Category: Impeachment

AN IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY’S DUELING WORLDS: FACT & FICTION

Debate students – young people passionate about the art of argumentation and persuasion – should be quarantined from Donald Trump’s impeachment defense.  Either that, or use it as a textbook example of how not to argue a case. 

It may take a leap of faith in these dark moments of American political life, but I’d like to think that we will one day return to the kind of normative discourse in which our dialectic is based on evidence and reason. We will get there only by forever banishing from our brains the intellectually-challenged rhetoric churned out by Trump and his Republican sycophants.

Here is just the tip of the bizarre, otherworldly political climate we are forced to endure:

After days of bruising testimony about how Trump bent foreign policy into a cudgel in an attempt to extract Ukraine’s help with his reelection campaign, the world awaited the president’s exculpatory rebuttal.   And this is what we got through separate tweets:  “The Republican Party, and me, (sic) had a GREAT day yesterday with respect to the phony impeachment Hoax”, and, “NOTHING WAS DONE WRONG!” 

Yes, this is Donald Trump being Donald Trump.  From his fictional inaugural crowd to his Sharpie-enhanced hurricane map, facts are foreign to this presidency.  Still, when it comes to a subject as somber and serious as impeachment, it would have been nice to see the quality of debate rise above that of a middle school food fight. 

Instead, Trump responded to a barrage of damaging testimony about his Ukrainian chicanery by calling in to Fox and Friends. His defense? He called Rep. Adam Schiff, who chaired the impeachment proceedings, a “sick puppy”, and insisted that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is “as crazy as a bedbug”. As for Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the president finally came up with a cause for firing her.  He said – falsely – that the ambassador didn’t post Trump’s picture in the Ukrainian Embassy.

What a difference 20 years makes.  The Bill Clinton impeachment in 1999 felt divisive and acrimonious at the time, but the discourse and arguments presented were thoroughly consistent with the adversarial system of dispute resolution.  Both sides agreed on the facts:  President Clinton had sex with an intern and lied about it.  Republicans argued that the president should be impeached, not for the sexual liaison, but for lying about it.  Clinton’s defenders, on the other hand, posited that a lie about sex does not rise to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors”, the constitutional basis for impeachment.  

That all seems so quaint now. The current impeachment controversy can’t, by any stretch of the definition, be called a debate.  Instead, we have two parallel universes. In one, House Democrats systematically assembled evidence to show that the president abrogated his sworn duty to execute policy based on the nation’s interests, not on his own partisan political motives.

For the most part, Trump and his defenders have avoided any engagement with the Democrats’ premise.  Instead, the president called the process a “hoax” and insisted that he is “winning”. After his handpicked ambassador, Gordon Sondland, flipped on him last week and testified that there was, indeed, a quid-pro-quo and that “everyone was in the loop”, Trump triumphantly tweeted “. . .if this were a prizefight, they’d stop it.” 

Meanwhile, two former prosecutors, Preet Bharara and Anne Milgram, issued a special edition of their podcast Thursday night just to rave about how compelling and persuasive last week’s impeachment witnesses were.  They echoed the reaction of many of us by concluding  that the case against Trump has been solidly proven.  Yet, the Donald closed the week by announcing that “. . .we are winning big.”  In a way, both the podcasters and the president are right. That’s because they are operating in separate universes, one factual and the other fictional. 

The political arena’s rhetorical culture is a modified adaptation of the adversary system that has dominated adjudication of legal disputes for more than 200 years.  It rests on the belief that if lawyers for disputing parties advocate fiercely and thoroughly for their clients, through both evidence and argument, a neutral factfinder, such as a judge or jury, will be able to determine the truth of the matter. 

Deliberative bodies, from city councils to the U.S. Congress, have used a similar approach when arguing about legislation.  The legislators marshal evidence that supports their position, along with arguments designed to persuade, not a judge or jury, but their fellow legislators and the voters who control their fate.  Most political debate focuses less on the underlying facts of a controversy and more on the conclusions to be drawn from them.

And then along came a president who eschews facts the way vampires avoid crucifixes.  To him, it’s all about the base. His fevered MAGA crowd has but one truth: the primacy of Donald Trump. He is their savior, their last great white hope against an evolving and diversifying culture they disdain. In this universe, there is no burden of proof because facts, evidence and laws don’t matter. His followers will believe anything he tells them.  Impeachment is a hoax and a witch hunt. Trump is winning and the Democrats are losing. The news media is the enemy of the people. Joe Biden is corrupt. Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election to help Hillary Clinton.  His phone calls are perfect.  It doesn’t matter that all of those assertions are demonstrably false. Facts are irrelevant in this universe.

