Tag: GOP now the cult of Trump

Republicans Move to Block Impeachment Witnesses, Driving Toward Acquittal

New York Times logoEfforts to bring wavering Republicans into line appeared to be working as President Trump’s lawyers argued that anything a president did to win re-election was “in the public interest.”

WASHINGTON — The White House and Senate Republicans worked aggressively on Wednesday to discount damaging revelations from John R. Bolton and line up the votes to block new witnesses from testifying in President Trump’s impeachment trial, in a push to bring the proceeding to a swift close.

As the Senate opened a two-day, 16-hour period of questioning from senators, Mr. Trump laced into Mr. Bolton, his former national security adviser, whose unpublished manuscript contains an account that contradicts his impeachment defense. The president described Mr. Bolton on Twitter as a warmonger who had “begged” for his job, was fired, and then wrote “a nasty & untrue book.”

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Trump’s aides circulated a letter informing Mr. Bolton that the White House was moving to block publication of his forthcoming book, in which he wrote that the president refused to release military aid to Ukraine until its leaders committed to investigating his political rivals. That is a core element of the Democrats’ case, which charges Mr. Trump with seeking to enlist a foreign government to help him win re-election this year.

John Bolton and John Kelly finally turn on the boss — and Trump loyalists respond with fury

AlterNet logoMany people wondered what exactly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was thinking when she decided to delay delivery of the articles of impeachment against President Trump until after the holiday recess. That question has never been adequately answered, but if it was because Pelosi had a feeling — or perhaps knew for sure — that more evidence of Trump’s abuse of power would trickle out almost daily, she was absolutely right.

From White House emails revealed through the Freedom of Information Act to Rudy Giuliani’s “associate” Lev Parnas passing on documents and tapes it’s been a steady drip, drip, drip ever since the middle of December. But none of it is as important or as incriminating as the potential testimony of former national security adviser John Bolton. Keeping him from testifying in the impeachment trial has been Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s singular focus from the very beginning. This week we found out why.

As I wrote on Monday, the New York Times’ reporting about Bolton’s book has upended what was to be an open-and-shut trial with no testimony or evidence. The plan was to feature some dull arguments by the House managers and the president’s lawyers, followed by a few questions from senators and a quick vote before the Super Bowl, where Trump is slated to have a “yuge” victory interview with Sean Hannity. Basically, it was to be a constitutional wham, bam, thank you ma’am. Continue reading.

‘Our chances of ever exiting the nightmare are shrinking’: Paul Krugman explains how the GOP is getting worse

AlterNet logoIt is a great detriment to civil discourse that the divide between left and right in the United States is often depicted as being purely cultural — as if one’s politics were solely mediated by aesthetics, such as whether one prefers shooting guns or drinking lattes. This fabulist understanding of politics is harmful inasmuch as it masks the real social effects of the policy agendas pushed by left versus right. Seeing politics as aesthetic transforms what should be a quantitative debate — with statistics and numbers about taxation and public policy, questions of who benefits more or less from policy changes — and devolves it into a rhetorical debate over values.

This is especially bad for liberals because there is a lot of quantitative evidence that the right’s economic agenda is a dismal failure in terms of providing any real gains to the vast majority of the population. As most Salon readers are aware, economist, professor, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has spent much of his career doing precisely this: debunking the asserted merits of right-wing fiscal and economic policy through unemotional facts and statistics. Continue reading.

The president and his demons: Why Trumpism must be pulled out by the roots

AlterNet logoDonald Trump is an authoritarian and an autocrat. For him and others of such ilk, violence is political currency in the form of raw power. Autocrats and authoritarians such as Trump are de facto crime bosses who just happen to be leaders of their respective countries.

As such, Donald Trump uses violence in an effort to intimidate his enemies and control the public. Trump also uses violence to control his allies, servants and other supporters.

Paula White, Trump’s “spiritual adviser” and a prominent Christian hustler, has claimed that Democrats, liberals and others who oppose Trump are possessed by the devil and demonic forces. Continue reading.

GOP’s Doug Collins reveals Trump’s last line of defense: ‘No matter what happened the president did nothing wrong!’

AlterNet logoRep. Doug Collins (R-GA) on Wednesday admitted that literally nothing President Donald Trump may have done would justify removing him from office.

