A Watergate Moment

The headline for Jonathan Bernstein's latest column, posted this morning (Here We Have It. The Trump Impeachment Smoking Gun,) doesn't precisely match the point he actually makes in the column. (Headlines are almost always written by an editor or someone else in the organization.) He only notes the "close parallels" to Nixon's Smoking Gun tape. He also points out that it wasn't the tape that doomed Nixon, it was what it revealed about his behavior, and that Donald has done something similar. This is the column in its entirety: 

President Donald Trump’s team opened its impeachment-trial defense in the Senate on Saturday morning. I was wrong about how the president’s lawyers would go about the job. I had suspected that they would use a tantrum to rally Republicans to their side, but it turned out that Republican Senators had their tantrum late Friday night when they chose to be outraged that the lead House impeachment manager, Representative Adam Schiff of California, referred to a (somewhat thinly sourced) news report that someone at the White House had threatened that Trump would have the “head on a pike” of any Republican who opposed him.

Trump’s lawyers began with a misstep, rehashing their flimsy claim that there’s some kind of significance to the fact that Schiff paraphrased, instead of directly quoting, the words Trump used in the July 25 phone call in which he pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to participate in a smear of a leading Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.

But they didn’t rely on emotion in their presentation. Instead, they did what defense attorneys do. They floated alternative interpretations of the evidence the House managers, serving as prosecutors in the Senate trial, had presented in support of the articles of impeachment accusing Trump of abusing his power by trying to coerce that country’s interference on his behalf in his 2020 re-election effort. They pointed out that some of the witnesses who testified on the House side were not entirely reliable on some questions. And they added a bunch of mostly irrelevant points, such as the administration’s overall support for Ukraine (which in fact only makes Trump’s decisions to pause congressionally approved military aid and refuse to schedule an Oval Office meeting with Zelenskiy harder to understand as anything but elements of a pressure campaign) and the fact that previous presidents had also put foreign aid on hold (which no one denies, but the question is why it happened this time).

I’m not sure I’d call the first few hours of their presentation strong, but then again if they are constrained by their client to pretend that the Zelenskiy call was “perfect,” they have a difficult hand to play. It could have been worse.

And then, Sunday night, it fell apart. The New York Times reported that former National Security Adviser John Bolton has written in his upcoming book that Trump made explicit the quid pro quo that his lawyers are denying: that Trump told him directly that he wanted to keep the military aid frozen until the Ukrainian government agreed to help with investigations of Democrats. Not only that, but apparently the White House has had Bolton’s manuscript all month. Trump’s team knew this was coming.

While I certainly don’t expect the president’s support in Congress to collapse, it’s impossible not to see close parallels to the “smoking gun” tape that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1974. That tape, proving that Nixon ordered his staff to have the Central Intelligence Agency block the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s inquiry into the Watergate scandal and released to Congress and the public after the House Judiciary Committee had passed articles of impeachment, was so devastating for Nixon not so much because it was proof of his crimes; plenty of proof of plenty of crimes had long since been placed in the record. Instead, it became the moment when conservative Republicans realized that Nixon had deliberately set them up with false arguments even though Nixon knew that the evidence, if released, would undermine those arguments and make them look like liars and fools.

That is exactly what appears to have happened with the Bolton book. Trump knew that Bolton’s testimony and supporting notes, if they ever surfaced, would undermine the claims of his supporters. In some ways, it’s not quite as strong as Nixon’s smoking gun, since there’s no tape (as far as we know!) furnishing absolute proof of what Trump said to Bolton. But in some ways, it’s worse. Nixon knew what was on the tapes, but until the Supreme Court ruled against him he might at least have hoped that he could keep them secret. Apparently in the Trump case, at least some people in the White House have known for weeks that Bolton was going to release this book, and yet they still encouraged their allies to say things that were about to be shown to be false.

So far, it appears that Republican politicians would rather look like liars and fools — following ever-less-plausible White House lines, perhaps hoping that no one notices — than dare to oppose Trump and his still-loyal allies in the Republican-aligned media. Maybe they’ll all stay on message, even after this episode. Some of them, I’m sure, are either such blind partisans or so far inside the conservative information feedback loop that they may not even notice. But I have to believe that, whatever they do about it, a lot of Republican politicians are feeling more uncomfortable than ever.

Lawlessness

A longer than usual post from political scientist Jonathan Bernstein, writing at Bloomberg. It was published yesterday morning at 7.00 a.m.:

Title: The Unspoken Charge That Should Doom Trump: Lawlessness

Subtitle: Senators are entitled to render their judgment based on more than the specific impeachment case that the House put before them.

For three days, the House managers serving as prosecutors in the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump set out the details of his effort to strong-arm Ukraine into aiding his 2020 re-election, and then argued that those details constitute reason to remove him from office. They made a strong case. Using the power of the presidency to push a foreign power to smear a political opponent is an abuse of that power, a “high crime and misdemeanor” in the constitutional phrase setting forth the standard for removal.

What of the case made by law professor Josh Blackman in the New York Times on Thursday: that presidents often pursue policies in hopes of improving their political prospects? It is true, of course, that presidents consider domestic politics, including electoral politics, in everything they do. There’s nothing wrong with that. Presidents should act to increase their influence, and that includes taking actions with their professional reputation and personal popularity in mind.

So what’s different about Ukraine?

For one thing, as Representative Adam Schiff and the other House managers explained, Trump’s actions weren’t taken with politics as one consideration. They were taken, as Schiff said, with electoral concerns as the primary goal.

But that’s not enough to make it impeachable. Trump ordered a hold on congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine last summer, according to high-ranking officials who testified in the House impeachment investigation, as the president and his allies were ratcheting up the pressure on the Ukrainian government to announce a criminal investigation of a leading Democratic presidential candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden, along with another investigation into a bizarre, evidence-free theory about Ukraine and the 2016 election.