And because his loyal fanbase worships him without question, congressional Republicans, many of whom see Trump as a malignant goiter on their political trajectory, will vote against impeachment out of fear that this president will tweet them out of office. Barring an unimaginable seismic change in this dynamic, the 45th president of the United States will be impeached in the House and acquitted in the Senate, both on party line votes. Trump will call it the greatest presidential achievement in the country’s history.

That leaves only one exit strategy for this dystopia.  Those of us in the other universe, the one where facts and reasoned arguments really do matter, must vote like we’ve never voted before. We don’t yet know the name of our candidate, but truth itself will be on that ballot. It will be the one not named Donald John Trump. Without a hint of hyperbole, this will be the most important vote we ever cast. 

THE FIRE AND FURY OF AN IMPLODING PRESIDENCY

What we need in this country right now is a slow news day.  Headlines limited to the latest Kardashian pregnancy, or Felicity Huffman’s community service, would be welcomed comfort food for our overtaxed brains.  Small chance of that happening anytime soon.  Instead, we are bombarded with almost hourly reports of a perpetual presidential implosion, stories of such spectacular incredulity that there is barely time to unpack them before another one breaks.

The Trump presidency is looking very much like the grand finale of a fireworks display, those closing moments in which the pyrotechnician tosses up one spectacular explosion after another.  We were bug eyed when the president linked Ukraine’s security to that country’s ability to help Trump’s reelection campaign. Then, poof – before the shock wore off, before we could so much as exhale, the next one exploded. Our president, rejecting unanimous pleas of his military and intelligence advisors, pulled our troops out of Syria, abandoning the Kurds who led our battle against ISIS.

While we tried to absorb the catastrophic results of that move, along came another poof. State Department officials said Trump’s political shenanigans in Ukraine went down only after career diplomats were pulled back so that the president’s private lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, could call the shots.  Then another poof: Four of Giuliani’s associates on the Ukrainian caper  were indicted on charges of conspiring to circumvent federal laws against foreign influence. While pondering the mug shots and bios of the first two arrests – Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman – yup, another poof.  Giuliani himself was reported to be under criminal investigation.

On one level, all this news seems overwhelmingly cumulative and confusing. Who has the time to do endless Google searches on Lev, Igor, the Kurds and Ukraine? Yet, there is a very simple common denominator. Donald Trump is so singularly focused on himself and his interests – petty and large – that he has forsaken everything else. Absolutely nothing outside of himself matters, not the Constitution or the laws of the land, not truth or integrity, and certainly not the welfare of the American people.  To him, this presidency has always been about one thing and one thing only: the needs of Donald J. Trump.

We’ve known since January 20, 2017 that the solipsism of our 45th president would dictate his every action, tweet and utterance. Hours after promising to “faithfully execute” his office, the Donald concocted a lie about how his inauguration crowd was the largest in American history.  That very same day, he filed papers with the Federal Election Commission launching his reelection campaign.  From that day forward, the very essence of his first term was about winning a second term. For the 44 men who preceeded him, winning the presidency meant an opportunity to make a difference in the world.  For Trump, winning was all that mattered, an end unto itself, validation for a dangerously insecure man.

Unfortunately, the articles of impeachment are likely to be narrowly constructed, directed at the president’s attempt to obtain campaign assistance from foreign countries and then obstructing the House’s investigation into the matter.  As odious as those actions were, the circumscribed prosecution is reminiscent of nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. The fact of the matter is that every single dark moment of this presidency, every injury he has inflicted, has come about through a single course of conduct, namely Trump’s consistent propensity to promote himself, with reckless disregard for the harm inflicted on others. 

Republican leaders in Congress were incredulous over Trump’s cut-and-run in Syria, calling it a foreign policy disaster that will haunt the United States for years. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of the president’s chief enablers, called it a “grave mistake” and a “strategic nightmare”.  Yet, until and unless the Republican base decides to give up the ghost on this president, the party’s leadership will continue to view him privately as their worst albatross while publicly opposing impeachment.

