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.