The aid freeze wasn’t part of a legitimate reconsideration of U.S. policy towards Ukraine, which Trump would have been free to initiate. Instead, it was an effort to undermine the consensus plan to support Ukraine as he squeezed that country’s government to help him get re-elected. The president certainly has the right to change his policies and to work to get the rest of the government to go along. It’s much less legitimate to attempt to subvert the official policy. And given that it appears the freeze on aid to Ukraine was illegal, Trump’s scheme wasn’t legitimate at all.

Blackman’s analysis is also wrong because it matters how a president uses policy for political advantage. Trump is accused of soliciting foreign election interference! Unlike maneuvering to get a Supreme Court justice to resign, or even deploying troops, Trump tried to get a foreign nation to influence an election. That’s not just a likely violation of U.S. law; it’s contrary to his oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

So: Could a president legitimately base Cuba policy in part to win the support of a key group of voters in a swing state? Absolutely. Even if national security experts think the resulting policy would be a bad one. But could a president base Ukraine policy on whether or not the Ukrainian government gets involved in U.S. domestic politics? No. Because that involves something which is itself both illegal and a violation of the president’s oath of office. It is, indeed, an abuse of power — the use of his formal powers to do something illegal and unconstitutional.

The truth is, however, that for all of the strength of the House managers’ case, what really clinches it is something they didn’t say, and which isn’t part of the two articles of impeachment that the Senate is considering: Trump’s overall lawlessness.

The articles make only a glancing mention of Trump’s obstruction of justice, as laid out in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. They don’t say that Trump is probably violating the Constitution’s emoluments clauses when foreign and domestic governments spend money at his hotels and resorts. They say nothing about his threats against the media or his threats to prosecute political opponents. If impeachment was purely a legal matter, those things would therefore be irrelevant and jurors would be directed to ignore them.

Impeachment isn’t a judicial procedure. U.S. senators are not mere jurors. Impeachment and removal or acquittal is a political act, even when expressed in judicial language. I don’t mean “political” here only in terms of elections and ordinary partisanship, although those are necessarily part of it, but as the broader idea of politics as the way a polity collectively governs itself. As political scientist Julia Azari has written: “There is no nonpartisan, apolitical mechanism to evaluate abuses of power and remove a president from office. Our Constitution places this responsibility with the people’s elected representatives (and senators, to be precise).” And that’s because the framers thought that politics at its best was very much a good thing — that neither elites who were not ultimately responsible to the people nor any kind of automatic formula was as good as purposeful self-government.

Therefore, it is appropriate that members of the House take into account what they know about the president’s fitness for office and his compliance with his oath of office when deciding whether to impeach or not. Senators can — and should — take all of that into account when deciding whether to vote to remove or acquit.

To be clear: That doesn’t mean that senators should vote based on whether they like the president or not. Nor should they vote to remove him based on ordinary policy differences, such as disagreements over taxation or abortion or gun control, or to leave him in office because they agree with his positions on such things. They should, indeed, resist their natural urge to vote based on their strongly held policy ideas.

If impeachment and conviction should not rest only on the specific articles, why bother having any specific articles of impeachment at all? One reason is that it’s traditional to do so, although note that in the case of the first presidential impeachment trial, of Andrew Johnson in 1868, the House impeached first and drew up the articles later. But it’s a good idea anyway, because it grounds the debate in specific actions. And the need for concrete articles based on particular episodes is a healthy practice in that it probably deters the House majority from simply impeaching presidents they don’t like or have merely ordinary differences with. Just as it is probably healthy that impeachment in practice has become a political procedure expressed in judicial language, by custom if not by constitutional mandate. That, too, deters removing the president merely for policy or partisan differences.

And so while Democrats did talk on the Senate floor about Trump’s threat to American democracy given his invitation to other nations to interfere with U.S. elections, they did not talk about Trump’s general lawlessness. The closest Democrats have gotten to that larger idea is to point out that Trump’s various public statements amount to claims that he will repeat this particular offense again — that he asked Russia for help during the 2016 campaign, pressured Ukraine for help in 2019, and publicly asked China for help when the Ukraine scheme went public.

But all the senators know that there is more to it than even that — that the president has repeatedly displayed his willingness to flout the law in a variety of serious ways. And they’re entitled to take that knowledge of his unfitness for office into account when deciding what to do about the two accusations before them. (This is the column in its entirety.) 

The Guessing Game - Updated

With Christmas on Wednesday, the new issue of People will probably be published early. What will be on the cover? My guesses:

Donald Trump: The third president to be impeached. So far, the only cover story about Donald during his presidency was in July, 2017 when the Russia scandal started to heat up:

Issue dated July 31, 2017


Will the first issue of 2020 feature a picture of Donald and a big headline that says "Impeached!" Maybe.

Other possibilities:

Teresa and Joe Giudice: The reality couple has separated
JK Rowling: Controversy over her support for transphobic comments
Channing Tatum and Jessie J: They broke up
Prince Philip: Hospitalized on Friday Dec 20, he's still there as I'm writing on Sunday. In other royal news, Harry and Meghan are spending the holidays in Canada, and the Queen, Princes Charles, William and George posed for a cute picture. (See it here.) 
Peter Weber: His season of The Bachelor starts January 6
Camille Schrier: The new Miss America is a scientist who is pursuing a Doctor of Pharmacy degree #SmartWomen
Hillary Duff: Married
Eddie Murphy: Returned to Saturday Night Live after 35 years
Emanuel Ungaro: The French fashion designed died at age 86

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

Update: Click here to see the new cover, dated January 6, 2020 and featuring Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox and Lisa Kudrow. You'll also see the January 13 cover, which is the annual Half Their Size issue. I didn't do a Guessing Game post for that one.

