A President Cannot-- Not Even An Illegitimate One-- Be Impeached For Character-- No Matter How Bad It Is

I don't think anyone in the House thinks they're going to get 20 Republicans to vote to remove Trump from office. They'll be lucky if they can keep Joe Manchin, Doug Jones and Kyrsten Sinema on the reservation and get even one Republican, presumably Collins or Murkowski. Instead, I think what the Democrats are trying to do is create a record for posterity and make a case against Trump's reelection. And they're been very successful in doing just that. Attacking Trump's character is certainly an indictment for voters to consider, both when they decide for whom to vote in the presidential election and for how to look at Republicans how chose to back Trump in the impeachment and subsequent trial.

Yesterday, Washington Post reporters Elise Viebeck, Karoun Demirjian and Mike DeBonis wrote that the Democrats argued that Trump's behavior towards Ukraine "reflected a dangerous reflex toward political expediency and a lack of character that will backfire on Republicans if they do not help remove him from office. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-CA) and his colleagues attempted to drive this argument home Friday.

The trio of reporters wrote that the purpose was "to sway a handful of Republican senators whose position on gathering further evidence will determine the arc and scope of the trial." In other words, will the Democrats be allowed to call witnesses this week. Mitt Romney said he would probably vote to allow witnesses. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins may have found the excuse they wanted-- Adam Schiff's aggressiveness-- to vote against calling witnesses. As our trio of Post reporters asserted, "there were few signs that any Republican was persuaded, leaving open the matter of possible witness testimony and further dampening Democrats’ already meager hopes of a conviction in the GOP-controlled Senate.

Schiff’s pointed and increasingly personal approach was an attempt to go beyond the specifics of House Democrats’ case to make the broader argument that Trump is an untrustworthy president who is likely to repeatedly flout the Constitution if allowed to stay in office.

“It goes to character,” Schiff said. “You don’t realize how ­important character is in the highest office in the land until you don’t have it.”

The Democrats’ closing statements were their final appeal to senators before the next phase of the trial: an aggressive rebuttal from Trump’s lawyers that will kick off Saturday and continue in earnest on Monday.

Speaking Friday on the Senate floor-- hours after new evidence emerged of Trump’s campaign to oust the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine starting in 2018-- Schiff predicted that Trump’s future behavior would vindicate Democrats’ claim that he abused his power, and he warned Republicans the president, now their ally, could ultimately turn on them.

“Do you think for a moment that any of you-- no matter what your relationship with this president, no matter how close you are to this president-- do you think for a moment that if he felt it was in his interest, he wouldn’t ask you to be investigated?” he asked.

...Democrats need four Republicans to join them in any attempt to secure new testimony or evidence, and the senators being targeted have been careful to say that they have made no decision-- while giving no indication they are moving closer to supporting any subpoenas.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), one of the most closely watched Republican senators, said Friday that the House managers had “presented us with a mountain of overwhelming evidence,” though it was unclear which way he was leaning on the question of hearing more.

Alexander told reporters that he will make his decision on admitting witnesses and other new evidence only after the White House defense team makes its case.

“I think that question can only be answered then,” he said. “We’ve been polite to the House managers, listened to them carefully, and now we’re going to do the same with the president’s lawyers. I think the House managers have done a good job of making their arguments. But that doesn’t mean I will agree with them.”

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) raised the prospect that a Senate trial could drag on for months if Trump administration witnesses are called, arguing that the issue of executive privilege would have to be litigated in the courts.

“This could tie up the Senate through the election and even beyond as the courts litigate these claims,” Cornyn said during an appearance on conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt’s syndicated radio show. “We’ll wait and see, but right now, I’m not for extending this for months and months while claims of privilege and the like are litigated in the courts.”

The question of whether the Senate will seek more evidence was heightened Friday by a new Washington Post-ABC News poll revealing that a majority of American adults, 66 percent, support the Senate calling new witnesses to testify, as opposed to 27 percent who don’t.

ABC News also reported Friday that it reviewed a recording of Trump at a private dinner telling associates that he wanted then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch gone, a reminder of the evidence yet to be uncovered about Trump’s actions.

“Get rid of her! Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. Okay? Do it,” Trump is heard saying, according to ABC News.

Schiff challenged the Senate to call the administration’s bluff on whether witnesses would be limited from testifying by executive privilege and let Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who is presiding over the trial, make those calls.

Calling executive privilege “the last refuge of the president’s team to conceal the evidence from the American people,” Schiff argued that Roberts should “decide issues of evidence and privilege” whenever witnesses or the president claim it, but that the assumption Trump will try to silence certain witnesses by claiming executive privilege should not keep the Senate from calling them to testify.

“The Senate will always have the opportunity to overrule the justice,” Schiff said to reporters, adding that “you cannot use executive privilege to hide wrongdoing or criminality or impeachable misconduct, and that is exactly the purpose for which they seek to use it.”

After Roberts scolded both sides for overheated rhetoric late Tuesday night, Democrats took pains to tone down their accusations against Trump and his supporters in the Senate.

Yet Schiff also sharpened his case on Friday, arguing that Republicans trust Trump at their own peril.

He invoked the late senator John McCain (R-AZ) in arguing about the strategic importance of Ukraine as a U.S. ally and quoted him as saying, “We are all Ukrainians.”

And he made a lengthy case that Trump’s skepticism about the conclusions of U.S. intelligence services-- particularly about Russian interference in the 2016 election-- represents a “coup” for Russia.

“Has there ever been such a coup? I would submit to you that in the entire length of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had no such success. No such success,” Schiff said. “I hope it was worth it. I hope it was worth it for the president. Because it certainly wasn’t worth it for the United States.”

...Schiff concluded his remarks Friday night with a different message as he urged senators to support hearing more evidence.

“I ask you. I implore you: Give America a fair trial,” he told senators. “Give America a fair trial. She’s worth it.”

