Nearly six in 10 Americans say that the U.S. representative in their congressional district deserves to be reelected, the highest level of such sentiment recorded by Gallup since 2012. While only 35% similarly say that most members of Congress deserve reelection (as opposed to their own member), that's also a higher percentage than at any time since 2012.
What bodes so well for Democrats, obviously, is that they currently hold a commanding majority in the House. So when 59% of Americans are happy with the status quo, it redounds to Democrats’ advantage. As Gallup writes, “Democrats have a solid majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the elevated 59% of Americans saying their member of Congress deserves reelection augurs well for their bid to maintain their majority next year.”
It is always worth remembering that there are literally hundreds of bills passed by House Democrats now languishing in Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's legislative graveyard. With the Presidents Day recess over, the winter holiday break hangover is being shaken off. Impeachment is done and McConnell's cover-up of Donald Trump's misdeeds effected. Under normal Senate leadership in an election year, the real legislative work would be underway now. But McConnell will not let us have normal anymore; he won't let us have anything good.
Like the bill passed by the House on Dec. 12 last year, which would substantially reduce the costs of prescription drugs (a sustained issue for voters) and strengthen Medicare by allowing it to negotiate drug prices and use the savings to expand Medicare benefits to include hearing, dental, and vision care. That bill is "the most impactful piece of drug legislation" since the Medicare prescription drug program was created nearly 20 years ago, Steve Knievel, an advocate at Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program, told HuffPost.
It's been one year, Sen. Chris Murphy points out, since the House passed universal background checks for gun purchases, a year in which more than 15,000 people died by gun violence.
Just the week before last, McConnell and his minions once again blocked Democrats from bringing election protection bills to the floor. That's while the intelligence community is being destroyed by Trump for telling the truth to Congress—that Russia is even now interfering to help Trump be re-elected.
What McConnell is bringing to the floor is forced-birth legislation that will never pass in the Senate or be considered in the House. It's a bill in search of a problem—the abortion procedure it would ban doesn't even exist. But McConnell thinks it will help his vulnerable Republicans to take this vote, so that's what the Senate is going to do.
Instead of making the nation healthier. Instead of making the nation safer.
Throughout the history of the Republic, traitorous and treasonous have held a broader, more generic meaning for treason than the one found in the U.S. Constitution. The rebellious founders, having themselves been traitors to the British Crown—and being fully familiar with how English treason laws had been extended and abused in what was then the not-very-distant past—the drafters wisely kept to the narrowest of definitions in the first paragraph of Article III, Section 3:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
Thus, while many Americans have been harassed or imprisoned on suspicions of disloyalty, something wrongly but popularly equated with treason, trials have been rare, convictions rarer, and none has included a president. Not even, as it turns out, the president of the Confederate States of America who conspired with others to initiate the bloodiest war ever fought on U.S. territory. Andrew Johnson made sure neither Jefferson Davis nor the top generals nor other prominent rebels ever would be prosecuted when he granted amnesty to all Confederates before leaving the presidency in 1869. That leniency factored in spurring these obvious traitors into becoming iconic heroes. Statues of some of the worst aren’t just rampant in town squares across the South, they are also still displayed like heroes in the nation’s Capitol.
Since even the leaders of the slavocrats’ rebellion were given a pass a century and a half ago—with at least 900,000 people moldering in the ground from the slaughter they started—how could I possibly suggest that the man who now sits in the big chair in the Oval Office should be treated more harshly than they? And, besides, how does anything Donald J. Trump is doing qualify for the justifiably and thankfully narrow constitutional definition?
On the first point, I would argue that failing to try the leading Confederates and deconstructing Reconstruction were mistakes that have paid horrible dividends to the African American population ever since. It was meant to reunite, to reconcile. But reconciliation without truth paves the way for future evil. Our nation’s political and social dynamic today is still profoundly affected by that decision.