More About Donald's Letter

The New York Times just posted an article titled "Trump Wanted to Get Something Off His Chest, and in His Letter to Pelosi He Did," and subtitled "The letter was a diatribe that played loose with facts and sometimes disregarded them outright. A former Clinton aide called it a reflection of the president's 'id'":

WASHINGTON — The letter read like a Twitter tirade published on White House stationery. The words ran together with the cadence of a Trump rally script, just before the president veers from the teleprompter. The accusations, untruths and wayward exclamation points piled up by the paragraph.

“You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!” President Trump wrote in the letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday. “By proceeding with your invalid impeachment, you are violating your oaths of office, you are breaking your allegiance to the Constitution, and you are declaring open war on American Democracy.”

Five and a half pages long, signed in Sharpie and sent the afternoon before the House of Representatives was due to impeach him for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, the letter officially underscored — for the “permanent and indelible record” — how angry he had become over the prospect of becoming only the third president in history to have this happen to him.

Multiple aides said on Tuesday that the president wanted the letter to be written because he wanted to get some things off his chest. By letter’s end, he seemed to have gotten rid of all of them.

Extensive in its grievances and laced with different words for what he perceives the House is about to do to him and what its reason is for doing it — such as “assault,” “destruction” and “derangement” — the letter was a rambling diatribe that played loose with facts, sometimes disregarding them outright.

As Mr. Trump laid out a case for his belief that the Democrats have been engaged in an unlawful crusade to end his presidency, he repeated his erroneous contention that a “so-called whistle-blower” had “started this entire hoax with a false report of the phone call that bears no relationship to the actual phone call that was made.”

Even his historical analogies were problematic. Comparing impeachment to the Salem witch trials, Mr. Trump claimed that the Massachusetts women accused of witchcraft in the 1690s were treated to “more due process” than he was afforded during the inquiry. (Definitely not true.)

In an impeachment inquiry marked by reams of emphatic, eloquent and often emotional testimonies written by lawyers, Foreign Service officers and Purple Heart recipients, Mr. Trump’s letter stands out for how much it sounds like an unvarnished version of its signer: off the cuff, angry and ready to make an expletive-laden case against impeachment.

The White House has tried in recent days to focus on Mr. Trump’s accomplishments as president, but he framed his record in the context of his own victimhood.

“There are not many people who could have taken the punishment inflicted during this period of time, and yet done so much for the success of America and its citizens,” Mr. Trump wrote.

Some of the president’s closest advisers were involved in drafting the letter, but they did not include Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel who will play a large role in a Senate trial.

Instead, Eric Ueland, the director of the Office of Legislative Affairs, led the process, with input from Stephen Miller, the president’s top policy adviser, who often scripts many of Mr. Trump’s public remarks. Michael Williams, an adviser to Mick Mulvaney, the president’s acting chief of staff, also weighed in, and Mr. Ueland’s draft was framed over the last few days.

Former presidential advisers said documents like these were always a reflection of the person in charge. To them it seemed clear that, on the eve of impeachment, Mr. Trump was interested in speaking only to his base.

“There just doesn’t seem to be a lot of strategy,” said David Litt, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama. “Nothing here suggests that he’s trying to talk to someone who is trying to make up his or her mind” on impeachment.

Michael Waldman, who served as a policy aide and speechwriter to President Bill Clinton during his impeachment, called the letter “a six-page screech” and said it was a representation of Mr. Trump’s “id.”

“Typically a president’s words are weighed very carefully, especially at a moment of constitutional significance,” Mr. Waldman said. “This just seemed to be a chance to change the news stories for a few hours and get it off his chest.”

On the other side of a sharply partisan lens that has divided Washington, Mr. Trump’s Republican allies in Congress felt differently. Representative Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania called the letter “very important” and urged his fellow Pennsylvanians to read it.

“It is a straightforward summary that provides an account of the unfair procedures by Democrat leadership, and the failure to substantiate any impeachable offense,” Mr. Meuser wrote. “This letter marks a historic night — the eve of the Democrats’ vote to undermine the American election process.”

The president made clear whom he blamed for it — Ms. Pelosi. He even belittled her for having said she prayed for him, “when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense.”

“It is a terrible thing you are doing,” Mr. Trump wrote, “but you will have to live with it, not I!” (This is the article in its entirety.)

Donald Is Losing It - Updated

If things go according to plan, tomorrow Donald Trump will become only the third president to be impeached. (Who were the others? Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. Richard Nixon came close in 1974, but he resigned before the House could impeach him.) In spite of the fact that he will almost certainly not be removed from office by the Senate, impeachment is a bad look for any president and there's no question that Donald really, really doesn't want to join that particular club. In a last-minute attempt to change the course of history, Donald sent a strange, unhinged, frankly ridiculous letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi today.

When she received the letter, the Speaker realized for the first time how hurtful the impeachment process has been for Donald and immediately moved to shut the whole thing down. After all, keeping Donald happy is her ultimate mission in life.

Just kidding.

Back in January, the Speaker and the President had a power struggle over when he could give his State of the Union speech in the House chambers. This is what I said about Nancy Pelosi at the time:

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. (Read the entire post here.)

Click the link below to read the letter:

NEW: Letter from Trump to Pelosi re: impeachment https://t.co/2L3JxcVGT0 pic.twitter.com/YC11eUIsD2

— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) December 17, 2019

This is Talking Points Memo's take on it:

In what reads as a six-page amalgamation of his go-to impeachment tweets, President Donald Trump sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) a lengthy screed to preserve his thoughts about impeachment in the annals of history.

“You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!” he railed, accusing Democrats of being out to get him from the moment of his inauguration.

He called his conversation with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky “perfect,” as he has countless times before, and cited the final electoral vote count from the 2016 election, which he has also referenced ad nauseam.

He also brought up the Mueller report, claiming that Pelosi “completely failed” since there was “nothing to find.”

