Saturday, September 21, 2019

What might finally ensnare Trump by Jennifer Rubin

What might finally ensnare Trump

 
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President Trump pauses while speaking to members of the media before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on Monday. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)
By Jennifer Rubin
Opinion writer
President Trump tweeted on Thursday as the whistleblower scandal was unfolding: “Is anybody dumb enough to believe that I would say something inappropriate with a foreign leader while on such a potentially ‘heavily populated’ call?” Actually, any sentient being knows that Trump has no idea what is and is not appropriate, so he would absolutely say something on a call that others found shocking. He told George Stephanopoulos he would take help from a foreign power again. He told Lester Holt he was thinking of Russia when he fired James Comey as FBI director. Trump is precisely the sort of person to say something deeply incriminating.
And that brings us to The Post’s latest bombshell: “A whistleblower complaint about President Trump made by an intelligence official centers on Ukraine, according to two people familiar with the matter, which has set off a struggle between Congress and the executive branch.” And it gets worse:
Two and a half weeks before the complaint was filed, Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian and political newcomer who was elected in a landslide in May.
That call is already under investigation by House Democrats who are examining whether Trump and his attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani sought to manipulate the Ukrainian government into helping Trump’s reelection campaign. Lawmakers have demanded a full transcript and a list of participants on the call.
Trump and his fixer Giuliani, it has been widely reported, have been pressuring Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden based on a groundless theory that as vice president he was helping his son, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company. (Biden was accused of getting a prosecutor investigating his son’s company fired. In fact, “The investigation into Burisma, Hunter Biden’s employer, had ground to a halt long before the prosecutor was sacked. A subsequent probe into the company’s owner was opened because of a request from Ukrainian legislators, not because of prosecutorial initiative.”)
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) adds this interesting account:
All of this raises the question as to whether the multiple actions amounted to a “promise” by Trump to release aid in exchange for Ukraine’s help investigating Biden. Aside from possibly implicating bribery statutes, there could be no clearer example of a “High Crime & Misdemeanor” than in using government revenue to extort a foreign power to help you get reelected. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me that such an arrangement would probably meet the definition “within the meaning of the Constitution’s phrase ‘Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,’ although it might well fail to meet the narrow definition of ‘bribery’ for purposes of criminal prosecution under 18 U.S.C. § 201.”
What is a whistleblower: How to be a journalist
Whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg take personal risks to expose wrongdoing. (The Washington Post)
But make no mistake: This would be the perfect example of conduct that might not technically be a crime but is obviously and blatantly a violation of the president’s oath of office and a threat to our democratic system. Former prosecutor Renato Mariotti tweeted, “If Trump promised foreign aid to Ukraine in exchange for investigating Biden’s son, that is obviously corrupt and should meet any definition of a ‘high crime’ for impeachment.”
Meanwhile, Giuliani made a wild appearance on CNN. Amid the accusations and insults, he acknowledged that “of course” he asked Ukraine to look into Biden. Umm. That’s a problem.
Even if you took the aid out of it, going to a foreign government to request dirt on a political opponent would be precisely the “collusion” (or illegal conspiracy) that Robert S. Mueller III was investigating. Using taxpayer money (foreign aid) to facilitate such an arrangement makes it doubly corrupt.
Now, we do not know whether this is the basis of the complaint and whether any Trump “promise” was part of a quid pro quo. That is why we need the whistleblower’s complaint released to Congress, a lightning-fast investigation and then, if supported by the facts, a call for Trump to resign or be impeached.
Along the way, there will be questions as to whether Trump or his attorney general ordered the complaint not to be sent to Congress. There will be questions as to whether Vice President Pence, who went to Ukraine recently and was asked about release of aid by reporters, or former national security adviser John Bolton (who was there as well) knew anything about this.
And of course, we’ll have to see what excuse Republicans come up with for not doing anything. (It was a joke! Deep state!) However, if the facts point to corrupt behavior, impeachment will be a necessity and a political winner for Democrats. And yes, this would be way, way worse than Watergate.

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Trump finally realizes being president is hard by Paul Waldman

Trump finally realizes being president is hard

 
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(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By Paul Waldman
Opinion writer
President Trump says many outlandish things, yet even the most outlandish can offer a clue to his thinking. And lately, he’s giving hints that he’s increasingly frustrated by foreign policy.
Which is not how it usually works. Many presidents begin their time in office with an ambitious domestic agenda, then turn more and more to foreign policy as time goes on, because it’s an area where their ability to act is much less constrained. They don’t have to get Congress’s permission for most of what they do and don’t have to spend months wrangling with two-bit members to achieve anything. For all the power of the office, it’s defined in large part by its constraints, and foreign policy is an area with fewer of them.
Yet when Trump talks about what’s going on around the world, he begins to sound almost wistful, focusing on what he could do but hasn’t and won’t. For example, here’s what he said Friday on the subject of bombing Iran:
The easiest thing I could do, in fact I could do it while you’re here, would say, “Go ahead fellas, go do it.” And that would be a very bad day for Iran. That’s the easiest thing I could do, it’s so easy.
What’s so strange about this is that the reason he hasn’t gone to war against Iran is precisely because it wouldn’t be easy, and Trump knows it. One of his few worthwhile impulses is his reluctance to get into another war in the Middle East, because he has no taste for getting trapped in a quagmire like Iraq.
So why keep insisting that it would be “easy”? Let’s look at something else he said Friday:
We’ve been very effective in Afghanistan, and if we wanted to do a certain method of war, we would win that very quickly, but many, many, really, tens of millions of people would be killed, and we think it’s unnecessary.
Committing the worst genocide in human history is “unnecessary.” Good to know.
You might think this idea — that we could quickly end the war in Afghanistan by killing everyone in the country — would never even occur to a sane person. But Trump keeps bringing it up. Back in July, he said, “If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in a week. I just don’t want to kill 10 million people.” The point is always how easy it could be, compared with what he has to do now.
I think what underlies these repeated statements is a genuine frustration on his part with how complicated being president has turned out to be. This was something Trump was plainly unprepared for. A few months in, he told Reuters, “This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.”
Yes, Trump actually believed that being president of the United States, the most important job on the planet, would be easier than running a midsize brand-licensing firm.
This was probably because he figured that being president was mostly giving speeches and throwing out a few ceremonial first pitches (though he is the first president since William Howard Taft not to do the latter, most likely because he’s afraid of being booed). How hard could it be? He saw presidents on TV and thought they were all idiots; obviously he could run circles around them.
Then he got to the White House and learned that everything was more complicated than he thought, especially legislating. You’ll remember him lamenting, “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated,” when in fact everyone except for him was quite aware. Which is why the only major piece of legislation he passed was a tax cut, and it isn’t exactly hard to get a Republican Congress to cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations.
In foreign policy, Trump figured his matchless skills as a negotiator would enable him to solve any problem. I don’t need to know anything about nuclear deterrence and uranium enrichment and throw weights — just get me in a room with Kim Jong Un, and we’ll make a deal!
We saw how that worked out: A bunch of meetings and “beautiful letters” and … nothing. We’re in the same place we were with North Korea before he took office.
As he looks at Iran, all Trump sees is complications. He walked away from the nuclear agreement because it was Barack Obama’s, and now tensions have skyrocketed. He imposed sanctions on Iran, and instead of knuckling under it is being more provocative. He loves the Saudis but doesn’t have a taste to get into a regional war against Iran on their behalf. A direct strike on Iran would create all kinds of unintended consequences.
At last, Trump understands that it isn’t as easy as he thought. So he can’t stop talking about some other imagined course he could take, the one that would be easy. The one that will remain forever out of his reach.

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