Republican Voices: Defining President Trump

A MENACE TO THE U.S. CONSTITUTION

 

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“Felony stupid.” 

Former Secretary of Defense Gen. James Mattis, describing President Trump

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Since starting my blog, I have refrained almost entirely from quoting Democrats. I have chosen, instead, to use Republican, conservative, and non-partisan experts to build a case against Donald J. Trump. 

(I have, however, quoted neo-Nazis who loved him – which I believe supports my damning assessment.)

 

* 

“A real opportunity for people like white nationalists.” 

For example: 

We could parse the stirring words of Rocky Suhayda, leader of the American Nazi Party. Back in 2016, in the days leading up to the presidential election, he told followers he had high hopes for the future.

 

Now, if Trump does win, OK, it’s going to be a real opportunity for people like white nationalists, acting intelligently to build upon that. You know how you have the black political caucus and whatnot in Congress, and, everything, to start building on something like that, OK.

 

It doesn’t have to be anti, like the movement’s been for decades, so much as it has to be pro-white. It’s kinda hard to go and call us bigots, if we don’t go around and act like a bigot. That’s what the movement should contemplate.

 

Yeah. Subtle neo-Nazis.

 

* 

I’m not “obsessed” with Trump, as a conservative friend fumed recently. I don’t “hate Trump” as a former student, a friend on Facebook, insisted angrily just this week. I make it a habit never to hate anyone because hate is a blinding emotion. (That’s one reason I don’t like Nazis.) It is my simple contention, based on overwhelming evidence, that Donald Trump should never again be allowed within a hundred miles of the White House. Not even to visit.

Mattis served 44 years with the Marines.

 

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“And the truth is, there’s almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.” 

Former-Vice President Mike Pence

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Let’s begin by quoting former-Vice President Mike Pence. Even the most clueless Trump supporter can probably recall how, on Jan. 6, 2021, the president pressured Pence to throw out electoral votes for Joseph Biden, and gift him a second, undeserved term. Trump said Pence “lacked courage” to do what he should. If all the Founding Fathers could have risen from the grave, and danced in circles round the White House on that day, none would have ever said they wanted to give one man the power to overturn the counting of the votes – and even give himself a second term. 

Which Pence could have done. 

Fortunately, Mr. Pence was not a craven coward. He refused President Trump’s mad demand. 

On June 24, 2021, in a speech to an audience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Pence explained: 

 

Now, there are those in our party who believe that in my position as presiding officer over the joint session, that I possessed the authority to reject or return electoral votes certified by states. But the Constitution provides the vice president with no such authority before the joint session of Congress. And the truth is, there’s almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.

 

Vice President Pence did his constitutional duty.

* 

“Never interested in what the actual facts were.” 

We also know, it’s been two years since Trump began predicting the 2020 election would be stolen, and then claiming that it was – and convincing legions of his fans that he was cheated of a second term. You could believe him, I suppose, if you were singularly ill-informed. Attorney General Bill Barr was asked about the “stolen election” during congressional hearings this summer. 

In taped testimony, under oath, Barr said he had spoken to then-President Trump on three occasions, in the wake of the 2020 election, on November 23, December 1, and December 14. Each time he told the president that the Department of Justice had found no evidence the election had been rigged. “I made it clear that I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit.” 

Barr explained his decision, on December 14, to resign his cabinet post. “You can’t live in a world where the incumbent administration stays in power based on its view, unsupported by specific evidence [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted], that there was fraud in the election.” 

The problem was clear. Trump, Barr added pointedly, was “never interested in what the actual facts were.”

 

*

 

“A president unconstitutionally attempted to remain in power.” 

Another former White House lawyer spoke up just last week. This time the voice of sanity issued from the lips of Ty Cobb, who previously defended Trump during the Mueller investigation. 