The letter is peppered with unorthodox capitalization and scattered exclamation points, much in the style of his usual tweets.

As he concluded the letter with his typical marker scrawl, he intoned that he wrote the letter so that people understand the situation in 100 years and ensure that it “can never happen to another President again.”

The letter comes somewhat late in the game for the House side of the proceedings, as the full chamber is expected to vote on the articles of impeachment on Wednesday. After that, they’ll be handed over to the Senate where the trial will be conducted. (This is the article in its entirety.)

Philip Bump at the Washington Post points out that Nearly every thought he articulated over the course of six very Trumpian pages already exists on a server maintained by Twitter, Inc. Every point he makes is one that’s appeared before, in 280 characters on his favorite social media website. (Read more here.)

Twitter user The Hoarse Whisperer provides some context:

Umm. This is the most nutbag communication ever put to paper by a United States president.

This is the “Loco Lawn Sprinkler” of a severe narcissist absolutely untethered from emotional regulation as an unavoidable public shaming looms. https://t.co/kGj0vUZ0Lq

— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) December 17, 2019

The sign-off tells the entire story.

Trump knows that he is 24 hours away from infamy. He is on the train tracks of history with the locomotive of impeachment bearing down.

This letter is so very Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

My lord, they’ll put this in text books. pic.twitter.com/puppUrEyDk

— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) December 17, 2019

The most emotionally out-of-control time for a narcissist isn’t when they’re being publicly shamed or just after.

It’s when they know the public shaming is coming and they can’t do anything to stop it.

It feels like the last walk toward a firing squad to them. Excruciating.

— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) December 17, 2019

Trump, like all narcissists, has no internal life. There is nothing inside.

His entire existence is dedicated to building a fragile, porcelain facade of what he imagines other people will admire, respect and adore.

Seeing a hammer swinging down is absolutely crushing.

— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) December 17, 2019

Click here to read more about the emptiness of Donald's soul. 

Barring his handlers keeping him away from his phone, expect an absolutely unhinged barrage of nutbaggery over the next 24 hours...

...right up until the House votes to formally impeach.

These next 24 hours will be his most miserable as president.

Affix thy helmet.

— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) December 17, 2019

Because of Trump’s false swagger and bravado, people underestimate how emotionally devastating impeachment is to his fragile, eggshell ego.

A public shaming is like being burned at the stake to a narcissist.

Trump is writhing.

And there is no escaping this one.

— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) December 17, 2019

There is no particular danger to us in this meltdown. It’s entirely egocentric. It is akin to an overtired toddler utterly unable to regulate themselves.

While Trump has the power to do great damage, this particular moment is just a toddler breaking their own toys.

— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) December 17, 2019

Tomorrow's going to be an interesting day.

Update: The Washington Post's head fact-checker weighs in:

Re-reading this astonishing letter, it seems clear that all Trump appears to know about Biden and Ukraine is the surface-level information he gleamed from Biden's CFR clip and Fox News bits. Too many things are wrong in the letter to suggest otherwise. ...

— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) December 17, 2019

It was not $1 billion in U.S. aid. It was a $1 billion loan guarantee. A big difference a president should understand.

— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) December 17, 2019

The prosecutor was not fired for digging into Burisma. The IMF, Euros and US wanted Slotkin out precisely because he was not investigating corruption. Biden was carrying out U.S. policy objectives.

— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) December 17, 2019

Biden did not say the firing "looked bad". He said his son taking such a high profile job at the same time "may have looked bad" but there was nothing illegal about it.

— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) December 17, 2019

Trump without irony quotes from the conversation that he told Zelensky "our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it." This a Russian-fueled fantasy that apparently the president has swallowed hook line and sinker.

— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) December 17, 2019

... and Politico calls the letter a "stream of consciousness" diatribe:

Crafted more like one of his signature tweetstorms than a legal document, the letter was written “for the purpose of history and to put my thoughts on a permanent and indelible record,” according to the president. Replete with grammatical errors, odd capitalizations and language rarely seen in official White House documents, it castigates Pelosi for “declaring open war on American democracy” and “offending Americans of faith” in what Trump called an “election-nullification scheme.”

White House official denied that Trump was “frustrated” and venting in the letter.

“What do you mean frustrated?” the official said. “Why would he be frustrated if there's not a single Republican that is going to vote for his impeachment? He won.”

“He's trolling her now,” the official added, referring to Pelosi. “We watched for a year and everybody said, ‘Oh she‘s so powerful now, she‘s so brilliant.‘ Show me one power move that she‘s made. Show me one action that she prevailed on this year. I‘m serious.“ (Read the article here.) 

The Speaker herself says it's "really sick":

Pelosi says Trump's letter is "really sick." pic.twitter.com/8HtOUPVVny

— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) December 17, 2019

John Dean goes there: ...take him over to the Tidal Basin!

Trump merely wants “Witch due process” which per Hist. Ch: “... accused witches were dragged to the nearest body of water, stripped to their undergarments, bound and then tossed in to to see if they would sink or float.” Skip the Senate trial, take him over to the Tidal Basin! https://t.co/cwXV1sYWF2

— John Dean (@JohnWDean) December 18, 2019

From Christiane Amanpour, Donald's friend Chris Ruddy urges him to testify:

Close confidant of President Trump @ChrisRuddyNMX addresses @realDonaldTrump directly: "Mr. President, if you're watching this show, please testify. I think it would be good, because I think you're your number one witness." pic.twitter.com/t0yk3FEmUg

— Christiane Amanpour (@camanpour) December 17, 2019

Finally for tonight, Donald's not the only one who can write a letter. 750 American historians have jointly signed a letter in support of impeaching the current President of the United States. Some of the names I recognized are Jonathan Alter, Douglas Brinkley, Robert Caro, Robert Dallek, Elaine Tyler May, Jon Meacham and Ken Burns. (Click here to see the full list.)

