Ole Trumpy-The-Clown Had Such A Bad Week! And, Including The Cognitive Decline He's Suffering, No One Ever Deserved It More!

Finally, Republicans are started to break. Yesterday, Digby pointed out that younger Republicans are finally starting to jump off that sinking ship. Florida GOP Congressman Francis Rooney said he's open voting for impeachment-- the first one to say anything like that, as when their are still a handful of Blue Dogs who haven't! And John Kasich was on CNN yesterday saying he thinks Trump should be impeached. And if it can be proved that Trump was gaming the stock market, as appears more than likely... well, even his die-hard supporters will understand what that's all about. Oh... and his chief Capitol Hill henchmen, who has propped him up, Moscow Mitch told the Washington Post that withdrawing from Syria is a "grave mistake." A grave, I hope, that is big enough for the entire Regime and all his congressional lackeys.

Reporter Ashley Parker, reminded Washington Post readers that all the impeachment evidence points squarely at Trump as having personally orchestrated the Ukraine effort against Biden. "Two Cabinet secretaries. The acting White House chief of staff. A bevy of career diplomats. President Trump’s personal attorney. And at the center of the impeachment inquiry," she wrote, "the president himself. Over two weeks of closed-door testimony, a clear portrait has emerged of a president personally orchestrating the effort to pressure a foreign government to dig up dirt on a potential 2020 political rival-- and marshaling the full resources of the federal bureaucracy to help in that endeavor. On Thursday, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney waded further into the morass, saying during a rare news conference that he understood Trump to be asking for a quid pro quo with his Ukrainian counterpart-- only to attempt to retract those comments in a bellicose statement six hours later.

Contrary to weeks of denials from the president and his defenders, a growing body of evidence makes clear it was Trump himself who repeatedly pushed his own government and a foreign power to intervene in domestic political concerns, enlisting and ensnaring a growing number of administration officials in a way that increasingly made even some members of his own team uncomfortable.

The wave of witnesses reflects the growing peril enveloping Trump amid the burgeoning inquiry, which he and some top aides have tried to block by refusing to abide by congressional subpoenas. Not only are a growing number of officials and longtime employees choosing to come forward with damaging evidence, the narrative they are laying out points to potential violations of law, including prohibitions on accepting campaign help from a foreign entity, that bolster the case for impeachment.

The prepared testimony Thursday of Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, showed how deeply the president involved himself in the Ukraine negotiations that are the focus of the inquiry, and the extent to which he outsourced Ukraine policy to his personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani.

“I would not have recommended that Mr. Giuliani or any private citizen be involved in these foreign policy matters,” Sondland said, according to his prepared remarks.

Yet despite his discomfort, Sondland said that because he and his team had been “given the president’s explicit direction,” the group “agreed to do as President Trump directed” and involved Giuliani in the ongoing Ukraine discussions.

...In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Energy Secretary Rick Perry also clarified just how adamant Trump was in ensuring that Giuliani be included in Ukraine discussions.

“Visit with Rudy,” Perry paraphrased the president as saying.

Perry told the paper that after he contacted Trump’s personal attorney as part of an effort to facilitate a meeting between the president and Zelensky, Giuliani relayed to him unsubstantiated concerns that Ukraine-- not Russia, as the U.S. intelligence community has concluded-- had interfered in the 2016 presidential elections.

On Thursday, Perry notified Trump in writing that he planned to resign soon.

As early as May, Giuliani began publicly pushing theories involving Ukraine for which he had no reliable evidence. He urged, for instance, a corruption investigation into Hunter Biden, who sat on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, while his father was vice president. So far, there is no evidence of any wrongdoing by Biden or his son.

At the time, many viewed Giuliani’s efforts in Ukraine as something of a personal passion project-- the extracurricular schemes of an aging lawyer whose behavior even some in Trump’s own orbit considered erratic.

Now, however, as Giuliani has said himself and as a number of other witnesses have made clear, Giuliani was working at the behest of his client, the president of the United States.

In rough notes released by the White House of Trump’s controversial call with Zelensky, the president seems to view Giuliani as almost interchangeable with Attorney General William P. Barr, telling Zelensky he hoped the Ukrainians could work with Giuliani and Barr to root out corruption there, including investigating the Bidens.

Mulvaney, too, acted as an enabler, organizing a meeting in late May that stripped control of Ukraine policy from experts at the National Security Council and State Department. He reassigned control to Perry, Sondland and Kurt Volker, then the special U.S. envoy to Ukraine-- a trio that called themselves “The Three Amigos.”

Even those with fewer one-on-one interactions with Trump have offered testimony painting a picture of dysfunction at best-- and malfeasance at worst-- emanating from the president.

Last Friday, Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told congressional investigators that she had been forced out of her post by “unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives.” Yovanovitch specifically named associates of Giuliani-- two of whom have since been arrested over campaign finance violations-- who she believe regarded her as a threat to their financial and political dealings.

