The critical mass of evidence that Donald Trump accepts no limits when it comes to serving his own interests has increasingly emboldened mainstream political journalists to situate the drip-drip of new revelations within the master narrative of Trump’s presidency: That he has consistently distended and abused the powers of his office.
That is essential context, because it explains the otherwise inexplicable — and because it ineluctably calls attention to the post-Trump imperative to rebuild and reinforce the constitutional barriers to presidential tyranny that Trump and his accessories in the Republican Party have so profoundly corroded.
Veteran White House correspondent Stephen Collinson, who now writes for CNN.com, provided a master class in contextualizing the news on Tuesday. His article was pegged to the testimony from former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch about how she had run afoul of Trump’s personal fixer Rudy Giuliani, who was secretly extorting Ukrainian officials to incriminate Trump’s political rivals.
View the complete November 7 article by Dan Froomkin from Salon on the AlterNet website here.