This is the letter:

We are American historians devoted to studying our nation’s past who have concluded that Donald J. Trump has violated his oath to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” His “attempts to subvert the Constitution,” as George Mason described impeachable offenses at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, urgently and justly require his impeachment.

President Trump’s numerous and flagrant abuses of power are precisely what the Framers had in mind as grounds for impeaching and removing a president. Among those most hurtful to the Constitution have been his attempts to coerce the country of Ukraine, under attack from Russia, an adversary power to the United States, by withholding essential military assistance in exchange for the fabrication and legitimization of false information in order to advance his own re-election.

President Trump’s lawless obstruction of the House of Representatives, which is rightly seeking documents and witness testimony in pursuit of its constitutionally-mandated oversight role, has demonstrated brazen contempt for representative government. So have his attempts to justify that obstruction on the grounds that the executive enjoys absolute immunity, a fictitious doctrine that, if tolerated, would turn the president into an elected monarch above the law.

As Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist, impeachment was designed to deal with “the misconduct of public men” which involves “the abuse or violation of some public trust.” Collectively, the President’s offenses, including his dereliction in protecting the integrity of the 2020 election from Russian disinformation and renewed interference, arouse once again the Framers’ most profound fears that powerful members of government would become, in Hamilton’s words, “the mercenary instruments of foreign corruption.”

It is our considered judgment that if President Trump’s misconduct does not rise to the level of impeachment, then virtually nothing does.

Hamilton understood, as he wrote in 1792, that the republic remained vulnerable to the rise of an unscrupulous demagogue, “unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents…despotic in his ordinary demeanour.” That demagogue, Hamilton said, could easily enough manage “to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day.” Such a figure, Hamilton wrote, would “throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

President Trump’s actions committed both before and during the House investigations fit Hamilton’s description and manifest utter and deliberate scorn for the rule of law and “repeated injuries” to constitutional democracy. That disregard continues and it constitutes a clear and present danger to the Constitution. We therefore strongly urge the House of Representatives to impeach the President.

Update #2 on Wednesday morning: Historians continue to sign on to the letter:

Update: Now over 1,500 and counting.https://t.co/HwpkJyaBdh

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) December 18, 2019

How Did We Get Here?

CNN media reporter Brian Stelter has some interesting thoughts about how right-wing media led Donald to impeachment:

How'd we get here, with Trump on the verge of impeachment? His sources of information led him astray. He was misinformed by the shows and sites he was watching and reading... https://t.co/I4gF400V9k

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) December 17, 2019

This is what his newsletter says:

The right-wing roots of impeachment

How did we get here? How did Trump wind up on the verge of impeachment? Well, his sources of information led him astray. He was misinformed by the shows and sites he was watching and reading.

To be clear: His choices, what Trump did with the information — the withholding of aid money, the alleged shakedown of the Ukrainian president, the claims that it was a "perfect" phone call — that's all his own doing. Trump is responsible for what he did. But what he was hearing from right-wing media was crucial. The conspiratorial bent of his favorite talk shows was critical.

--> Re: Ukraine and 2016: Sean Hannity and other Trump backers took tiny bits of true information from a January 2017 Politico story titled "Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire" and blew it way, way out of proportion, to the point that some viewers thought Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election. Hannity leaned on the Politico story for months and months — in fact, he's still talking about it, as of Sunday -- so it's no wonder why Trump harbored a grudge against Ukraine.

--> Re: the Bidens and Burisma: Enter John Solomon, the right-wing columnist for The Hill who worked closely with Rudy Giuliani to light the fuse of the Ukraine scandal. Trump was watching when Solomon went on Hannity in March and described a Ukrainian effort to "try to influence the United States election in favor of Hillary Clinton." We know he was watching because he tweeted about the segment. Solomon rolled out an anti-Biden conspiracy theory... the feedback loop kept looping... and it ultimately ensnared Trump.

--> Re: the aid money for Ukraine, according to WaPo, Trump saw an article from the right-leaning Washington Examiner titled "Pentagon to send $250M in weapons to Ukraine" and started to ask Q's about the $$.

Here's the thing: The pro-Trump media bubble did not actually help Trump. To the contrary, it led him to the brink of impeachment...

Ari Melber's point

MSNBC's Ari Melber made a similar point about the power of right-wing media last week. The web headline: "Trump could be impeached partly for admissions on Fox News."

"Democrats think they can prove key, damning parts of this plot based partly on these scheming and intimidating statements in public, specifically broadcast live on Fox," Melber said, "which looks especially bad because it was occurring before this whistleblower came forward."

"The impeachment probe is finding evidence that Trump's Ukraine plot was fundamentally about propaganda," he added. "The goal was pushing Ukraine to damage the Bidens in public, not about actually investigating foreign corruption. It was about getting talk of Biden and corruption on American television -- in a loop from Fox News, back to Ukraine, back to CNN -- an entire political conversation that was designed to tarnish the Biden brand."

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Sleaze, Low And High

Jonathan Chiat, writing at New York magazine, lays out Joe Biden's Burisma problem:

In the waning years of the Obama administration, Hunter Biden, whose life was in a downward spiral, took a job with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which was transparently attempting to gain influence with Hunter’s father. The maneuver was unsuccessful for Burisma (which received no favorable treatment from the vice-president), fairly successful for Hunter (who received a hefty paycheck for minimal work), and has left a residue of low-grade sleaze that Joe Biden’s campaign has proven unable to scrape away. The dilemma this poses for Biden, and his party, is what — if anything — they can do about this problem.

So far, Biden’s responses to questioning on his son’s role, which range from challenging his interlocutor to a push-up contest to trailing off awkwardly, have hardly allayed the concern. But it’s difficult to think of a better response, since a true answer is extremely difficult for a politician to communicate. And the true answer is: Yeah, I screwed up, but it’s actually not that big of a deal.