Secondly, U.S. intelligence services have concluded and explained to selected members of Congress that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election. There’s a difference of opinion over whether or not they said the Russians are specifically working to help Sen. Bernie Sanders get the Democratic nomination as a means of getting Donald Trump reelected. Whatever the Russians’ specific strategy, what matters is that they are meddling.
The public hasn’t yet learned the classified specifics of exactly how the interference is happening. But if it is like 2016 plus the honing and polishing of the four years since, we can assume that in addition to the deluge of disinformation, the fake news, and the whole social media assault, the Russians will be hacking into pieces of our insecure electronic election infrastructure. Perhaps this will be to alter results or simply to create chaos by persuading people they can’t trust their vote to be tallied correctly, so why bother to show up?
Cyberwarfare is war. Kremlin attacks on U.S. elections in hopes of advancing the interests of Vladimir Putin and other Russian oligarchs by weakening America are clearly as much a threat to national security as would be, say, an attack on the software of a few chemical plants or the electrical grid—potentially lethal acts achieved without firing a shot. Attacks on our elections and on the election apparatus that Senate Republicans won’t allow to be made secure can have lethal impacts on what is becoming an increasingly fragile democracy. One of the many faces of 21st century conflict. Sun Tzu would recognize its value immediately: “In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.”
Donald Trump has chosen to abet Moscow's attack on U.S. national security via election meddling. By purging the veteran intelligence experts who have done their job and by appointing a right-wing toady without a shred of relevant experience to oversee 17 intelligence entities—plus calling the assessment that Russia is at it again a “hoax”—the man in the White House has adhered to, if not an American enemy, certainly an adversary. He is giving Russian meddlers the comfort of knowing that he’s doing all he can to smooth the way for them to meet whatever meddling quotas they are assigned, and he aids them by making it obvious that anybody who reports the meddling is happening will be fired.
What Trump has done, what he is now doing, meets the strict definition of treason in the Constitution. No doubt the lawyers will tell me I am full of it. That including cyberwarfare as the same as a declared war is bogus, even though we’ve had plenty of wars but none declared since 1942. They’ll also remind me what just happened with the impeachment vote in the Senate.
No way will Trump ever be tried for treason, of course, so why bother to bring it up? Because Trump is a traitor. Because he’s thrown open the door to bad actors, not sneakily the way he has done so many things, but in broad daylight. This isn’t speculation about something that will happen someday down the road. It’s happening right damn now.
Trump knows the Republican He-Did-It-So-What? Caucus will never convict him for treason or anything else. If it got as far as another impeachment, Alan Dershowitz would argue that Trump can order the strafing of an entire U.S. Army division on Fifth Avenue and not be liable for prosecution. The GOP would have no trouble if Trump made a deal for Russia to write software for swing state voting machines and made a fat commission off it.
Trump’s protectors will shield him no matter what and he will do whatever. The word for that in these circumstances isn’t supporters, it’s accomplices. If the constitutional machinery of the Republic is inadequate to oust this traitor, if he can’t be defeated at the polls or won’t leave office if he is defeated, then “street politics” will be all that remains. That’s far from a happy prospect.
Donald Trump continues his march to autocracy, planning his largest purge of government officials yet. And he’s getting outside help in assembling his enemies list, with a conservative activist network headed by Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, providing a stream of memos detailing how some administration officials have been insufficiently loyal to Trump.
The pieces are being put in place. Trump is getting ready to push the purge with a new head of presidential personnel—his former body man, Johnny McEntee, who was fired by then-White House chief of staff John Kelly in 2018. And Groundswell, the Ginni Thomas group, helped push former national security adviser H.R. McMaster out of office, and is not remotely done, Axios reports.
More recently, a memo targeted Jessie Liu, the former U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., who was nominated for a Treasury Department position only to have the nomination pulled. Liu’s offenses against Trump included signing off on a sentencing filing asking for jail time for former national security adviser Michael Flynn and not having former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe indicted—in other words, Liu dared to prosecute a former Trump official whom Trump didn’t want prosecuted and didn’t prosecute one whom Trump did want prosecuted.