Mr. Cobb weighed in on the search at Mar-a-Lago and assorted investigations in Congress, related to the January 6, 2021, attack on Capitol Hill. “I think the president is in serious legal water,” he told CBS News, “not so much because of the search, but because of the obstructive activity he took in connection with the Jan. 6 proceeding. That was the first time in American history that a president unconstitutionally attempted to remain in power illegally.” 

Cobb went on to describe the former president as “a deeply wounded narcissist,” and suggested that he could be barred from holding further office under the Fourteenth Amendment.

 

He also blasted the former president for spreading the “Big Lie” about a stolen election – a lie he will likely spread until his dying day. Trump’s treatment of his own vice president in January 2021 should disqualify him from holding office again. “Interfering with Pence, saying Mike deserves this when people are shouting ‘Kill Pence,’ I think that’s outrageous,” Cobb added. 

“I think interfering with what the vice president was obligated to do, trying to persuade him in a very aggressive effort not to certify the election, and to send certain electors back, I think that was criminal.”

 

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“Not consistent with the truth. Not consistent with the Constitution.” 

If you dared to listen (and many Trump fans did not), the January 6 hearings in Congress shredded the “Big Lie.” Again, we’re not quoting Democrats or independents or pedophiles to make a case. (Yes, Trump fans also believe in a mass movement of pedophiles hidden in the bushes on the Left). These are top voices from the Trump administration. Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen had served from the start, in multiple capacities, under Mr. Trump. After Barr resigned, the president placed Rosen in charge at the Justice Department.  

Rosen testified that starting on December 23, 2020, through January 3, 2021, Trump pressed him daily (except Christmas). The president asked Rosen to take a series of steps Rosen considered “inappropriate.” Finally, he insisted that Rosen sign and send a letter to seven key state legislatures, including this sentence: “At this time we have identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states, including the State of Georgia.” 

 

Rosen rebuffed the president. Why? First, he testified, the letter was “not consistent with the truth.” Second, it was “not consistent with the Constitution.” For most men and women of principle, that would clinch. 

Trump threatened to fire him, relenting only when almost every other top official at DOJ agreed. If Rosen goes, we all go. 

Honest men on one side. Trump on the other.

 

* 

At a meeting on December 15, 2020, with top officials at Justice, we learned that the president brought up the vote in Antrim County, Michigan. He had a report, he said, that proved there had been a 68% error rate in Antrim. That was possible only if the voting machines had been rigged.  

Steven Engel, Chief Legal Counsel at Justice, told the Jan. 6 congressional panel that he had examined all credible allegations, and to “this date,” the hearing date, he meant, there had been no evidence of widespread fraud.

 

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“Tried to educate the president.” 

On December 27, 2021, Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue had a 90-minute phone conversation with the president, during which he took notes. Trump brought up Antrim County again, and aired a number of allegations. All, Donoghue testified, had been debunked. He said that he was “very blunt.” He said he “tried to correct him in a serial fashion.” A hand recount of the more than 15,000 votes in Antrim, for example, had shown the machines were off by a single vote, not by 68% as Trump said. “What people are telling you is not true,” he told him. Donoghue said he “tried to educate the president,” for his own good. Remember: Donoghue and Engel, Rosen and Barr, all were testifying under oath. 

(The Antrim vote, in the end, turned out to be off by 12.)

 

FUN FACT: Did you know that Mitt Romney got a higher percentage of the popular vote in 2012, than Donald Trump did in either 2016, or 2020? 

Well, you can look it up!

 

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“Openly debating these unconstitutional schemes.” 

When news began to break in late January 2021, in a report from The New York Times, that in December 2020, President Trump had toyed with the idea of ordering the U.S. military to seize the voting machines in seven battleground states, even Trump apologists swallowed hard and admitted the idea was nuts. 

Howard Kurtz of Fox News had this to say:

 

The gist [of the report] is that Trump explored having the Pentagon, Justice Department or Homeland Security seize voting machines in disputed states based on a complete lack of evidence that they had been tampered with. The voting machine theories, promoted by fringe characters around Trump, were the wackiest of all, said to include machinations involving Venezuela and Hugo Chavez.

