Quote of the Day (Mitt Romney, on Trump’s ‘Extreme and Egregious’ Violation of His Oath of Office)

“The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the President committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a ‘high crime and misdemeanor.’

“Yes, he did.

“The President asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival.

“The President withheld vital military funds from that government to press it to do so.

“The President delayed funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders.

“The President’s purpose was personal and political.

“Accordingly, the President is guilty of an appalling abuse of the public trust.

“What he did was not ‘perfect’— No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security interests, and our fundamental values. Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.”—Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah), “Romney Delivers Remarks on Impeachment Vote,” Feb. 5, 2019

Over the last several weeks, I have despaired over what I will call, after their most prominent House and Senate exemplars, the “(Will) Hurd-(Lisa) Murkowski Defens
e” of Donald Trump—that, yes, his conduct might be “inappropriate,” even “shameful and wrong,” but it did not warrant his removal from office. 

Springing from fear of either retaliation by this most vindictive of men or of being “primaried,” their objections to impeachment, when not legally irrelevant, were constitutionally inadequate and morally incoherent.

Few figures in positions of high authority exit public life completely uncompromised, and over the years I often disagreed with Romney’s vision of America’s future. 

Particularly in the last few weeks, I wondered what was taking him so long to speak out, as one Republican Senate colleague after another turned out to be as morally abject about the President's rank offenses as what Winston Churchill scathingly called "the Boneless Wonder" of Barnum and Bailey Circus. 

But his explanation today of his vote to impeach the President leaves him far more than one of the “footnotes at best in the annals of history” that he evoked in his closing lines. With admirable concision, he cut through the fog of cant, excuses, insults and lies spread by the President and his accomplices in his latest brazen assault on the Constitution and on the dignity of the office once occupied by George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and the Roosevelts.

The odds are long, given his age and the current parlous state of his own party, that Romney will ever achieve his dream of the Presidency. 

But today—when history was watching and weighing what was happening, and when the Constitution itself was riding on the results—he looked more Presidential than anyone now on the hustings. He proved that sometimes, a politician really can stand as tall as the occasion demands.

The Impeachment Saga: Trump’s Putinesque ‘Misdirection, Disorder, and Political Stagecraft’

“Once this quagmire—in which truth and lies are knotted up and nothing is incontrovertible—is established, the final aim comes into view….As the Kremlin has long known, once you've successfully swamped truth, you're no longer accountable for your actions. Mounting evidence  from the administration's first month or so in office suggests that this is the Trump team's goal: to produce a state of disorder between themselves, the media, and the public, so that it becomes all but impossible for Trump and his team to be held accountable for conflicts of interest, shady relationships, and abuses of power. It’s how Moscow has entrenched a super-rich oligarchy and a thinly veiled authoritarian regime: by hiding behind its splashy dramaturgia [Russian for “theater craft”]. Trump is quickly learning his own variation on this theme. ‘There is a sense that he will purposefully move the conversation onto colorful bullshit, away from the really serious stuff,’ [former Russian TV producer Peter] Pomerantsev says. The Kremlin has provided him with a blueprint for ruling with impunity by way of misdirection, disorder, and political stagecraft.”—Mike Mariani, “In Trump’s America,” Vanity Fair, April 2017 

A few weekends ago, while channel-surfing, I came across a C-Span talk to a Temple University class given by Geoff Shepard, who 45 years ago served as principal deputy to President Richard Nixon’s lead defense lawyer. Shepard was speaking about alleged judicial and prosecutorial abuses in the case that brought the President down, or what he insisted on calling The Real Watergate Scandal in a book by that name.

Poor Tricky Dick. I imagine he would be kicking himself that when he needed it, he didn’t have a cybersphere where anything goes and a Fox News happy to offer guest appearances to die-hard apologists who wrench facts out of context and manufacture political conspiracies out of whole cloth.

Most of all, Nixon—who made his career as an unrelenting commie-hater—would be stunned that a later Republican occupant of his office would not only solicit, on national television, aid from a former lieutenant colonel in the KGB and take that spy-turned-dictator’s word over his own intelligence agencies, but would then, as Mike Mariani noted above, copy that foreign thug’s playbook to power. 

Such is the state of America, even with the battle on Capitol Hill joined now, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally moving the articles of impeachment against Donald Trump to the Senate after a delay of several weeks, and—in a scene with multiple levels of irony—Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts swearing the Senate to impartiality—something that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for one, has previously gloated he would not do. 