That’s not the only such memo going after a specific Trump appointee—whether potential or already on the job—and pushing Trump to purge those who aren’t fully on board with Trump’s corruption and narcissism.
Given that Trump’s moods change constantly and his actions offend anyone with even a teeny shred of integrity, that could leave a lot of jobs to fill. Never fear, though: Groundswell has another list of appropriately Trumpy potential appointees ready to go. That list includes former Sheriff David Clarke for a top Homeland Security job, and Fox News’ favorite former Secret Service officer, Dan Bongino, for something in Homeland Security or counterterrorism.
Donald Trump is personally corrupt and dedicated to abuse of power. But he’s not operating alone—if he was, Republicans would have put limits on him long ago. Groundswell—a group that, it cannot be emphasized enough, is headed by the wife of a Supreme Court justice—shows that Republicans aren’t just failing to rein Trump in; they’re encouraging him to make the government more ruthlessly partisan, to place loyalty above competence at every turn.
Have you ever considered what happens when Donald Trump loses in November? One year ago, his former attorney Michael Cohen testified before Congress that Trump would not accept electoral defeat this upcoming election. Sadly, he’s probably right: If there’s one thing Trump has been consistent about, it’s that he narcissistically refuses to accept reality whenever it’s in any way negative toward him. This is why Trump has repeatedly, and ridiculously, insisted that he won the popular vote in 2016. In his very first meeting with Congressional leaders, he told them he won the popular vote because “3 to 5 million people voted illegally, and I’m not even counting California.”
Despite images to the contrary, Trump still refuses to accept that his sparsely attended inauguration was anything except the largest in history. Trump is so mentally incapable of admitting defeat that he literally took a Sharpie marker to an official map rather than admit he got something wrong. Most people found that hilarious, while others thought it pathetic.
I found it dangerous.
Recent events have made Trump even more reckless than “usual.” His impeachment acquittal by Republican senators, despite overwhelming evidence, seemingly proved Trump’s own adage that he could murder someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any political support. Right after the vote, when Maine Sen. Susan Collins’ gave a jaw-dropping justification that Trump had “learned his lesson,” Trump decided to shed any pretense of caring about democratic norms, and fully embraced his goal of complete authoritarian corruption.
Trump has turned the Department of Justice into his own personal political hit squad. His Treasury Department, which refused to turn over anything to Congress, even under subpoena, quickly and illegally turned over private financial information on Joe Biden’s son. Trump has pushed out career public servants and replaced them with sycophants who place loyalty to him above the Constitution. Republican senators have willingly surrendered their power on just about everything, even allowing Trump to rewrite their budget through decree, and helped him pack the courts with unqualified toadies.
Trump destroying democracy with Attorney General Bob Barr.
Now that the checks and balances are gone, Trump is in a great position to steal the next election. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has done his part by refusing to allow any bills on election security to come up for a vote, while remaining silent as Trump openly calls for foreign hacking. It appears that voter suppression and gerrymandering are no longer enough. Yet even if all the dirty tricks fail, and Trump still manages to lose the election outright, Trump is very likely not going to step down.
Many call this line of thinking paranoid, but that’s because they give Trump and his GOP allies too much credit. Election night has always been the one time that the Republicans have had to come face-to-face with reality. Unlike trickle-down economics or climate science, elections are straight math, no matter your preconceived view. You can’t challenge an election.
Or so we thought.
As with so many other things, Trump is going to change that dynamic. There are many possible scenarios, but several have Trump likely calling the election for himself long before the votes are in. If the results are not breaking his way during the election, expect Trump to cry fraud. Washington Monthly put out a very plausible sequence of events of what might happen once this occurs. Trump would declare, probably through a tweet, that he is hearing “from a lot of people” that polling sites are “fixed” and “rigged” against him. After Trump claims fraud, the GOP leadership is almost certain to back him up. His chief bootlickers, like Sens. Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham, will call for bogus investigations.