 

Think, for a moment, of the reaction if the leader of another country had ordered the confiscation of voting machines in a disputed election, and how that would play here. 

 

“You might say the system worked,” Kurtz added, “but the fact the president was openly debating these unconstitutional schemes in the White House is rather chilling. You can support Donald Trump, you can believe there was election fraud, but there’s no getting around the craziness of this particular plot.” 

It was too bad Kurtz included that caveat: “You can believe there was election fraud,” without adding, “if, like a five-year-old, you can believe Santa comes down the chimney and brings all the good children their toys.”

 

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Sen. John Thune, the second ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate, knew how close we came to Trump blowing up our system of free and fair elections. He was frank when asked to comment on the Times report. He praised those, like Kevin Cuccinelli, who had headed the Department of Homeland Security at the time, who refused to grab the machines when Trump asked if DHS would do the honors. (The Justice Department had also passed on the chance, as did leaders of the U.S. military.) 

“I’m just glad that there were people in the right places and that the system worked,” Thune said. “People who had positions of responsibility held their ground even when being asked to do things that they knew they shouldn’t do. Things may have bent a little bit, but they didn’t break.” 

“Things,” is always vague, as I used to tell my students, when we were working on their writing. 

What Thune meant was that the rule of law was bent and warped, but it didn’t break, even though the president intended to break it.

 

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“Bad advisers, who were basically snake oil salesmen.” 

In February, 2022, during an appearance on Meet the Press, Marc Short, former chief of staff for Vice President Mike Pence, offered his thoughts regarding the fable of the “stolen election.” 

Asked to comment on the idea that Pence could have overturned the vote and gifted Trump a second term, Short told NBC’s Chuck Todd, “I think unfortunately the president had many bad advisers, who were basically snake oil salesmen giving him really random and novel ideas as to what the vice president could do.”

 

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Short was not alone in sounding alarm. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and took a swipe at Mr. Trump. Responding to the former president’s claim, reiterated recently, that Pence could have overturned the election results, Gov. Christie refused to pull his punches.

 

“Let’s face it. Let’s call it what it is,” he told host Martha Raddatz. “January 6 was a riot that was incited by Donald Trump in an effort to intimidate Mike Pence and the Congress into doing exactly what he said in his own words last week: Overturn the election.” 

 

“[Trump is] trying to do a clean-up on aisle one here,” Christie added. “But it’s not going to change. He actually told the truth by accident. He wanted the election to be overturned.” 

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“An assault on the first branch of government.” 

On CBS, former Trump National Security Advisor Gen. H.R. McMaster was featured as a guest. 

That’s Trump’s own man for the job, and not to be confused with other Trump choices for top jobs, who came to view him as a fucking moron, a threat to the U.S. Constitution, the most flawed person ever, a man who put self-interest above national security interests, and now the man who had done his best to advance the most un-American idea ever, so he could get a second term. 

Asked to respond to comments by his former boss, about the rioters who attacked Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, McMaster pointedly disagreed. Those rioters weren’t “patriots,” as Trump insisted.

 

They weren’t engaged in “legitimate political discourse” as the Republican National Committee claimed. 

What happened on January 6, Gen. McMaster said, “was illegitimate political discourse because it was an assault on the first branch of government. I think it’s really important for us to come together now,” he added. “I really think it is possible to improve the transparency and the security of our elections while ensuring that every eligible voter gets to vote.” 

He thought about it a moment, then added, “It is pretty clear that we are emerging from a number of traumas of the past couple of years.”

 

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Word for the day: “piffle.” 

The editors of the Wall Street Journal had this to say about the plot hatched by the snake oil salesmen/women – and embraced by then-President Trump: “Mr. Pence stands out as a rare Republican these days willing to stand up to Mr. Trump’s disgraceful behavior after the election. Too many in the GOP seem to have lost their constitutional moorings in thrall to one man.”

