Trump Off the Rails on Impeachment

      President Trump is now conceding that the House of Representatives is all but certain to impeach him by Thanksgiving for the high crime of soliciting foreign assistance to benefit him in his bid for reelection next year. His inability to control or manipulate events has driven the distractible Trump to new heights of distraction, even to the point of adding to the articles of impeachment by publicly soliciting China's help on Thursday [Oct. 3] in digging up dirt on his political rival, former vice president Joe Biden, and Biden's global business-dealing son Hunter.
      The president's defense strategy appears to turn on how he feels any given day and, recently, he has not been feeling well at all. Trump was "as riled up as any time in his presidency," according to the New York Times's senior White House correspondent Peter Baker, when he called on China as the second foreign country that should investigate Hunter Biden's business dealings for unspecified wrongdoing.
      On Capitol Hill, Florida's Republican senator Marco Rubio, the former Trump rival turned Trump lapdog, had no better answer to Trump's latest high crime than to insist that he was not serious. China, apparently, agreed; Beijing responded to Trump's veiled threat to step up the trade war unless it bowed to his demand by saying that it would not interfere in the U.S. election.
      Meanwhile, the email traffic between administration officials in Washington and embassy personnel in Kyev confirmed what Trump had initially denied until eventually defending as completely proper. The text exchanges, as shown on cable news programs and in the pages of the New York Times and other newspapers, show that the White House was slow-walking President Volodymyr Zelensky's hoped-for White House meeting until he delivered on the asked-for investigation of Hunter Biden's role in the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma.
      With the former ambassador, Marie Yovonovitch, removed because she would not cooperate, it was left to the embassy's chief of mission, Bill Taylor, to try to make sense of the demands from Washington. "Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?" Taylor asked in a Sept. 1 text message. Eight days later, he put his objections into writing. "As I said on the phone," Taylor wrote in a Sept. 9 text, "I think it's crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign."
      It bears repeating that the risk of foreign influence on the new government was the very danger that led the Framers in 1789 to give Congress a method for removing the president. Only now, 230 years later, has the fear materialized. "We have never seen the president of the United States using his foreign policy power for his own political advantage," Mieke Eoyang, a former staff director for the House Intelligence Committee, remarked in a briefing sponsored by the progressive American Constitution Society (ACS).
      Trump continues to deny and to dismiss as unimportant Russia's documented interference in the 2016 election benefiting him by publicizing Hillary Clinton's emails and spreading cybersmears about her among targeted population groups and in targeted battleground states. In Moscow, the Russian president Vladimir Putin was pursuing this strategy eagerly, as one of several initiatives aimed at destabilizing Western democracies that he views as obstacles to Russia's rightful place in the world.
      Ukraine, on the other hand, had no interest in U.S. politics except its own sovereignty and transparency, but the emails before Trump's infamous July 25 telephone call with Zelensky make clear the pressure on him to bow to Trump. "I spike [sic] directly to Zelensky and gave him a full briefing," Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the European Union, wrote six days before the phone call. "He's got it."
      With the phone call concluded, the U.S. diplomats set about drafting the actual statement that Zelensky was to use in announcing the requested investigation. For Trump's lackeys, it was not enough that Ukraine had lost part of its territory to Russia; it also had to be turned into an actual client state for Trump to control.
      Trump's substantive defense to the looming charges against him consists mostly of confusion and deflection, according to Michael Gerhardt, the University of North Carolina law professor and author of Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know. Trump and House Republicans are insisting that House committees cannot conduct an impeachment inquiry without a formal House vote first. Not so, Gerhardt remarked in the ACS briefing. "The fact is that all the procedures are being properly followed," he said.
      In the meantime, Trump has hurled denunciations right and left. The still unidentified whistleblower is a spy in Trump's telling and perhaps deserves the punishment once reserved for spies, an apparent reference to execution. Trump is demanding the whistleblower's identity, in contravention of the law guaranteeing whistleblower confidentiality. As the law's main author, Iowa's senior Republican senator Charles Grassley broke GOP ranks over the issue. "We should always protect whistleblowers," Grassley said in a statement on Tuesday [Oct. 1].
      Judging from his conduct so far, Trump is all but certain to go even further off the rails as the House moves toward impeachment and the articles, however many there be, move toward trial in a Senate controlled by Trump-fearful Republicans. Trump is counting on division, just as he did in his campaign. "He's making it clear," MSNBC's Chris Matthews remarked on Hardball last week. "If he's going down, he's taking the country with him."