This morning, Philip Bump did an insightful analysis of the Trump tape that the Senate will never subpoena and that Fox isn't likely to broadcast. "Parnas, wrote Bump, "would become tightly integrated into Trump’s circle, though the distance at which he was kept varies depending on who you ask. Trump insists that Parnas, an eventual business associate of Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, was only given access to the president because he’d contributed to Trump’s campaign or to America First. Parnas, the argument goes, was simply one of hundreds of such people who take photos with the president. To hear Parnas tell it, though, his work for Giuliani in late 2018 and in 2019 was well-known by Trump and was integral to the effort to get Ukraine to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, a possible opponent of Trump’s in the upcoming election... [A]t one point, Parnas tells Trump that then-Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch had disparaged the president, prompting Trump to say that she should be removed from her position. It’s a response that seems to conflict with the idea that Trump was simply interacting with a random donor, seemingly bolstering Parnas’s insinuations that his relationship with Trump was substantial.

It comes down to a question with no good answer: Is the president lying about his relationship with Parnas or is he prone to endorsing rash personnel changes based on unfounded assertions from strangers?

It’s oddly easy to believe that either might be the case. Trump’s predilection for seeking out the opinions of random nearby individuals is well-documented. This is a president who held a discussion with a foreign leader about an international crisis in the middle of the dining room at one of his properties. This is also a president who has made more than 16,000 false or misleading statements during three years in office. Frankly, it’s easy to see a way in which both could be true: Parnas was just a donor then but eventually made his way into Trump’s inner team.

Bear in mind, this dinner, where one attendee recorded the entire discussion, was not organized by the Republican Party. It was instead for a pro-Trump super PAC, a group to which Parnas allegedly made contributions illegally. Once in the room, he got the president to endorse his opinion of the ambassador to Ukraine.

That exchange has been known for a while; the Washington Post first reported it in November. Given what we know about where Parnas wound up and the extent to which he was involved in the successful effort to oust Yovanovitch that picked up steam in early 2019, it’s worth asking: How does Parnas’s request fit into what we know about Yovanovitch’s firing?

Parnas was not yet working for Giuliani during that April 30 event; Giuliani had himself only begun working for Trump two weeks prior.

A few weeks after the dinner, though, Parnas and a colleague met with then-Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), at which point the two advocated for Yovanovitch’s ouster and, according to the later indictment of Parnas, agreed to raise money for Sessions. The day they met, Sessions wrote a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling for Yovanovitch to be removed. This, again, appears to have occurred before Parnas and Giuliani were connected.

That effort expanded in early 2019, in part at the encouragement of Yuri Lutsenko, then Ukraine’s prosecutor general and someone who viewed Yovanovitch with hostility. By then, Parnas and Giuliani were connected, with Parnas joining Giuliani’s interviews of Lutsenko in January of that year. While Giuliani clearly embraced the idea of firing Yovanovitch (which took place in late April 2019), it’s still not clear what spurred the idea. Parnas, enacting a long-standing desire? Lutsenko, recognizing an opportunity? Something else entirely?

Photos provided to the House Intelligence Committee complicates the matter of Parnas’s role and relationship to Trump. One image shows a copy of the Sessions letter. Two others show someone, presumably Parnas, holding an envelope addressed to the president and identified as coming from Sessions’s office. The flap is sealed, with Sessions’s signature written across it. A later photo, apparently taken during an America First event in June 2018 shows Trump near Parnas as the president puts something in his pocket that appears to match the shape of the envelope.

What Trump is putting in his pocket may not be Sessions’s letter. But Parnas appears to have had control of the letter at some point. Why? Was it a function of his relationship with Trump? Did it relate to his conversation with Trump in April?

At another point in that April conversation, the group is discussing military aid to Ukraine. One comment from Trump raises a question: How familiar was he with the aid being given to Ukraine?

The same day of the event, then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko confirmed the delivery of American antitank missiles to his country. This is an act of enormous significance to Trump at the moment, since his attorneys have made his support of arming Ukraine a central part of their defense in the impeachment trial underway in the Senate.

“While it’s true that the United States has stood by Ukraine since the invasion of 2014,” Trump’s attorney Jay Sekulow said during the trial on Saturday, hours before the release of the recording, “only one president since then took a very concrete step. Some of you supported it. And that step included actually providing Ukraine with lethal weapons, including Javelin missiles. That’s President Trump.”

On the recording, one of the attendees-- perhaps Donald Trump Jr.-- mentions the Javelin missiles.

“I guess there’s supposed to be an order of Javelin missiles over there, right?” he says. “They’re the antitank missiles. I saw that go through today.”

“Today?” Trump responds.

“I saw-- I read about it today,” the person replies. “I don’t know when it happened. It must have happened in the last couple of days.”

This does not suggest that Trump is intimately familiar with the transmission of the weapons. Reporting the prior year suggested that Trump was wavering on authorizing lethal arms sales to Ukraine, something that he eventually approved.

We do know what happened when military aid to Ukraine was announced in mid-June 2019. When Trump saw news coverage of a Defense Department announcement that it would provide $250 million in aid to that country, Trump intervened with questions. A few weeks later, the aid was placed on hold, an act that is at the center of the impeachment inquiry.

Trump’s team has argued that the hold was an outgrowth of his skepticism about foreign aid while claiming that his support for Ukraine was steadfast. In that meeting in April 2018, in conversation with a donor he’d met a few times before, Trump seemed unclear on the timing of a major component of his administration’s policy about Ukraine.

No question, though, is more significant than this, at least for Republican senators: What other tapes might exist? The release of this recording spawns new questions related to Ukraine and the actors involved in Trump’s efforts there. Parnas’s attorney told The Post that Parnas had turned other recordings over to House investigators.

If you want to feel how tough this is-- electorally speaking--for a handful of Republican senators who could conceivably vote against Trump's interests-- and, for example, agree to subpoena witnesses and documents-- let's take a look at Alaska, where a more independent-minded Lisa Murkowski is not up for reelection but where 100% Trump puppet Dan Sullivan is. Alaska Survey Research polled the state on both senators and how their votes on impeachment are likely to impact their careers. "Murkowski," they concluded, "has more to lose politically from what decision she makes in the trial because of her diverse base of support... [A]round 20% of people who view Murkowski positively are Democrats and another 20% who view her positively are Republicans. The remainder identified as another party or no party at all. Overall, she has a 51% positive rating and a 35% negative rating according to this poll. That same poll shows that Senator Dan Sullivan (R) has an easier decision to make, since his supporters widely support the president as explained by pollster Ivan Moore."