 

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None of this is the least difficult to comprehend. When asked if he agreed with Pence, in refusing to overturn the electoral votes, Sen. Marco Rubio was clear. “Vice presidents can’t simply decide not to certify an election.”

 

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Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming concurred. On “Fox News Sunday” he explained that Mr. Pence “did his constitutional duty that day. It’s not the Congress that elects the president, it’s the American people.” 

What he left unsaid was that Trump wanted Pence to ignore his constitutional duty, which would be the key.

 

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The former two-term Republican governor of Montana, and former chair of the Republican National Committee, Marc Racicot, was asked to comment on Trump’s continued ranting about a “stolen election.” 

It was all a bunch of “piffle” he said. 

“Nonsense,” he meant. 

To be more exact, Racicot was asked about more recent comments by the RNC, backing Trump’s lies:

 

Although it is ever so neat and tidy to blame the defeat of the former president on the existence of decisive and widespread fraud, there is not even a scintilla of evidence, anywhere, to support such piffle. The former president didn’t experience defeat in 2020 because of fraud. The truth is quite the opposite. The defeat of the former president is explained by the fact that legions of responsible citizens, part of that Great Middle of America, voted the way they did because they embraced the very fidelity to their country and its Constitution that the RNC claims to embrace in its Party Platform.

 

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“A clear and present danger.” 

The highly respected conservative jurist, retired Judge J. Michael Luttig, also blasted those in his beloved Republican party who continued to peddle the “Big Lie.”

 

Mr. Trump and his allies insist that the 2020 election was “stolen,” a product of fraudulent voting and certifications of electors who were not properly selected. Over a year after the election, they continue to cling to these disproved allegations, claiming that these “irregularities” were all the evidence Mr. Pence needed to overturn the results, and demanding that the rest of the G.O.P. embrace their lies. The balance of the Republican Party, mystifyingly stymied by Mr. Trump, rejects these lies, but, as if they have fallen through the rabbit hole into Alice’s Wonderland, they are confused as to exactly how to move on from the 2020 election when their putative leader remains bewilderingly intent on driving the wedge between the believers in his lies and the disbelievers.

 

Asked in June 2022, to testify in front of the January 6 Committee in Congress, Judge Luttig reiterated his position. It would have been a profound violation of the U.S. Constitution, he said bluntly, for the Vice President to have refused to count the electoral votes. He went on to warn that Trump was a “clear and present danger” to American democracy. 

And you can look it up.

 

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P. J. O’Rourke, the conservative author of Parliament of Whores, who died in February 2022, once explained why he held his nose and voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.  “She was the devil I knew – she was going to be another eight years of Obama, which we had endured. Donald Trump? I knew people who knew him. Nobody liked him. I just thought he was unstable…dangerous. I still do.”

 

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“There’s no Team America for Trump.” 

In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Dr. Fiona Hill, former National Security advisor to President Trump, pointedly blamed him for the Russian aggression. He treated Ukraine like a “playground,” she fumed, and never cared about the Ukrainian people, or what was good for them, or even what was good for U.S. interests. He never stood up to Vladimir Putin. He only wanted Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and help him win reelection in 2020. 

In an interview with CNN, Dr. Hill was frank. “There’s no Team America for Trump,” she said. “Not once did I see him do anything to put America first. Not once. Not for a single second.”

 

* 

“This is genius…How smart is that?” 

This isn’t all “Fake News.” In fact, let’s quote the former president. In a stunning radio interview, just days after Russia invaded its neighbor, Trump not only failed to condemn the attack, he praised Putin’s moves, calling him “savvy,” instead. 

