Monday, September 30, 2019

The Guessing Game - Updated

What will be on the cover of People this week? My guesses:

Archie Harrison: Cute pictures from the South Africa visit. Of course Harry and Meghan are there too
Chanel Miller: The Stanford sex crimes victim has a book coming out tomorrow
Princess Beatrice: The elder daughter of The Duke and Duchess of York, aka Andy and Fergie, is engaged
Justin Bieber and Hailey Baldwin: Another wedding
J Lo and A-Rod: Celebrated their engagement at the home of songwriter Carole Bayer Sager
Debbie Harry: Her memoir comes out tomorrow
Sandra Lee: She and NY governor Andrew Cuomo have broken up
Jessye Norman: The great soprano has died at age 74
Donald: Scandal is bubbling up around him. Two years ago, People published this:

Issue dated July 31, 2017



... and other than a small sidebar headline about Don Jr.'s divorce, there have been no Trumps on the cover since. No Melania, no Ivanka, no Tiffany. Would People do another Trump Scandal cover this week? It's possible.

Stories that appear on the new cover will be highlighted in green.

Update: See the new issue, featuring Tyler Perry, here.
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Felicity Huffman

Issue dated October 7, 2019: Felicity Huffman

After two "top right corner" headlines in the last two weeks, Felicity Huffman is the main cover story this time. Based on the teaser story at people.com, linked to above, the magazine didn't actually interview Huffman. The story quotes a source, as well as Huffman herself speaking in court. 

Last year at this time: Issue dated October 8, 2018

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Thursday, September 26, 2019

More, Part 2 - Updated

More interesting tweets:
























Richard Painter is a Law Professor and former chief White House ethics lawyer 2005-07.

And now a few words from Lindsey Graham:











And one more thing. Do you remember that outrageous scandal from the Obama administration?


Update on Thursday afternoon. This is interesting:


This is Sherman's Vanity Fair article in its entirety:

In public, Donald Trump’s allies are putting on a brave face, repeating talking points, mostly staying on message. But in private, there are few who believe that the allegations leveled by an intelligence agency whistle-blower that Trump abused American foreign policy to leverage Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden won’t result in considerable damage—if not the complete unraveling of his presidency. “I don’t see how they don’t impeach,” a former West Wing official told me today. “This could unwind very fast, and I mean in days,” a prominent Republican said.

Trump’s final bulwark is liable to be his first one: Fox News. Fox controls the flow of information—what facts are, whether allegations are to be believed—to huge swaths of his base. And Republican senators, who will ultimately decide whether the president remains in office, are in turn exquisitely sensitive to the opinions of Trump’s base. But even before the whistle-blower’s revelations, Fox was having something of a Trump identity crisis, and that bulwark has been wavering. In recent weeks, Trump has bashed Fox News on Twitter, taking particular issue lately with its polling, which, like other reputable polls, has shown the president under significant water. Meanwhile, Trump’s biggest booster seems to be having doubts of his own. This morning, Sean Hannity told friends the whistle-blower’s allegations are “really bad,” a person briefed on Hannity’s conversations told me. (Hannity did not respond to a request for comment). And according to four sources, Fox Corp CEO Lachlan Murdoch is already thinking about how to position the network for a post-Trump future. A person close to Lachlan told me that Fox News has been the highest rated cable network for seventeen years, and “the success has never depended on any one administration.” (A Fox Corp spokesperson declined to comment.)

Inside Fox News, tensions over Trump are becoming harder to contain as a long-running cold war between the network’s news and opinion sides turns hot. Fox has often taken a nothing-to-see-here approach to Trump scandals, but impeachment is a different animal. “It’s management bedlam,” a Fox staffer told me. “This massive thing happened, and no one knows how to cover it.” The schism was evident this week as a feud erupted between afternoon anchor Shepard Smith and prime-time host Tucker Carlson. It startedTuesday when Fox legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano told Smith on-air that Trump committed a “crime” by pressuring Ukraine’s president to get dirt on Biden. That night, Carlson brought on former Trump lawyer Joe diGenova, who called Napolitano a “fool” for claiming Trump broke the law. Yesterday, Smith lashed back, calling Carlson “repugnant” for not defending Napolitano on air. (Trump himself is said to turn off Fox at 3 p.m., when Shep Smith airs.) Seeking to quell the internecine strife before it carried into a third day, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and president Jay Wallace communicated to Smith this morning to stop attacking Carlson, a person briefed on the conversation said. “They said if he does it again, he’s off the air,” the source said. (Fox News spokesperson Irena Briganti denied that management had any direct conversation with Smith).