Biden’s error is that he created what used to be called “the appearance of impropriety,” a phrase that was common back before actual impropriety rendered it into a quaint anachronism. The appearance of impropriety is that Hunter Biden made money from Burisma, a Ukrainian firm, at a time when Joe Biden was directing the administration’s Ukraine policy, creating the appearance that Burisma bought Joe Biden’s favor. Indeed, President Trump has relentlessly charged that Burisma did in fact buy Biden’s favor. This is false. Biden demanded the firing of notoriously ineffectual prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who, at the time, was not investigating Burisma.

Firing Shokin was a unified demand of the pro-democratic world, and if anything, increased the legal jeopardy faced by Burisma. It would have been suspicious and potentially corrupt if Biden had not endorsed Shokin’s firing. His error was allowing his son to cash in on the false perception that he could sell access to his father. And by all accounts, Biden was too distracted by his job and distraught by the death of his other son to intervene in Hunter’s actions. It’s not nothing, but it is a small thing.

Democrats have bitter experience with this sort of flaw. Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of State is an eerily similar precursor. It was a small error borne of neglect — Clinton was a technophobe in search of an easy way to keep track of her work-related devices, and ignored proper security protocol for handling State Department email by using a private server. And Trump turned the small error into a gigantic scandal, accusing her of heinous crimes and ludicrously insisting she ought to be imprisoned over them. 

Later in the article, Chiat points out that the ranks of Trump officials who used private email to conduct official business include Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Stephen Miller, Gary Cohn, Steve Bannon, K.T. McFarland, and Reince Priebus. Since then, Nikki Haley has been found to have done the same.

And of course, Trump’s most blatant security breaches make the use of a private server look trivial. Trump has routinely used a cell phone to communicate and opened himself up to private espionage — like in the now-famous case in which he talked via cell phone to Gordon Sondland, who was in Kiev, in a call almost certainly intercepted by Russia. Most of Trump’s lax security protocol is both far more serious than Clinton’s snafu, and still not on anybody’s list of the 100 worst things Trump has done in office. (Click here to read the entire article.) 

Would Trump Resign?

The conventional wisdom among the wise men and pundits I follow has been that Donald would never resign the presidency. Due to his temperament, his ego, his narcissism, his neediness, or all of the above, I've heard many observers say that a Trump resignation would never, never, happen.

Now, consider the following, and note that the first tweet was sent out Sunday and the response was posted Monday. In other words, before today's explosive testimony at the Impeachment Hearing:

I am not a soothsayer.  I only have an opinion.  I think he will quit.  I have lots of reasons - too many words to tweet.  I could be wrong.  According to 95% if the twittersphere, I am.  I am thinking of the man I know and his ability to withstand the disgrace of impeachment.

— Barbara Res (@Allaloneon68fl) November 18, 2019

Well, for one thing, I see the party abandoning him, at least some of them, as more and more stuff comes out  There is too much at stake here - his business and, perhaps, his children. Trump does not want to spend the rest of his life as the impeached president.  Just my opinion.

— Barbara Res (@Allaloneon68fl) November 18, 2019

Who's Barbara Res? This is from an article at the Huffington Post, dated October 7: 

A former executive in the Trump Organization said President Donald Trump really doesn’t want to be impeached ― and that he may not let the process go much further as a result.

Barbara Res, who was vice president in charge of construction at Trump’s company, predicted that he will look for a way out first.

“My gut tells me he’ll leave office, he’ll resign or make some kind of a deal, even, depending on what comes out,” she said on CNN on Sunday.

Trump would leave office to save face, Res said, even if he’s unlikely to be found guilty by the Senate during an impeachment proceeding.

“I don’t think he wants to be impeached,” Res said. “I think that’s what this panic is about.”

She went into more detail on Twitter, predicting that Trump would warn of the “deep state,” spread conspiracy theories about the Democrats and claim he’s quitting to save the Republican Party.

Res said he may quit even before the House votes to impeach him.

“Trump is toast,” she wrote in one tweet.  (This is the article in its entirety. Click here to see video.)

That's interesting but it was still just one person's opinion, although Ms. Res knows Donald better than almost everyone else. Then today, I saw this. *Ken Starr* thinks we may see a Barry Goldwater moment aimed at getting Donald out of the White House: 

BREAKING: Ken Starr just suggested on Fox News that Sondland’s testimony could prompt GOP to “make a trip to the White House” and ask Trump to resign.

— Scott Dworkin (@funder) November 20, 2019

Would Donald resign? I'd say it's not out of the question. 

Donald's Very Bad Day

John Podhoretz is a Conservative writer and columnist who co-founded The Weekly Standard and currently serves as the editor of Commentary magazine. In an article posted yesterday, he says yesterday was "the day that has ensured Donald Trump's impeachment." Washington Post columnist David Ignatius echoed that thought on Morning Joe this morning, saying "Yesterday's testimony [of acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor before House impeachment investigators] had the feeling of a tipping point. It just was of a different character than we've seen before."

A tweet from Ignatius links to a pdf of Taylor's opening statement:

This carefully detailed memo by William Taylor, the American charge in Kiev, documents Trump' s gross abuse of power on Ukraine to subvert bipartisan, legislated goals of US policy, for political reasons. Strikes me as the most damaging evidence yet.  https://t.co/lUH7hfC84y

— David Ignatius (@IgnatiusPost) October 22, 2019

... and this is Podhoretz's article in its entirety:

Remember when I said last week that October 17 was the worst day of the Trump presidency? Well, October 22 and has now come along to break the record. This is the day that, I think, has ensured Donald Trump’s impeachment. Not his removal. But impeachment will be bad enough.

Today’s key sentence: “Ambassador Sondland said, ‘everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance.”