Moore said at the end of this impeachment trial, Murkowski will be hard pressed to not upset at least some of the people who voted for her.

“She has a 51% positive, but they’re not 50% Republican at all,” he said, “They’re kind of balanced. Much more non-partisan, and they’re 20 plus points in favor of removing the President right? So if she acquits, there’s a lot of political risk.”

Moore said once it comes down to decision making time, he believes that Murkowski will vote in favor of Trump. However, it can’t be completely ruled out since she’s broken rank before.

...From a strictly political strategy view, Moore expects that Murkowski will end up supporting the President in the impeachment trial in a Senate with a Republican majority.

“At the end of the day, if what you’re thinking about is the end result of this thing, it’s not significant at all,” he said, “because the Senate is not going to vote to convict right? So whatever Murkowski votes, whatever she does with her vote is irrelevant to the end result. Where it is relevant is to the people who support her, and to her, and to her election chances.”

Imagine how much tougher that is for Susan Collins who, is up for reelection in November and who has seen her popularity in the state collapsing in the state to the point that she is now the least liked senator in her own state than anyone else in the country-- including Moscow Mitch!





And you almost feel sorry-- almost-- for desperate Colorado sad sack Cory Gardner-- "weak, frightened, impotent... a small man terrified of a political bully." And that's what conservative Republicans are saying about him, not Democrats, who wouldn't dare be that blunt. This is just an internet ad today. Can you imagine the Lincoln Project putting it on television!

There Are 53 Senators Who Should Be Voted Out Of Office... But Only 19 Are Up For Reelection In November

CNBC reactionary Joe Kernen interviewed Señor Trumpanzee in Davos yesterday, allowing him to just lie his ass off. The video above, though begins towards the very end when Trump talks about cutting "entitlements" (Social Security and Medicare) at the end of the year-- in other words-- after the election. His rationale is... what you might expect from a senile person-- and, of course, from a liar. Consecutive polls are showing a majority, not a plurality of Americans would like to see the Senate remove Trump. If Americans understood his and the GOP's post-election plans for for Social Security and Medicare, the numbers for removal would be much higher. He's as bad as Status Quo Joe on this!

Now about those 19 Trump stooges who were part of the 53 who voted down every single request for witnesses and evidence Tuesday night. Let's start with the names:

• Dan Sullivan (R-AK)
• Martha McSally (R-AZ)
• Tom Cotton (R-AR)
• Cory Gardner (R-CO)
• David Perdue (R-GA)
• Kelly Loeffler (R-GA)
• Jim Risch (R-ID)
• Joni Ernst (R-IA)
• Moscow Mitch (R-KY)
• Bill Cassidy (R-LA)
• Susan Collins (R-ME)
• Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS)
• Steve Daines (R-MT)
• Ben Sasse (R-NE)
• Thom Tillis (R-NC)
• Jim Inhofe (R-OK)
• Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
• Mike Rounds (R-SD)
• John Cornyn (R-TX)
• Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV)

The names in red are locked in for reelection. The seven names in blue are the best bets for defeat. And the ones in black... well, it depends a lot on how big the wave is in red states this year. It's not making the 53-- let alone the 19-- feel any more confident in the Republican strategy that public opinion has swung even further against them after the first days of the trial. Jonathan Allen reporting for NBC News, noted that Trump's defense looked shaky from the start. Allen: "Trump's defense failed him at the opening of his Senate impeachment trial Tuesday... McConnell had one job. He just had to collect 51 votes for the trial rules he had written, in close consultation with White House officials, to deliver Trump an acquittal quickly, quietly and with as few surprises as possible. He couldn't do it. Fellow Republicans balked at his plan so late in the game-- moments before the start of the trial-- that he had to order up hand-written changes sought by Democrats just to secure enough GOP votes for the rules. So much for the modern 'master of the Senate.'"

The other half of Trump's squad, his legal team, chose not to defend his actions with a cogent explanation for them. Rather than rebutting hours of evidence presented by House Democratic impeachment managers, White House lawyers opted to repeat Trump's attacks on the process and the disjointed set of rejoinders he's delivered to Democrats in public.

“If you can't even rise to the challenge of trying to defend your client," NBC News legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said on NBC News Now, "it becomes painfully obvious that the emperor has no defense."

Taken together, McConnell and the White House team demonstrated that, for all of their coordination and the institutional advantages afforded them by Republicans' Senate majority, they still appear focused more on pleasing their audience of one-- Trump-- than persuading any undecided senators or voters outside the chamber.

But Trump's defenders are as devoid of his passion as they are loaded with his logic, leaving them so weak in the face of the Democratic case that even the president may wind up displeased with the obvious imbalance in the quality of the execution by the parties.

"If there’s any unfairness in these proceedings, it’s the astounding mismatch between the high skill and preparation of the House managers and the rambling, dissembling, and gaslighting of @realDonaldTrump’s counsel," George Conway, a conservative lawyer and prominent Trump critic, wrote on Twitter. "It’s like the New York Yankees versus the Bad News Bears."

...The outlines of that case so far, described Tuesday by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-CA) alleged that Trump abused his power at the expense of U.S. interests to boost his own, then covered up his actions by obstructing Congress.

"GOP Senators may vote to acquit, but there is something truly cleansing to the national conscience to see Adam Schiff walk into their chamber and shove a full dose of truth down their throats before they do," former Rep. David Jolly, who served as a Republican from Florida, wrote on Twitter.

Despite the rocky start for Team Trump, there's no indication the president will have trouble winning the 34 votes he needs to remain in office. But a shaky defense could cost him votes among the electorate-- at this point, the audience that may matter most.