Nor is this a liberal blogger, searching high and low for examples to make Trump sound weak. This was an interview clip provided by his spokesperson, Liz Harrington, who chose what to post, proving that she might be as soulless as the man for whom she works. “In the last 24 hours we know Russia has said that they are recognizing two breakaway regions of Ukraine, and now this [Biden] White House is stating that this is an ‘invasion,’” host Buck Sexton says in the clip. “That’s a strong word. What went wrong here? What has the current occupant of the Oval Office done that he could have done differently?” he asked Trump. 

Pause a moment and pay attention to everything Donald doesn’t say. 

“Well,” he responded, “what went wrong was a rigged election,” as always misrepresenting the results of the 2020 contest. 

“What went wrong,” he added, “is a candidate that shouldn’t be there and a man that has no concept of what he’s doing.”

 

Did it bother Mr. Trump that 42 million Ukrainians were in the path of Russia’s guns? Not a bit. “I went in yesterday and there was a television screen,” he told Sexton, referring to how he spends time at Mar-a-Lago, “and I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of Ukraine … Putin declares it as independent. Oh that’s wonderful! So Putin is now saying it’s independent. A large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force – we could use that on our southern border.” 

(Sure, Mexico, remembering 1846, would love that concept.)

 

Trump wasn’t appalled. Trump was impressed. “That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re going to keep peace all right,” he said. “No, but think of it. Here’s a guy who’s very savvy. I know him very well. Very, very well.”

 

The next day, Trump doubled down. He said Putin was beating Biden “like a drum.” Talking to his pals at dinner at Mar-a-Lago, where every member knows they’re safe from Russian artillery fire and need not worry about being chewed to bits under the treads of all those tanks, Trump mocked his successor. Biden was weak. Putin, he said, was “pretty smart.” He was “taking over a country, literally, a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in.”

 

And all “for $2 worth of sanctions.”

 

To this blogger, it was repellent, like saying Hitler was savvy when he walked right in on Poland on September 1, 1939.

Removing bodies after a "savvy," "genius" Russian missile strike.

 

* 

Have we mentioned white supremacists? I don’t like them, myself. But this past February 25, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene made headlines once more. On that Friday evening, she gave a keynote speech at a conference organized by Nicholas J. Fuentes. 

Fuentes, 23, is a piece of far-right work. As the New York Post reports, “he has been labeled as a white supremacist by the Anti-Defamation League…[and] has denied the Holocaust, defended segregation, and urged his followers to kill state legislators.” 

“[They say] Vladimir Putin is Hitler, and they say that’s not a good thing,” Fuentes joked, on Friday night. 

“I shouldn’t have said that” he added, with a laugh.

 

We can also offer up a taste of Fuentes’ thinking when it comes to the question of race:

 

Fuentes and his America First adherents vocally support the closure of the U.S. borders to immigrants, while opposing “liberal” values such as feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. Fuentes views these societal changes as the “bastardized Jewish subversion of the American creed. The Founders never intended for America to be a refugee camp for nonwhite people.”  

 

Fuentes believes in the Great Replacement Theory, which he refers to as the “Great Replacement REALITY.” In this view, white people are being replaced in Europe and in the USA by dark-skinned immigrants, and the white race faces extinction, and it’s all part of some nefarious, globalist plan. “If you are a White male zoomer,” he warned recently, “remember that the people in power hate you and your unborn children and they will try to genocide you in your lifetime.” 

FUN FACT: A reporter asked Sen. Mitt Romney to comment on the fact that Greene and Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona had both appeared on the same venue as Fuentes. “I’ve got morons on my team,” he replied.

Today: the "master race."

 

* 

Trump “barely knew where Ukraine was.” 

Former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton appeared on Rob Schmitt’s Newsmax show on March 1. What Schmitt hoped to do, as shown by graphics that ran at the bottom of the screen (“TRUMP WAS TOUGH ON RUSSIA”), was credit Trump for holding the Russians at bay, during his four years in office. Bolton savaged that argument from the start. He pointed out that his old boss “barely knew where Ukraine was” and once had to ask if Finland was part of Russia. 