The ultimate referee of this fight will be Lachlan Murdoch. In recent months, Rupert’s oldest son has been holding strategy conversations with Fox executives and anchors about how Fox News should prepare for life after Trump. Among the powerful voices advising Lachlan that Fox should decisively break with the president is former House speaker Paul Ryan, who joined the Fox board in March. “Paul is embarrassed about Trump and now he has the power to do something about it,” an executive who’s spoken with Ryan told me. (Ryan did not return a call seeking comment.) But a person more sympathetic to Trump has told Lachlan that Fox should remain loyal to Trump’s supporters, even if the network has to break from the man. “We need to represent our viewers,” the source said. “Fox is about defending our viewers from the people who hate them. That’s where our power comes from. It’s not about Trump.”
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Wednesday, September 25, 2019

More - Updated

It's going to be a big news day, I'll add to this post whenever I see something that interests me. I'll start with this headline at CNN.com:

"Trump incredulous after his moves on transparency failed to stop Pelosi." The story starts with this:

President Donald Trump was incredulous Tuesday as he sat in Trump Tower and watched House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announce she was launching a formal impeachment inquiry against him, sources familiar with the moment say. Sitting in the same building where he launched his long shot presidential campaign four years ago, Trump said he couldn't believe it, he later told people.

He had felt confident after phoning Pelosi earlier that morning. The drive for impeachment in her caucus had ramped up amid reports he pushed the Ukrainian President to investigate Joe Biden, and Trump was hoping to head off a clash. He figured he could de-escalate tensions by speaking with her directly.

It was after that call that Trump made the decision to release an "unredacted" version of the transcript of his July call -- against the advice of aides such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who warned him it would set a risky precedent. Trump wanted to undercut the argument from Democrats that he acted inappropriately, he said, and felt he had nothing to hide. (Read the rest of the article here.)

Back in January, in a post about when Donald would be allowed to give his State of the Union address in the House chambers, I said this about Nancy Pelosi:

Donald isn't used to dealing with a woman who's smarter than he is, stronger than he is and savvier than he is. Right now she also appears to be more powerful than he is. Donald sees women as either sex partners or subordinates. The women he interacts with most are employed by him and/or dependent on him. Speaker Pelosi is neither. He's not her husband, he's not her boss and he's not her daddy. She's not afraid of him and she's not intimidated by him. She's exponentially better at her job than he is at his.

It's still true. You can read that post here. 

 Update #1. The White House has released a record of Donald's call with the president of Ukraine. How bad is it? Talking Points Memo titled their first story about it "As Bad As It Gets: Trump Ukraine Call Records Are Explosive." This is the article in its entirety: 

President Trump told the Ukrainian president to work with Attorney General Bill Barr on investigating debunked allegations around his political opponent Joe Biden, according to a White House record of a July 25 phone call between the two leaders.

The five-page record of the call has been at the center of a political firestorm over Trump’s – and his attorney Rudy Giuliani’s – efforts to pressure Ukraine into manufacturing political dirt on Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden. The Trump call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is the subject of whistleblower’s complaint from the intelligence community that has spurred House Democrats to launch an impeachment inquiry, posing a grave new threat the Trump presidency.

The White House’s version of the call appears to contain notes that constitute a “memorandum” of the telephone conversation between the two leaders.

Trump referenced “Rudy,” the memorandum shows, and asks Zelensky to “speak with him.”

Trump also references “a lot of talk about Biden’s son.” He goes on to tell Zelensky, the memorandum says, that “Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that.”

Trump goes on to say that “whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.”

In a Wednesday statement, Barr said that he only learned of the call “several weeks” after it took place, upon receiving a criminal referral from the Intelligence Community Inspector General. Barr denied having any communications with Ukraine, and also said that neither Trump nor Giuliani had directed him to work with Ukraine on the Biden issue, or any other.