This weekend, a friend told me that, even as the third President in our lifetime undergoes impeachment, the U.S. should emerge as intact as it always has. I’m afraid I can’t be that confident. 

The Russian-style regime viruses pointed out above by Mike Mariani—"conflicts of interest, shady relationships, and abuses of power”—have been normalized here now, too, starting with Trump's own family and radiating out to businessmen who enjoyed his favor as Cabinet members or in their own industries. 

And the means of accountability that Americans have long employed to keep wayward Presidents in check—independent investigators, the press, the opposition party, and even formerly independent Congressmen in his own party—have found themselves slipping on what Mariani has correctly identified as “misdirection, disorder, and political stagecraft.”

No Matter What the Outcome, A Capricious, Transgressive President Has Been Marked

It may be a foregone conclusion that the President will escape conviction in the Senate, as Bill Clinton did two decades ago and as Nixon almost certainly would not have in 1974. Yet, no matter what else happens now, Trump has been marked as a transgressive President whose conduct has been judged even by subordinates as legally perilous to him and themselves. (Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney fled the room during crucial meetings on the Ukraine involving Trump and the President’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.)

The enormity of what is happening to him has managed to penetrate even the skull of this Oval Office occupant with precious little knowledge of history. His consequent default to whining—full Trump Baby mode—has been lightning-fast, and all the more horrible to watch. (Trump’s cry that he has not been given due process, for instance, is laughable, starting with the fact that he forbade any documents or witnesses that might have exonerated him before the House Intelligence Committee.)

It is never a cause for celebration when a President is impeached, because it is not only the ultimate weapon allowed by the Constitution against a President, but the only possible one sanctioned when assassination is considered too awful and rotation in office insufficient to prevent further ills. It is a tragedy when an intelligent politician's deep character flaws make him vulnerable to this instrument, whether it be Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton. 

But Trump was never an attentive if deeply imperfect student of government, as those Presidents were. Neither has he ever been capable of summoning a lonely courage in his best moments before the public, as Andrew Johnson did as the only Southern senator to remain loyal to the Union. Nor can Trump even be considered a conventionally tragic figure, as he has never demonstrated the slightest capacity for the self-examination undertaken by such dramatic figures after their fatal mistakes.

For anyone still inclined to see tragedy in the President’s case, it is that Trump never learned to channel properly his near-boundless energy. He could have steered the ship of state firmly but decisively forward. Instead, he nearly capsized it with mad caprice. 

Understand this: as the White House, early in this new year, escalated tensions with Iran, most Congressional Republicans had to be privately asking themselves what they had let themselves in for by never curbing the President’s penchant for metastatic mendacity. 

We should not imagine that the lack of an all-out shooting war to date means an already fragile Middle East has not been further destabilized. It’s a shorter walk than the GOP should imagine from campaign falsehoods to flimsy excuses about whether or not Iran presented an imminent threat.

Lawmakers’ tolerance for the never-ending tide of lies from the White House has worn perilously thin, as seen in Sen. Mike Lee’s outburst after listening to an "insulting and demeaning" briefing by administration officials offering no plausible, even coherent rationale for the assassination of Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani. 

No matter how audible their sighs of relief over the lack of American bloodshed after that strike, Republicans on Capitol Hill had to wonder if the inevitable had merely been postponed. With the credibility of America’s commander-in-chief suspect from the get-go, what exists to tamp down protest at home and street rage abroad?

Republicans were so busy going into a fetal position in the first few hours after Trump’s saber-rattling that they weren’t repeating with their accustomed shameless gusto their argument that it is the American people through the next election who should decide his fate. (If impeachment is a coup, as Trump has insisted ad infinitum, what do you call the attempt to remove from office Bill Clinton, who won more terms by wider margins than Trump as the popular and Electoral College victor both times?)

Trump Has Left No Alternative to Impeachment

The GOP could say what they wanted about their opponents, but really, what alternative did Trump leave Pelosi and the House Democrats? 

*If they did nothing after knowing the facts of the Ukraine scandal, Trump could reasonably claim that they saw nothing wrong when he tries something worse the next time (and there WILL be a next time—he is STILL sending Rudy Giuliani over there to find dirt on Biden, and, in the most recent budget negotiation, STILL held up military aid to Ukraine). 