They choose, charitably, to view the Syrian disaster as a foreign policy disagreement.  It is anything but.  Donald Trump doesn’t have a foreign policy. All he has is a Donald policy. He does whatever he thinks is best for himself, with utterly no regard for the consequences.  He leveraged Ukraine’s security on digging up dirt on the Democrats because the 2020 election is an existential crisis for him. The strategic nightmare in Syria was a product of the same Donald-centric dynamic. He wants to campaign on bringing the troops home.  Because that’s all that mattered to him, he pulled the plug without a single strategic thought about the consequences of such sudden action.

Sadly, we would need at least another 20 Vietnam Walls to list all of the victims of Trump’s it’s-all-about-me approach to governing.  For example, he instituted a ban on transgender Americans serving in the military and has asked the Supreme Court to strike down employment discrimination protection for the entire LGBTQ community, both moves aimed at garnering affection from evangelical Christians and the homophobic portion of his base. 

To keep the love coming from that base, Trump has: 

REDUCED or eliminated food stamp assistance for millions of poor families.

ENDANGERED the economic security of American farmers through his trade wars.

ELIMINATED teen pregnancy programs that provided access to contraception and education.

REFUSED, as part of his anti-regulation political pitch, to ban a pesticide linked to birth defects in children of farm workers.

SEPARATED migrant children from their parents to show how tough he is on immigration.

PROMOTED racism and xenophobia by appealing to forces that fear the loss of white privilege.

The list, of course, goes on and on.  In each instance, the force at work here is not the president’s ideology.  He has none.  It’s all about feeding his base, positioning himself for his next tweet or rally or election.  It’s all about making himself a winner, a legend in his own mind.

That’s why we need a more expansive view of impeachment.  It’s about so much more than trying to get other countries to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.  It’s about a president who, despite his sloganeering, has never once put America first. It’s about  a president clinging so obsessively to a pathological power of self-absorption that nobody outside of himself is safe.

Most importantly, it’s about a president who, for the first time in our country’s history, represents the biggest threat to America’s democracy.

TRUMP’S ALTERNATE REALITY IGNORES LAW, TRUTH AND DECENCY

Amazingly, Donald Trump has a cohesive foreign policy after all.  By off-shoring his reelection campaign’s opposition research function, he has brought countries as disparate as Ukraine, Russia, China and Australia together for the common goal of digging up dirt on his political opponents. 

Remember “America First”? That was so 2016. We’re now into the Donald First school of international relations.  No nation is too small or too corrupt to join the foreign legion of Trump campaign operatives.  All you need to secure favorable treatment by the United States government are sordid details and conspiracy theories involving the president’s political opponents. Truth is not required.  

In describing what we are going through right now, historians will eventually note that we lived in singularly unique times.  Their reports, however, will not begin to capture the angst, agita and anxiety of watching a bizarre dream-like sequence in which our president floats about in an alternate reality, auctioning off our democracy, piece by piece. 

I suppose we should be used to it by now, but it’s still painful to watch the purported leader of the free world babble his way through a constant state of disassembling. First, he calls the whistleblower’s report a “partisan hoax”, and then releases a modified transcript of his call with the Ukrainian president that substantiates the accusation.  

Next, he insists he withheld Ukraine’s funding, not as a quid-pro-quo for getting dirt on Joe Bidden, but because he was concerned about wide spread Ukrainian corruption.  Hours later, he switches excuses, saying he held up the money because he wanted European countries to also pony up aid for Ukraine.  Only in Trump World would it make sense to encourage other countries to send money to a corrupt regime.  

Our president is clearly outdoing Lewis Carroll’s Queen from Alice in Wonderland, who boasted that she “believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”. The most impossible thing to come out of Trump’s mouth last week was that he absolutely did not pressure the Ukrainian president to help his reelection campaign by investigating Bidden.  “No pressure,” he insisted with a straight face, “no quid pro quo.”   

Never mind that the president’s own record of the Ukrainian call, together with extensive text messages among top diplomats, establish both a pressure campaign and an iron clad quid-pro-quo.  The very essence of Donald Trump’s negotiating style is the tit-for-tat MO of holding out a carrot or a stick (usually a stick) to get what he wants. Asked by a reporter in August why he keeps threatening China with more tariffs, the president replied, “Sorry, it’s the way I negotiate. It has done very well for me over the years. It’s doing even better for the country.”