If the vote comes down to a state like Florida, where the GOP is in full control, they likely won’t certify the Democratic winner. Even if it came down to a purple state that refuses to fix the election, like Pennsylvania, recall that our constitution requires the current vice president to certify the election results. Mike Pence, who is the most submissive veep in our nation’s history, will not do this if Trump instructs him not to. The GOP has likely already calculated this, because in that event, the decision would go to the House of Representatives, where each state gets one vote. Since there are more GOP controlled states than Democratic ones, the victor would most assuredly be Trump.
The Senate has already proven they won’t do anything to stop him, and the Supreme Court is packed with Trump’s people, like Brett Kavanaugh, who warned that he would not be impartial after his confirmation hearing.
So then what? What if Trump loses the election, refuses to leave, and the GOP doesn’t make him? Can you imagine a scenario where Trump loses the popular vote AND the Electoral College, yet is still in office after a 5-4 vote in the Supreme Court? What would you do in this case? I am seriously asking YOU: Then what?
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I come home, read the daily dose of awful news from this administration, get angry, fire off a few posts, and then do something else to take my mind off of the political despair. But that is getting harder to do. Opinion writers tell me I’m being silly: Americans will never accept a dictatorship. Yet, for the most part, the populace has been staying silent. After all, it certainly doesn’t look like a dictatorship. We don’t have tanks rolling down the streets or violent militias patrolling neighborhoods—mostly, anyway. People still feel free to march and to protest, and we still have a free press where journalists don’t fear violent retribution—mostly, anyway.
Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse...
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945”
If Trump remains in office after the next election, all of this will change. There will be absolutely nothing and nobody reigning him in. Meanwhile, Trump’s list of enemies, perceived and real, grows. As Americans, we have become more and more comfortable with his attacks on our Democratic institutions. We have become numb to his frequent attacks on his immigrant scapegoats and the free press.
We aren’t in a dictatorship yet, but it absolutely can and will happen here if we allow it, and sooner than you think. Right now, many Americans don’t want to speak out. They, like me, just want to go about their lives. The problem with that is if you wait until it gets bad enough to where you feel you have to speak out, only then will you realize speaking out will no longer be possible.
The framers of the Constitution were worried that someone might come along who could be elected president who didn't have concern about the rule of law or about democracy. We are now in that situation.
[...]
Up until now, there is nothing in Mr. Trump's words or in his actions which would even suggest that he cares even a little bit about democracy or about the rule of law.
[...]
What I would say is that our institutions were set up for a moment just like this one, but they'll only protect us if we enliven them and if we support them.
Authoritarian leaders like Trump count on two things: that you’ll despair, and that you’ll be quiet. Yet authoritarians can’t turn into dictators without a compliant populace. For me, becoming noncompliant means that my personal ban on discussing politics with friends, neighbors, and co-workers is over. I don’t have to verbally attack anyone to confront a blatant lie, but I will no longer be silent.
I’m asking you, right now: What you are comfortable with doing, and what you are amenable to giving up? For me, it’s comfort. I can’t be upset that there aren’t mass protests in the streets if I’m not there myself. I can’t participate as long as I fear that one of my bosses or clients will see me. Not anymore.
There’s plenty of organizations to join or financially support that need help now, from Indivisible to Planned Parenthood to the ACLU, to name just a few. There’s even the main opposition party known as the Democrats, and the brave candidates who are risking everything to fight our slide into Trump’s tyranny. For far too long I have avoided getting too involved, because I feared it would interfere with my primary career. Those days are over.
Yes, I may anger some clients, and I may lose more than I gain, but I’d rather lose them than lose my country. The type of involvement needed, the kind of canvassing I need to participate in, and the speaking out that needs to happen will no longer allow me to hide. However, I feel if I don’t get involved now, it will only get worse. Trump has no trouble going after critics’ pensions, their families, and their income, using the courts and his executive powers to do so. Yet he has openly pined for the power of the dictators he fawns over—the ones who imprison their critics ... or worse. The more political power he is able to accrue, the more likely that may happen.
