — has the Fox & Amigos mediasphere reached the point where its self-perpetuating insularity machine is beginning to grind adherents between its infernal vulpine gears?

But it’s the president himself who’s the biggest wild card of all.  Accused of vast and disqualifying corruption, he has attacked witnesses throughout the proceedings.  This includes a tweet denigrating former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch during her actual testimony, which led Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff to note that he takes witness intimidation “very, very seriously” (if you listened closely, you could make out the clackety-clack of a congressional staffer typing up a new article of impeachment).  The tweet blew up the GOP strategy to avoid appearing disrespectful of the ambassador; The New York Times reported that “his inability to hold his fire on Friday raised fresh doubts among his allies and White House advisers about what he will do next week, when eight witnesses are scheduled to testify in public hearings over the course of three days,” and that his tweet left “some of his advisers deeply dispirited.” The president’s willingness to display the very corruption he’s accused of, in real time, may impress the Republican base, but along with unsettling his congressional defenders, it will also further push middle-of-the-road voters into the Democratic camp.

Such behavior by the president, and GOP representatives’ appeals to blatantly false narratives, may rally the most loyal, but I am wondering if the rest of us have been a little taken in ourselves by the power of the right-wing machine and the depth of the president’s support.  Can even the most extreme acts of the president be explained away by the loyal talking heads?  And if the real-time attack on Yovanovitch set off warning lights, couldn’t this happen again?  The machine doesn’t need to break down completely; it is possible that enough cracks in the suffocating narrative of Trump’s rightness could push Republican rank and file into less vigorous support, or neutrality.  Which leads to my second point, the very real possibility that the president’s base is neither as large or committed as generally perceived.  His hard core of support is certainly a minority of the population, but it seems to me that there is a big difference between whether 40% of the country supports him, versus 30% or even 35%.  With 40%, he has a viable path to a narrow electoral college victory in 2020.  At 35% or lower, it starts to look quite iffy.  And Trump’s hold over the GOP has everything to do with whether it perceives he will be re-elected or not.  Even if there is no sure catastrophic tipping point in the size and intensity of his base, even a slow chipping away could change the calculations of GOP politicians, both in the House and Senate.

I’ve frequently dug into the Very Important Idea that the GOP is essentially becoming a permanent minority party in the United States, based on a demographically dwindling white population, and increasingly dedicated to preserving its hold on power by manipulating our political system to prevent majority rule, such as by gerrymandering or, more malignantly in the case of the president, by enlisting the aid of foreign powers to help subvert national elections.  What has been less discussed — because it hasn’t been as imminent as it is now — is whether the GOP is truly willing to irrevocably say goodbye to ever holding a majority in the House of Representatives again, and possibly to ever winning the presidency post-Trump.  

As dangerous and damaging as Trump’s reign has been, he and the GOP have maintained power only at the price of advancing the GOP’s permanent minority status, at least in terms of overall support among the U.S. population, from likelihood to near-certainty.  Addicted to the worship of a faithful base, Trump has made clear that he serves the white, the conservative, and the male, in the process poisoning the GOP’s prospects for winning over anyone else.  The long-term damage will make itself known in the coming years, but at a minimum, we can see signs that he has badly soiled the GOP brand, perhaps irrevocably, among younger voters for whom his presidency is now their formative political experience; for non-white voters who have been told they are not real Americans; and for women appalled by his misogyny and the allegations of his sexual assaults.

Given this reality, to which GOP politicians are hardly blind, impeachment may represent the final, irrevocable decision point for the Republican Party.  They have already seen gerrymandering’s failure to hold the House.  And while the structure of the Senate means that they have a decent chance of maintaining a thin edge there for the foreseeable future, are Republicans really willing to continue to support the president if his support drops below some critical level where his re-election becomes doubtful?  Is the GOP truly ready to be a party that may be able to block legislation, but will increasingly see its ability to wield affirmative power dwindle?  Are Republicans willing to fully embrace permanent minority status as a de facto white nationalist party in order to defend a president unlikely to win in 2020?  Is every single member of the Republican party in Congress down with this vision?  The lockstep approach up to now may prove particularly brittle if even a small number of Republicans begin to look past the immediate future, and towards a future Republican Party that stands for actual conservatism rather than a self-defeating hash of white nationalism, authoritarianism, and capitalism run amok.