Trump also disparaged the testimony of Special Counsel Robert Mueller before Congress the day before – July 24, urging Zelensky to help with an investigation of the origins of the Russia probe which, Trump purportedly said, “started with Ukraine.” He added that Zelensky should “find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine.”

“As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller,” Trump added.

“I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it,” Trump later told Zelensky, according to the record.

Zelensky replied that the chief prosecutor he then intended to appoint would be “100% my person.” The Ukrainian president added: “He or she will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue.”

Zelensky also referred to former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch on the White House’s version of the call, who stepped down after lobbying from Giuliani, saying that “it was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree with you 100%”

Zelensky later added to Trump that last time he was in the United States, he “stayed at the Trump Tower.”

Click here to see a pdf of the call summary. 

 Update #2. In the "no zealot like a convert" category, our friend The Mooch takes the prize: 



Tony Schwartz isn't a convert; he was Trump's first biographer and he's known the truth about Donald since the beginning. Here's his take, from yesterday;



This is the question I've been wondering about:


From political scientist Jonathan Bernstein:


Update #3. They really are incompetent:






If it was a secret ballot...




If anything is going to make Donald's head explode today, it's this: ("President Pence")


"They loathe Donald Trump..." An interesting comment from Joe Scarborough during his show this morning. Note that he was speaking before the call summary came out:

"Yesterday I heard in the afternoon after Nancy Pelosi’s speech, her people are already gaming this out, saying what the House is going to do, and then what the Senate was going to do and I understand that the Republicans blindly follow Donald Trump, I understand all of that but you can go back and you can look at Watergate, you can look at the Mueller Report. You see these investigations don’t always go the way the politicians or pundits planned. Nobody expected Watergate to end up where it did and here I go back to David Drucker’s story in Vanity Fair. We talked to him yesterday. And he uncovered a truth that we all know and that is Republicans on the Hill loathe, loathe, I can’t say it enough. They loathe Donald Trump personally, they blame him for the chaos that’s going on in Washington and stopping them from getting more things done. We don’t know what‘s going to happen do we? Maybe evidence comes out, we don’t know what happens when the levee breaks but that is a possibility. And the fact that nobody on the Hill is actually personally loyal to Donald Trump means we don’t know how any of this ends up."

On Monday David Drucker posted a story at Vanity Fair titled "Boom or Bust: How Republicans Are Surviving Life In The Trump Vortex;" I think that's what Joe is referring to. Read it here.

Along those same lines, this is from a story at the Washington Post posted late this morning, and yes, Mittens is still troubled:

Several Senate Republicans were stunned Wednesday and questioned the White House’s judgment after it released a rough transcript of President Trump’s call with the Ukraine president that showed Trump offering the help of the U.S. attorney general to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

One Senate Republican, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly, said the transcript’s release was a “huge mistake” that the GOP now has to confront, even as they argue that House Democrats are overreaching with their impeachment effort.

A top Senate GOP aide said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is expecting Wednesday’s closed-door lunch to be eventful and possibly tense as Republicans react to the transcript and debate their next step.

“It remains troubling in the extreme. It’s deeply troubling,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told reporters Wednesday, when asked about the transcript.

...While many Republicans continue to dismiss Democrats’ impeachment efforts, cracks have begun to emerge privately as GOP lawmakers have discussed Trump’s conduct and their party’s political standing — and those fault lines could foreshadow how Senate Republicans ultimately handle a trial, should the House impeach the president, according to several lawmakers and aides. (Read the article here.)
Update #4, (probably) the last update for tonight. An interesting thought from David Rothkopf. I've stated here before my believe that the only reason Mitt Romney got himself elected to the Senate in 2018 was so he'd be in position to step up if Donald flamed out. It's also interesting that Rothkopf thinks Pence doesn't have a chance; to be clear, I don't think so either, he's too closely tied to Donald:   

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Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Ukraine-gate, Part 2 - Updated

There's a lot going on today, obviously. I'm just going to post whatever catches my eye as we go forward. To start us off, a tweet from The Mooch:





A few other tweets from this afternoon:






Some info about how calls to heads of state usually work: 























A couple of comments about Pfeiffer's tweets. First, it's hard to believe the Trump White House ever executes this level of organization and discipline. Second, the transcript of the call, which Donald has said he'll release tomorrow, will almost certainly be edited within an inch of its life. To put it another way, if there was anything incriminating on it, I can't imagine Donald would allow it to be released unedited. 










