Tag: GOP now the cult of Trump

Trump’s Impeachment and the Degrading of Presidential Accountability

The President will see an acquittal—which was preordained by the highly partisan Senate—as license for further abuse.

The sordid truth of the impeachment trial of Donald Trump is that it will end with the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, doing him a favor: delivering the votes, with little regard for the facts. That is sadly appropriate, because Trump’s favors—the ones he covets, the ones he demands—and the terms on which he extracts them, remain the trial’s most contested issue. The House managers cited Trump’s statement to President Volodymyr Zelensky, of Ukraine, in their phone call on July 25, 2019—“I would like you to do us a favor though”—as the crux of a corrupt scheme. Trump’s lawyers countered that he was talking not about his “personal interests” but about America’s. In their trial brief, they argued that Trump “frequently uses variations of the phrase ‘do us a favor,’ ” and cited examples. “Do me a favor,” he said he’d asked Europe. “Would you buy a lot of soybeans, right now?” “Do me a favor,” he said he’d asked North Korea. “You’ve got this missile engine testing site. . . . Can you close it up?” The lawyers could have added Trump’s claim that, before choosing Alexander Acosta to be his Secretary of Labor, he’d worried that he was related to the CNN reporter Jim Acosta, so he told his staff, “Do me a favor—go back and check the family tree.” Continue reading “Trump’s Impeachment and the Degrading of Presidential Accountability”

The Putin defense: How far will Donald Trump go now to stay in power?

AlterNet logoDonald Trump never faced even the tiniest chance that two-thirds of the United States Senate would vote to find him guilty in the impeachment trial we’re now being told will come to its ignominious end in the middle of next week. You don’t need to put on a defense when you already know the outcome of the trial. He could have gone with what you might call the “potted plant defense,” sending Jay Sekulow or Pat Cipollone or even one of the lesser lights on his team to essentially sit there by himself and watch the House managers set their hair on fire. He didn’t even need to ask for what amounted to a directed verdict of acquittal. He had all the Republican votes he needed right from the start.

Trump didn’t bother merely swatting aside the rule of law and the Constitution. No, he dropped all pretense and went full-on authoritarian, tapping no less a figure than Jeffrey Epstein pal Alan Dershowitz to present the Putin Defense: If it’s good for Trump, it’s good for the country, and that means it can’t be illegal.

I guess we always knew it would come to this. How else can you account for Trump’s parade of obsequiousness to Vladimir Putin? It goes back to December of 2015, when Trump was running for the Republican nomination. He appeared on “Morning Joe” not long after Putin had praised him as “brilliant” and “talented.” Host Joe Scarborough asked him if he still accepted Putin’s praise in the face of his violent policies. Continue reading.

Cowardice and guilt: Republican senators finally hint Trump may have done something wrong — in the most shameful way possible

AlterNet logoOn the day it became clear a majority of the Senate would allow the trial of the president to close without hearing from a single witness, Republicans who found themselves protecting Donald Trump started making a surprising admission.

Trump, of all people, might have done something wrong.

The revelations started with Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, whose pending retirement gave him more independence than many of his colleagues to break with the president. But on Thursday night, he revealed that he would join most other Republicans in a vote to block the Senate from hearing witnesses, most notably former National Security Adviser John Bolton. Continue reading.

Fox News judge comes out swinging against Senators who vote to block evidence in Trump’s trial

AlterNet logoJudge Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News contributor and frequent critic of President Donald Trump, wrote an editorial Thursday, which asked Republican senators who refuse to call witnesses for Trump’s impeachment trial the following: “How can the Senate be faithful to the Constitution if it suppresses the truth?”

After reviewing the history of the separation of powers established in the U.S. Constitution, Napolitano wrote that “in the case of impeachment of the president, the Constitution gives ‘sole power’ to the House of Representatives. In the case of an impeachment trial, the Constitution gives exclusivity to the Senate. There is no place for presidential resistance or judicial interference, so long as the House and Senate arguably follow the Constitution.”

The president was impeached by the House of Representatives for valid reasons, in the view of the Fox News judge. Continue reading.