*If Congress censured him, he would move to rescind it (as Andrew Jackson did in the 1830s, before he left office) or laugh it off as a slap on the wrist (more likely). 

Trump brought the tsunami of his current troubles on himself because he can never leave well enough alone: enough women, enough money, enough power, enough adulation.  He could not abide being a laughingstock for exhibiting Presidential ambitions, so he had to find some way, any way, to get it done. He could not tolerate Americans watching the storming of a U.S. embassy in Iraq and wonder if this was so much better than the Benghazi affair under President Obama.

Without realizing it, Trump had revealed that he is exactly what he scorns so often in others: weak. With no other alternative, he has sought, ever more frantically, to capitalize on the chaos that has resulted from this emotional incapacity.

Baseball fans throughout the country have been convulsed by the cheating scandal involving the Houston Astros. The team’s victory in the fall 2017 campaign has been tainted, many believe.

Yet the stakes in the 2016 Presidential campaign were far more consequential, and nearly half the country not only shrugs off credible reports that Russia aided Trump but equally urgent testimony by intelligence officials that this is occurring again. Where is the outrage comparable to what we are seeing in the baseball world?

Trump’s Farrago of Irrelevancies, Insults, Half-Truths and Brazen Falsehoods

The Ukraine affair itself was only the most recent attempt to distract voters from the lingering stench from the more than 100 contacts made between Russia and 18 people (including the candidate himself) from the Trump campaign, according to the Mueller report.

From virtually the moment Trump was inaugurated, he sought to defuse a series of revelations that could have destroyed his Presidency before it had barely begun, with threats against all the players who could bring him and his henchmen down:

*The investigators: The ostensible cause of the removal of Acting Attorney-General Sally Yates was her refusal to defend his travel ban. But her firing also got out of the way someone who had warned him that then-National Security Adviser Mike Flynn could be "blackmailed by the Russians," because he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his "problematic" conduct. The FBI has endured even worse, as Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe were not even fired by Trump but subject to investigations themselves. While Comey has been investigated for his leak of a Russian-related document, former Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has so far escaped similar recrimination from his old boss for leaking private text messages critical of Trump by FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page. The latter leak enabled the President to ridicule the latter pair for their affair—and to serve notice on others who dared to step out of line that their vulnerabilities would be similarly exposed to public shaming. Ask yourself: After being around for 40 years, why is it only now that FISA warrants have been called into question as a tool of prosecutors? Even Robert Mueller, a registered Republican who served in the (Republican) George W. Bush administration, was not spared, as Trump ludicrously claimed that a dispute over a country-club fee in a Trump property biased him against the President. After all that, Trump still felt the need to make Attorney-General William Barr—the most dangerous administration confederate in his assault on the Constitution—authorize the Inspector General Michael Horowitz and John Durham, U.S. Attorney for Connecticut, to poke around in the original allegations that helped surface Trump’s misdeeds.

*The opposition: Trump has continually sought to blunt the effectiveness of the Democratic Party as a means of restraining him. Incensed by Hillary Clinton’s post-election criticisms, he authorized two investigations—into her use of a private server and possible corruption at the Clinton Foundation while she was Secretary of State—that turned up nothing. Biden has seen his credibility called into question through the Ukraine affair. Rivals and critics of the President have been served notice: if they don’t keep quiet, they will have to endure some combination of loss of votes, Twitter-induced hatred, or mounting legal bills.

*The media: Everyone from reporters up to and including publishers have been subject to a campaign of vitriol and Presidential retaliation far surpassing any prior administration’s. One media claim after another about Trump’s actions on Russia and the Ukraine have been denounced as “fake news,” then proven by documentary or eyewitness testimony, then dismissed with the equivalent of “who cares?” shrugs. Repeatedly, he has used the totalitarian trope that the press are “enemies of the people.” In a particularly egregious retaliation against a prominent press critic, Amazon has charged him with exerting “improper pressure” to block a $10 billion cloud-computing contract with the Pentagon because of negative coverage by the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon head Jeff Bezos.