We need to stop him. Now. If you are in a government position, or even a military position, where you are being asked to do something that you know is wrong—such as permit or engage in corruption, or target dissent—please remember that dictatorships rely on our cooperation to survive. That cooperation can either be voluntary or coerced, but it has to happen in order for their plans to work. There may come a time you need to make a very difficult choice with real consequences. You don’t have to go along with something that is unjust just because you are expected to.
These are difficult times, but our nation has been through dark times before. There were always heroes who have pulled us through. Just look at Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. He showed us what a hero looks like, and has paid quite the price.
We are all soon going to face a test. We have a president who has turned his office into a cult of personality, who has repeatedly shown his disdain for the law, and who puts his personal interests above everything else. Is it any wonder that we are being prepared for the increasingly likely event that the president may declare martial law?
I ask everyone reading this to undergo the same uncomfortable self-examination. If Trump refuses to leave the White House, how much are you willing to sacrifice, and how much you are willing to tolerate? Our democracy depends on your answer.
Susan Collins is going to be very, very concerned about her re-election prospects come November. A Colby College poll released Tuesday has her losing by one point to her likely Democratic opponent, Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon, 42-43. The Democratic primary isn't until June, so Gideon is still focused there, but even if she doesn't emerge as the victor, Collins needs to be worried.
Just 42% of Mainers said they will vote for her in November, which is pretty darned bad. That's where her favorability rating sits, too, compared to 54% who view her unfavorably. Since winning the seat in 1996, when she squeaked in, Collins has always won with about 60%. "We're not used to seeing Sen. Collins in a tight race," Dan Shea, a researcher on the poll, told The Wall Street Journal.
"American politics has taken a dramatic turn in the last four to six years, and the broader question is whether or not the nationalization of American politics has spread to Maine as well," Shea continued. That's one way of putting it. Another is that Collins has demonstrated that she's as craven as any other Republican when it comes to giving Trump a free pass and betraying the principles she's always claimed to hold. Especially when it comes to selling out women.
That's where Collins has lost the most support, Shea points out. "She is hemorrhaging women voters. […] We weren't quite sure of the impact that the Kavanaugh vote would have on her brand, but it's really popped up in this poll." She has the support of just 36% of women overall, compared to 49% for Gideon. With women under 50, she loses 25-56. Her vote for the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court contains multitudes of problems for Collins—it was a proxy for her caving to Trump and McConnell; it is a rebuke of Christine Blasey Ford and her testimony against Kavanaugh, and by extension of all of the women who have been abused by powerful men and bravely tell their stories; it endangers the most basic of our rights: control over the decisions we make for our own bodies. Collins betrayed women on every level with that one vote, so it's not a surprise that they're abandoning her now. Not to mention what Kavanaugh will mean for civil rights, the environment, gun safety measures—all the issues for which Collins was a pet Republican who won't be there any more.
Mainers aren't too thrilled with her impeachment trial performance, either, especially independents, about 40% of the electorate in the state. Just 13% of that group say they're more likely to vote for her because of her vote to acquit Trump, compared to 39% who are less likely to vote for her. "What happened for a lot of independents is I think that many were looking for a Mitt Romney moment, and they didn't get it," Shea said. Sounds like they're the last group to get the message about Collins.
Impeached president Donald Trump has made lots of supportive noises about a bill with bipartisan support in the Senate to bring down drug prices, written by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley and Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden. Knowing that Democrats are going to be running hard on health care in all the states, some Republican senators—such as Arizona's Martha McSally, Iowa's Joni Ernst, and Maine's Susan Collins—would really like to have this pass. They need something to run on.
Grassley says so: "Since the president stated [his support] in his State of the Union message, we've had a lot of Republicans express interest that probably wouldn't have." But one obstacle remains: Mitch McConnell has remained steadfast against it. He says it divides his conference, as there are some Republicans who don't like that it would cap price increases or force companies that raised prices above the cap to pay out rebates as their penalty. They say that amounts to price controls, so McConnell is pointing to that as a reason for his opposition. What he's not talking about is the massive haul his campaign fund has received in the past year from the drug industry.