It comes from the testimony of acting U.S. ambassador to the Ukraine William Taylor before House impeachment investigators, and it instantly makes all but impossible the task of anyone seeking to defend Trump against the charge that he held up American military aid to Ukraine to secure a political advantage in the 2020 election.

There were three defenses of Trump following the revelations of the “whistleblower” and the phone-call transcript of the conversation between the presidents of the United States and Ukraine. The first was that he is only interested in investigating corruption relating to the 2016 election. The second is that even though Trump himself said he wanted the Ukranian to do him a favor, there was no quid pro quo. The third is that the only thing Trump was trading for was a White House visit, which is no great shakes.

There’s no need to talk about the “whistleblower” and his findings any longer, and there’s no need for the whistleblower to be heard any further. We have a veteran U.S. diplomat on the record saying that a Trump intimate told him Trump was holding up Congressionally authorized and appropriated military aid to Ukraine because he wanted a public statement from the Zelensky government that it was investigating Joe Biden’s son.

Taylor said this of a September 1 phone call with Gordon Sondland, our ambassador to the European Union about the $275 million in U.S. security assistance to Ukraine as well as a possible meeting between Trump and Ukranian president Zelensky:

“Ambassador Sondland told me that President Trump had told him that he wants President Zelensky to state publicly that Ukraine will investigate Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Ambassador Sondland also told me that he now recognized that he had made a mistake by earlier telling the Ukrainian officials to whom he spoke that a White House meeting with President Zelenskyy was dependent on a public announcement of investigations—in fact, Ambassador Sondland said, ‘everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance. He said that President Trump wanted President Zelenskyy ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations.”

So that’s it. Unless Trump and Sondland deny this, and offer evidence that Taylor is wrong or lying, we now have contemporaneous confirmation that the president intended to hold up military aid to the Ukranians to secure domestic political advantage.

That’s the ballgame. That’s impeachment. In doing this Trump was contravening U.S. law, which does not give the president the right to deny Ukraine the money appropriated by Congress for Ukraine.

Whether what Trump does obliges the Senate to remove him from the presidency will be up to Republicans in the Senate to decide at the trial that will follow what I think is the now-inevitable impeachment. The fact that the aid to Ukraine has in fact gone through despite Trump’s illegitimate temporary suspension may be the straw the GOP will grasp to prevent his conviction in that trial. But that’s no defense of Trump’s actions. If I’m right, they will, in effect, have to concede the wrongdoing and say it is too minor to lead to such an extreme sanction. So Trump won’t be the first president to be removed from office. He will, however, be the third to be impeached. And, as I said, that will be bad enough.

Last Exit From Trumpland

Ross Douthat is a Conservative author, blogger and columnist. This is his September 27 column in the New York Times, in its entirety:

Ask an intelligent Republican staffer what they imagine awaits their party after Donald Trump, and you’ll get an interesting disquisition on the factions and figures that might shape conservatism, the political and policy arguments to come.

Ask that same staffer what happens if Trump is re-elected, and you’ll get a heavy sigh, a thousand-yard stare and then a hopeful “Well, maybe we can just pretend he isn’t there …?”

This is the state of Republican politics with impeachment suddenly looming. People are ready for the after, the reckoning to come, the attempted restorations and Trumpisms-without-Trump, the great Nikki Haley-Tucker Carlson brawl.

But if Trump survives impeachment and somehow gets re-elected, there will be no after Trump, not yet and not for four long years. Instead Trump will bestride his party like a decaying colossus, and his administration’s accelerative deterioration will be the G.O.P.’s as well. There will be no second-term policymaking, no John Kelly to stabilize the ship — just a floating hulk drifting between the icebergs of recession and foreign crisis, with all American conservatism onboard.

Outside the ranks of the truest Trump believers, most Republicans anticipate very bad things in 2022 and 2024 if the Trump Show continues uninterrupted. And most would happily fast-forward through that show if the magical remote control from that terrible Adam Sandler movie were suddenly available.

My days of writing high-dudgeon columns demanding that Republicans act in concert against Trump are behind me; cynicism and bemusement define my attitude toward G.O.P. decadence these days.

But in a bored-Roman-aristocrat drawl, I just want to suggest — mildly, dabbling my hands in a convenient finger bowl — that the current impeachment inquiry might, in fact, be that magical remote control: a chance to hit fast-forward and summon the post-Trump future into existence here and now, for the 2020 campaign.

Hitting the button requires only two things: the swift, before-primary-season impeachment schedule House Democrats are entertaining and then 20 Republican votes in the Senate for conviction, if the Trump-Giuliani operation in Ukraine looks as bad in a few months as it does today.

Of course the second thing is a political near-impossibility. But we’re fantasizing here, my dear Petronius, so we can imagine how it might happen. Start with Mitt Romney, add the four retiring Republican senators, plus the most embattled purple-state 2020 incumbents, plus a clutch of Republicans most at risk in 2022, plus the handful of the senators who don’t face the voters till 2024 … and then you’re just a few Republicans of principle away from 20.

In voting to remove Trump (and to bar him, as an impeachment can, from simply running for president again immediately), these 20 would allow the other 33 Republican senators to stand by him, thank him for his service and promise to Make America Great Again themselves. And the more ambitious among the latter group of senators would then compete to succeed Trump, while his wrath was concentrated against the treacherous 20.

That competition would be the next phase of our fast-forward: With Trump gone, everyone from Haley and Carlson to Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley could jump into an accelerated primary campaign against the unloved Republican “incumbent,” Mike Pence. The result would be, in effect, the 2024 G.O.P. primary four years early — with the possibility of either pre-empting a President Elizabeth Warren or preventing a Trump second term’s likely demolition of the G.O.P.

Of course this is just a pleasant conceit, whose mere description by a Trump critic like myself will irritate the many conservatives for whom it’s absurd to imagine any upside to allowing Democrats and the media to eject a fighting conservative president from office.

