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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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GOP claims that the various witnesses don’t have first-hand knowledge of Trump’s crimes and misdemeanors are a bizarre joke when the White House is blocking key figures from testifying. If I have to choose, I’ll take the word of people speaking in public under oath over those shooting from ambush, cowering and tweeting.
The GOP techniques on display are quite familiar to me, having spent so much of my life inside the propaganda bubbles of the Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia. It was therefore ironic to see the GOP accusing the Democrats of "Soviet-style” hearings when it’s the Republicans who are taking cues from the KGB playbook.
Obscuring the truth is one objective, but the larger goal is to create so much doubt and hostility that people become exhausted and stick to one or two news sources that make them feel comfortable.
In America, that means directing Trump’s followers to Fox News, which has become bad enough to evoke memories of the Soviet Pravda (“Truth”) newspaper and nightly news where the Communist Party could do no wrong.
As the joke went, there were three TV channels in the USSR. Channel 1 was Brezhnev, Channel 2 was Brezhnev, and Channel 3 was a KGB guy warning you to stop changing channels. That’s what the Republicans are doing now in a desperate attempt to keep voters from hearing the truth. Don’t look with your eyes or listen with your ears, comrades, just turn back to Channel 1!
But even if you can fool some of the people all of the time, the relentless moving of the goalposts has to be wearing thin.
That nearly everyone around Trump turns out to be a criminal is a coincidence nearly on the scale of how many of their crimes come back to Russian connections. It’s good to know that when you follow a false prophet, Jesus’s dictum “the truth will set you free” does not apply. Instead, the truth gets you sent to jail.
Trump’s ability to drag people down to his level of the swamp is mirrored on the international front. He attacks traditional allies while befriending thugs and autocrats. He spreads corruption, keen to make other leaders as complicit as he is in order to gain leverage over them. These are the practices Putin uses to spin his web in the free world and it’s a sad day when these same habits are preferred by the president of the United States.
uch immoral lunacy is why impeachment is not only valid, but urgent. This is not a partisan matter, which is why the Renew Democracy Initiative recently moved to support the impeachment inquiry. The American people deserve the opportunity to pick a side between corruption and the rule of law, between democracy and autocracy, between the truth and deception. We already know which side Trump has taken in each case. Now his Republican defenders should be forced to do the same, to pick a side in full view of the voting public.
“Facts are stubborn things,” wrote John Adams. And we must be no less stubborn in defending those facts. If Trump is so infallible, he and his defenders should have no qualms about having him deliver the truth not on Twitter, not at a rally, but under oath.
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While Trump may have deluded himself into believing that this kind of bullying projects strength, I think it reveals the exact opposite. Donald Trump is afraid. This is a man who has spent the entirety of his adult life plastering his name on skyscrapers and casinos; this is a man who is obsessed with his own legacy. And that’s why impeachment is the permanent stain that Trump deserves — and one he clearly fears.
Axios reported recently that Trump has said privately impeachment is a “bad thing to have on your resume.” He doesn’t want impeachment to be the first thing written about him in the world's history books.
Conventional wisdom suggests that there are enough https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-ukraine-controversy/2019/09/25/9390e9b8-df82-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html (votes in the Democrat-controlled House) to successfully impeach Trump, while the Senate will vote against it. But when it comes to Trump and how he is wired, it may not matter if he is thrown out of office. The fact that he would go down in history as only the third president ever to be impeached would psychologically cripple him.
Trump revels in his own celebrity, fame and wealth. But what we’re talking about right now is infamy on a historic scale. Impeachment is his scarlet letter, a public rebuke that will be very hard to dismiss or minimize (although we can be sure that he’ll try).
And the increasing public meltdowns we have seen from the president suggest the fear of impeachment is getting to him.
Trump’s unhinged tweets and press outbursts are a manifestation of what feels a lot like desperation. And the more desperate Trump becomes, the more outrageous his rhetoric will become and the more his paranoia will grow. He will continue to howl and bark in the hopes that he can both scare anyone willing to cooperate with impeachment and maintain his GOP-firewall of protection. But just remember, like any bully, the louder he yells, the more scared he is.
WASHINGTON—A U.S. ambassador set to testify this week in the House impeachment inquiry kept several Trump administration officials apprised of his effort to get Ukraine to launch investigations that President Trump would later discuss in a July call with his Ukrainian counterpart, emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show.
Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union who will be one of eight witnesses to testify in the inquiry’s second week of open hearings, is one of several people who has linked a holdup of security aid to Ukraine over the summer with investigations that Mr. Trump sought. Mr. Sondland’s conversations with Mr. Trump about the investigations, including one revealed last week in another ambassador’s testimony, has made him a central figure to Democrats’ investigation.
Several witnesses have testified to impeachment investigators that they were alarmed by what they perceived as dual channels of U.S. policy on Ukraine—one traditional, and the other led by Mr. Sondland and Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, which focused on the president’s push for certain investigations. Mr. Sondland kept several top officials—including acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and Energy Secretary Rick Perry—apprised of that push, according to the emails reviewed by the Journal, in the weeks leading up to Mr. Trump’s July 25 phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart that spurred a whistleblower complaint and, ultimately, the impeachment probe.
