It’s bad enough to pretend that facts aren’t facts. What’s worse is claiming that a president can’t be removed for abuse of power.
President Donald Trump’s legal team wrapped up its three-day defense presentation in the Senate impeachment trial on Tuesday. The president’s lawyers wound up taking up less than half of their allotted time, which doesn’t necessarily mean anything — after all, the House managers who played the prosecutorial role took up all 24 hours in part by making many of their points multiple times. Keeping the defense short might be thought of as a strategy, rather than an indication of a lack of anything useful to say.
In this case, however? It’s really astonishing how unimpressive their overall case turned out to be.
Trump Allies – Cash for Votes
From Iron Knee at Political Irony:
Why does nothing shock or surprise me anymore? I mean, this is something I would expect in some corrupt third-world country run by a warlord, but here we are:
Allies of Donald Trump have begun holding events in black communities where organizers lavish praise on the president as they hand out tens of thousands of dollars to lucky attendees.
The money is being funneled through a 501(c)3 charity, which allows the donors to remain anonymous and their contributions to be tax deductible. So you are paying for part of this.
All he had to have done was to order his legal team to read this:
You’re not going to vote to remove the President from office. Regardless of the evidence, regardless of whether or not the Senate calls witnesses, you’re not going to vote to remove the President. You wouldn’t do that even if video showed the President strangling the last porn star he had sex with. You don’t have the guts to do that. So we all know what the outcome of this so-called trial is going to be. So go ahead and vote.
The rest of what Trump’s legal team has been saying is nothing more than bullshit and eyewash.
Fresh Air‘s episode for the occasion features two good older interviews: a 2005 one with Laurence Rees on his book, Auschwitz: A New History, and an 1988 interview with Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, who died in 2016. The PBS NewsHour segment, “The lessons of Auschwitz, 75 years after its liberation,” features some survivors revisiting the camp and some striking memories. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website has an excellent primer on Auschwitz and other resources. (Going through the museum’s permanent exhibit is a powerful experience.)
Although a solely historical post might be appropriate today, it feels more pressing to note current events. Hate crimes are on the rise in some areas, and the number of high-profile hate crimes in recent years is troubling. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) tracks anti-Semitic incidents. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a more general “hatewatch” page, and both organizations maintain “hate maps.” FBI statistics for 2019 hate crimes aren’t available yet, but the website has information from1995 through 2018, and as CNN summarizes, the 2018 report “collected data from 110 fewer agencies” but “found that 7,120 hate crime incidents were reported by law enforcement agencies to the FBI in 2018, just 55 fewer than had been reported in 2017. Between 2016 and 2017, the FBI found a 17% increase in reported incidents.” Besides raw numbers, though, it’s the overall efforts to intimidate marginalized groups that’s disturbing.
“The madman theory is a political theory commonly associated with U.S. President Richard Nixon’s foreign policy. He and his administration tried to make the leaders of hostile Communist Bloc nations think Nixon was irrational and volatile. According to the theory, those leaders would then avoid provoking the United States, fearing an unpredictable American response.”
The theory, however, has not, until now, been empirically ‘tested’ in a ‘large-N’ context (that’s to say with a large number of leaders who were, or are, regarded, by some, at least in part, as ‘mad’).
A new article in the British Journal of Political Science, from Professor Roseanne McManus at Penn State University, US, examines the Madman Theory in some depth.
Shortly after midnight Sunday, in the wee hours of Monday morning, Trump tweeted: “I NEVER told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens. In fact, he never complained about this at the time of his very public termination. If John Bolton said this, it was only to sell a book.” The tweet was unfortunate, since if Bolton is lying, Trump should want him to testify under oath. Also, tweeting about the issue likely destroys Trump’s chances to protect the conversation under executive privilege. (Instead, the White House has floated the idea of going to court to get a restraining order against Bolton to stop him from speaking. This would tie the issue up in legal fights until the Senate finishes the trial.)
The media chewed over the issue all day today, with New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who broke the story, saying that Republican Senators felt blindsided by the news and wanted to know who had had access to the manuscript. Fox News Channel personality Lou Dobbs called staunch Republican John Bolton “A Tool For The Left,” (which is hilarious, despite the deadly seriousness of all this). Trump supporters, including Representative Mark Meadows (R-NC), one of Trump’s closest allies, warned that Republicans breaking with Trump over impeachment could face “political repercussions.” But while senators do not want to buck Trump, they also don’t want to acquit the president only to have more damning information appear. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Senator James Langford (R-OK) tried to avoid asking for witnesses but still get some security, saying that the Senate should be allowed to see the manuscript.