McConnell is the top recipient among all members of Congress for the 2019-2020 cycle from the pharmaceutical industry. The CEOs of these companies have been very generous to McConnell as well. Last summer, as the drug pricing bill was coming together, William Anderson, the CEO of Roche Pharmaceuticals, gave $15,600 to the McConnell for Majority Leader Committee, as did Bristol-Myers Squibb CEO Giovanni Caforio. The CEOs of Pfizer, AbbVie, Merck, and Sanofi all maxed out as well, while nearly a dozen officers of other companies and the pharmaceutical industry trade group PhRMA itself gave thousands.
Trump supposedly supports it, though it might be his reward to McConnell for the impeachment cover-up to let this one drop. When it comes down to it, Trump needs McConnell right where he is—no one else would be quite so ruthless and effective at helping him get away with all the crime.
Multiple sources are reporting that Undersecretary of Defense John Rood has been asked to submit his resignation. CNN says that Rood has “lost support among senior national security leadership,” but there may be a simpler reason for the undersecretary’s departure: Rood was the person who signed off on the Defense Department’s examination of corruption in Ukraine. That review said that Ukraine had met all the goals set forward in legislation to combat corruption and promote democracy and was eligible to receive military funding allocated to it by Congress.
Throughout the impeachment hearings, members of the Defense Department, such as Laura Cooper, testified that investigations of Ukraine had found no reason to withhold military assistance funding. Subsequent letters revealed by filings under the Freedom of Information Act have made it clear that when Donald Trump’s demand to freeze the aid was passed to the Pentagon by officials in the Office of Management and Budget, those officials knew they were breaking the law. And now Rood is the next one to pay the price for being honest when Trump is in charge.
Rood made another mistake when it comes to hanging around Washington in the Age of Trump. Shortly after Trump’s “perfect” call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Rood emailed his boss, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, to inform him that "placing a hold on security assistance at this time would jeopardize this unique window of opportunity and undermine our defense priorities with a key partner in the strategic competition with Russia."
Rood also made Esper aware that a group of Pentagon officials were meeting to figure out how they could deal with Trump’s demands.
So Rood both:
Validated that Ukraine had met the required commitments to fighting corruption and supporting democracy that were the only test included in the legislation authorizing the military assistance.
Made it clear that placing a hold on the assistance was a threat to the national security of both Ukraine and the United States.
That’s not the kind of truth-telling that’s allowed in either the White House or the Pentagon under Trump. During the impeachment proceedings, Republicans in the House and the Senate repeatedly maintained that Trump had the right to place a hold on the assistance for any reason. He doesn’t. And they claimed that the hold did not represent a threat to Ukrainian security. It did.
The purge of Rood from the Pentagon shows that the general housecleaning of anyone who dared to speak the truth during Trump’s impeachment is far from over.
In her first public comments since the impeachment hearings, retired Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch told students at Georgetown University Wednesday that her former employer is currently in a shambles. “Right now, the State Department is in trouble,” she said in an acceptance speech for the Trainor Award, celebrating her decades-long work as a U.S. diplomat. “Senior leaders lack policy vision, moral clarity and leadership.”
Yovanovitch suggested the department's current emphasis on sizing up monetary contributions country by country is both shortsighted and counterproductive to the nation's long-term foreign policy goals. “It’s not about a handout for foreign friends; it’s about enlightened self-interest,” she explained. “For example, it’s hard to see how cutting funds to the World Health Organization in the middle of the coronavirus crisis keeps Americans safer.” Unfortunately, this is the type of concept that requires an explanation under the Trump-era leadership of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Yovanovitch also said some of the current shortcomings were an outgrowth of the "hollowing out" of the department internally, in terms of expertise, institutional knowledge, and personnel. "The policy process has been replaced by the decisions emanating from the top with little discussion," Yovanovitch observed. "Vacancies at all levels go unfilled and officers are increasingly wondering whether it is safe to express concerns about policy, even behind closed doors."
