What Will Hurt Trump More-- His Lying Nature Or Justin Amash?

Perception by Nancy Ohanian

The thing about the Trump/Stephanopoulous interview that was so mind-boggling was how Trump admitted he would break the law to get his tiny little hands on Russian intelligence about the elections again. But there was something else that caught my attention-- and apparently other people's as well. Andrew Sullivan wrote it up for New York Magazine: Donald Trump and the Art of the Lie.

“I like the truth. I’m actually a very honest guy,” President Trump told a slightly incredulous George Stephanopoulos this week. Like almost everything Trump says, it was, of course, a lie. But it was a particularly Trumpish kind of lie. It was so staggeringly, self-evidently untrue, and so confidently, breezily said, it was less a statement of nonfact than an expression of pure power.

For Trump, lying is central to his disturbed psyche, and to his success. The brazenness of it unbalances and stupefies sane and adjusted people, thereby constantly giving him an edge and a little breathing space while we try to absorb it, during which he proceeds to the next lie. And on it goes. It’s like swimming in choppy water. Just when you get to the surface to breathe, another wave crashes into you.

This particular lie was in the context of a report from the New York Times this week, independently confirmed by ABC News, that Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio had found Trump lagging Joe Biden in most of the states he needed to win-- even in Texas. The Times reported that Trump had instructed his staff to lie about this polling. When asked about it by Stephanopoulos, Trump simply followed his own advice. “No, my polls show that I’m winning everywhere,” he said blithely. And when you hear him, it sounds as if he is telling the truth. He’s gooood.

In Michael Wolff’s new book, Siege... Bannon, Wolff writes, came to understand that the lies were “compulsive, persistent and without even a minimal grounding in reality.” This is not to deceive the public. This is simply the way Trump behaves-- in private and public. It’s why I have long believed he is mentally unwell.

At some point, the law usually catches up with this kind of con artist, and Trump has had quite a few close calls over the years (and paid out a lot in settlements). But a presidential con man at this level of talent, legitimized by public opinion, enlarged and enhanced by the office and its trappings, is far harder to catch. It seems to me we had one shot of doing this definitively-- the Mueller investigation-- and we failed. Trump’s lies about the report, and his attorney general’s genius move of lying about its conclusion before the rest of us could check it out fully, helped. So did conservative media’s blackout of the actual substance of the report. Trump’s Roy Cohn tactic of accusing his accusers of the same flaw-- it was Hillary who colluded with the Russians!-- was another masterstroke of distraction. But it’s hard to deny at this point that in the battle between Trump and Mueller, Trump just won.

...So, of course, Trump has upped the ante again. Why wouldn’t he? He has proven that he can obstruct justice and get away with it, so now he is not only refusing to comply with any subpoenas and barring critical witnesses from testifying, but claiming, through his lawyers, that the only branch of government that can investigate the president’s compliance with the law is the executive branch itself, over which the president has total control: “Congress is simply not allowed to conduct law-enforcement investigations of the president.” Congressional oversight of possible crimes by the president “improperly impinges upon and hence interferes with the independence that is imperative to the functioning of the executive branch.” The president, they argue, is the only person who can determine if the president breaks the law. The only possible exception, Trump’s lawyers grudgingly concede, is in an impeachment proceeding-- which they well know Pelosi doesn’t have the guts to invoke.

If the president is judge and jury in his own case, he is a monarch, not a president. To add to this, we also have both Trump and his Botoxed dauphin, Jared Kushner, recently express the belief that they did nothing wrong in inviting, welcoming, and encouraging a foreign enemy of the United States to interfere in an American election. Trump, contradicting his own FBI director, told Stephanopoulos this week he’d be open to receiving dirt on a political opponent from a foreign power again in 2020. Hey, why not? “If somebody called from a country, Norway, [and said] ‘we have information on your opponent’-- oh, I think I’d want to hear it,” the president said. He might tell the FBI, or he might not. I know we’re used to this kind of thing-- he openly invited Russia to intervene in 2016, after all, and they did-- but it is vital to repeat that this is about as impeachable a statement as could be uttered by any president.