But the lawyers charged with defending Trump in the Senate today didn’t mention the new information at all until Alan Dershowitz mentioned it tonight only to say that even if Bolton’s accusations were true, they are not an impeachable offense. (Dershowitz is virtually the only constitutional scholar trying to make this argument.) Indeed, Jay Sekulow went so far as to say that “not a single witness” testified that they heard from Trump himself that the aid was linked to investigations… even as a direct witness has offered to testify, but is being blocked.
Clearly Trump’s defenders are not trying to defend him against the charges brought by the House. So what are they doing?
Representative Schiff noted this is the time for moral courage in the Senate, and quoted the relevant words of Robert F. Kennedy:
“Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.”
Indeed. Moral courage is measured by the willingness to act on one’s conscience and to stand for what is right, despite retaliation from those lacking this quality of character. The threat of “heads on a pike” for any Republican daring to express moral courage comes to mind.
Apart from former Republican Justin Amash, we have witnessed neither courage nor morals from elected Republicans.
So, kids, are you watching the impeachment trial? I’m having a little trouble doing so, because my cable company keeps changing the channel. Instead of the Twitler impeachment trial, I have seen the impeachment of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Barack Obama and everyone else who is not Twitler.
So far, I have not seen any of the talking heads on TV take notice of the multiple crimes that took place on the Senate floor today. Ken Starr murdered irony. Then he desecrated its corpse as he lectured us on how impeachment is used too much these days and for the wrong reasons, not important stuff like blowjobs. I missed what happened next, because I was trying to retrieve my eyeballs from the back of my skull.
But perhaps the most bizarre tweet of the bunch was this beaut:
“I often get asked the question, well, isn’t the President going to be stronger and harder to beat if he survives this? The answer is yes, but, the Congress has no choice, it has a Constitutional responsibility.” Joe Biden, pres. candidate. Even Joe agrees with us! @foxandfriends
Trump is quoting Joe Biden’s assessment that Trump could gain some advantage after emerging “victorious” from the Senate’s impeachment trial. That’s debatable, but Biden’s view is not unreasonable. What’s peculiar is that Trump is latching onto – and agreeing with – Biden’s comments that “Congress has no choice, it has a Constitutional responsibility.” Biden is referring to to the responsibility to impeach Trump and remove him from office. And Trump, as expressed in this tweet, apparently agrees with that. Good to know.
The view that Trump will be “harder to beat” following these hearings is not cast in stone. On one hand, Trump has already been impeached, and that’s forever. The Senate hearings are driving home the facts surrounding Trump’s criminal coercion of Zelensky and his efforts to cover it up. They are also revealing the Republicans’ unprincipled obsession with suppressing new evidence and witness testimony. Consequently, any “acquittal” by a partisan vote of the GOP majority would immediately and totally lack credibility. And Trump’s guilt would still be presumed by most Americans, as it is now.
The argument that Trump would be stronger rests only on the notion that his cult followers might be more motivated to turn out in November. But that’s speculative at best. His most fervent supporters are already as buzzy as they can possibly be. And he isn’t likely to attract new supporters simply because the GOP-run Senate let him off the hook.
For ordinary people’s profound attachment to their own countries and cultures (whose roots go back more than a millennium), for their objections to mass immigration unprecedented in the history of those lands, for their concerns about the encroachment of a corrupt and unelected EU oligarchy upon national laws and sovereignty — the mainstream parties have had no response to offer except scolding and name-calling. This has generally been true of right-wing mainstream parties as much as the left, driving voters toward fringe parties, some of them dangerously extremist.
(As a personal aside, my own family roots lie among just such ordinary people, in the unfashionable industrial cities of England. It was the Labour party government after World War II that gave them a chance at better lives, somewhat like the New Deal and the GI Bill in the US. That the party is now led by snobs infected with the same slimy, aristocratic disdain for ordinary people that it once rebelled against — this is beyond infuriating. Yes, there are some hints of such disdain among the Democratic left activist fringe in the US, but nothing like this bad — and the party leadership has not succumbed to it.)
The UK broke out of this pattern almost by accident when David Cameron, a Conservative prime minister as pro-EU as any other mainstream politician, called a referendum on leaving the EU. He did this primarily as a threat to strengthen his hand in dealing with the EU oligarchy, probably never seriously considering that voters might actually choose to leave. Even after the referendum, it took more than three years for a genuinely pro-Brexit figure — Johnson — to emerge as party leader. It could just as easily have been the Labour party that got out ahead on this issue; it should have been. But with the current leadership, such boldness was unthinkable — and now it will be the Conservative party that reaps the benefits.