Phil Bump brought something else up, something that would be important in another, saner world, namely that after the 53 blocked all the new impeachment evidence, Trump boasted about what he’s withholding. He wrote that "In total, the Senate took 11 votes on amendments to the rules aimed at broadening the evidence that would be included in the impeachment trial of President Trump. They were, in order:

1.      A subpoena to get documents from the White House.
2.      A subpoena to get documents from the State Department.
3.      A subpoena to get documents from the Office of Management and Budget.
4.      A subpoena for testimony from Mick Mulvaney, former OMB director and acting White House chief of staff.
5.      A subpoena to get documents from the Defense Department.
6.      A subpoena to get testimony from Robert Blair, an aide to Mulvaney, and Michael Duffey, a political appointee at OMB.
7.      A proposal to mandate that inclusion of testimony excerpted from materials would necessitate the release to both sides of the material in its entirety.
8.     A subpoena for testimony from former national security adviser John Bolton.
9.      A proposal to eliminate a mandated vote before the Senate could vote on calling witnesses.
10.  A proposal to allow additional time for responding to motions.
11.   A proposal allowing Chief Justice John Roberts, who is presiding over the trial, to determine whether witnesses or evidence should be included.

"In each case but one," he continued, "the proposed amendments were tabled on a 47-to-53 vote. The lone exception was the 10th amendment, for which Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) joined the Democratic caucus in support of the proposal-- but it, too, was tabled when a majority of senators, all Republicans, voted in opposition to it... it was another example of the remarkable unanimity with which congressional Republicans have approached the impeachment effort. While Trump and his allies have excoriated the process as being a manifestation of Democratic partisanship, it’s certainly the case that Trump has benefited enormously from his own party’s lockstep voting. In the House, that agreement-- setting aside party defector Rep. Justin Amash (I-MI), who supported impeachment-- allowed Trump et al to make the case about a partisan impeachment in the first place. In the Senate, it meant that McConnell’s proposed rules for proceeding through the trial would not be immediately overhauled by the inclusion of things that might be problematic for the president’s case.

Democrats hammered at the significance of rejecting the proposals: Were Senate Republicans saying that they were disinterested in knowing the truth about what happened? Republicans, for their part, had a pat response: Didn’t you think you had enough evidence to make your case when the impeachment articles were addressed in the House?

President Trump wasn’t in Washington for any of this. As the votes unfolded, he was in Switzerland, having given an address at the World Economic Forum’s annual event in Davos. Early Wednesday morning, though, he offered his thoughts during a news conference at the event.

“So here’s the story: Did nothing wrong,” Trump said of the impeachment push. “... The best lawyers in the world have looked at it. The Department of Justice has looked at it, given it a sign-off. There was nothing wrong.”

He walked through his now-familiar complaints about the evidence and then confirmed that he’d seen some of the debate.

“I got to watch enough. I thought our team did a very good job,” he said. “But honestly, we have all the material. They don’t have the material.”

That quote, in that context, in that moment, is potentially problematic. Trump appears to be saying that he has material reinforcing how his position of innocence is warranted-- material that “they,” presumably Democrats, can’t see.

Which, of course, was largely Schumer’s point. There is a lot of evidence that has been withheld by Trump and his administration, including things as seemingly mundane as personal calendars for State Department staffers. On several occasions during the impeachment testimony in the House, witnesses lamented that they couldn’t answer questions with specificity because they didn’t have access to material that the State Department wasn’t releasing.

Rep. Val Demings (D-FL), also a House impeachment manager, quickly seized upon Trump’s comment as evidence that he was retaining pertinent material.

Trump has argued repeatedly that if witnesses such as Mulvaney were to testify, they’d reinforce his arguments about the case. He has also, as the impeachment process has moved forward, been increasingly less likely to forcefully advocate for the inclusion of such testimony. (Asked during his Davos news conference whether he wanted to see witnesses in the Senate trial, Trump replied that he would “leave that to the Senate.”)

His comments on Wednesday morning, though, go further, seemingly hinting that there might even be an advantage for the White House in keeping material out of the hands of Democrats. That his team was better informed. That, at least, there was pertinent material that he and his team were simply keeping to themselves.

It’s not that this isn’t known to be the case. There is obviously documentary and witness evidence that the White House has sought to keep out of the Democrats’ hands-- an effort bolstered by McConnell’s caucus on Tuesday. It’s just not obviously useful for Trump in this moment to reinforce that this is what he is doing.

McConnell’s twin goals in the impeachment process are to protect Trump and protect vulnerable swing-state GOP senators. The former effort seemingly necessitates limiting the evidence presented at trial; the latter, ensuring that voters see the trial as fair and thorough. The Senate majority leader worked late into the night to line up 11 victories on the first point-- only to see Trump himself undercut the second point from Switzerland a few hours later.

What's Better, An Incompetent Trump Or A Competent Trump?

Auschwitz Revisited by Nancy Ohanian

"Trump," wrote Philip Bump in his Washington Post column yesterday, "appears to simply be making the figure up." What figure? Does it matter? Trump makes everything up. (So does Biden, but not as much). Bump was talking about how Trump consistently lies about his approval numbers, "touting a 93% approval rating from Republicans. The first iteration of that figure that we found came from a straw poll conducted at the Conservative Political Action Conference, which is a bit like foxes claiming to be overwhelmingly popular after surveying people at a furry convention. It’s like asking about support for the Second Amendment at a gun show. In June, though, Trump tacked on a percentage point. He first claimed to have 94% support from Republicans during a news conference with then-British Prime Minister Theresa May. Our fact-checkers looked into it, determining that there was no public poll showing anything of the sort. If it was an internal campaign poll, it hasn’t been made public (our fact-checkers asked). Since then, though, 94% has supplanted 93% in Trump’s rhetoric, with his touting this purported number over and over and over again."

Lying is Trump's modus operandi. (Biden's too, but not as much.) As Max Boot wrote in his own Post column in the same edition, "Trump inherited more than $400 million from his father and invested in one failed business after another." New polling, he reports, "shows voters aren’t buying Trump's bullshit as much as they once did," not about anything.

Another Post reporter, Karen DeYoung, wrote on Sunday night that Trump's regime is in a shambles policy-wise. She wrote that the bumbling non-leader some call "president" had screwed up Afghanistan even more. "Plans for U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, in keeping with President Trump’s pledge to end the war there, were thrown into confusion Sunday, following Trump’s decision to call off a secret meeting he planned with Afghan and Taliban leaders to secure a peace deal. Competing versions of what led to the cancellation of the meeting and, at least temporarily, any further U.S.-Taliban negotiations, exposed internal administration tensions that have flared as a deal seemed near in recent weeks. Those tensions have pitted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whose chief negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, said a week ago that agreement 'in principle' had been reached after 10 months of talks with the militants, and Trump national security adviser John Bolton, who opposed the talks."