The cringing abdication of Senate Republicans

Washington Post logoREPUBLICAN SENATORS who voted Friday to suppress known but unexamined evidence of President Trump’s wrongdoing at his Senate trial must have calculated that the wrath of a vindictive president is more dangerous than the sensible judgment of the American people, who, polls showed, overwhelmingly favored the summoning of witnesses. That’s almost the only way to understand how the Republicans could have chosen to deny themselves and the public the firsthand account of former national security adviser John Bolton, and perhaps others, on how Mr. Trump sought to extort political favors from Ukraine.

The public explanations the senators offered were so weak and contradictory as to reveal themselves as pretexts. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she weighed supporting “additional witnesses and documents, to cure the shortcomings” of the House’s impeachment process, but decided against doing so. Apparently she preferred a bad trial to a better one — but she did assure us that she felt “sad” that “the Congress has failed.”

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said the case against Mr. Trump had already been proved, so no further testimony was needed. But he also said, without explanation, that Mr. Trump’s “inappropriate” conduct did not merit removal from office; voters, he said, should render a verdict in the coming presidential election. How could he measure the seriousness of Mr. Trump’s wrongdoing without hearing Mr. Bolton’s firsthand testimony of the president’s motives and intentions, including about whether the president is likely to seek additional improper foreign intervention in that same election? Continue reading.

The extreme measure one House Republican is taking to win over Donald Trump

Facing a primary, Kentucky’s Thomas Massie is targeting the president with TV ads at Mar-a-Lago.

GOP Rep. Thomas Massie is running for reelection in Kentucky. So why is he running TV ads in Florida?

Like most everything in Republican politics, the answer has to do with one person: President Donald Trump.

With Trump planning to go to his Mar-a-Lago club for Super Bowl weekend, Massie, a four-term Kentucky congressman, is purchasing TV advertising time in South Florida on the president’s favorite channel, Fox News. Massie’s goal: Communicate to the president that his Republican primary challenger, attorney Todd McMurtry, is a “Trump hater.” Continue reading.

For Senate GOP, impeachment impedes legislative agenda — that may not exist

Senate likely returns to judicial nominations after impeachment trial

It’s been a constant refrain from Republican senators over the last two weeks: The impeachment trial is blocking us from addressing our legislative agenda.

“While this case is pending, we can’t do anything else,” Texas Republican John Cornyn complained earlier this week, postulating that paralyzing the Senate with impeachment proceedings was part of House Democrats’ strategy.

Sen. Rick Scott of Florida has released more than a half-dozen videos over the last two weeks as part of what he’s calling a “Let’s Get Back to Work” series. Continue reading.

Is Donald Trump a Manly Man?

His followers seem to love his strength. But it wasn’t so long ago his act would have been seen as exactly the opposite.

The House impeachment and Senate trial of Donald Trump have offered good occasion to listen to and understand the minds of his defenders. Even people who dislike parts of his character or record invoke certain words again and again to describe the parts they do like.

In interviews and emails, these backers tell me they regard Trump as “strong.” His battles with adversaries reveal him as “tough.” What in a conventional light looks outrageous—the bragging, the insults, the defiance, the rule skirting, the shredding of familiar standards of how a president should act—in this more sympathetic light looks like charisma. It gives him the aura of “a winner.”

To put a fine point on it, his backers regard him as a real man—possessed of a virility that flows not in spite of his excesses but because of them. In these minds, Trump represents a certain ideal of male power in exaggerated form. Continue reading.

Dershowitz says media ‘willfully distorted’ his view of presidential power

The Hill logoHarvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz on Thursday sought to clarify remarks he made at President Trump’s impeachment trial while articulating his view of presidential power, saying media outlets “willfully distorted” his argument.

Dershowitz said CNN, MSNBC and other news outlets intentionally ignored a nuanced point he made on Wednesday about the mental state a president must possess in order to commit an impeachable offense.

“They characterized my argument as if I had said that if a president believes that his reelection was in the national interest, he can do anything,” Dershowitz, a opinion contributor to The Hill, said on Twitter. Continue reading.

Video here: https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/480669-dershowitz-says-media-willfully-distorted-his-view-of-presidential?jwsource=cl

McConnell, Romney vie for influence over Trump’s trial

The Hill logoThe fight over calling additional witnesses at President Trump‘s impeachment trial has turned into a struggle for influence between Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney.  

The two Republican leaders — one the Senate majority leader, the other the GOP’s 2012 nominee for president — have two very different agendas.

McConnell has staked his reelection to a seventh term on helping Trump implement his agenda and has made clear that he is closely coordinating trial strategy with the White House.