GOP Defense of Trump Just Continues His Corrupt Scheme By Other Means

As the impeachment inquiry heads into a phase of public testimony, House Republicans have provided a list of witnesses they’d like to call.  The inclusion of Hunter Biden is a clear sign that they intend to muddy the waters of Trump’s impeachable acts by doubling down on the fictional corruption of the Bidens.  In doing so, they’re making themselves complicit in the same corrupt plot that led to the impeachment process in the first place.  And in a sign that the Democrats are starting to understand the power of pointing this out, Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff indicated in his response that, “This inquiry is not, and will not serve, however, as a vehicle to undertake the same sham investigations into the Bidens or 2016 that the President pressed Ukraine to conduct for his personal political benefit, or to facilitate the President’s effort to threaten, intimidate, and retaliate against the whistleblower who courageously raised the initial alarm.”  This is exactly the sort of hardball and truthful rhetoric that’s needed right now, and I hope Schiff and other Democrats keep pressing the point that the House GOP is offering up more of what Trump is accused of doing, as a way of discrediting this defense and making Republican representatives pay a price for trying to move forward a fake narrative of Biden-related corruption instead of holding a rotten president accountable.

Bloomberg Is the Titanic, and His Billions Are the Iceberg

I’d like to think that former New York mayor and multi-gazillionaire Michael Bloomberg has a snowball’s chance in H-E-double toothpicks of surviving first contact with the Democratic presidential primary, but this may be a case of my revulsion getting the better of me.  After all, a man who has made clear his plan is to buy his way to the nomination may indeed have the firepower to alter the dynamics of the race, though whether in his favor remains to be seen.  As the The New York Times reported:

Advisers said he intended to stake his candidacy on big, delegate-rich primary states like California and Texas, where Mr. Bloomberg’s immense personal fortune could be put to extensive use.

Should Mr. Bloomberg proceed with such a campaign, he would be attempting to take a high-risk route to the Democratic nomination that has never succeeded in modern politics — one that shuns the town hall meetings and door-to-door campaigning that characterize states like Iowa and New Hampshire, and relies instead on a sustained and costly campaign of paid advertising and canvassing on a grand scale.

It seems as likely that his plan will backfire spectacularly, given the presence and momentum in the race of the two major populist candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.  Many have already commented on how his presence is a gift to those two, who will be able to literally point to his presence on stage as the living embodiment of the outsized power of billionaires in our political (and economic) system.  Indeed, the non-negligible possibility that he might actually succeed in using his billions to win the Democratic nomination should be a moment of reckoning for all party members, including moderates who might not have placed income and wealth inequality at the top of their priority lists.  I’d like to think that Bloomberg will supercharge the Warren and Sanders campaigns at the expense of more centrist candidates like former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Amy Klobuchar; not only does Bloomberg serve as living proof of the two populists’ indictments of the corruption of wealth, but he also presents an existential danger to their very candidacies and the progressive movements they both lead and are carried by.

It’s notable that Bloomberg’s plan — mass advertising rather than actual contact with voters — would potentially build his candidacy without cultivating the grassroots networks that would benefit the Democrats beyond just himself.  It would be a shallow movement dedicated to a single candidate, rather than the mass democratizing surge currently underway and desperately needed by this country.  By relying on a financial shock and awe approach, Bloomberg’s strategy threatens to dominate whatever substantive message of liberal social policies and conservative economics he’s hoping to sell us: the campaign medium would (accurately) become the message.