(MAGA guys: It’s not.)

 

Bolton insisted Trump didn’t take a tough stance on Russia. Quite the contrary. “It is just not accurate to say that Trump’s behavior somehow deterred the Russians. I think the evidence is that Russia didn’t feel that their military was ready.” Bolton also cited Trump’s “lack of any significant historical knowledge,” “lack of strategic thinking,” and “pretty much his lack of thinking about pretty much anything other than what benefited Donald Trump.”

 

What was Trump’s only interest in Ukraine in the summer of 2019? Trump didn’t care about holding Russia at bay. He didn’t care about cleaning up corruption – his stated reason for withholding military aid to  Ukraine. According to Mr. Bolton, the president only cared about himself – and what might help him win a second term. When the Newsmax host (who no doubt had to be wondering who booked Bolton to appear on his show) tried again to credit Donald, saying, yeah, well we got that aid to the Ukrainians in the end, Bolton was having no part of that either. 

“It was mandated by Congress,” he responded adamantly. Trump “made up the reasons” for withholding aid for months. After knocking down another point the Newsmax host tried to foist on viewers, Bolton said, “My point is Trump was not fit to be president…and was not competent to be president.”

 

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“Country and principle took second place.” 

Around the same time, Bill Barr sat for an interview with Lester Holt of NBC News, to talk about his new book. In a White House meeting, in December 2020 (as we have already noted), he told Holt, he told the president the information he was getting, that there had been massive voter fraud in the November election, was “bullshit” and “it was wrong to be shoveling it out, like he and his team was.” 

Here’s a key line from Barr’s book: “Trump cared only about one thing: himself. Country and principle took second place.” 

The former AG goes on to describe his old boss as an “incorrigible” narcissist who, “through his self-indulgence and lack of self-control,” blew the 2020 election. Trump then did “a disservice to the nation” in falsely claiming his defeat was due to fraud. “The election was not ‘stolen,’” Barr wrote. “Trump lost it.”

 

I can’t say as I  intend to buy Barr’s book, but he does admit that he and White House lawyers had weekly lunches, when they would “inventory the legally problematic ideas floating around the administration.” Even more appalling, Barr writes, a “fair share” of those bad ideas “came from Trump himself.”

 

Mr. Trump “lost his grip” after the election, Barr says. “He stopped listening to his advisers, became manic and unreasonable, and was off the rails. ... He surrounded himself with sycophants, including many whack jobs from outside the government, who fed him a steady diet of comforting but unsupported conspiracy theories.” What the whack jobs were putting out (and still are) were “fact-free claims of [voter] fraud.” Claims about hacked Dominion voting systems, for example, Barr calls “absolute nonsense” and “meaningless twaddle.” 

So, the whack jobs told Trump he won. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the biggest whack job was Trump.

 

* 

We had another Nick Fuentes sighting on March 7 of this year. This time, the white supremacist leader explained, “I am unapologetic. I thought the Capitol [riot] was awesome; it was awesome! And so was Trump. And Trump was awesome because he was racist. Trump was awesome because he was sexist. The only thing Trump wasn’t awesome for was being antisemitic; he wasn’t antisemitic.”

 

* 

“He loved the dictators.” 

Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham was asked about Trump and his relationship with Vladimir Putin. 

She says she believed Trump “feared” Putin.

 

I think he was afraid of him. I think that the man intimidated him. Because Putin is a scary man, just frankly, I think he was afraid of him. I also think he admired him, greatly, I think he wanted to be able to kill whoever spoke out against him. So I think it was a lot of that. In my experience with him, he loved the dictators, he loved the people who could kill anyone, including the press.

 

Trump said he liked Putin, Putin liked him.

* 

Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, weighed in during an interview with Roll Call. He was asked how he felt after Trump called Putin’s attack on Ukraine “genius.” 