Trump is a one-trick, transactional pony. His every ask is tied to a quid-pro-quo. He threatened to withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea in order to get a better trade deal with Seoul. He talked of imposing tariffs on European car imports if he couldn’t get the trade agreement he wanted with the European Union.  He threatened to use the government’s power to license television airways to punish NBC’s news coverage of his administration.  When the Palestinian Authority president declined to meet with Vice President Mike Pence, Trump threatened to cut off aid to Palestine. He told the NFL he would eliminate the league’s tax breaks if it couldn’t get players to stop kneeling during the national anthem. He said he would force all American businesses to leave China if that country wouldn’t accept Trump’s trade proposals.  He allegedly got Stormy Daniels into his bed by promising her a guest shot on the Apprentice. The list is endless. 

The contention that Donald Trump went after Ukraine for campaign assistance without pressure or a quid-pro-quo is every bit as impossible to believe as his assertion that all 24 women accusing him of sexual misconduct are lying. Yet, when it comes to this wretchedly amoral, unhinged and incompetent president, vast segments of our society – Fox News, congressional Republicans and true believers in red hats – have joined the Queen in believing impossible things.

And therein lies the source of our disquietude.  Prior to the arrival of our 45thpresident, most of us enjoyed a shared reality based upon a belief in possible things.  Republicans, Democrats and Independents cried and grieved together when the planes struck the towers on September 11 of 2001.  We repeated that mourning over and over again as school children were gunned down in their classrooms in places like Columbine, Sandy Hook and Parkland. 

Based on our politics, we had different and conflicting responses to those tragedies, but there was a shared sense of their factual underpinnings.  Sure, there were some off-the-wall, crazy conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attack being an inside job and the school shootings nothing more than staged events with actors.   Outside of those small, dark pockets of derangement, facts mattered and mainstream America apprehended a shared sense of truth.

That has all changed now. Our president came to the White House from one of those dark pockets, one where truth has no value. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” Trump told a cheering crowd of his followers.  The man who doctors weather maps, invents “invasions” at our southern border, talks of “riots” that never happened and pulls figures out of thin air, holds the highest office in the free world. As a result, his followers shower him with hosannas by screaming “fake news” at what the rest of us see as facts.

So, we emit deep sighs, our eyes briefly closed, wondering when it will all end, wondering when we will return to a world with shared meaning, a world where truth is valued. How many more lies, how many more atrocities, how many more wounds to our democracy, will it take for the Trumpian crowd to see that this is no longer about politics? This is about saving a country we all love from the ravages of a deeply disturbed man who will stop at nothing when it comes to feeding his ravenous and demented ego needs. 

It is impossible to know when this terror will end.  Yet, I cling to all the optimism I can muster in order to believe that the end will, indeed, come, and that we will somehow be able to rebuild our shaken democracy. With all due respect to the Queen, I pray that I am not believing in an impossible thing. 

AS THE WHISTLE BLOWS, DEMOCRACY FADES

The ultimate outcome of the Ukraine/whistleblower ordeal is less important than the broader message it portends. In other words, welcome to the tipping point in the unraveling of our democracy.   This is no longer about an unhinged president doctoring a weather map with his Sharpie.  This is about a concerted and rapidly escalating assault on the very democratic values that made America great.

In many ways, Trump’s flagrant flaunting of a whistle-blower statute to keep a report documenting his alleged misdeeds from a congressional committee is neither new nor surprising behavior. This is a guy who has never shown the slightest inclination to let a law, covenant or moral code interfere with his singular motivational force of self-interest.  

Yet, this aberrant behavior pattern is rapidly escalating, from the amusing to the abhorrent.  Back during the 2016 campaign, reporters profiling this unlikely candidate almost uniformly described him as someone who “defied conventions” (here, here and here).  How benign and understated that seems now. It’s like describing Jeffrey Dahmer’s epicurean tastes as defying convention.

As diabolical as Trump has been, there was once room for reasoned optimism regarding the long-term impact of his malignancy on the future of American governance.  After all, our democracy has survived brutal assaults over the past 200+ years.  Surely our system of checks and balances, along with the commitment and integrity of dedicated public servants, would help mitigate against serious damage inflicted by the Donald’s defying of conventions.  Well, that worked for a while. But most of the White House folks with even a modicum of integrity have been fired or quit.  And the checks and balances we learned about in grade school grind at a snail’s pace.

For all practical purposes, our democracy has ceased to function.  This isn’t just Trump’s fault, although he is clearly the triggerman, the guy who took a dysfunctional system and reduced it to the kind of shambles that would warm the heart of a narcissistic authoritarian.  The problem began more than a decade ago when politics became so divisive and polarized that Republican congressional leaders would rather pass no legislation than work with a black Democratic president.  That’s why the biggest problems facing the country – immigration, gun control, health care, climate change – have seen insufficient or no action in the past 20 years.

That opened the door for Donald J. Trump to get elected on the solemn assertion that “I alone” can fix America.  And it’s been downhill ever since.

Remember all that stuff about three “co-equal” branches of government serving as the cauldron of our democracy?  Well, what many of us didn’t learn back in those civics classes was that the system was predicated on at least a modicum of good faith.  It’s common for Congress and a president to be on different pages. What the founders didn’t contemplate was a Trumpian presidency insisting that, it alone, controls the entire book.

So now we have, yet again, an impasse crisis between the president and Congress.  The Trump-appointed inspector general for the intelligence community reviewed a whistleblower complaint supposedly involving, among other matters, a phone conversation Trump had with the new president of Ukraine. The IG found it to be credible and of “urgent concern,” terms of art in the law that requires such matters to be referred to the Intelligence committees of the House and Senate.  The Trump administration is refusing to comply with the statute.  

At the same time, the Donald, out of a mixture of arrogance and invincibility, has been somewhat transparent when it comes to corruption.  That leaves us with the ironic duality of a president openly defying the whistleblower law while tweeting out much of the content likely involved in the matter.  Trump has acknowledged asking the Ukrainian president to investigate alleged wrongdoing by Joe Biden’s son, and has also admitted sending his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to push Ukraine officials to dig up dirt on Biden for use in the 2020 presidential election.  

Meanwhile, House Democrats continue to spar with each other over potential moves on the impeachment chess board, largely over Trump’s obstruction of justice during the investigation into Russia’s interference in 2016 election.  Their opponent, however, has moved on to get another country to interfere in the upcoming election.  None of those chess pieces are moving right now because Donald Trump has pulled the rug out on the very democratic processes they rely upon.

Despite the constitutional impeachment and oversight responsibilities assigned to Congress, Trump has thumbed his nose at every turn, denying information and testimony that the House and Senate are clearly entitled to.  From the president’s tax returns to Don McGahn’s testimony, to information about immigration policy, bank loans and scores of other subjects, the White House has refused to produce any of it.  The intransigence is totally without precedent.  The result has been litigation and appeals, that may well continue beyond the 2020 election.

But Trump’s ruination of democracy goes much further.  With help from the Supreme Court, he has taken money Congress appropriated for various military projects and deferred it to building part of his wall at the Mexican border, a project specifically rejected by Congress.  The Pentagon now wants more money appropriated to replace the funds diverted to the wall.  According to reporting by the New York Times, White House sources say the president has his eye on diverting any such new appropriation toward additional sections of his wall.  

Freedom House is an independent agency that, for the past 50 years, has ranked countries around the world on how democratic their governments are.  The United States had always been near the top of the chart. Since 2017, however, our ranking has steadily deteriorated due to Trump’s frequent attacks on norms and institutions and the wearing down of democratic checks and balances.  Freedom House now places the U.S. well below other large and long-standing democracies such as France, Germany and Brittan.

Standing alone, the Ukraine/whistleblower episode would be tragic enough.  But on the heels of effectively usurping Congress’s oversight and funding responsibilities, this emboldened, in-broad-daylight rush to get yet another country to interfere in our elections moves this crisis into a whole different realm. Donald Trump is not just a terrible president.  He is not just a threat to our democratic way of life.  He has already dismantled huge parts of our democracy.  With a second term, it is hard to see how we would ever get it back.

TIME TO RID THE WHITE HOUSE OF ITS RACIST INFESTATION

With all due respect to Nancy Pelosi, there is an urgent and compelling need to impeach Donald Trump. I totally get and appreciate the speaker’s concern and pragmatism.  Wrangling for months in the nuanced weeds of the Mueller Report could give Trump a perfect platform for his victimization-by-witch-hunt narrative, and thereby boost his reelection chances. 

So forget the Mueller Report.  Instead, the articles of impeachment need to focus on what a majority of Americans are only too painfully aware of: the president’s racism. His bigotry, meanness and hatred are tearing the country apart. As conservative columnist Bret Stephens wrote in the New York Times this week, Trump “is a disgrace to his office, an insult to our dignity, a threat to our Union and a danger to our safety.” It doesn’t get much more impeachable than that. 

As a matter of fact, the Constitution’s impeachment clause was crafted in 1787 with visions of Trump dancing in the founders’ heads. One of them, Benjamin Franklin, argued that some future presidents might “render (themselves) obnoxious.”  In such a case, Franklin posited, impeachment offers a more rational alternative to assassination. (Back in those days, the assassination of Julius Caesar still weighed heavily on the minds of the ruling – and sometimes dueling – elite.)  James Madison suggested that impeachment should be used in the case of a president’s “perfidy”, meaning someone who could not be trusted.  Alexander Hamilton said the impeachment option is designed to remedy “injuries done immediately to the society itself.” 

Donald Trump is not merely obnoxious and untrustworthy, he is inflicting a level of injury on this country that escalates daily.  In another time and place, the Mueller Report’s abundant and substantial evidence of obstruction of justice would have removed any president from office.  Given the moral paralysis of the Senate’s Republican leadership, it will not remove Trump.  Through the lens of the past several painful weeks, a prolonged – and ultimately unsuccessful – impeachment battle over the legal intricacies of the Russia investigation would deflect the focus from the much larger Hamiltonian issue.   This president’s racism and toxic narcissism are creating endless “injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

The prospect of protracted legislative hearings over what the Donald said to James Comey or Donald McGahn two years ago pales in comparison to the abject damage Trump’s culture of fear and hatred has inflicted on our country.  He has made America far worse than any of us could have imagined.  For that, he needs to be impeached.  

To be sure, Senate Republicans will refuse to remove him from office.  Yet, it is far better to proceed on a basis that viscerally resonates with voters, than on one that amounts to a sequel to Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony.  Only 37 percent of voters say the Russia investigation warrants impeachment.  On the other hand, 59 percent called many of the president’s tweets “un-American”.  Six in 10 people found Trump’s actions to be bad for Hispanics and Muslims. Another poll found that 56 percent of voters believe the president has made race relations worse. Some 57 percent said Trump is a racist.

Every day of this deplorable presidency is filled with horrid moments, the likes of which no dystopian novelist could have ever conjured.  On Sunday, hours after a shooter, using Trumpian phrases like “Hispanic invasion” and “send them back”, killed 22 people in an El Paso Walmart, the president’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, went on television to say that the alleged mass murderer developed his anti-immigrant views before Trump was elected.  And how did Mulvaney, know that?  Turns out he lifted the line from the alleged shooter’s “manifesto”.  Another White House first:  political spin ghost written by an accused mass murderer.

Then, later in the week, Trump made the mass shooting circuit, ostensibly to comfort traumatized communities in El Paso and Dayton, where nine people were killed early Sunday. He attacked local politicians in both places, and regaled medical providers, still weary from caring for the wounded and dying, about crowd sizes at his political rallies.  When none of the still hospitalized shooting victims in El Paso would meet with him, Trump’s team had family members bring a baby who survived the shooting to the hospital for a photo op.  The two-month-old infant lost both his mother and father in the Walmart shooting. Totally oblivious to the gravity and somberness of the moment, Melania held the newly orphaned baby and beamed widely with her husband who flashed a victorious thumb’s up for the camera. For that alone, he should be impeached. 

Based on Hamilton’s standard of “injuries done immediately to the society itself”, there is overwhelming evidence supporting impeachment.  

For example, Trump:  

LAUGHED when someone at a political rally yelled that immigrants should be shot.

REBUFFED Department of Homeland Security efforts to make combating domestic terror threats, such as those from white supremacists, a greater priority.

USED the word “invasion” or “invade” to refer to migrants in tweets 10 times this year.

CUT funding for a federal program designed to undermine neo-Nazi groups and other violent domestic terrorism.

WAS named as the motivating force by countless perpetrators of hate crimes.

REPEATEDLY attacked people of color with blatantly racist tropes (here, here and here).

CALLED Mexican immigrants “rapists”, Syrian refugees “snakes”, and countries of black and brown people “shit holes”.

Impeachment should never be used to get rid of a merely bad president.  That’s what elections are for.  Yet, our wise founders envisioned the possibility that a day could come when the leader of the free world might be way worse than bad, so toxic, in fact, that our entire society is left in spiraling agony.  Alas, that tragic day has arrived.  

As damning as the Mueller evidence is, this no time to thread a legal needle over whether the president obstructed justice or merely obfuscated it.  All along, the smoking gun was hiding in plain sight, in the president’s tweets, his rally speeches, his everyday actions.  

Donald Trump is a disgrace to his office because he has totally failed to insure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty, in accordance with the Constitution he swore to faithfully execute.  It is hard to fathom a more compelling case for impeachment.