Who's the happiest Republican in all the land tonight? Mike Pence. Donald either will or won't be removed from office, there's a lot that has to play out before this is over. Still, Pence's dream (and goal) is a lot closer to happening now. My guess is that over at the Naval Observatory, the VP is practically slobbering with joy; Lawrence O'Donnell's tweet from last November is aging nicely:










Finally, at least for now, there's always, always a tweet: 





Update on Wednesday afternoon. Did Donald throw Mike Pence under the bus?




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That Was Then, This Is Now

Remember this picture? It was taken at Buckingham Palace on June 3rd, the night of the big state dinner in London:

Tiffany Trump, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr.


Things look different today. All the kids, plus Kimberly Guilfoyle this time, are in New York for Dad's big speech to the United Nations. It doesn't look like they're having much fun:

 Image

Eric, Ivanka and Don Jr. in particular look seriously unhappy. (I'm not exactly sure how to interpret the look on Tiffany's face.) Could it be they're worried about Donald? His presidency, his re-election, his ability to form a coherent sentence? Probably.

Speaking of Donald's ability to speak, how about this, also from today:




Asking again: How does he sound to you? 
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Monday, September 23, 2019

The Guessing Game - Updated

What will be on the cover of People this week? My guesses:

The Emmys: The big show was last night, with some surprising winners
Alex Trebek: Has announced that his cancer is back and he's going through another round of chemotherapy
Cokie Roberts: The ABC reporter died of breast cancer at age 75
Alec Baldwin: He and his wife are expecting baby #5
Representative Joe Kennedy III:  Running for the Senate in Massachusetts
Harry & Meghan and/or their friend designer Misha Nonoo: Harry and Meghan were guests at Nonoo's wedding in Italy over the week-end. Now, with Archie in tow, they've begun their tour of South Africa. There are rumors Meghan is pregnant again, based on a slight tummy bump in her black and white dress:


Image result for Meghan in Cape Town
photo credit: Yahoo

Carson King: His "need money for beer" sign has now raised over $1 million for a children's hospital in Iowa. Read more here
Joe Giudice: His request to be released from ICE custody, in order to be with his family while he waits for a decision on his appeal, was denied
Britney Spears: Truthfully I'm not sure what's going on with her, but I've seen her name in the news lately

Stories that appear on the new cover will be highlighted in green.

Update on Tuesday afternoon. Hillary Clinton. People just posted an article about Hillary, titled "Hillary Clinton Says Donald Trump Is Moving Closer to Impeachment with Biden/Ukraine Scandal: 'We Are in a Crisis.'" Deep in the article it mentions that she and Chelsea have a book coming out soon, which presumably was the original reason for the interview. The book alone wouldn't rate a cover story but comments about impeachment might get Hillary a cover mention. You can read the article here.

Update #2: See the new cover, featuring Felicity Huffman, here.
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Sunday, September 22, 2019

Hitting The Road






Chris Jackson is a photographer for Getty Images, Simon Perry is a reporter for People magazine. They both focus almost full-time on the British royal family and today they posted almost identical pictures on their Instagram pages, in anticipation of Harry and Meghan's upcoming tour of South Africa. Details were posted September 6th on the official Instagram account of the Duke and Duchess:



View this post on Instagram
Today, we are excited to be able to announce details for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s upcoming tour to Africa! 🇿🇦🇧🇼🇦🇴🇲🇼 • In just two weeks, Their Royal Highnesses will embark on this official tour focusing on community, grassroots leadership, women’s and girls’ rights, mental health, HIV/AIDS and the environment. This programme has been many months in the making, and The Duke and Duchess are eager to focus their energies on the great work being done in Southern Africa. From meeting with Archbishop Desmond Tutu to joining ‘Waves for Change’ on Monwabisi Beach, the South Africa programme will be educational and inspiring. The Duke is especially proud to continue the legacy left by his mother with her work in Angola as he joins Halo Trust again in an effort to rid the world of landmines. HRH will also travel to Malawi where he will check in on the British Army’s partnership with African Parks and will be working on the ground supporting local communities. The Duke is particularly proud to be able to deliver an exciting new initiative, a Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy three-country partnership which he designed and consulted with Governments in Namibia, Botswana and Angola to protect forest and wildlife corridors around the Okavango Delta. The Duchess will be working with local organisations to promote women and girls’ health and education, entrepreneurship and leadership. With such a textured culture and history, Their Royal Highnesses are grateful for the opportunity to connect with those on the ground in Southern Africa and to be inspired by the work being done and learn how they can be better supported. As President and Vice President of The Queens Commonwealth Trust and The Duke’s role as Commonwealth Youth Ambassador, The Duke and Duchess cannot wait to meet with young leaders mobilising change and adding to the beauty of these Commonwealth countries 🇿🇦🇧🇼🇦🇴🇲🇼 • “We look forward to seeing you soon!” • Photo ©️ PA images / Tim Graham - Getty Images / @Sentebale /@AfricanParksNetwork / @YouthAlert
A post shared by The Duke and Duchess of Sussex (@sussexroyal) on
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This Day In History, 1999: The Debut Of The West Wing





















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Saturday, September 21, 2019

This Day In History, 1996: JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette's Wedding


photo credit: Denis Reggie

Some random thoughts and pictures:

An article at InStyle has some details about the planning of the secret wedding, from Steve Gillon's book titled "'America's Reluctant Prince." Read it here.

The Greyfield Inn, the only hotel on Cumberland Island, is where everyone stayed and where the rehearsal dinner and reception took place:



In July, at the time of the 20th anniversary of the plane crash, the TLC network had a special about the wedding, which included the menu for the reception dinner:

Fresh Poached Artichokes with a Balsamic Vinaigrette

 Free-range Capons with a Wild Mushroom Demi-glace

 Roast Irish Potatoes with Rosemary

 Patty Pan Squash with Fresh Herbs

 John's friend Billy Noonan licensed some home videos from the wedding to TLC for the special, as shown during this Today Show story:



 This is what the church looks like today, along with other scenery on Cumberland Island:

Clockwise from left: the First African Baptist Church, where John F. Kennedy Jr. married Carolyn Bessette, was founded in 1893 by former slaves; sunset over a corner of Cumberland Island, which is preserved and protected as a National Seashore; behind the Dungeness ruins.
photo credit: Alainna Lexie Beddie, from a 2017 story at the New York Times; read it here.

Blog readers know I'm fascinated by John Jr. and Carolyn; 23 years after their wedding and 20 years after their deaths, I wonder what they would be doing today.
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Ukraine-gate? - Updated

Are we calling it Ukraine-gate yet? Trouble is brewing for Donald concerning a phone call with the president of Ukraine. An article at the Washington Post, titled "How Trump and Giuliani pressured Ukraine to investigate the president’s rivals," starts with this:

When President Trump spoke on the telephone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in late July, the Ukrainians had a lot at stake. They were waiting on millions in stalled military aid from the United States, and Zelensky was seeking a high-priority White House meeting with Trump.

Trump told his Ukrainian counterpart that his country could improve its image if it completed corruption cases that have “inhibited the interaction between Ukraine and the USA,” according to a readout of the call released by Kiev.

What neither government said publicly at the time was that Trump went even further — specifically pressing Ukraine’s president to reopen a corruption investigation involving former vice president Joe Biden’s son, according to two people familiar with the call, which is now the subject of an explosive whistleblower complaint. (Read the article here.) 

How bad is it? This is some of what I'm seeing in my Twitter feed: 










This is Nichols' article in its entirety: 

The president of the United States reportedly sought the help of a foreign government against an American citizen who might challenge him for his office. This is the single most important revelation in a scoop by The Wall Street Journal, and if it is true, then President Donald Trump should be impeached and removed from office immediately.

Until now, there was room for reasonable disagreement over impeachment as both a matter of politics and a matter of tactics. The Mueller report revealed despicably unpatriotic behavior by Trump and his minions, but it did not trigger a political judgment with a majority of Americans that it warranted impeachment. The Democrats, for their part, remained unwilling to risk their new majority in Congress on a move destined to fail in a Republican-controlled Senate.

Now, however, we face an entirely new situation. In a call to the new president of Ukraine, Trump reportedly attempted to pressure the leader of a sovereign state into conducting an investigation—a witch hunt, one might call it—of a U.S. citizen, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden.