Coats responded as every thinking American should. “I’m speechless on this,” he told a reporter, “how anybody could think that could be said.”

 

And Coats agreed that Trump still being the de facto Republican presidential nominee in 2024 feels like a very different party than that of Coats, or fellow Hoosiers such as Mike Pence, who as vice president did not go along with Trump’s plan to override the counting of electoral votes, or another former vice president, Dan Quayle, who served under President George H.W. Bush. Quayle advised Pence that he didn’t have the power to do what Trump asked.

 

“I think the big issue before 2024, is it going to be the Trump Party or the Republican Party?” Coats said.

 

* 

Rep. Tom Rice, one of only ten Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives to vote to impeach Donald Trump (on the second try) defends his vote in a statement prior to the GOP primary:

 

If you want a Congressman who supports political violence in Ukraine or in the United States Capitol, who supports party over country, who supports a would-be tyrant over the Constitution, and who makes decisions based solely on re-election, then Russell Fry [endorsed by Trump] is your candidate.

 

(Fry prevailed.)

 

*

 

Fourteen months after the election, on March 27, 2022, Mo Brooks, a Trump loyalist and former member of Congress, told reporters for CBS news that Trump did in fact ask him in the lead up to the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill, to “rescind the election. He always brings up, ‘we’ve got to rescind the election. We got to take Joe Biden down and put me in now.’”

 

When asked if Trump still said that Brooks acknowledged he did.

 

* 

The dream never dies – and won’t until Trump does. On June 1, Maggie Haberman, a reporter for Vanity Fair penned a column claiming that the former-President Trump had been “telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated [as president] by August.”  

As a former history teacher, I’ve read the U.S. Constitution over many times. I’ve even read James Madison’s Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787. (Twice!) Unlike Mr. Trump, I’m not a delusion narcissist, and, as I said, I’ve read the Constitution many times. So I know without having to look it up. This dream of reinstatement is an impossibility. The former president might just as well have said he was going to cartwheel across the country, starting on August 1. 

I found it hard to believe that even Donald J. Trump would make such outlandish claims. I wondered if Haberman’s sources weren’t good. 

Then again, hardcore QAnon fans had dubbed August 12, as “Reinstatement Day,” and awaited the political resurrection with bated breath. And, lo, the sun didst rise in the East on that Friday morn, but Trump didst not rise with it, from the political cave at Mar-a-Lago. He was not reinstated.

 

Still, could Trump be that weird? It turns out he could and still is. Sure enough, in a post on Truth Social, on August 29, Trump shared the dream. First, he howled about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and how the F.B.I. buried the story of the Laptop from Hell. Then he went full toddler-tantrum mode:

 

This is massive FRAUD & ELECTION INTERFERENCE at a level never seen before in our Country. REMEDY: Declare the rightful winner or, and this would be the minimal solution, declare the 2020 Election irreparably compromised and have a new Election, immediately!

 

As outlined, nowhere, in the U.S. Constitution, nor federal statue, nor even the Girl Scout handbook.

James Madison - Father of the Constitution.

 

*

 

“The illegality of the plan was obvious.”

 

By the end of March, evidence of a widespread plot hatched by Dr. John Eastman, and championed by Trump, to win the president a second term, began to accumulate. It was Eastman, after all, who suggested Vice President Pence simply refuse to count all the electoral votes. When lawmakers in Congress started demanding documents, and subpoenaing witnesses to figure out who had been involved in that plan, Eastman decided he’d rather not provide documents – or testify either. In the ensuing court battle, a federal judge in California, ordered Eastman to turn over a trove of emails and communications, though he did say some documents could be withheld for legitimate reasons. To say that Judge David O. Carter otherwise penned a blistering opinion is to understate the case. Most news outlets headlined the fact that Carter ruled former President Trump “more likely than not” tried to impede congressional proceedings on the day of the attack. 

That would mean Trump broke the law.