Trump, she reported, is "likely to move ahead with the planned initial withdrawal, regardless of the apparent collapse of negotiations." Trump had been the main person pushing for the Camp David meeting-- on the anniversary of the 9/11 debacle no less. "Trump," she wrote, "thinks his personal style can persuade anyone, and that he has seen the possibility of a substantial Afghan withdrawal as a major plus for his reelection campaign... The Taliban said that the decision to end the U.S.-Taliban peace process for now would 'lead to more losses for the United States,' spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said in a statement. 'Its credibility will be affected, its anti-peace stance will be exposed to the world, losses to lives and assets will increase.'"

Sounds like a real shit-show, right? And it most ways it is. Trump's colossal incompetence is one of the biggest scandals of the long list of scandals that has made this the worst presidency in American history. (There are new virtually no serious historians who disagree that Trump is the worst occupant of the White House ever, worse than Hoover, worse than Nixon, rose than Buchanan, worse than Taylor and Tyler, worse than Harding... just the worst. 

Mark Gamba, the progressive mayor of Milwaukie, Oregon who is running for a congressional seat held by right-wing Blue Dog Kurt Schrader confirmed what the historians are all saying: "Trump is the worst, most corrupt President, certainly in this century and arguably in the history of the country. The damage he’s done to our international relationships will take many years to repair. The damage he’s caused to civility, decency and public discourse is tearing the country apart. The damage he is doing to the future of the planet by avoiding strong climate action may be the crime of the millennia. I suspect that he is in deep with the Russian banks because no one else will loan him money after all the bankruptcies. That explains the pandering to Russia, and his dismissal of their intervention in our elections. The Republicans always paint themselves as more patriotic, but how patriotic is it to prop up a president this corrupt, who is likely in bed with one of our enemies? The shocking loss to Trump has made the democratic leadership gun shy and unwilling to begin formal impeachment inquiries. It’s time to put people into office that are not so twisted up by their own machinations and those of the opposition that they can’t even recognize their duty to their country. If I were in Congress right now, I would be calling for formal impeachment inquiries. There is far too much on the line for anything less."

But there is one way that Trump has proven to be a fast learner-- he's figured out how to corrupt the entire government, something that doesn't surprise any serious Trump-watchers. Jonathan Chait: "Trump came to the presidency a complete novice to government and often found his corrupt, authoritarian impulses frustrated by its bureaucracy. But he is slowly learning how to control the machine that has stymied him. This is the story of 2019, as Trump has replaced institutionalists attempting to curtail his grossest instincts with loyalists happy to indulge them. It is playing out across multiple dimensions. This is the through-line between several seemingly disconnected episodes from the last several days." And that isn't the worst of it!

Increasingly, Republicans are dispensing with the fig leaf and flaunting their complicity. Putting money in Trump’s pocket by booking his properties has become a symbol of partisan solidarity. It is a signal of support both to the president and to fellow Republicans or business clients that you are on the ins with the boss. “President Trump has really been on the side of the Evangelicals and we want to do everything we can to make him successful,” one Evangelical leader tells the Times. “And if that means having dinner or staying in his hotel, we are going to do so.” Aggressive lack of curiosity has given way to open boasting of the quid pro quo arrangement.

None of these stories by itself has the singular drama of a Teapot Dome or a Watergate. Indeed, the mere fact that there is so much corruption prevents any single episode from capturing the imagination of the media and the public. But it is the totality of dynamic that matters. A corrupt miasma has slowly enveloped Washington. For generations, both parties generally upheld an assumption that the government would abide rules and norms dividing its proper functioning from the president’s personal and political interests.

The norm of bureaucratic professionalism and fairness is a pillar of the political legitimacy and economic strength of the American system, the thing that separates countries like the U.S. from countries like Russia. The decay of that culture is difficult to quantify, but the signs are everywhere. Trump’s stench is slowly seeping into every corner of government.

Some People Are Already Saying "Anyone But Trump" And They Include Status Quo Joe

As Philip Bump pointed out yesterday in his Washington Post column, after Trump's latest anti-Fox Twitter-tirade, "Trump’s objection to Fox News polling is possibly largely due to the fact that they’re good polls. Fox’s on-air programming is often heavily weighted in Trump’s favor, but their polling isn’t." The poll shows Trump's overall disapproval 51-48% and even worse on the key issues he plans to fight the 2020 election on. Underwater on every issue but the economy:

• Border security- 44-52%
• Immigration- 41-54%
• Trade- 40-49%
• Race relations- 32-57%

Worse yet, the Fox poll shows him losing to Biden 49-39%, losing to Bernie 46-40% and within the margin of error in matchups with Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren.

Matt Taibbi is in Iowa and what he's seeing on the ground has him worried that the Democrats are going to blow this again.

The front-runner-- the front-runner!-- is septuagenarian gaffe machine Joe Biden, who started running for president in the Eighties and never finished higher than “candidacy withdrawn,” with a career delegate total matching John Blutarsky’s grade-point average, i.e., zero point zero. The summer’s “momentum” challenger is California Sen. Kamala Harris, who spent all year sinking in polls but surged when she hit Biden with “I don’t think you’re a racist . . . but . . .” on national TV.

A third contender is Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a famed red-state punchline who already has 10,000 Pocahontas tweets aimed at her head should she make it to the general. Her “I have a plan for that” argument for smarter government makes her a modern analog to Mike Dukakis-- another Massachusetts charisma machine whose ill-fated presidential run earned him a portrait alongside the Hindenburg in a Naked Gun movie.

A fourth challenger, Bernie Sanders, is a self-proclaimed socialist born before the Pearl Harbor attack who’s somehow more hated by the national media than Trump. A fifth, Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has never earned more than 8,515 votes in any election. The claim to fame of a sixth, Beto O’Rourke, is that he lost a Senate bid to the world’s most-hated Republican. It goes on.