On Monday, Fiona Hill, the White House’s former top Russia adviser, told investigators that on Ukraine, Giuliani ran a shadow foreign policy that bypassed traditional channels and career diplomats. Then-national security adviser John Bolton was so alarmed by Giuliani’s actions that he instructed Hill to alert White House lawyers about his efforts, she testified.

Hill also testified that Bolton said he wanted no part of any “drug deal” that the president’s allies were pursing with Ukraine, and that Bolton described Giuliani as a “hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up.”

As for Sondland-- a wealthy Oregon hotelier-- Hill told investigators that she believed he was a possible national security threat because he was so out of his depth when it came to handling the administration’s Ukraine policy.

Then, on Wednesday, Michael McKinley, a former senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, testified that he had resigned the previous week in protest over how he believed the State Department had become politicized under Trump and Pompeo. McKinley, according to his prepared testimony, also cited his concerns over the administration’s efforts to pressure Zelensky into investigating the president’s political rivals.

“I was disturbed by the implication that foreign governments were being approached to procure negative information on political opponents,” McKinley said in his prepared remarks.

The steady stream of closed-door testimony, as well as public statements, contradicts Trump’s repeated claims that his phone call with Zelensky was “perfect” and “totally appropriate,” and that he did nothing wrong.

Nick Akerman, a prosecutor who investigated President Richard Nixon, said that unlike Watergate, when prosecutors struggled to figure out Nixon’s role in the events they were investigating, a growing body of evidence points directly to Trump.

“Here, you’ll have that in spades,” Akerman said. “All these individuals, all testifying that this is what happened... It’s just cascading at this point.”

Akerman said that unlike Nixon’s loyal cadre of aides, Trump’s outer circle of aides and advisers is increasingly unwilling to shield him from what some view as his own dubious behavior.

“This is a situation where you’ve got a lot of people who are career people, extremely smart people who certainly don’t want their reputations smeared,” Akerman said. “Trump had to use these foreign services people and professionals. He didn’t speak Ukrainian and Russian. He couldn’t communicate his threat without these people. He was forced to use people whose loyalty was to the U.S. government and Constitution and not to him.”

And, he added, each new witness and detail seems to reveal a common thread: “You’ve got Trump clearly involved.”

"I really try very hard to be super-ethical and always legal"

Of the 241 Republicans in the House when Señor Trumpanzee was installed, about 40% are gone or retiring-- and that will be a lot higher after election day, 2020. There were two pieces in The Atlantic that I want to point to, one from last year by James Fallows, This Is the Moment of Truth for Republicans, and one from yesterday by Peter Nicholas, The Unraveling of Donald Trump. Both are horrendous for Trump and the GOP. Let's start with Fallows, who warned Republicans back then that they could "either defend the United States or serve the damaged and defective man" who is now its illegitimate and soon to be gone "president." He continued that "There are exactly two possible explanations for the shameful performance the world witnessed on Monday, from a serving American president. Either Donald Trump is flat-out an agent of Russian interests-- maybe witting, maybe unwitting, from fear of blackmail, in hope of future deals, out of manly respect for Vladimir Putin, out of gratitude for Russia’s help during the election, out of pathetic inability to see beyond his 306 electoral votes. Whatever the exact mixture of motives might be, it doesn’t really matter. Or he is so profoundly ignorant, insecure, and narcissistic that he did not  realize that, at every step, he was advancing the line that Putin hoped he would advance, and the line that the American intelligence, defense, and law-enforcement agencies most dreaded. Conscious tool. Useful idiot. Those are the choices, though both are possibly true, so that the main question is the proportions." Brutal!

But never before have I seen an American president consistently, repeatedly, publicly, and shockingly advance the interests of another country over those of his own government and people.

Trump manifestly cannot help himself. This is who he is.

Those who could do something are the 51 Republican senators and 236 Republican representatives who have the power to hold hearings, issue subpoenas, pass resolutions of censure, guarantee the integrity of Robert Mueller’s investigation, condemn the past Russian election interference, shore up protections against the next assault, and in general defend their country rather than the damaged and defective man who is now its president.

For 18 months, members of this party have averted their eyes from Trump, rather than disturb the Trump elements among their constituency or disrupt the party’s agenda on tax cuts and the Supreme Court. They already bear responsibility for what Trump has done to his office.

But with every hour that elapses after this shocking performance in Helsinki without Republicans doing anything, the more deeply they are stained by this dark moment in American leadership.