*The Senate: Six-year terms had long enabled the Senate to act in effect as a “coolant” to a House of Representatives subject to elections every two years. Powerful committee chairs especially had to be placated, even by Presidents of the same party who had enjoyed landslide victories like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. But GOP Senators today are running scared that a storm of Trump Twitter tirades will lead to them being “primaried” out of office. Thus, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, two fierce (and, in retrospect, far-seeing) critics of Trump in the race for President have fallen meekly in line. No surprise, then, that Republicans are trying to distract the focus of the Senate trial, periodically threatening to subpoena the targets of Trump’s dirty tricks, Joe and Hunter Biden, rather than the aides who could confirm or deny the President’s account. To an effect never before seen in a body that traditionally valued its independence, they have become, in effect, a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump Inc., as they obfuscate the overwhelming conclusion of witness testimony and the President’s own transcript of his July 25, 2019 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: i.e., that Trump personally shook down a foreign leader for dirt to use against the leading candidate to defeat him in the next election.

The Ukraine Affair—Geopolitical Three-Card Monte

Those with long memories will recall that dirty tricks against the presumptive nominee of the opposing party represented the same strategy that Richard Nixon used in his 1972 reelection against Sen. Edmund Muskie. As ugly as that was, it was still less dangerous than Trump’s Ukrainian three-card monte—a geopolitical sleight-of-hand that:

* diverts attention from his Russian machinations; 

* bolsters his reelection prospects;

* ensures he is less likely to be prosecuted following an electoral defeat; 

* continues the cozy arrangement by which the family business in which he retains an ownership interest still reaps benefits from foreign governments; and

* imperils a small, relatively young nation threatened by a larger, neighboring authoritarian power (shades of 1938 Czechoslovakia and Nazi Germany).

Sticking to the Misdirection Script, Even as He is Brought to Account

Are you really surprised that Trump continues to bellyache and abuse even as the impeachment trial limps to its foreseeable conclusion? Consider how he:

*fired off a rambling—and, of course, fallacious—six-page letter to Nancy Pelosi, denouncing her for trying to impeach him while also insisting she wouldn’t dare (WRONG!);

*bizarrely tweeted that Pelosi’s “teeth were falling out” at a recent public appearance (leading many to wonder if the President’s frequent mispronunciations resulted from his own dental difficulties); 

*retweeted (with no evidence, naturally) a suggestion by former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer that Pelosi’s delay in moving impeachment to the Senate resulted from the Democratic establishment’s desire to hurt Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who must attend the impeachment trial instead of visiting Iowa in the crucial final week before its caucus; and

*suggested at rallies that the late Rep. John Dingell and LBJ were currently in hell.

The intent was the same as it's always been for him: to get the media he says he despises (but cannot do without) to run off to tut-tut or correct his latest outrage, even as they shift the public's attention from his real misconduct.

In the 2016 election, before they began to cower at the rampaging menace in their midst, many Establishment Republicans questioned whether Trump was adhering to conservative doctrine. I, for one, am here to say that Trump runs a grave risk of being liberal, if we use Tom Wolfe’s winking definition of that term in regard to his once-smug "Master of the Universe" Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities: “A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.”  

Only that can account for Trump's suddenly tender concerns about violation of rights (his!) and “McCarthyism.” Those concerns are only marginally less laughable than his contention that in the Ukraine affair, he’s acted as an international corruption fighter. (If you believe that, then you probably bought O.J. Simpson’s claim  that he would spend the rest of his post-acquittal life seeking the real killers of his ex-wife.)

Throughout his life, nobody has ever called Donald Trump to account. Now that he has been, let's be clear why this came to pass: not because he is a bullying wretch, not because his opponents disagree with his policies, but because he broke the law and flagrantly abused the Constitution he swore an oath to uphold. 

In the number and variety of his offenses in a still-limited amount of time--profiting from his office through shameless violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, open solicitation of three foreign governments' (Russia, Ukraine, and--lest we forget!--China) intervention of U.S. elections, obstruction of justice, such blatant coddling of an authoritarian that he could credibly be charged with treason were we at war, discrediting the intelligence and criminal-justice agencies charged with keeping us safe, and rampant abuse of power--no other President has deserved impeachment more. 

Indeed, if Trump's actions do not violate the Constitution (as egregiously obnoxious impeachment defense team member Alan Dershowitz insists, against all evidence), then it is impossible to conceive what the Framers might have had in mind with this clause.

Now is not the time for his critics to bewail his misconduct. Action is called for--loud enough so it can even be heard and heeded by Senate Republicans who right now have as much backbone as a chocolate eclair.

