During each and every tilt further away from democratic norms over the past three years, many of us have tried to send out the alarm that Trump is not stupid, and that things are going to get much worse than people think. We have been ignored and disregarded as alarmist Cassandras.
Today is no different.
Trump stood on the south lawn of the White House and openly declared an invitation to the People’s Republic of China to “investigate” Joe Biden and his son.
Amidst all of the tisk-tisking there is again no shortage of pundits nearly giddy with surety that Trump has finally overstepped: ‘Surely this is it’. They say. ‘Surely the Republicans in Congress will start to abandon him now!’
Whether they will is unclear. But what I know, is that this move by Trump is no miscalculation. No, it is yet another step in the numbing of our country to his corrosion of democracy.
Time is not our friend, it is his.
While we dither over procedure, the American people are being further anesthetized into a torpor from which they may not emerge.
This is an audacious gambit in the style of not only Roy Cohn, but in the style of the burning of the Reichstag, to seize more more power while America Slept.
***
“Trump is relying on ’20 treasons are better than 1′. If you can no longer deny a crime, boast about it, try to normalize it. That’s why the law must be the law, not politics.”
-Garry Kasparov 10/3/2019
Not one Republican would get on camera today to defend Trump after his meltdown yesterday.
Trump told China that he would keep quiet about the Hong Kong democracy protests during trade deal talks. He sold out the moral commitments of the U.S.
“Dracula Ghouliani” ran a shakedown shadow foreign policy for Trump.
“What did Donald Trump promise China in exchange for interfering in our election? An easier deal on trade? Ignoring crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro – democracy movement? Condoning repression of religious freedom?” Speaker Nancy Pelosi
“Congress must not back down from our duty to defend the Constitution as Trump ignores the Founders’ warnings about foreign interference at every turn.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi
This is all very bad. I just hope the system still works like it did to remove Nixon.
Republican elder statesmen like Goldwater told Nixon if he didn’t resign they would find him guilty to forcibly remove him from office.
Unfortunately, there are no elder statesmen left in the Republican party today.
Romney the only one so far to do so in terms remotely direct enough to matter. I doubt he has much currency in today’s party compared to Goldwater in 74’. It’s a shame, but it’s unlikely he will sway many Senators. Only the people continuing to resist will do that.
Joe Biden was asked if he would support conviction and removal if he was in the Senate.
“I am not going to speculate what I would do in the Senate.”
The core argument of his campaign is defeating Trump and now we have incontrovertible evidence of the President abusing his power to investigate Biden’s family. You can’t say what you would do!?!?!?!
Warren gave a firm, quick “Yes” when asked the same question. Harris said she’d need to see more evidence.
This question ain’t hard.
True enough, but Warren and Harris both stumbled badly when asked questions about the Joe/Hunter Biden situation. To me this is just mind boggling.
I can understand that Democrats might be reluctant to play into a false equivalency narrative, but this scandal was out there long before this summer, and none of Biden’s rivals touched it. Why wouldn’t they?
I agree with this quote from Sarah Chayes “You know, when the son of a vice president gets a job in a field he knows nothing about while his father is vice president in a country that just had a revolution that, you know, typically, in that part of the world, post-revolution, all the oligarchs steal all the crown jewels, and the industry is one of the crown jewels – that is to say, gas – since when is that doing nothing wrong?”
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/03/766706864/atlantic-prominent-americans-shouldnt-leverage-their-names-for-payoffs
The Joe/Hunter Biden situation is clearly (to me) corrupt even if superficially legal.
That isn’t relevant to whether or not the Trump administration is breaking the law by soliciting foreign intervention to exploit it.
It’s also worth mentioning that the Joe/Hunter Biden situation is just one of two demands by Mr. Trump. The other was that Ukraine manufacture evidence to support the bizarre contention that the 2016 election interference was by Ukraine to benefit Hilary Clinton.
Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence (along with the rest of the cabinet co-conspirators) should be removed from office.