During an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Collins said that Republican senators should reject hearing from witnesses in the president’s impeachment trial because nothing those witnesses could say would change the fact that Trump shouldn’t be impeached.

“I think at the end of the day, when they look at the total case, they look at how it was presented, and how badly it was done in the House, and how poorly these articles were drafted… witnesses are not going to help this!” he said. “No matter what happened, the president did nothing wrong!” Continue reading.

GOP Senators Propose ‘Classified’ Look At Bolton Book

As pressure mounts to have former national security adviser John Bolton testify in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, a pair of Republican senators is proposing an idea to stall and possibly block Bolton from speaking publicly about his knowledge of the Ukraine scandal.

In The Room Where It Happened, his forthcoming memoir about his time in the Trump White House, Bolton says Trump told him that he was withholding congressionally appropriated military aid to Ukraine until the country’s leadership announced an investigation into his political rivals. That is exactly what Democrats charge Trump with doing, calling that quid pro quo an abuse of power.

Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and James Lankford (R-OK) suggested a deal that would allow senators to review Bolton’s book in a classified setting before deciding on whether to have him testify. Continue reading.

Anatomy of a ‘smear’: How John Bolton became a target of the pro-Trump Internet

Washington Post logoThe headline drew little notice when it appeared last spring on a blog called “Disobedient Media.”

“John Bolton Took Money From Banks Tied To Cartels, Terrorists, Iran,” it read.

On Monday, the blog entry gained sudden popularity. That’s because its central claim — based only on innuendo and half-truths — proved useful to President Trump’s most fervent online supporters, who rushed to discredit the former United Nations ambassador and national security adviser as news broke that his forthcoming book would corroborate accounts that the president held up aid to Ukraine to advance investigations into his domestic political rivals. Continue reading.

Republicans signal renewed confidence they’ll avoid witness fight

The Hill logoSenate Republicans emerged from a closed-door caucus meeting on Tuesday voicing renewed confidence that they will bypass a nasty witness fight in the impeachment trial.

“The consensus is that we’ve heard enough and it’s time to go to a final judgement,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) told reporters.

Asked if the trial proceedings should go past Friday, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), another member of Senate GOP leadership, said it “shouldn’t.” Continue reading.

‘Get your facts straight!’ Fox News host blasts conservative guest live on air for bogus claim about impeachment

AlterNet logoFox News’ Chris Wallace slammed conservative pundit Katie Pavlich on air, telling her to “Get your facts straight” after she tried to claim all kinds of made-up facts in her defense of Donald Trump. In question was Pavlich’s revisionist retelling of how the Democratic House’s impeachment inquiry was hampered by obstruction. In Pavlich’s imagineering, the Democratic Party is breaking with impeachment tradition by pushing an incomplete case, “and every impeachment beforehand, the witnesses that were called had been called in the House before being brought to the Senate. So there are questions here about the process.”

That’s not true. It’s not even a little bit true, and Wallace cut Pavlich off to tell her as much: “They hadn’t all been called in the House, and in the Clinton impeachment, they’d been called by the general independent counsel. They had not been called by the House.”

Right-wing pundit Katie Pavlich is just the kind of dumb that Trump’s Republican Party loves: willing to toe any line of misinformation, no matter how many obvious facts and contradictions there are. Appearing on Fox News with conservative luminaries such as Brett Baier, Pavlich was promoting the old conservative trope that the difference between Clinton’s impeachment trial and Trump’s is that the Democratic Party keeps trying to add new things to it, because it’s going so terribly. The basis of this bit of bullshit is that Donald Trump’s White House has refused to allow anyone to testify, while his Department of Justice has done more work trying to cover up his criminal behavior than any of the actual work it’s supposed to do as a department. Continue reading.

There Are More Recordings Of Donald Trump And Lev Parnas, Attorney Reveals

The latest bombshell tape could be just the beginning.

The lawyer for Lev Parnas told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Saturday that there are other recordings of his client and President Donald Trump.

Joseph Bondy revealed the existence of other tapes just hours after he released a video of the president giving the order to “get rid of” then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.

“Are there more recordings that Lev Parnas has? With the president?” Cooper asked Bondy.

“Yes,” Bondy replied. Continue reading.