But, no matter what else happens from now on, Trump can’t say he hasn’t been warned about the consequences of his misconduct—and we, the American people, can’t claim, like Germans after WWII, that we didn’t know what was going on when a leader convinced his nation to follow him down a reckless, lawless path.

Trump’s Capitol Hill GOP: The Sin of Collaboration

In Stephen Crane’s classic short story of the Old West, “The Blue Hotel,” a saloon shooting triggers anguished post-mortem handwringing over how matters could ever have come to this pass. During this conversation, the story’s “Easterner,” the tale’s mouthpiece for Crane, bitterly explains who’s responsible for the death of “the Swede”: 

“Johnnie was cheating. I saw him. I know it. I saw him. And I refused to stand up and be a man. I let the Swede fight it out alone. And you—you were simply puffing around the place and wanting to fight…. Every sin is the result of a collaboration. We, five of us, have collaborated in the murder of this Swede.”

At some point in the not-too-distant future, Republican officials on Capitol Hill, like the guilty bystanders in Crane’s tale, will lament a murder. The corpse will be American democracy, dead of a thousand cuts at the hands of Donald Trump and his minions. But if they are honest, GOP Congressmen and Senators must, like the Easterner, admit that it was their own cowardice that enabled this disaster. 

Criminality and Complicity in Broad Daylight

The Capitol Hill GOP’s dilemma is inescapable now with the impeachment hearings publicly broadcast—the outcome that so many rashly begged for just a few weeks ago. Now, Republican insubstantiality and sycophancy are apparent for all to see.

In this, they resemble the man to whose whims they have tied themselves, for the outrageous crimes of Donald Trump have taken place in broad daylight. 

The President operates with such impunity not only because he has escaped being held to account his entire life (his financial messes were handled by his father, his legal ones by Roy Cohn and Michael Cohen), but also because the Capitol Hill GOP—most of them conservative Republicans for far longer than Trump ever was—have never properly exercised their oversight of Trump. 

Oh, yes, Mitt Romney has managed to get under the President’s skin. But more often, conscience-stricken members, like Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, will redden, stutter, gasp out that what Trump has done is “inappropriate,” if that—then dash for a side door, hoping for no more encounters with reporters asking uncomfortable questions or with GOP voters in hissy fits over even this mealy-mouthed criticism.

I suppose we should be glad that Collins and a select few colleagues like Ben Sasse and Lisa Murkowski are occasionally caught out in public with a sense of shame. The rest, when they are not engaged in downright obfuscation, can only resort to juvenile stunts and sideshows more worthy of a lunchroom full of middle-schoolers (e.g., storming a secure room where the House Intelligence Committee was holding closed-door hearings, then ordering Chick-fil-A and pizza) than serious legislators tasked with running this country.

Over the last two weeks, as Esquire’s Jack Holmes makes clear, GOP members of the Intelligence Committee tried out 22 different defenses: Where was the whistleblower? The meeting was being held behind closed doors! The testimony was based on hearsay! Foreign-born witnesses have dual loyalties! What’s so unusual about aid being held up? Did the Ukrainians even realize the aid had been delayed?

One by one they all fell apart, as the defense of the indefensible invariably does.

A Gallery of Apologists-Turned-Collaborators

The obstructionism of the President is now matched by these apologists-turned-collaborators. Let’s take a moment to highlight their roles:

*Mitch McConnell: The Capitol Hill GOP takes its marching orders from the Senate Majority Leader. Despite a powerful GOP tendency among voters in Kentucky, however, McConnell has only a 36% poll rating back home, so he knows his only hope is to cling desperately to Trump, despite the grimaces that invariably cross his face whenever asked to comment on the President’s latest outrage. All of that would have been politics as usual, except that McConnell bears an especially heavy responsibility for the lack of a bipartisan consensus against a Russian cyber threat that, as Fiona Hill noted at the impeachment hearings, affects all parties. In the closing days of the 2016 race, “Moscow Mitch” not only refused President Obama’s request to issue a bipartisan statement decrying Russian interference, but said he would regard any public challenge to the Russians as a partisan act.