As the Ukrainian Interior Ministry official Anton Gerashchenko told the Daily Beast when asked about the president’s apparent requests, “Clearly, Trump is now looking for kompromat to discredit his opponent Biden, to take revenge for his friend Paul Manafort, who is serving seven years in prison.”

Clearly.

If this in itself is not impeachable, then the concept has no meaning. Trump’s grubby commandeering of the presidency’s fearsome and nearly uncheckable powers in foreign policy for his own ends is a gross abuse of power and an affront both to our constitutional order and to the integrity of our elections.

The story may even be worse than we know. If Trump tried to use military aid to Ukraine as leverage, as reporters are now investigating, then he held Ukrainian and American security hostage to his political vendettas. It means nothing to say that no such deal was reached; the important point is that Trump abused his position in the Oval Office.

In this matter, we need not rely on a newspaper account, nor even on the complaint, so far unseen, of a whistle-blower. Instead, we have a sweaty, panicked admission on national television by Trump’s bizarre homunculus, Rudy Giuliani, that he did in fact seek such an investigation on Trump’s behalf. Giuliani later again confirmed Trump’s role, tweeting that a “President telling a Pres-elect of a well known corrupt country he better investigate corruption that affects US is doing his job.”

Let us try, as we always find ourselves doing in the age of Trump, to think about how Americans might react if this happened in any other administration. Imagine, for example, if Bill Clinton had called his friend, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, in 1996, and asked him to investigate Bob Dole. Or if George W. Bush had called, say, President Vicente Fox of Mexico in 2004 and asked him—indeed, asked him eight times, according to The Wall Street Journal—to open a case against John Kerry. Clinton, of course, was eventually impeached for far less than that. Is there any doubt that either man would have been put on trial in the Senate, and likely chased from office?

The Republicans, predictably, have decided to choose their party over their country, and the damage control and lying have begun. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, for one, has already floated the reliable “deep-state attack” nonsense that will play well on Fox and other conservative outlets. And while Giuliani did Trump no favors with his incoherent ranting on CNN, he did manage to hammer away at the idea that Biden, and not Trump, tried to shake down the Ukrainians while he was vice president.

The problem for Giuliani, the Republicans, and the president himself, however, is that Biden and his actions are now irrelevant to the offenses committed by Trump. The accusations against Joe Biden are false, as we know from multiple fact checks and from the Ukrainians themselves (which is why I won’t deign to repeat them here). But even to argue over this fable about Biden is to miss the point, because it changes nothing about Trump’s attempts to enmesh Biden in a foreign investigation for Trump’s own purposes.

There is no spin, no deflection, no alternative theory of the case that can get around the central fact that President Trump reportedly attempted to use his office for his own gain, and that he put the foreign policy and the national security of the United States at risk while doing so. He ignored his duty as the commander in chief by intentionally trying to place an American citizen in jeopardy with a foreign government. He abandoned his obligations to the Constitution by elevating his own interests over the national interest. By comparison, Watergate was a complicated judgment call.

In a better time and in a better country, Republicans would now join with Democrats and press for Trump’s impeachment. This won’t happen, of course; even many of Biden’s competitors for the presidency seem to be keeping their distance from this mess, perhaps in the hope that Biden and Trump will engage in a kind of mutually assured political destruction. (Elizabeth Warren, for one, renewed her call for impeachment—but without mentioning Biden.) This is to their shame. The Democratic candidates should now unite around a call for an impeachment investigation, not for Biden’s sake, but to protect the sanctity of our elections from a predatory president who has made it clear he will stop at nothing to stay in the White House.

I am speaking only for myself as an American citizen. I believe in our Constitution, and therefore I must accept that Donald Trump is the president and the commander in chief until the Congress or the people of the United States say otherwise. But if this kind of dangerous, unhinged hijacking of the powers of the presidency is not enough for either the citizens or their elected leaders to demand Trump’s removal, then we no longer have an accountable executive branch, and we might as well just admit that we have chosen to elect a monarch and be done with the illusion of constitutional order in the United States.