The Democrats, meanwhile, should nominate a different candidate for the 2020 election. In a world paying attention to actual facts, that nominee would be the incumbent President Nancy Pelosi.
I for one see it as a good sign that no Dem rivals are taking the bait when it would be so easy and tempting for them to do. Likewise, in 2016 the high point of my respect for Sanders (not suggesting there were necessarily low points) was when he declared to HRC in a debate, “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!”
I agree with most of what you say, Christopher. The Hillary “scandals” in my opinion were uniformly bogus, all of them.
Unfortunately, the Joe/Hunter Biden scandal is a real one. No further investigation is necessary to conclude that Hunter Biden’s job falls into the category of influence peddling.
The very least Joe Biden should have done would have been to recuse himself from anything to do with the Ukraine in order to prevent the appearance of impropriety. Instead he did just the opposite, injecting himself into the internal affairs of Ukraine.
It doesn’t matter that the prosecutor Biden had fired was regarded as corrupt, or that the investigation of Burisma wasn’t current. Once Joe Biden demonstrated an ability and a willingness to blackmail the Ukrainians, the chances that any Ukrainian prosecutor going anywhere near Hunter fell to zero.
Of course, as Tom says, all this is irrelevant to Trump’s crimes. But is still a mystery to me how none of this was brought up months ago. After all there were more than 20 candidates, some with very little to lose, and this story had been reported in the New York Times.
Pretty sure Joe Biden’s not the one blackmailing anybody.
Joe Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations in January 2018 what previously happened in Ukraine:
Mr. Biden was certainly happy to tell the gathering about his instrumental role in causing that prosecutor to be fired. He did not tell that audience about the sweetheart deal his son had with a target of the investigation.
I’m not sure that’s exactly blackmail, but it was certainly coercion. I think Bob’s point is that anyone on the receiving end of that kind of coercion would have to be nuts to go after the coercer’s SON, no matter what the evidence.
And that latter reluctance is why Joe Biden should not have been involved once his son got this deal.
Joe Biden showed incredibly poor judgement in not at least recusing himself once the deal with his son was done.
It doesn’t matter whether it was legal or not, it was influence peddling. It STUNK. It exemplifies the behavior that I want nowhere near the Oval Office — no matter the party affiliation of the President.
Elizabeth Warren is NOT vulnerable to these kinds of attacks. Elizabeth Warren would NOT permit her family to behave anything like this (she loudly chastised her husband for attempting to use her celebrity to get a table at a crowded Cambridge restaurant).
Why choose a nominee with baggage like this when Elizabeth Warren is one of the alternatives?
As I understand it there were a lot of people who wanted that prosecutor gone, and with good reason. The difference between Biden and Trump is that Biden threatened to hold up aid over a country’s behavior which is fairly common, whereas Trump threatened to hold it up over direct assistance to his political fortunes. What I have not seen is evidence that Biden tried threatening Ukraine aid over how they treated his son. I strongly doubt Obama would have stood for what you seem to be alleging on the part of his VP and I have no patience for “appearances”.
@ lot of people who wanted that prosecutor gone:
No doubt. That means that Mr. Biden could have recused himself knowing that somebody else could be just as effective.
Nobody is claiming that Mr. Biden’s role was in any way comparable to the crimes of the Donald Trump administration.
Your lack of patience for appearances is charming — and terrible politics. The Probation Department scandal was, in fact, the epitome of what Massachusetts voters hate about the corruption rampant within Massachusetts government. The fact that an appeals court ultimately reversed the convictions — on the grounds that the actions were “just patronage” — makes it worse, not better.
Nobody disputed the fact that dozens of utterly unqualified people were given important jobs in exchange for votes and campaign contributions. THAT is explicitly corrupt, and is all the more so for being legal because Democrats in Massachusetts have been doing it for so long.
One of our primary complaints about Donald Trump is the flagrant and pervasive corruption that he epitomizes. We weaken — to the point of hobbling — our fight against that aspect of his campaign by choosing the nominee who is most tarred by the appearance of corruption.