The top Democrats’ best arguments for office are that they are not each other. Harris is rising in part because she’s not Biden; Warren, because she isn’t Bernie. Bernie’s best argument is the disfavor of the hated Democratic establishment. The Democratic establishment chose Biden because he was the Plan B last time and the party apparently hasn’t come up with anything better since. Nothing says “We’re out of ideas” quite like pulling a pushing-eighty ex-vice president off the bench to lead the most important race in the party’s history.

...In a mid-June appearance in Iowa, Biden tipped off reporters that he’d be making remarks about Trump. Dressed in dark-wash dad jeans and blue shirt, he became the 10,000th Democrat this year to call the president an “existential threat.”

Trump wasted little time laying into Biden. “Joe’s a loser,” he quipped, adding Biden was a “dummy” who was “even slower than he used to be.” Saying he’d rather run against Biden than anybody, Trump said, “I think he’s the weakest mentally. . . . I like running against people that are weak mentally.” He then ripped Biden for keeping a light schedule, saying, “Once every two weeks . . . he mentions my name 74 times in one speech. . . . That reminds me of crooked Hillary. She did the same thing.”

Next thing you knew, we were right back in 2016, with reporters dutifully conveying Trump’s insults and even kinda-sorta suggesting they were true. “There’s been a lot of questions about your schedule, and that it’s been a little lighter than some of the other candidates,” a reporter asked Biden in Ottumwa, Iowa.

MSNBC gave Trump more than a minute of airtime for “Joe’s a loser,” while the Washington Post and the New York Times put the exchange on the front page. This is how things went in 2016. Trump would taunt an opponent, the opponent would face-plant the effort at return fire, ratings would go up, and the cycle would repeat.

The logic of the Biden candidacy is a facsimile of our last memory of normalcy, like if Barack Obama were on vacation, or sick, maybe. Biden’s labors to remind us he was the understudy of the last president are painful. His launch speech contained 35 uses of the word “folks.” This included a rare double-folks (“Folks, I know some of the really smart folks say Democrats don’t want to hear about unity. . . .”). He constantly references the “Obama/Biden administration” and chides audiences that “we don’t say often enough as a party or a nation” that Obama was awesome.

Biden on the trail will spit out the campaign equivalent of clip art, e.g., “America, folks, is an idea, an idea that’s stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean,” or, “America has always been at its best when America has acted as one America.” By the end of the campaign, Biden will be plunked behind podiums to mutter, “America America America America America . . .” And we’ll vote for him.

The problem is that he’s got almost a year of Democratic primary left, and has to keep saying actual things until he wins. He seems engaged almost daily in cleaning up verbal messes. When Harris oar-smacked him with her “that little girl was me” busing story (T-shirt now on sale for $29.99 at store.kamalaharris.org!), Biden’s response was the debate equivalent of “Check, please,” saying, “My time is up.”

His awesome vulnerabilities on the woke front have him saying things that sound like Trump quotes, like his response to Booker on working with segregationist senators: “There’s not a racist bone in my body.”

Biden’s early front-runner flubs are reminiscent of Jeb Bush’s $150 million failure to handle Trump tweets. There are many such parallels. Biden is Jeb. O’Rourke, running in what the Times calls the “younger face” lane, is Marco Rubio. Unseen Steve Bullock is unseen Jim Gilmore. Bill de Blasio is the same “Why is he running?” New Yorker George Pataki was. And this election’s version of John Kasich, the embittered realist barking, “What are we doing here?” from the literal edge of the debate stage, is former Maryland Rep. John Delaney.

Noon on a weekend, Room 103 of the Statehouse, Des Moines. John Delaney is addressing Iowa’s Asian and Latino Coalition. Stocky and bald, the co-founder of a health care lender is the umpteenth Democrat to address the influential group, which is full of local small-business owners. I will later hear this is one of the smallest turnouts of this group any Democrat candidate has yet attracted, a list that includes self-help author Marianne Williamson.

Delaney seems to sense this and looks peeved, not with the Asian-Latino coalition but with the Almighty. In a normal campaign year, he’d be the “crossover” candidate, praised for being a straight talker-- he’s already gotten accolades from both George Will and David Brooks, usually a sign of media love to come. Yet the love hasn’t arrived. Delaney, whether on TV or in person, throws off the same “I can’t believe I’m losing to this field” vibe Kasich often exuded.

Like Kasich, Delaney just wants the American people to get along, and if it’s not too much trouble, elect him president. But nobody is complying.

Flipping through Delaney’s book, The Right Answer, it’s clear he is genuinely saddened by the state of American politics. The epigram in the opening pages is from Kennedy, and begins, “Let us not despair...” About what is Delaney despairing? Mainly, it seems, that Bernie Sanders is pulling 15 percent on a promise to give everyone Medicare.

“Why do we have to go further than Germany and France and Sweden and the Netherlands, and throw out the entire U.S. health care system?” he pleads. “That doesn’t make sense to me. We should attack the problems, and fix those. And not mess with what’s working.”

He goes on to propose that from birth to age 65, all Americans be covered by “a federal health care policy, for free, as a right of citizenship.” This plan, he says, would allow America to avoid a fully government-run health care program. “Look, maybe in 20 years, people will like their government health care so much, they’ll drop their private insurance and we’ll get to the same place in the end,” he says. “But we have to live in the real world.”

At the end of his speech, a therapy dog in the crowd barks. Delaney flashes a look like he can’t catch a break. He did fine here, and may have won a convert or two from health care skeptics, but the “Why not me?” tone of his campaign captures something. It’s a familiar narrative: Republican state governments and a CEO-friendly administration are hacking away at policies dear to working people, while Democrats can’t seem to settle on an electoral formula to stop them.

They’re paralyzed by Delaney’s question: Do we really have to make radical changes? The centrists want the progressives to step aside for the sake of “unity,” while the progressives believe they’re the new mainstream and are the better bet in a world where traditional notions of electability are upside-down. While this argument rages, traditionally Democratic constituencies are taking losses all over the place.

Mark Rocha, a Communications Workers of America official, liked that Delaney grew up in a union household, but he seemed more focused on the idea that whoever the nominee was, that person needed to stop the bleeding quick.