In other Trump news, an Australian reporter visiting our country is "stunned" at Donald's incoherence. Lenore Taylor is the editor of Guardian Australia; in an article titled "As a foreign reporter visiting the U.S. I was stunned by Trump's press conference," and subtitled "Despite being subjected to a daily diet of Trump headlines, I was unprepared for the president's alarming incoherence," she has this to say about Donald's inability to form a coherent sentence: 

As a regular news reader I thought I was across the eccentricities of the US president. Most mornings in Australia begin with news from America – the bid to buy Greenland, adjustments to a weather map hand-drawn with a Sharpie or another self-aggrandising tweet. Our headlines and news bulletins, like headlines and news bulletins everywhere, are full of Trump.

As a political reporter for most of the last 30 years I have also endured many long and rambling political press conferences with Australian prime ministers and world leaders.

But watching a full presidential Trump press conference while visiting the US this week I realised how much the reporting of Trump necessarily edits and parses his words, to force it into sequential paragraphs or impose meaning where it is difficult to detect.

The press conference I tuned into by chance from my New York hotel room was held in Otay Mesa, California, and concerned a renovated section of the wall on the Mexican border.

I joined as the president was explaining at length how powerful the concrete was. Very powerful, it turns out. It was unlike any wall ever built, incorporating the most advanced “concrete technology”. It was so exceptional that would-be wall-builders from three unnamed countries had visited to learn from it.

There were inner tubes in the wall that were also filled with concrete, poured in via funnels, and also “rebars” so the wall would withstand anyone attempting to cut through it with a blowtorch.

The wall went very deep and could not be burrowed under. Prototypes had been tested by 20 “world-class mountain climbers – That’s all they do, they love to climb mountains”, who had been unable to scale it.

It was also “wired, so that we will know if somebody is trying to break through”, although one of the attending officials declined a presidential invitation to discuss this wiring further, saying, “Sir, there could be some merit in not discussing it”, which the president said was a “very good answer”.

The wall was “amazing”, “world class”, “virtually impenetrable” and also “a good, strong rust colour” that could later be painted. It was designed to absorb heat, so it was “hot enough to fry an egg on”. There were no eggs to hand, but the president did sign his name on it and spoke for so long the TV feed eventually cut away, promising to return if news was ever made.

He did, at one point, concede that would-be immigrants, unable to scale, burrow, blow torch or risk being burned, could always walk around the incomplete structure, but that would require them walking a long way. This seemed to me to be an important point, but the monologue quickly returned to the concrete.

In writing about this not-especially-important or unusual press conference I’ve run into what US reporters must encounter every day. I’ve edited skittering, half-finished sentences to present them in some kind of consequential order and repeated remarks that made little sense.

In most circumstances, presenting information in as intelligible a form as possible is what we are trained for. But the shock I felt hearing half an hour of unfiltered meanderings from the president of the United States made me wonder whether the editing does our readers a disservice.

I’ve read so many stories about his bluster and boasting and ill-founded attacks, I’ve listened to speeches and hours of analysis, and yet I was still taken back by just how disjointed and meandering the unedited president could sound. Here he was trying to land the message that he had delivered at least something towards one of his biggest campaign promises and sounding like a construction manager with some long-winded and badly improvised sales lines.

I’d understood the dilemma of normalising Trump’s ideas and policies – the racism, misogyny and demonisation of the free press. But watching just one press conference from Otay Mesa helped me understand how the process of reporting about this president can mask and normalise his full and alarming incoherence.
Our Election Day is 408 days away. Will Donald still be in office on November 3, 2020? Unfortunately the answer is "probably." Will he be voted out of office by appalled American voters? Lord I hope so. 

In the meantime, consider this: In August, 1974, it was a tape recording of a specific conversation that turned the tide of the Watergate scandal and made Richard Nixon's removal from office a virtual certainty; he resigned before that could happen. If there's a recording of Donald's conversation with the president of Ukraine, and presumably there is, could it have the same effect on Donald's career? Possibly.


Update on Sunday afternoon. A little historical tidbit from Rick Wilson:

Update #2. Mittens weighs in:




Update #3 on Monday morning. As I see interesting comments related to 
the Ukraine story, I'll add them to this post. So far I haven't seen anyone
else using the term Ukraine-gate, but references to Watergate, or, more
broadly, to the Watergate era, are increasing.   



Update #4. More from Mitt Romney:





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