A famous aphorism among Germans is (roughly translated) “sometimes merely displaying the knives is the most effective means of torture”.
Mr. Biden did not have to sink to the level of the Trumpists. He only needed to show his “knives” — his ability to withhold vital military aid — and his intended target got the message.
Joe Biden knew that, and that’s why he proudly described the moment.
I stand by my assessment. Joe Biden could have and should have recused himself from EVERY formal action involving connections of his son. He knowingly chose not to do that.
I’ve never liked this attitude that says Dems can only criticize absolutely horrible behavior if we are perfect saints ourselves. This same attitude (wrongfully IMO) destroyed Al Franken’s political career in the context of much worse allegations of against Roy Moore.
@perfect saints:
There is a middle ground that you ignore.
The very fact that none of the other Democratic candidates have family members selling their influence to the highest bidder shows that one doesn’t need to be a perfect saint to avoid the morass that Joe Biden put himself in.
We’re not talking about Al Franken or anybody else. Al Franken was not the Vice President. Al Franken is not a candidate for president.
Joe Biden did not need to be a perfect saint. He needed to recuse himself if he was unable to persuade his son to decline the offer of a no-show job.
In a situation where there was some question about the President’s culpability — such as Watergate before the release of the tapes — it makes sense for a member of the jury to publicly maintain a position of wait-and-see. Every defendant deserves a fair trail, and that certainly includes the right to a jury that has not made up its mind about the outcome before the indictments are even presented (never mind evidence).
This is not that situation. Donald Trump has been committing impeachable offenses on-camera all week. There is no question that he is soliciting foreign governments for help in investigating a political rival — anybody who watched a news feed this week saw and heard him do that on the White House lawn. He solicited not just Ukraine, but China as well. Not just at a press gaggle, and not just on a phone call, but through a still unfolding pattern of formal orders to at least three agencies (State, Defense, and Intelligence). More is sure to follow.
So Mr. Trump is clearly guilty. The question is whether his jurors have the courage to actually say so.
It appears to me that Mr. Biden is again stuck in a time warp, applying Watergate-era sensitivities to today’s chaos. Mr. Nixon was never a Russian asset. The GOP of 1974 did not require Russian intervention to remain politically competitive. The GOP base of 1974 was not limited to racist, xenophobic, and well-armed White Supremacists itching for a chance to start shooting “liberals”.
If a murderer shot a victim on 5th avenue on network television, so that every viewer saw and heard the fatal shot and immediate death of the victim, it might be hard to find a neutral juror for a subsequent murder trial.
The murderer would still be guilty.
All about the carbon bubble. Hunter Biden’s job was in fossil foolishness. Trmp is all for fossil foolishness. Putin and MSB disseminate authoritarian nationalism around the world to keep the price up for fossil foolishness. And to make sure they get paid for their “stranded assets” (hello, nuclear industry) when it becomes obvious how much oil, gas, and coal we have to keep in the ground.
Sooner we understand this dynamic, the better off we will be.
Incidentally, if we have only a decade and change to turn this climate thing around, has anyone seen a day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year action schedule to reduce emissions and begin carbon drawdown from the sky? Just asking. Might be a good idea if anyone was really serious about that particular issue.
As for autocracy from the kakistocratic kleptocratic plutocrats, start making plans for what happens AFTER the House votes articles of impeachment. Be ready for McConnell to play games and for Trmp to walk. That is, unless, about 10 million or so people show up on the street ahead of the Senate trial. Repeatedly.
Trumpists have picture of Joe Biden hanging in their bathroom because there’s nothing that makes a traitor shit quicker than the sight of a true patriot! 🙂
Trumpists have a picture of Joe Biden hanging in their bathroom because there’s nothing that makes a traitor’s bowels move quicker than the sight of a true patriot! 🙂
“Ukraine plot shows Trump now a ‘Domestic Enemy’ to the Constitution.” Daniel Ellsberg