The Ukrainian Connection

Of all the things that would bring Trump down, who would have thought Ukraine would be his weak point?  The recent arrest of two thuggish Giuliani "associates" is yet another chapter in the saga of Trump's "secret diplomacy" with Ukraine to get dirt on Joe Biden.  These guys were apparently helping to funnel foreign money into Republican campaigns, namely Donald Trump.

These two goons couldn't have made their efforts more obvious, lunching with Rudy Giuliani at Trump's Washington International Hotel before trying to board a plane at Dulles with one-way tickets to Kiev.  I guess they figured their job was done for the time being and wanted to lay low for awhile.  Now, Giuliani finds himself under investigation and may very well find himself served with an indictment in the coming days.

Stupid Watergate just gets more stupid.  You just can't believe a President would be so open about his crimes.  He admitted straight to George Stephanopolous that he would accept any dirt on opponents from foreign governments, even Norway.  I guess when those countries weren't so forthcoming, he tried to extort them as he did the Ukraine back in July.  Honestly, I don't think he understands the severity of these crimes and for the first time in his life is going to have a civics lesson courtesy of Nancy Pelosi.

Of course, we didn't need to be here if more Americans hadn't been so keen to elect a guy with a demonstrable record of high crimes and misdemeanors that stretched back through his entire life.  He built his empire on one con game after another, including lying his way onto the Forbe's 400 in the 1980s.  Trump is The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg writ large. Yet, for whatever reason a large swathe of Americans voted for him.

These same Americans continue to support him for the most part.  There have been a few high profile defections, but for the most part Trumpists remain Trumpists, thanks in large part to a conservative media cocoon that shields them from unsavory news that casts their president in a bad light.  It will take a Herculean effort to break down this wall, so there is no point even trying.  They are so completely insulated in their beliefs that they won't accept anything the "lamestream media" has to say.  In fact, they turn a deaf ear when Trump admits himself that he solicited dirt on Joe Biden from the Ukrainians.

The Democrats have had more than enough dirt on Trump to launch an impeachment inquiry since the day they regained the House.  Pelosi just didn't want to make it the first act of a new Congress, or she decided to give the Orange King a chance to turn the page, which of course he didn't.  We lived with all his domestic policy failures because the economy was so strong it was able to resist the Republicans' attempt to derail it once again.  Now, Trump has begun tampering with foreign policy on a scale that frightens not just the US State Dept. but the US Military. 

If strong-arming Ukraine wasn't bad enough, he pulled a small contingent of US troops out of the Kurdish region of Syria without fully notifying the military.  A decision they no doubt would have appealed against, but Trump was tired of hearing criticism and decided to act on the advice of his closest confidant, Tayyip Erdogan.  Apparently, he got some assurance Turkey wouldn't invade Syria, but within 72 hours Turkish forces began bombarding the region.  This will go down as Trump's worst FP blunder, as it not only upset his opponents but many of his closest allies, including the erstwhile Lindsey Graham.

Trump apparently now determines much of his FP on the advice of Erdogan and Putin.  No telling what FP secret foreign policy he has shared with these two in his "perfect" phone calls.  The Democrats will probably want to investigate this too once they have sorted out everything that went down in Ukraine.

For some daffy reason, Trump was using Giuliani to garner information on the Bidens.  When the former NY mayor ran into a stone wall with Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine, he cried to Trump and he removed her.  Yovanovitch is a career diplomat with an extensive knowledge of the corruption in Ukraine, something Giuliani all too obviously wanted to pin on Biden and the previous administration.  I don't know what Giuliani or Pompeo or Trump thought, but ousting Yovanovitch like this was a huge mistake.  Did they really think she would stay quiet?

I suppose Trump thinks he can pay anyone off.  He has been able to do so for the most part with his former staffers, who continually pitch up on Fox, CNN and other media outlets defending him against the many charges brought against him.  The more disgruntled former employees he tries to discredit, usually with calamitous results. 

This has resulted in Trump fatigue among those who voted against Hillary.  With her safely out of the way they are now considering other options.  An astounding 58 per cent of American favor the impeachment inquiry, depending on which polls you take.  This is a 17-point swing from when talk of the inquiry first began.  People are sick of Trump and for good reason.  He is dragging the country down.

His domestic and foreign policies have created havoc and uncertainty.  The stock market has made no appreciable gain in nearly two years.  Unemployment stays low, but the type of employment available remains marginal with no net improvement to standard of living in the US.  Most Americans are still a paycheck away from bankruptcy, as Trump's crazy shutdown this past January highlighted.  A shutdown he was forced to eat when the media amply illustrated all the unnecessary hardships he was inflicting on federal employees.  We forget these numerous gaffes because he has a new one every week.

Unfotunately, the House can't impeach a president for being a shitty president.  You have to have something more substantial, so Trump gifted the Democrats by making an ill-advised phone call in front of a room full of staffers, who couldn't believe what they just heard.  It was only a matter of time before it came out, as the groundwork for this infamous call had been laid by his dubious personal lawyer, Rudolph William Louis Giuliani.  WTF was the president thinking having a guy like this sniffing around Ukraine for him!  Mayor Rudy is unable to keep anything under his belt.

I suppose Trump felt he was completely insulated by the immunity bestowed on a sitting president.  He like many Republicans thought the Democrats were bluffing with impeachment, and now that it is very much a reality, His Trumpness is beside himself with self-righteous indignation, openly calling for the heads of Pelosi and Schiff in his tweets, and demanding that the rats be flushed out of the White House.

It's not like either he or Giuliani made any effort to hide their unsavory dealings with the Ukraine, or that they even deny it.  They just don't consider it a crime.  He has his AG William "The Conqueror" Barr trying to make a case for this, but it doesn't hold much water and it seems Barr is just looking for a way out before he too comes under investigation.  Immunity only extends so far as the Commander-in-Chief, not his subordinates.

For some goofy reason, our founding fathers felt that the president should be above the law, at least so far as it might jeopardize national security.  They gave the right of the House to launch an investigation into his malfeasances, but vested in the Senate the power to overturn an impeachment with only one-third vote, pretty much insuring that the president could survive such an inquiry.  Of course, it was assumed no president would be so corrupt as Trump, or at least have the shame to resign as Nixon did when confronted with the spectre of impeachment.

As we should know by now, Trump has no shame.  Neither does it seem do his closest cabinet members.  Pompeo, Mnuchin and Barr continue to stonewall the House investigations, but given that many of their subordinates have since been dismissed, they can no longer effectively block them from giving testimony, as is the case with Marie Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill.  Their testimonies are proving quite damning, and threaten to bring down the entire White House, given all the complicity in Trump's actions.

Trumpists will remain loyal to their president, but they are now very much the minority of the electorate.  Impeachment or not, Trump will have to spend the entirety of his campaign defending himself against his record as President, which will be pretty hard to do even for a con man like him.