Noting that Iowa’s Republican leadership has passed laws attacking the right of public-sector unions to organize, he says private-sector unions are dying too. His CWA once had 1,200 members statewide. Now it has 525, and the new members can’t pay much in dues.

“If they even come in the door, if I even get ’em to sign, they’re the lower-paid workers, they make $15 an hour,” he says. “We’re getting beat up.”

In the 2020 race, a succession of Democrats have already taken star turns as darlings-for-a-news-cycle, only to splat in polls right after. The pattern is incredible.

Harris is on her second run up the hill (her first was a “dazzling” debut in January). O’Rourke earned the death-knell “Kennedyesque” title, and raised a record $6.1 million in the first 24 hours of his campaign, but cratered in polls even before his 8,800-word Vanity Fair springboard profile officially hit newsstands. “How About Pete?” asked New York magazine, atop a backlit cover photo that made the 37-year-old look like a Midwest Jesus; a South Bend police scandal later, Buttigieg was polling at zero percent with black voters. Then came Biden, who soared to 41 percent after launching to become what CNN called the “clear front-runner.” He’s lost a third of his support since then and is struggling to keep the lead.

Reporters show up at events with anxious smiles on their faces, like parents looking for a child at a department store. Maybe this one? How about her, or him? This is an extension of a phenomenon that began in the second half of the last GOP primary, when the press tried lavishing compliments on the “real” candidates they hoped would stop Trump. The internet remains littered with the wreckage of these efforts, in headlines like “Signs of ‘Marco-mentum’ for Rubio in New Hampshire.”

Then as now, in their zeal to find someone, anyone, to beat Trump, the press is once again too focused on the candidates themselves, ignoring warning signs that are almost always sitting right there in front of them, in the crowds.

Winterset, Iowa, a Monday afternoon in July. “Amy” “Amy” “Amy” read the alternating green and blue signs on cafe walls, as a packed house awaits Klobuchar. Gently spinning ceiling fans mark the passing time in this classic Iowa campaign stop. The Northside Cafe was founded in 1876, in the heart of Madison County-- yes, that Madison County, the one with the bridges-- and its comfort food, saloon walls covered in handmade quilts, and entranceway portraits of hometown hero John Wayne are familiar scenery for campaign journalists.

The rear of the cafe buzzes. Reporters love Klobuchar. She cracks jokes, gives good quotes, and reminds everyone of a relative. Maybe her? “She’s great,” someone whispers from the nest of tripods. “And funny too!” Some are repeating their favorite Klobuchar lines, like her bit about Trump being “all foam and no beer.” This is the Minnesota version of “all hat and no cattle,” a standby that holds the record for being told the most times by the most politicians without earning a genuine laugh.

Klobuchar plunges into her speech. It’s border crisis, climate crisis, and jokes about Trump. “All foam and no beer” takes a turn as a metaphor for Trump’s tax plan: “All the beer went to the wealthiest people.”

...Papers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe ran stories suggesting Warren’s campaign might be fatally “wounded” before it even began in January, because of her too-liberal politics and her infamous claim to Native American heritage. But she persisted and suddenly looks like one of the favorites. Numerous stories about the Iowa race point out that she has the largest paid organization in the state, with 50 staffers here.

Her policy prescriptions are detailed and bold, including a two percent overall “ultramillionaires tax” that measures by net worth instead of income (theoretically closing a giant loophole), along with the cancellation of student debt and the breakup of Silicon Valley monopolies.

In late spring, the same media outlets that pummeled her in winter began swooning over a Warren “surge,” in a lovefest that frankly was just as phony as the previous reports of momentum for Harris, O’Rourke, Mayor Pete, and Biden. But at least the pundit predictions of her campaign dying before birth were wrong.

The problem for Warren is “I’ve got a plan for that!” is a dubious strategy in an era in which the campaign promise itself is a declining currency. On paper, she’s done just about everything right. But if she advances, voters will soon be introduced to the fact that plans and promises similar to the ones Warren is making have been made many times before. It’s not a referendum on her but on how much belief is left out there.

Her “economic patriotism” plan, which envisions the government using levers like the Fed and the Treasury to protect jobs, has earned praise from left and right (Tucker Carlson gave it an “attaboy” on Fox). But the catchphrase was used not only by Obama, but also by two other Massachusetts Dems Warren resembles: 1992 presidential contender Paul Tsongas, and Dukakis. The Duke’s 1988 message of “new economic patriotism” included proposals for universal health coverage, a higher minimum wage, scholarships for students committed to teaching careers, etc.

Politicians often sound great. They may sound like they understand issues up and down. They may even have passed laws that ostensibly address problems. But for a lot of Americans, speeches never catch up with reality. Legislation designed to prevent pollution, contractor corruption, sexual assault, predatory lending, and countless other abuses may earn approving headlines-- but create few results on the ground. This gap between reality and political proclamation is what opened the door for Trump in 2016.

“I work at Walmart, along with 1.5 million other people,” Morgan Baethke says. “Those employees are used to the idea that if the Walton family says X will happen, X happens. If a businessman says X will happen, X will happen.” He pauses. “But if a senator says it, who knows?”

Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a Sunday morning, just after services at the Unity Center, an alternative church that preaches a “practical approach to Christianity.” It’s a place you might expect to buy healing salts or take hypnotism lessons. The crowd is younger and more female than at most campaign stops.

Marianne Williamson, the self-help author made famous by Oprah Winfrey, is speaking to about 50 people. “When we get bad news, when we learn that something really terrible is going on, so many superficial concerns drop away. And we become very intelligent,” she says, glaring and pausing for emphasis.

Williamson is a small, almost ethereal figure with silver-streaked hair and intense eyes that 19th-century authors would have described as being “like coals.” Her superficial eccentricities and occasional incautious statements (she once said “there’s a skepticism which is actually healthy” on the issue of vaccines) have caused reporters to chortle at her run.

But her speech is not a lifeless collection of policy positions. It’s an interesting, tightly written diagnosis of the American problem. Precisely because socioeconomic stresses have pushed them into heightened awareness, she says, the American public sees what she calls “a transition from democracy to aristocracy,” and the corporate sector’s “insatiable appetite” for money that dominates American life.

Williamson is not a traditional orator, with a voice that fills the room. You can barely hear her without a microphone. But she grabs crowds. Nobody is checking sports scores or Twitter. They’re in.