Political Polarization is Wrong Lens for Viewing Impeachment

There are times when my attempts at media criticism feel useless, a shouting into the void.  But this piece by Salon’s Amanda Marcotte reminds me that the stakes are worth the effort, and how invigorating a righteously-worded beatdown can be for the spirit.  Marcotte’s not the only one who picked up on how The New York Times and other media outlets framed the impeachment resolution last week, but hers is surely the sharpest.  She takes the Times to task for a purported analysis that describes the party-line impeachment vote as a decontextualized example of Washington polarization, and that focuses on the inability of both Republicans and Democrats to compromise.  Marcotte writes:

The situation is simple: The Republican Party, both its politicians and its voters, has collectively decided that it's fine for Donald Trump to use his office to run an illegal extortion scheme against a foreign leader in an effort to cheat in the 2020 election. The moral rot of the Republican Party, and its cultist loyalty to a criminal president is the sole reason for this situation. Democrats are — rather too reluctantly! — trying to do something to stop the bleeding.

[. . .] How the parties are supposed to compromise on the issue of whether the president should be allowed to commit serious crimes is not even addressed. After all, to acknowledge that one side is for crimes and the other side is against them might expose how ridiculous this "compromise vs. polarization" framework really is.

The general tendency of the mainstream media to create a false equivalence between opposing political viewpoints is a cliché at this late date, but Marcotte pinpoints how, in the matter of impeachment, it’s been pushed to the point of absurdity and incoherence.  It’s no small detail that in this case, such bias makes the GOP’s position seem more normal in part by suggesting that the Democrats, too, are acting in extreme ways.  In a world where one party capriciously decides to up and impeach a president from the opposing party, why wouldn’t the president’s side stick together?

While it’s not the role of The New York Times to choose sides in our country’s great political conflicts, it’s also not proper for this paper or any other to perversely obscure the public’s ability to process the facts that are reported.  As Marcotte goes on to say, “This isn't an issue where reasonable people arguing in good faith can disagree. This is a black-and-white, wrong-versus-right issue.”  The New York Times does the public a disservice when it refuses to countenance the possibility, despite all available facts, that one of the nation’s two major political parties has simply adopted a position of defending indefensible acts by the president, separate and apart from any ideological conflict with the Democrats.

Reading through the Times piece that got Marcotte so rightly fired up, this paragraph stuck out to me personally as particularly rich in contradiction:

Polarization has consequences, and Democrats have been concerned from the start about running what Speaker Nancy Pelosi repeatedly called an inherently divisive process. The mostly party-line vote threatened to undermine public confidence in the proceedings, making it easier for voters to dismiss it as yet another skirmish in an endless partisan war, rather than a weighty constitutional process. Democrats are now faced with the challenge of mounting a compelling case to the public that can cut through the political noise and generate even the barest of bipartisan consensus, knowing that the greater likelihood is that Mr. Trump will be acquitted in the Republican-led Senate.

This summary of the impeachment vote makes me think of something that Marcotte gets at without stating directly: the way that the “both sides are polarized” argument, once internalized by enough reporters, itself becomes an essential catalyst to a more polarized political environment.  Here, we can see how the cycle works — the Times reporter describes how voters may dismiss the party-line vote “as yet another skirmish in an endless partisan war, rather than a weighty constitutional process”; while this is accurate as far as it goes, it also reinforces this very interpretation of events by attesting to its validity, in an instance where the very high stakes of impeachment mean that the explanatory power of “polarization” is actually at its weakest.  To restate one of Marcotte’s points: when the major fault line between the parties is that one believes in the rule of law and the other rejects it, “polarization” becomes a wildly distorting lens through which to view and describe events.  An emphasis on how the parties are “polarized” increasingly looks like a way to avoid acknowledging the fundamental reasons they can be described as polarized.

Far from showing a lamentable deadlock in our democracy, the Democrats’ decision to stand up to the president’s authoritarianism and lawlessness is a sign of life in American democracy — a wrecking ball swinging not just at our corrupt president, but also at the notion of polarization itself, and the idea that this abstract descriptor accurately describes our ongoing national clash between democracy and authoritarian rule.

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.