The worry about a president receiving assistance from a foreign country, let alone inviting it, was one of the central concerns of the Founders when they came up with the mechanism of impeachment. It need not be a conspiracy or a crime. It was about violating the integrity of the American political system-- to the advantage of another country. They were thinking of Britain and France, their equivalent of Russia and China. And they were understandably paranoid about it. “He might betray his trust to foreign powers,” Madison worried about waiting for the next election to call a president to account. Combine the blithe ease with which Trump considers this impeachable offense with his now-demonstrated attempts to obstruct justice, and now add a legal claim that the Congress cannot oversee what might be presidential criminality … well, you have a situation that impeachment was specifically designed for.

It is worth adding to this, for good measure, that, all the while, the president has been attempting to buttress Republican-- and essentially white-- power, by rigging the census to deny Democrats future seats, and thereby resources. We now have incontrovertible proof that this was the intention behind adding a citizenship question to the Census-- thanks to a leaked hard drive. Put all this together and you begin to get a sense of how contested the result of the next election could be. Trump is deliberately undermining public confidence in its integrity. He did this rhetorically as a candidate. Doing it as an incumbent president is an even graver assault on our liberal democracy. Imagine Bush v. Gore, but with an incumbent president who controls the executive branch and has the Supreme Court in his pocket, and you begin to see the risk we are taking by leaving him in place.

He will do anything, we have to understand, to protect his psychic attachment to his own self-interest. Anything. I’ll repeat what I believe: He will not leave his office if he narrowly loses in 2020. He’ll fight — and rally his supporters to fight with him. He’s not Nixon. He’s Erdoğan. When, since becoming president, has Trump conceded anything?

A tyrant’s path to power is not a straight line, it’s dynamic. Each concession is instantly banked, past vices are turned into virtues, and then the ante is upped once again. The threat rises exponentially with time. If we can’t see this in front of our own eyes, and impeach this man now, even if he will not be convicted, we are flirting with the very stability of our political system. It is not impregnable. Why is Putin the only person who seems to grasp this?

Although there are plenty of Republicans on Capitol Hill who understand all this as well as Andrew Sullivan does, they're all sticking with the tribe for one reason or another, political cowardice probably being the overwhelming factor. No one wants to mess with a pig like Trump. There's one exception: Justin Amash (R-MI). He not only repeatedly said Trump should be the subject of impeachment proceedings, on Wednesday he broke ranks with the other Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform Committee and voted to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt for refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas regarding the U.S. Census.

Trumpanzee, Jr already tried tangling with Amash-- and came out a laughing stock:

But there is little Trump, Sr can do to stop himself from going on the attack against Amash himself. There are now 2 crackpot Trumpists who have declared for the seat, state Rep. Jim Lower and perennial candidate Tom Norton. (There are also two Democrats engaging, Doug Booth and Amanda Brunzell.) Amash has fought off attempts by both the GOP establishment to beat him in primaries and the lame Michigan Democrats to beat him in a general election. He's very popular in Michigan and especially in Kent County, which decides election in his district. It's an independent-minded district where voters don't give a hoot about what party bosses want. In 2016, each of the district's 5 counties, for example, rejected Hillary-- the party establishment favorite-- and went heavily for Bernie:

• Kent-- Bernie- 62.5%, Hillary- 37.3%
• Calhoun-- Bernie- 51.5%, Hillary- 46.4%
• Barry-- Bernie- 62.8%, Hillary- 35.4%
• Ionia-- Bernie- 64.1%, Hillary- 34.0%
• Montcalm-- Bernie- 60.5%, Hillary- 36.8%

I wouldn't worry too much about an MIRS poll that shows Lower beating Amash 49-33%. You think voters are stupid enough to buy into this Lower talking point: "At this point, Justin Amash has more in common with Rashida Tlaib than he does the average Republican primary voter in the district?" The DeVos family has already cut off normal GOP funding for Amash. And if Trump gets too heavy-handed, Amash could very well wind up as the presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party, offering plenty of right-of-center voters who fancy themselves constitutionalists and detest Trump but won't vote for a Democrat, a place to go. If Amash runs as a Libertarian, not only can Trump forget about Michigan, he's likely to be critically wounded in states where he he can't afford it-- Arizona, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, Iowa, Georgia, North Carolina. Wisconsin...