'Peculiar,
irrational, self-destructive': Trump's week of impeachment rage
The
Observer
Donald
Trump
As the
walls of an impeachment inquiry closed in, Trump’s incoherent statements
renewed fears about his fitness for office
David Smith
David Smith
in Washington
@smithinamerica
Sun 6 Oct
2019 07.00 BST
Trump’s
spiral began last month when Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, announced
an impeachment inquiry.
Trump’s spiral began last month when Nancy
Pelosi, the speaker of the House, announced an impeachment inquiry. Photograph:
Shawn Thew/EPA
The eye of
a storm is deceptively calm. At the White House this week the sun was shining,
a bust of Ronald Reagan reposed outside the West Wing office of the press
secretary, a US marine saluted the president as he boarded Marine One and
scores of African American millennials cheered him in the east room.
But inside
Donald Trump’s head, there was no calm. The storm was a firestorm.
The
president’s behaviour broke boundaries so stupendously that the fact he
congratulated communist China on its 70th birthday, reportedly demanded
alligators or snakes and flesh-piercing spikes for his border wall and wrote
the unpresidential word “BULLSHIT” on social media were soon relegated to
historical footnotes.
Instead, as
the walls of an impeachment inquiry closed in, it will be remembered as Trump’s
week of rage. His incoherent, wacky statements raised new fears over his state
of mind. His brazen invitation to foreign powers to interfere in American
elections raised new fears over his moral nihilism.
“It is
without parallel,” said Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study
of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “I have never seen a
president behave in such a peculiar, irrational and self-destructive way as
Trump in the last week.”
This is a
drama unfolding on two levels. One is familiar to students of Watergate and
other Washington scandals: a river of leaks, subpoenas, transcripts,
whistleblowers and closed door committee hearings. The other is something
alien: a commander-in-chief who does not deny wrongdoing because he does not
see the wrong, but rather recommits in broad daylight, confounding his
defenders as if hellbent on self-impeachment.
Jacobs
added: “What we’re seeing is the house of cards he built – how he casually
manipulated domestic and foreign leaders to work for him – is imploding. It’s
not just the occasional leak, but every day there seems to be a new explosion
of information that’s even more devastating. Trump looks like he’s in a
downward spiral and his efforts to pull out of it are only quickening the rate
at which he is losing control of the political process, so even his supporters
are asking where this is going.”
The spiral
began last month when Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of
Representatives, announced an impeachment inquiry against Trump. It was
triggered by an intelligence community whistleblower’s complaint about a July
phone call in which Trump pressed Ukraine’s new president to dig up dirt on the
family of the former vice-president Joe Biden, his potential opponent in next
year’s election.
Last
Sunday, Trump used Twitter to paraphrase a conservative pastor predicting that
his removal from office could lead to a civil war. The Republican congressman
Adam Kinzinger, who served in Iraq, said the tweet was “beyond repugnant”. Yet
somehow the president managed to become even more apocalyptic as the week wore
on.
By Monday
he was suggesting that Adam Schiff, the chair of the House intelligence
committee and tip of the impeachment spear, could face “arrest for treason”. By
Tuesday, he was following the lead of rightwing allies Rush Limbaugh, Hugh
Hewitt and Newt Gingrich by casually tossing around the word “coup”.
‘China
should start an investigation into the Bidens, because what happened in China
is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine,’ Trump told reporters.
But the
revelations kept coming. It was reported that Trump and his attorney general,
William Barr, had dragged Australia, Britain and Italy into their efforts to
discredit the special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Mike
Pompeo, the secretary of state, clashed with the House committees but had to
acknowledge that he was on the call between Trump and Zelenskiy.
On
Wednesday, things got really crazy. Trump sat in the Oval Office with the
Finnish president, Sauli Niinistö, and lambasted “shifty” Schiff, saying: “You
know, there’s an expression: he couldn’t carry his ‘blank’ strap.”
Mysteriously, he congratulated Finland for getting rid of Pelosi and Schiff. He
also appeared to confess ignorance of the word “moat” as he railed against the
Washington Post for a story published by the New York Times.
At a joint
press conference, Trump’s fury about impeachment became volcanic. A dogged
reporter challenged him repeatedly over what exactly he had hoped Ukraine’s Volodymyr
Zelenskiy would do to Biden and his son Hunter. The irascible president went
full Travis Bickle, backing away from the podium and demanding: “Are you
talking to me?”
The
meltdown fuelled talk about Trump’s psychological fitness for office. Matthew
Miller, the former director of the justice department’s public affairs office,
said: “The kind of display we saw, where he was disconnected from reality and
angry and wallowing in self-pity, we’ve seen before from him but it does seem
to be ramping up pretty dramatically. We’re just at the beginning of the
impeachment process and it is probably going to get worse for him. Any citizen
of this country has to be worried about the prospect of the president cracking
up under pressure in the middle of this.”