*Lindsey Graham: The transformation of the senior Senator from South Carolina from one of Trump’s sharpest campaign critics into what New York Magazine’s Andrew Sullivan calls “perhaps the most contemptible figure of the last couple of years” has been so sharp that it has provoked much speculation on what could have caused it. Does he hope to “influence” the President by allying with him, as Graham has stated, fear losing his reelection bid—or does something unknown influence him? Whatever the case, at this point, “Leningrad Lindsey” has left no effective room between himself and the President. He may have acted most shamelessly and hypocritically in the last few days, however: Backing a President who has invoked executive privilege to bar witness testimony and the release of documents, while urging Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to release documents related to Joe and Hunter Biden. In currying favor with a President whose personal and policy preferences shift without warning, he has also eliminated any hope of working with Democrats on a bipartisan basis in any future Congress.

*Ted Cruz: Nobody would have blamed the Senator from Texas if he had punched Trump in the mouth after the reality show star-turned-candidate speculated that his opponent’s father had somehow been involved with the assassination of JFK and retweeted a Facebook ad that mocked the looks of Cruz’s wife in comparison with that of Melanie Trump. But, after correctly labeling candidate Trump as a “pathological liar” and a “bully,” Cruz has not only welcomed Trump’s support since then but has studiously avoided any occasion when he might criticize him in the slightest.

*Ron Johnson: The Senator from Wisconsin had been one of the principal backers of aid for Ukraine. Yet he has continually excused Trump’s conduct throughout this process. Like many Republicans, he also suffers from convenient lapses of memory. When he criticized impeachment as a process hurtful to the United States last week, he was reminded by NBC’s Chuck Todd that he had called for Hillary Clinton’s impeachment in 2016, only a week before an election he had predicted she would win.

*Devin Nunes: The ranking GOP member of the House Intelligence Committee hardly distinguished himself when his party controlled the house and he controlled the committee. (For instance, after a late-night visit to the White House, Nunes claimed to have found evidence of wrongdoing by committee officials—a backdoor attempt to lend credence to a presidential tweet claiming that President Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower. And, according to one of Rudy Giuiliani’s indicted ex-associates, Nunes met in December 2018 with a former Ukrainian official to get dirt on Joe Biden.) A year of powerlessness has only made Nunes whinier and more pathetic. Critics of the hearings’ “boredom” factor might have considered how much of that resulted from Nunes’ misuse of what he sarcastically called his “magic minutes”. He may have congratulated witnesses for passing the Democrats’ “Star-Chamber Auditions,” but he seemed to be actively auditioning himself to play the role left vacant by ousted California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher as “Putin’s favorite Congressman.”

*Jim Jordan: Jacketless, snarling, sneering, Jordan inspired one of the most indelible moments of these past two weeks. His constant attempts to interrupt David Holmes about the cellphone conversation in Kiev between Trump and EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland led to the witness’s involuntary eye-roll—the best show of non-verbal contempt for a former wrestling coach who might as well have been a mud wrestler. The hyper-aggressive style of Jordan may have played well with Trump and with the most avid watchers of Fox News, but not beyond that natural base. He also parroted two of Trump’s smelliest historical lies and distortions by claiming that Democrats have “never accepted the will of 63 million Americans, they never accepted the fact that Donald Trump won an Electoral College landslide.”  (For the record: the 63 million Trump voters were outnumbered by the approximately 66 million Hillary Clinton voters, and the 56.5% of the Electoral College vote won by Trump ranked only 46^th out of 58 Presidential elections—exceeded by, on two occasions, Bill Clinton—who, you might recall, Republicans had no issue with “reversing the will of the people.”)

*Will Hurd: No House Republican has disappointed more than this retiring member from Texas. His closing statement in the hearings—that Trump’s actions represented “inappropriate, misguided foreign policy” that” undermined our national security and undercut Ukraine,” yet still was not impeachable—may have doomed any chance for anything other than a straight party-line impeachment vote. His prior tentative complaints about interference—“I think some of these things are indeed damning” —brought down such a hailstorm from Republican voters that he has ignominiously backpedaled. Even looming retirement from the House hasn’t encouraged him to speak or act more freely. It seems that Hurd, the hope of Republican moderates, has morphed into one of the GOP invertebrates. Whatever your scariest, most dismaying horror show might be—“The Wolf Man,” “The Fly,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “Night of the Living Dead”—this surpasses it.