I think these conservatives underestimate, as liberals did with Bill Clinton long ago, the advantages in jettisoning a corrupt leader. (An Al Gore presidency was a better timeline for Democrats, even though it would have required the horror of letting Ken Starr win.) But I certainly can see ways in which, after so much elite failure and populist anger, having elites (indeed, the C … I … A!) work to remove a populist president just before his re-election campaign could make our toxic politics that much worse.

But I would still ask — swirling my wine and adjusting my NeverTrumper toga — worse than what? Worse than a world where Trump survives impeachment, the Ukraine miasma chokes Biden’s campaign, Warren proves less electable than her supporters hope, we replay 2016 with the Electoral College and enter a second Trump term with the ship of state rudderless, Democrats yet more radicalized, and all those icebergs looming for the country and the G.O.P. alike?

In the event we do arrive in that world, consider this column a casually tossed marker for the Republican Senators who will probably vote to keep Trump in office, in case they find themselves very unhappy with the ultimate result.

You can’t say that you didn’t have an early exit from the Trump era. You can’t say you didn’t have a choice.

More, Part 2 - Updated

More interesting tweets:

Never thought I would retweet the mooch. But all those who were involved, listened to the calls, etc. should be worried.. VERY. https://t.co/cH98pRDPvp

— Mika Brzezinski (@morningmika) September 26, 2019

One of the keys to the Clinton impeachment process, per old Clinton hands, was to have him never, ever talk about it. https://t.co/x2dfHCwEtE

— Annie Karni (@anniekarni) September 26, 2019

Just as a reminder: When historians write about Watergate, we always single out the biggest partisan hacks by name.

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) September 26, 2019

Also: when Cronkite and Co. said goodnight, the next news didn't come until the morning newspaper dropped on your doorstep. Time for information to sink in....now it's a 24 hour a day firehose. https://t.co/po4OgPSgsQ

— Jeff Greenfield (@greenfield64) September 26, 2019

Whatever else we learn about them, the whistleblower sure knows how to write a lede pic.twitter.com/06dhK0Tn6i

— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) September 26, 2019

Trump is desperate, throwing @VP under the bus to send senate Republicans a message that if Trump goes, Pence goes too.

— Richard W. Painter (@RWPUSA) September 26, 2019

This crew is going down with the ship.

All the president’s loyalists: Impeachment net snares Trump’s top advisers https://t.co/JTqhrqr3Dw

— Richard W. Painter (@RWPUSA) September 26, 2019

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

And now a few words from Lindsey Graham:

All you need to know about Lindsey Graham is that in 2016 he said Trump was “crazy” and a “kook” who was “not fit to be president.” Then, in 2017 said: “What concerns me is this endless attempt to label the guy as some kind of kook not fit to be president” pic.twitter.com/GX2UzZbuNl

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) September 26, 2019

Let’s travel back in time to see how Lindsey Graham felt when it was a Democratic president facing impeachment... pic.twitter.com/0Q0FscdpNV

— Adam Best (@adamcbest) September 25, 2019

This is what happens when you spend 24 years in Washington D.C. 👇🏾 pic.twitter.com/L9gz27mAHX

— Jaime Harrison (@harrisonjaime) September 25, 2019

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

Yeah but 5 years ago Barack Obama wore a bike helmet, the worst scandal in presidential history. pic.twitter.com/bmG571AXvG

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) September 25, 2019

Update on Thursday afternoon. This is interesting:

Chaos inside Fox News as impeachment looms. Mgmt told Smith to stop attacking Carlson. Hannity privately says whistleblower is really bad for Trump. Paul Ryan has told Lachlan to plan for a post-Trump future.https://t.co/b2MmBKrWkF

— Gabriel Sherman (@gabrielsherman) September 26, 2019

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.”

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: 

Honestly the call transcript is way more damning than I expected it to be.

Considering the efforts taken by Trump WH to prevent whistleblower complaint from seeing light of day, you can bet it’s going to be game, set, match.

— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) September 25, 2019

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;

Oddsmakers say Trump Republicans senators won't vote to impeach Trump. I believe all bets are off. Most Republican senators privately hate him & his power over them. If they believe, by banding together, they can push him out, I think there is a very reasonable chance they will.

— Tony Schwartz (@tonyschwartz) September 24, 2019

This is the question I've been wondering about:

This is the question of the day, and my only guess is that this is the least damaging version they could release, in hopes that the base - which will believe anything - will buy that "it's just politics" and completely normal.
Congress will likely, ah, disagree. https://t.co/PwQ5jOcoHv

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 25, 2019

From political scientist Jonathan Bernstein:

FWIW...it's correct to refer to a "call summary", not a "transcript" and of course Congress should see what else there might be. But what's here is 100% damning, and I'll caution not to get caught up in "what are they hiding?" instead of focus on proof of abuse of power.

— Jonathan Bernstein (@jbview) September 25, 2019

Update #3. They really are incompetent:

WH accidentally emailed talking points to House Dems pic.twitter.com/M16m6TC2AJ

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) September 25, 2019

No joke: White House just emailed all Dem offices asking to “recall” the talking points email. https://t.co/4fFtVYmrPd

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) September 25, 2019

If it was a secret ballot...

On whether Senators would vote for impeachment, @murphymike says, "One Republican senator told me if it was a secret vote, 30 Republican senators would vote to impeach Trump." #AMRstaff

— Andrea Mitchell (@mitchellreports) September 25, 2019

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

I think it’s impeachable but I also think the numbers won’t be there to convict based on what we know now. So no President Pence, sadly. https://t.co/jpQiUz73fU

— Liz Mair (@LizMair) September 25, 2019

"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:   

How many Republicans right now are thinking, if Trump slips, maybe I should run in 2020?  (Other than Haley, Pompeo, Pence...and the ones who are already running but, like Pence and Pompeo, don't have a chance.)

— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) September 25, 2019