Dear America,
Well, the first day of the Trump impeachment hearings has occurred and it seems to me that the Republicans should have harkened to the old importune, be careful what you wish for. Despite the thrashing about of Congressman Jim Jordan--he has been touted as the Republicans' formidable, dare I say vicious, attack dog--the case against Donald Trump seems to have now been set in stone. And not only did the witnesses from the state department repeat the damning testimony that they gave under oath in depositions, they splashed their credentials all over the television screen and the airways making them essentially unimpeachable, which I'll bet Donald Trump wishes he were. And now, to add insult to injury, a new, this time first hand account of Donald Trump expressing his interest in the Bidens rather than corruption is going to be forthcoming. A staff member of one of the two diplomats (both of them still with the State Department by the way) who testified yesterday had a staff member report to him just this week that he had overheard a cell phone conversation between Trump and our ambassador to the EU from the ambassador's end and heard Trump ask about the investigation. Afterward, in conversation with the ambassador, the ambassador reported that Trump was not so much interested in Ukraine as he was the Bidens. Now that staff member is being subpoenaed and will testify first hand as to what he heard Trump say as the ambassador spoke with him. This could be a big domino in the long chain of them, many teetering, and this one may well be the one that falls and starts the chain reaction, which raises the issue for the Republicans: what do we do now?
The prime strategy of the Republican Party, the one that they seem to inculcate all of their new coming office holders with, is dissemblance. They never reveal their inner thoughts and fears; they just whistle in the dark and try to divert attention from the things that they don't want the voters to think about. It is universal in the party. Think Lyndsey Graham fulminating at the Kavanaugh hearings about the presumption of evidence; he's a lawyer and he knows that the presumption is for people accused of crimes when they are prosecuted, not nominees for high office in which trustworthiness and sincerity are a sine qua non. Think Mitch McConnell claiming that he is not going to give President Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court so much as a hearing because he thinks the people should be heard in the election that was then a year away first; the subscript was, we might win the presidency and if so, we can approve our own person. Think Trump...well, he gives us an example every day. Think of all the Republicans complaining about a process just like the ones they implemented during the dozen or so Benghazi hearings in which they tried unsuccessfully to pin something...anything...on Hillary Clinton. And now we have Jim Jordan spewing righteous indignation without righteousness. He couldn't do anything with the testimony of the two diplomats, Kent and Taylor; their credentials that include military service, West Point, and decades of service in the State Department. So he relied upon characterizing that testimony as hearsay and berating the Democrats, in effect by ridiculing them as the party's "star witnesses." All the while, Trump keeps the full transcript of his July 25, 2019 phone call in favor of a "memorandum of telephone conversation." Who knows how much that account has been groomed to protect our dissembler in chief.
But the real problem for the Republicans will be next week or soon thereafter when some witnesses who did hear the phone call in the White House, Lt. Col Alexander Vindman for example. Jordan won't be able to call his testimony hearsay, and he won't be able to impeach Vindman for lack of commitment to democratic principles; he's a high level officer in our army entrusted with listening to our president's phone calls for security reasons. That's when it will get interesting.
Once a first hand account of the conversation is on the record, dissembling will no longer do. That means that the protect-Trump enterprise on which the party has embarked will become a threat to each participant in that enterprise. To put a fine point on it, when the Republicans are faced with a choice between protecting Trump from the American people knowing "if their president is a crook" to borrow a phrase from Richard Nixon and preserving their own political skins, I predict that you are going to see a lot of glum expressions and rueful accedence to the facts...not just in The House, but in The Senate as well, and we haven't even started talking about Doug McGann, Cory Lewandowsky and Trump's charity, which he used like a personal piggy bank.
So the outcome of yesterday's hearings is that what seemed impossible six months ago is well within the realm of possibility today. And what was once unthinkable--that The Senate would both try and convict Trump--is now a definite maybe. All I can say is that my fingers are crossed. Donald Trump is the worst thing that has happened to this country since Bush and Cheney manufactured the basis for the war in Iraq.
Your friend,
Mike
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