Williamson goes on to say that most Americans are aware that their government is now little more than a handmaiden to sociopathic forces. She describes a two-party system that, at its worst, operates in perfect harmony with the darkest impulses of corporate capitalism, and at best-- presumably she refers more to Democrats here-- sounds like institutionalized beggary.

“ ‘Pretty please, can I maybe have a hundred-thousand-dollar grant here?’ ” she says. “ ‘Pretty please, can we maybe have a million dollars in the budget for all this?’”

Heads are nodding all over the place.

“They say, ‘I can get you a cookie.’”

This elicits a few yeahs from the crowd.

Christ, I think. This woman is going to win the nomination.

Trump, she says, can’t be beaten by conventional thinking. “[He is] not just a politician,” she says. “This man is a phenomenon. . . . The only way we are going to defeat a phenomenon at the polls in 2020 is by creating a phenomenon.”

She stumbles a bit in Q&A, especially when a woman asks what she would do about the credit-score system. Williamson frowns, seeming genuinely perplexed. She clearly doesn’t know what having bad credit is like, and promises to look into it, in the tone of voice of a person who promises gamely to try a jellied-eel appetizer.

Still, she gets a rousing ovation at the end of her speech. After, she takes a few minutes to talk.

“The political establishment has the veneer of a deep conversation,” she says. “They think their political dialogue is so sophisticated. But it’s not sophisticated. It’s very unsophisticated.”

That lack of sophistication, she says, is what made Trump possible. Young people, in particular, have no more patience for the phoniness. “I see it especially in people who were born this century,” she says. “They’re tired of the nonsense.”

Williamson belongs to a category of candidate you might call the Ignored. They’re candidates blown off by national political wizards who don’t believe, or don’t want to believe, they can win. How anyone can think this way after 2016 is mind-boggling.

The list includes Williamson, entrepreneur and Universal Basic Income proponent Andrew Yang, Hawaii congresswoman and regime-change opponent Tulsi Gabbard, and, most conspicuously, Bernie Sanders.

It’s unseemly, the degree to which the press is rooting for Sanders to get his socialist tuchis out of the race. This is an actual headline from Politico after the first set of debates: “Harris, Warren Tie for Third in New Poll, But Biden Still Leads.”

The Washington Post/ABC poll showed Biden dropping to 25 percent nationally, with Harris and Warren jousting for third at nine percent. Where’s Waldo? The missing data point is that Sanders doubled both Harris and Warren in said poll at 18 percent. He also has the highest number of unique donors, and is the leading fundraiser overall in the race.

That doesn’t mean Sanders is going to win. He’s the only candidate with a more or less insoluble base of voters, but unlike Warren, who seems really to want this, Bernie has sometimes seemed dispirited. Still, the undeniable truth is that the Democratic race is about Sanders. Most of the candidates either support Medicare for All or try to sound like they do. They also tend to support a $15 minimum wage and call for wealth taxes, a Green New Deal, antitrust actions, and some rejection of corporate donors. Even Joe Biden, he of the lengthy career deep-throating credit-card-industry bucks, has parroted Sanders’ anti-corporate themes, noting that the Constitution reads “ ‘We the People,’ not ‘We the Donors.’”

There is an irony in the fact that Sanders has become the bête noire of Clintonian politics, given that Sanders represents the culmination of Bill’s 1992 electoral formula: “Change versus more of the same.”

Decades later, this is no longer just a marketing formulation. About 20 of the candidates exist somewhere on the spectrum of traditional Democratic politics, with Klobuchar, Mayor Pete, and Biden on one side, and Warren on the more progressive end. Sanders is the revolutionary. His election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forcing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector. That’s what a vote for “change” would mean in 2020.

Ames, Iowa, a house party. Reporters love this tradition, standing in the home of a real-life actual ordinary person.

House parties for me bat about .250. A major danger is ending up sardined in a room with insufficient air conditioning and no during-speech egress. This is the case at the gathering for Robert “Beto” O’Rourke.

After his dicey debate performance, O’Rourke was called to the carpet by his biggest donors, including Louis Susman, the former investment banker and Obama bundler. Susman reportedly ordered O’Rourke to unfuck himself before the next debates.

It’s bad enough when the money people are bossing around the candidates. It’s worse when one of those backers actually tells the story to the media; Susman went so far as to be quoted saying of O’Rourke, “The needed improvements are purely stylistic.”

After O’Rourke became a social media meme for his gringo Spanish, and got walloped in the debate on his pet issue, immigration, the campaign’s solution was to send him to Ciudad Juárez, across the Rio Grande, for an emergency session of Looking as Concerned as Julián Castro. Now the poor guy is back in Iowa reporting on his adventures and delivering a speech entirely about the crisis. He describes the border scene in horrific, Boschian detail, down to the “little kiddos” who are “pooping in their pants” and on the floor where they will sleep and eat.

Most are listening intently, but there’s some wincing in the heat. There’s no way to avoid wondering how this would play in a general-election setting. One can already hear what Trump would say about his emergency Juárez trip: If it was Susman’s idea, why isn’t Susman running?

Four years ago, the rank inadequacy of the Lindsey Grahams and Scott Walkers and Jeb Bushes who tumbled into the pastures of Iowa made great sport for snickering campaign journalists, myself included. We dubbed the field of governors, senators, and congressgoons who couldn’t beat a game-show host the “Clown Car,” and laughed at what many of us thought was the long-overdue collapse of the Republican Party. The joke turned out to be on us.

The GOP error was epic in scale. The Republicans sent twice the usual number of suspects into the buzz saw of a Throw the Bums Out movement they never understood, creating the comic pretext for the Clown Car: twice the canned quips, twice the empty promises, double the rage, frustration, and eye rolls.

Nobody will want to hear this, but Democrats are repeating the error. The sense of déjà vu is palpable. It might and should still work out, according to the polls. But a double catastrophe seems a lot less impossible than it did even a year ago. Lose to Donald Trump once, shame on the voters. Lose to him twice? It’s glue-factory time for the Democratic Party, and another black eye for America, which is fast turning its electoral system into a slapstick reality show.