As
Republicans kept mum or scrambled for excuses, a more conventional politician
would have retreated to his bunker and said nothing. That is not Trump’s style.
He ran towards the fire. The next morning, he walked out of the south portico
at the White House to face a human wall of reporters, photographers and
cameramen straining to hear him above the roar of the Marine One helicopter.
He not only
reiterated his view that Ukraine should look for dirt on the Bidens but added:
“China should start an investigation into the Bidens, because what happened in
China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine.” Soliciting foreign
help in an election is illegal but Trump had said the quiet part out loud, just
as he did during the 2016 election campaign when he asked Russia to make
Hillary Clinton’s emails public. There is no evidence that the Bidens were
involved in criminal corruption in either Ukraine or China.
Miller
added: “First of all, it is fundamentally unacceptable behaviour from the
president and second, in the political context, it is the worst possible thing
that he could say in his defence. There’s been a lot of polling on this
question about whether people think it’s appropriate to ask a foreign
government to intervene and the polling is overwhelmingly opposed to the idea.
He’s doubling down that this behaviour is OK and that’s a tough position to ask
Republican politicians to take.”
Indeed,
there was a rare rebuke from two Republican senators. Ben Sasse of Nebraska
observed that “Americans don’t look to Chinese commies for the truth”, while
Mitt Romney of Utah said: “By all appearances, the president’s brazen and
unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong
and appalling.”
At the
opposite end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the more orthodox machinery of an
impeachment inquiry was whirring on Capitol Hill. Kurt Volker, who resigned
last week as the special envoy to Ukraine, was interviewed by members of the
House for almost 10 hours. He gave them dozens of text messages, which were
later released, showing that Volker and two other diplomats discussed how to
navigate Trump’s demands.
In one
exchange, Volker and the Ambassador Gordon Sondland discussed a draft statement
in which the Ukrainian government would announce an investigation into the 2016
US presidential election and into a company where Hunter Biden was a board
member. “This is my nightmare scenario,” read one message between the three
diplomats. “As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security
assistance for help with a political campaign.”
Pelosi,
meanwhile, was handing out subpoenas “like cookies”, Trump grumbled. There was
one for Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, and the White House
itself, with the threat of court action if it does not comply. Democrats also
want documents, recordings and communications from the vice-president, Mike
Pence, regarding the July call and an earlier call in April.
All of
which left impeachment by the House looking likelier than ever. But if that
happens, two thirds of the Senate would be required to convict and remove Trump
from office, which would be a first in American history. That means of the 53
Republicans currently in the Senate, he would only need 34 to remain loyal.
Commentators
have been quick to note that the former president Richard Nixon also enjoyed
robust Republican support in 1974 until suddenly he didn’t. But Nixon’s
grandson, Christopher Nixon Cox, said he believes Trump is in a much stronger
position. “I think the difference with Watergate and my grandfather is you
didn’t have the conservative media, talk radio, Fox News, some of the
newspapers, you certainly didn’t have a Republican majority in either house. So
it was really just my grandfather and his defenders in the administration and
that was it for the voices out there. Certainly Republicans having control of
the Senate makes a huge difference.
“I also
think another big difference that is maybe not as well understood is the link
between the economy and Watergate, which was that it was really a bad economy
that sunk my grandfather’s poll numbers and then you got Watergate on top of
that and that’s where he ran into trouble. The president’s economy is much
stronger than the economy my grandfather had and I think that’s that’s a big
benefit for him as well.”
Trump on
Sunday used Twitter to paraphrase a conservative pastor predicting that his
removal from office could lead to a civil war.
Cox, 40, a
businessman who made an unsuccessful run for Congress in 2010, believes there
is no chance of the Republican-controlled Senate convicting Trump. But Richard
Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer who believes that Trump is
“clearly abusing his power”, said Republican senators could yet be tempted to
remove the president from office if they calculate Pence has a better chance in
the 2020 election.
He said:
“If they were going to go against Trump, they meet behind closed doors, look at
the evidence and say, ‘Look, we’re just gonna switch quarterbacks here and
we’re going to have Pence and we’re gonna tell Trump to leave’. I think that
could be a possibility because I know a lot of Republican senators behind
closed doors are mad as heck about Trump’s behaviour. They think it’s
ridiculous.”
Niinistö,
the latest foreign leader to find himself caught by White House whiplash, urged
America to keep its democracy going, a sentiment evocative of a Benjamin
Franklin line that Pelosi has been quoting lately: “A republic, if you can keep
it.”
The world
is watching. Joe Crowley, a former Democratic congressman from New York, said:
“They know that this president is erratic and not very trustworthy but now they
also know that he himself cannot discern between right and wrong. Obviously it
is disturbing to us as Americans but I think the whole world is looking at this
and is disturbed that something like this could happen to America. And we need
it to end before it goes any further.”