Yesterday Nicholas wrote that "As the impeachment inquiry intensifies, some associates of the president predict that his already erratic behavior is going to get worse. The country is entering a new and precarious phase, in which the central question about President Donald Trump is not whether he is coming unstrung, but rather just how unstrung he is going to get. The boiling mind of Trump has spawned a cottage industry for cognitive experts who have questioned whether he is, well, all there. But as the impeachment inquiry barrels ahead on Capitol Hill, several associates of the president, including former White House aides, worry that his behavior is likely to get worse. Angered by the proceedings, unencumbered by aides willing to question his judgment, and more and more isolated in the West Wing, Trump is apt to lash out more at enemies imagined and real, these people told me. Conduct that has long been unsettling figures to deteriorate as Trump comes under mounting stress. What unfolded Wednesday inside the West Wing’s walls might be only a foretaste of what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described that day, after a meeting with Trump, as a presidential 'meltdown.'

“He’s grown more comfortable in the job and less willing to assimilate new information and trust new advisers,” a former White House official told me. “He’s decided to throw caution to the wind and go it alone, especially when he’s stressed and feels under attack and threatened in various ways. Then his worst impulses and vices shine through.” ...[T]he latest concerns about Trump are just a crescendo in a long-running drama. Sam Nunberg, a former 2016 Trump-campaign aide, told me that a colleague once approached him and asked if Trump was losing it, saying they had just had the same conversation twice. Nunberg dismissed such concerns, assuring him that it was only because Trump likely wasn’t paying attention the first time.

His speech has changed over time, too. Software programs show that Trump currently speaks at a fourth-to-sixth-grade level. (Politicians are practiced at speaking to wide swaths of Americans, but Obama, for example, according to those speech analyses, spoke at an 11th-grade level in his final news conference as president.) A study last year by two University of Pittsburgh professors examining Trump’s appearances on Fox News found that the quality of his speech was worsening. They studied his comments over a seven-year period ending in 2017-- just as his presidency began-- and found that he had begun using substantially more “filler words”such as um and uh, though the authors did not conclude that the change signaled cognitive decline.

Even a casual observer can see the disordered and nonlinear thinking behind Trump’s speech. A case in point was Trump’s rally last week in Minneapolis. Within minutes of taking the stage, Trump launched, without explanation, into a dramatic reading of what he imagined was the pillow talk between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, a pair of former FBI officials who had exchanged text messages critical of the president. He gave no context as to why he was talking about them, leaving it to the audience to fill in the Mall of America–size blanks. Trump never even mentioned that they had worked for the FBI or that Strzok was at one point involved in the Russia investigation-- just that they were “lovers” who disliked him. (Still, as theater, it seemed to work. When Trump cooed, “Oh, God. I love you, Lisa!” the audience laughed appreciatively.)

Other people who have worked with Trump in the White House and on the 2016 campaign pushed back on the notion that his mental acuity has eroded over time. “Every president has a super-exaggerated ego and personality in some way,” Tom Bossert, Trump’s former homeland-security adviser and a former official in President George W. Bush’s administration, told me. I asked him if presidents or presidential candidates should be subject to a fitness test measuring whether they’re up to the job. Various psychologists have floated this idea in response to Trump’s behavior. “I’m not sure what the fitness standard would reveal about people who are already wired that way,” Bossert said.

Conventional wisdom in Washington is that impeachment won’t lead to Trump’s removal, but that view rests on Republicans continuing to stay by his side. Even those most loyal to Trump could lose patience if his rash decision making collides with their own interests. Trump’s impulsive decision to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria last week, setting the stage for Turkey’s attack on America’s Kurdish partners, has already infuriated some of his closest friends in Congress. It was soon after the House, in an overwhelming bipartisan vote, rebuked his Syria gambit on Wednesday that Trump lashed out at Pelosi, prompting her to abruptly walk out of their meeting. (Democrats, of course, are seizing the opportunity. “For those who don’t do politics professionally or even follow it closely: It is getting worse. He is getting worse,” Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii tweeted last night.)

At least one lawmaker thinks that Republicans could hit a tipping point-- though he’s a Democrat. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland told me that it might be easier for Republicans to concede that Trump is unwell than that he’s a criminal who violated his constitutional oath by committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The path to removing Trump, in this formulation, might not be impeachment, but the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

[Raskin is the obvious best replacement to head the House Oversight Committee but Pelosi will want to put an elderly and easily controlled crony of her on in that position, not an independent-minded firebrand like Raskin.]

Raskin, a former constitutional-law professor, is sponsoring a bill aimed at clarifying a provision of that amendment-- a vehicle for removing a president who is unable to carry out his duties, with the consent of the vice president-- by shifting responsibility for making such a judgment from the Cabinet to a panel created expressly for that purpose.

“It may be easier for at least certain Republican colleagues just to admit that the president is acting increasingly incapable of meeting the arduous tasks and duties of his office,” Raskin told me.

That’s still a lot to ask of Republican lawmakers who fully grasp Trump’s mystic hold on his political coalition and fear backlash. The question is whether Trump’s base starts to notice, or care, that the man it elected, facing pressures he’s never seen before, is devolving unmistakably into a different sort of man.