The Plight of the GOP ‘Moderates’ and Announced Retirees

Hurd—as well as another recent GOP announced retiree, New York’s Peter King—is not alone: As of now, 19 House GOP members—including six from swing districts—are stepping down, along with four Senate Republicans. Their calculus is simple: in the House, why fall into irrelevance as a member of a minority party, all the while forced to explain away the latest outrage from the Oval Office or to fend attacks on their flanks from within their own party?

Surprisingly, however, virtually none in the current crop, even with the greater freedom to speak their minds that retirement bestows, has given signs of breaking ranks with Trump.

The best explanation of their plight might have been offered by The New York Times'  Paul Krugman, not normally a favorite columnist of mine. But his analysis of the alternatives offered to retiring GOP retirees—commentary gigs with Fox News, cushy jobs with right-wing think tanks, and posts lobbying the very branch of the government they might have felt tempted to criticize—cogently points up the not-so-subtle carrots being offered to anyone who toes the line. The result: Trump’s protests this week notwithstanding, “Never Trumpers” are an endangered species, especially in Congress.

Trump: More Than a Vulgarian—A Criminal

A Facebook friend and fellow high school alum said he agreed that no President was as narcissistic or egotistical as Trump, and at least several other friends agreed with that. Although true, their assessments of the President miss the mark widely.

What they cannot grasp is that Trump is not imperiled now because he is a fake artist of the deal, a rash decision-maker, a tyro ignorant of history, an overgrown bratty billionaire who never mastered elementary impulse control, a vulgarian lacking dignity, or a Visigoth who violated the norms of D.C. politics and diplomacy—although, most certainly, he is all of these things.

He is in trouble because he is a common cheat who accepted foreign help to gain the Presidency and an extortionist now grasping at the assistance of another, fledging nation to win re-election. All the money in the world still makes him no better than a three-card monte chiseler scamming the unsuspecting on the streets of New York.

And that, my friends, is simply not acceptable. Like many Americans, I cherish the right to throw out errant officeholders at each election. But Trump’s dragging Americans down into his concocted Ukrainian strategy nullifies the effectiveness of those votes. A tainted election corrodes the foundations of democracy itself.

Surmounting the Impeachment Obstacles

The obstacles blocking the Democrats’ removal of Trump are considerable, starting with the constitutionally required two-thirds majority in the Senate, along with Americans’ longtime reluctance to get rid of opponents by any means other than the ballot box. 

To that can now be added a right-wing network, abetted by talk radio and often bot-activated social media, that Richard Nixon could have killed for, as well as still-favorable economic winds (a factor that also aided Bill Clinton, but—with an OPEC embargo fueling inflation—hurt Nixon).

But no obstacle may be more significant than fear—the fear of many incumbent Republicans of incurring the wrath of their outraged base and of staring into the vacuum of involuntary retirement at the polls. (Support of Trump among white evangelicals Republicans, in many ways the shock troops of the base, runs to 99%.)

Some Republicans, such as former Bush speechwriter and current Washington Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen, wonder why Congress can’t simply censure Trump, and be done with it. 

Besides forgetting that Trump wouldn’t be done with it without retaliating against participants in this humiliation, they ignore their own rationale for rejecting that alternative against Clinton in 1999: that it would be a mere slap on the wrist for felonious misconduct. 

Moreover, a censure vote might not even win a majority of Republican votes. After all, most have argued not merely that Trump’s actions were not impeachment-worthy but have also bought into the whole “fictional narrative” of Ukrainian interference that Fiona Hill warned against. How, then, could these GOP Senators censor Trump without also censoring themselves?

 

Through their pathetic inability even to find a clear, ongoing, unmistakable voice for denouncing Trump on earlier occasions, the Capitol Hill GOP has only emboldened him to try to get away with more. The initial embarrassment so many expressed when Trump stood next to Putin in Helsinki and accepted his assurances that American intelligence agencies were wrong about Russian interference in 2016 was followed by delay and even inaction in urging the President to take meaningful measures to guard against a repetition four years later.

Actually, there is an example closer in time even than that. One day after Robert Mueller testified about his probe on Capitol Hill, in an appearance regarded as so ineffective as to leave prospects for impeachment stillborn, Trump was making his now-infamous July 25 phone call to Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky. With the coast clear, the freshly enabled President could move on yet another front in his attempt to secure foreign assistance for himself--thus sustaining himself in office as he and his family continue to violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution.