If Donald Trump goes down, he’ll try to take everyone with him
Simon Tisdall
As the
impeachment saga gathers pace, even some Republicans fear that we’re looking at
the ’doomsday president’
Sat 5 Oct
2019 18.24 BSTFirst published on Sat 5 Oct 2019 12.06 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/05/donald-trump-take-everyone-with-him
Suggestions
that Trump has no idea what he’s doing were reinforced by some unhinged
behaviour last week. His ranting about traitors, spies and low-life at a White
House event was utterly bizarre, reviving claims that he is unfit for office.
As usual,
Trump turned defence into offence, in every sense. But his bullish tactics
staggered Washington. Instead of apologising, he freely admitted asking
Ukraine’s president for help in undermining Joe Biden, a leading Democratic
election rival. Nor did he deny seeking personal political favours from leaders
in Australia, Italy and Britain. He vowed to ask the same of China.
It was an
extraordinary display of chutzpah that doubtless delighted many Republicans.
But it still looked crazy, given that Trump is brazenly breaking the law. “It
is illegal for any person to solicit, accept or receive anything of value from
a foreign national in connection with a US election,” said Ellen Weintraub,
head of the Federal Election Commission. “I would not have thought that I
needed to say this.”
Trump’s
defiance is problematic in numerous other ways. Making America’s international
relations dependent on private quid pro quos – in Ukraine’s case $391m in
military aid and a high-profile White House meeting were allegedly dangled as
carrots – is a road to ruin. It amounts to extortion, and invites foreign
leaders to behave corruptly, too. As their published texts show, US diplomats
saw the danger, in effect, of putting US foreign policy up for sale.
By covertly
seeking favours for political advantage, Trump presented US allies with an
invidious choice: do as he asked, or risk negative consequences in key policy
areas. In Britain’s case, non-compliance could entail problems with a
post-Brexit trade deal. There is no proof this happened. But that’s the point.
Reports last week that Trump personally sought Boris Johnson’s help to
discredit the Mueller inquiry into his Russia links have not been denied.
America’s
rivals are not immune from such mafiosi-style arm-twisting. Trump openly
suggested that progress in trade talks with China next week could depend on
Beijing’s agreement to investigate what he claims, without proof, were corrupt
actions by Biden and his son, Hunter. If it were to agree, what might China ask
in return? US silence on human rights abuses in Hong Kong perhaps?
He is prepared to obstruct justice, intimidate
witnesses, peddle lies, demonise the media, whip up populist hysteria
Whether he
realises it or not, Trump has lit a fuse connected to an Oval Office bomb. The
move to impeach began after details of his phone call with Ukraine’s president
leaked. It has since emerged that transcripts and notes of his phone
conversations with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabia’s crown prince
Mohammed bin Salman, among others, are also held in a classified White House
archive. What private deals may he have cut with them? It’s only a matter of
time before Congress subpoenas these records too.
So is
Trump’s goose cooked? Not necessarily. For starters, he displays a ruthless,
killer instinct his more well-mannered Democrat accusers appear to lack. Nancy
Pelosi, the House speaker, resisted impeachment for months. Now she talks not
of her fury but of her sadness that it has come to this. This lack of
Watergate-style fire and brimstone partly reflects Democratic doubts about
Biden, who carries a lot of baggage.
Such
self-doubt is wholly foreign to Trump, whose determination to vanquish his
accusers and secure a second term knows no limit. As he has already shown, he
is fully prepared to obstruct justice, intimidate witnesses, peddle lies,
demonise the media, whip up populist hysteria – and, allegedly, fix the 2020
election, just like in 2016.
“As the President of the United States, I have an absolute
right, perhaps even a duty, to investigate, or have investigated, CORRUPTION,
and that would include asking, or suggesting, other Countries to help us out!”
Trump tweeted last week. In his mind, untroubled by ethical, legal or
constitutional principles, or any sense of shame, his actions are wholly
justified.
Trump and his supporters plainly believe impeachment will
backfire. They think claims he explicitly demanded quid pro quos from Ukraine
and others cannot ultimately be proven. They will obstruct demands for more
witness testimony and transcripts. They will step up mendacious TV ad campaigns
vilifying the Bidens. And they will argue, ferociously, that it’s all a
Democratic witch hunt, abetted by “fake news” media.
If impeachment ends with Trump’s acquittal – and given the
Republicans’ Senate majority and historical precedent, that’s probable – his
“victory”, and the Democrats’ ostensible defeat, will be used as a powerful
launch-pad for a second Trump term, regardless of whether his main challenger
is Biden, Elizabeth Warren or somebody else.
If on the other hand, it does not go Trump’s way, all bets
are off. Serious people, including some Republicans, worry that Trump is the
“doomsday president”, determined, if he goes down, to take everyone and
everything down with him. If such a point is reached, it is frighteningly
unclear whether a goaded, maddened Trump could be trusted to act sensibly and sanely
on issues such as Iran and North Korea.
The example of King George III, another American sovereign
who lost his reason and his control, comes to mind. From hubris, chaos.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário