Category: Ukraine

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.