Democrats, then, have no choice but to hold Trump accountable on this issue, because if they do not, his bullying instinct will sense their weakness and he will attempt something infinitely more brazen. The real issue is whether Republican Congressmen and Senators can conceive of any value in holding office other than winning re-election. 

If they cannot, then what the hell are they doing down there?

 

Where Are Today’s Weickers and Goldwaters?

In times past, Congressmen and Senators of the same party as the President might have usually supported his legislative efforts, but would have drawn the line when he pursued unconstitutional or foolhardy initiatives. Both liberal and conservative Democrats united, for different reasons, against FDR’s 1937 court-packing scheme, as did prominent members such as William Fulbright, Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy when LBJ escalated American participation in Vietnam. 

No such independence has been on display among GOP members of the House Intelligence Committee. In fact, intelligence itself has been in short supply on that side of the aisle. Evidently, they have surveyed the current GOP environment, noted that those not embarrassed into retirement have been cowed into complicity, and embraced the second choice.

Look in vain in these hearings for a GOP equivalent of stalwarts from different parts of the party who during the Watergate crisis were ready to criticize Richard Nixon without equivocation: liberal Lowell Weicker and conservative Barry Goldwater. 

No, Comrades McConnell, Graham, Nunez, and Jordan didn’t deviate in the slightest from supporting Trump, not daring to utter what these earlier counterparts understood: that a President unrestrained in using power was a threat not just to their country but to the long-term health of the party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower.

Which Republican Will Ask, ‘What’s Wrong With This Picture?’

A year or so ago, “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau depicted the dilemma of Capitol Hill Republicans in the Age of Trump with deadly accuracy. “Who needs a spine?” a legislator wonders to himself, just as a bystander shouts, “Didn’t Republicans once stand for things?” like free trade, strong alliances, reducing the deficits, standing up against brutal regimes—and, the item that gets the lawmaker not just unable to rise but bent through his legs looking up, “The FBI—You were BFFs!!!”

As it happens, there are precious few Republicans with enough spine left to ask, “What’s wrong with this picture?”:

*None wonders how, of all the leaders in the world, Vladimir Putin is the one never criticized by Trump. 

*None wonders why, at every turn, a statement by the President and his camp has proven to be incorrect (e.g., Don Jr. was not meeting with foreign operatives about “adoption policies”). 

*None wonders why a leader never known for honesty—one even forced to settle legal disputes against his foundation and “university”—now interests himself in corruption in another country.

*None wonders why, of all Presidential candidates in our history, only Trump was screaming about electoral fraud before a single vote was counted.

*None wonders why this President shouts so much about “McCarthyism” when he was tutored so thoroughly by Roy Cohn, the aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy who carried on his boss’s tactic of generating reckless, baseless charges when he himself was attacked.

*None wonders why a President who cries about “due process” has spent three years egging on crowds to chant about an opponent, “Lock her up,” as if the United States was no better than a banana republic.

*None wonders why, despite being told by then-National Security adviser H.R. McMaster and other intelligence experts that rumors of Ukrainian interference in 2016 were the product of Russian propaganda, Trump proceeded to tweet, “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump campaign ‘quietly working to boost Clinton.’ So where is the investigation A.G. [Jeff Sessions].” 

*None wonders why, two years to the day after issuing that tweet, Trump decided to push a newly elected Ukrainian leader around by personally urging him to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden.

The ‘Palpable Device’ Seen by All Trump’s Collaborators

Nearly three centuries before Stephen Crane assessed the responsibility of collaborators, William Shakespeare had done so in Richard III. In his masterly analysis of Shakespeare’s politically tinged work, Tyrant, Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt highlights one lowly “Scrivener” who, after copying out an indictment against Richard’s onetime conspirator Hastings, recognizes its absurd falsity (Hastings did not use witchcraft to make Richard’s arm wither) and its faked timeline (the charges were put together well in advance).

Anyone can understand what is really going on, the scrivener thinks to himself:

“Why who's so gross,

That seeth not this palpable device?

Yet who's so blind, but says he sees it not?

Bad is the world, and all will come to naught

When such ill dealing must be seen in thought.”

Trump’s Capitol Hill collaborators are now full participants in his “ill dealing.” Whether the President survives the impeachment process or not, they, like Richard’s collaborators in London—and Crane’s in the saloon—will never again breathe another easy night.