The veteran diplomat also warned that America's current trajectory could leave us isolated as our allies find "more reliable partners.”
“To be blunt: An amoral, keep-'em-guessing foreign policy that substitutes threats, fear and confusion for trust cannot work over the long haul, especially in our social media-savvy, interconnected world," Yovanovitch said. "At some point, the once-unthinkable will become the soon-inevitable: that our allies, who have as much right to act in their own self-interest as we do, will seek out more reliable partners, partners whose interests might not align well with ours."
As dire as her prognosis was, she still chooses to be positive about the future of U.S. diplomacy. "Some people say I'm too optimistic, and that may be, but throwing up our hands is a self-fulfilling prophecy," she said. "In these trying times, optimism is no longer a default setting for many of us—it's a choice."
What a testament to Yovanovitch’s strength of character after what Donald Trump and his henchmen put her through. Brava!
Every day of the Senate trial, Adam Schiff made the cases that Donald Trump is not a king. He’s not free to use the weaponry of the state as his personal tool, and not exempt from the consequences of his actions. He’s a citizen, constrained by law like the rest of us.
But of course, Republicans disagreed. And on Saturday morning Donald Trump made it clear that not only does he consider himself a king, he intends to make the remainder of his rule all about “grievance, persecution and resentment.”
Trump based his morning tweets on a two-week old article from The New York Times which looked at Trump’s post-impeachment actions. Susan Collins may have claimed that Trump was going to be chastened by the hearings, impeachment, and trial.
And Trump has made it clear that he did learn something from the whole process. He learned that he can get away with anything — absolutely anything — without being concerned that Republicans will hold him accountable.
Following the impeachment, Trump has fired those who testified against him like Lt. Col. Vindman and Gordon Sondland. He’s taken petty vengeance on people like Vindman’s twin bother for having the bad taste of being related to someone on Trump’s enemies list. He’s held a White House session of self-congratulation in which he pointedly left out even most of the Republicans who voted to acquit over their failure to be sufficiently loyal. He’s continued hollowing out agencies across the government. He made it clear that he did send Giuliani to Ukraine to mine for political turds, and he told Geraldo Rivera that the way he will deal with phone calls to foreign leaders in the future is by conducting them in secret with no one listening in.
In one sense Trump’s mentality post-impeachment is that of the bunker. He’s been even more suspicious, more dismissive of the idea that anyone else has an opinion worth listening to, more determined to surround himself with a handful of only the most loyal, most protective staff (Welcome back, Hope Hicks!).
But if Trump is suspicious and angry down there in the gold bunker, he’s also feeling like he now has the space to revenge himself on anyone and everyone. And, of course, he’s ramped up his use of the Justice Department—and primary tool William Barr—to protect his friends, punish his enemies, and defy the whole concept of rule of law.
Trump has not just drawn a hard connection between himself and the state, he used his morning tweets to select a quote from the Times article that was surely meant to be a criticism.
“Ralph Waldo Emerson seemed to foresee the lesson of the Senate Impeachment Trial of President Trump. ‘When you strike at the King, Emerson famously said, “you must kill him.’ Mr. Trump’s foes struck at him but did not take him down. A triumphant Mr.Trump emerges from the biggest test of his presidency emboldened, ready to claim exoneration, and take his case of grievance, persecution and resentment to the campaign trail.”
Trump added a “witch hunt!” claim to this statement, making it clear that as he was reading this section, he was nodding along. King, yes, Persecution, certainly. Resentment, and how.
The series of revelations that spilled in the last three days showing that not only was Barr putting pillows in place to protect Trump’s associates from facing consequences of their crimes, but building a whole team designed to second-guess and undermine veteran prosecutors shows how far down the fascism path Trump is already gone. Trump has already embraced “jokes” about naming himself president for life. Now he’s putting out tweets in which he’s the king.