 

Carter’s 44-page ruling was much more damaging if you read it all.

 

President Trump and Dr. Eastman justified the plan with allegations of election fraud – but President Trump likely knew the justification was baseless, and therefore that the entire plan was unlawful. Although Dr. Eastman argues that President Trump was advised several state elections were fraudulent, the Select Committee points to numerous executive branch officials who publicly stated and privately stressed to President Trump that there was no evidence of fraud. By early January [2021], more than sixty courts dismissed cases alleging fraud due to lack of standing or lack of evidence, noting that they made “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” and that “there is no evidence to support accusations of voter fraud.”

 

Judge Carter continued, highlighting Trump’s desperate call to three Republican officials in Georgia – demanding that they “find” enough votes for him to “win” that state and gain sixteen electoral votes. 

It was just another facet, Carter warned, of a dubious plot.

 

President Trump’s repeated pleas for Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger clearly demonstrate that his justification was not to investigate fraud, but to win the election: “So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.” Taken together, this evidence demonstrates that President Trump likely knew the electoral count plan had no factual justification.

 

“The illegality of the plan was obvious,” the judge continued.

 

 Our nation was founded on the peaceful transition of power, epitomized by George Washington laying down his sword to make way for democratic elections. Ignoring this history, President Trump vigorously campaigned for the Vice President to single-handedly determine the results of the 2020 election. As Vice President Pence stated, “no Vice President in American history has ever asserted such authority.” Every American – and certainly the President of the United States – knows that in a democracy, leaders are elected, not installed. With a plan this “BOLD,” [as Eastman described it] President Trump knowingly tried to subvert this fundamental principle. Based on the evidence, the Court finds it more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.

 

The evidence also demonstrates that Dr. Eastman likely knew that the plan was unlawful.

 

Judge Carter noted that when Eastman was young had clerked for Judge Luttig, and should have known better. Luttig himself described Eastman’s plan as “wrong at every turn.” Carter said in summary:

 

Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history. Their campaign was not confined to the ivory tower – it was a coup in search of a legal theory. The plan spurred violent attacks on the seat of our nation’s government, led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers, and deepened public distrust in our political process.

 

If Dr. Eastman and President Trump’s plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution. If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself.

 

And to show you just how “solid,” legally, this plan was, when Eastman was finally forced to testify, he plead the Fifth 146 times. 

Others who might be implicated, who also battled subpoenas, but in the end were forced to answer questions or face charges of contempt also took the Fifth…shall we say, with alarming frequency. Alex Jones admitted he refused to incriminate himself “almost a hundred times.” Rudy Giuliani not only took the Fifth when questioned by the Jan. 6 Committee, he traveled to Georgia, where another investigation was being held, and clammed up again. Roger Stone decided he wasn’t going to take any chances, and said he took the Fifth to every question he was asked. 

Including: “What is your favorite pizza topping?” 

And special mention to Steve Bannon! He refused to appear before Congress, went to trial on a charge of contempt. 

And got convicted promptly by a jury. 

When last seen he was headed for jail – barring appeal – and shouting that he was being persecuted for his beliefs. 

(He was originally up for trial on charges of fraud.)

Roger Stone - took the Fifth to every question.

 

* 

Well, at last, a bit of levity. 

On Saturday, April 2, 2022, after a two-year hiatus, due to COVID, the Gridiron Dinner was back. The Republican speaker for the evening was New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu. He offered this take on the former President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.

 

“He’s f---ing crazy,” Sununu said to laughter and applause – and, notably, no booing.

 

“I don’t think he’s so crazy that you could put him in a mental institution,” he added. “But I think if he were in one, he ain’t getting out.”

 

* 

“A threat to democracy in this country?” 

In May, former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper sat for an interview with Nora O’Donnell on 60 Minutes. 

With Ukraine dominating the news, Esper explained that back in 2019, he had to fight with Trump to follow the law. Congress had authorized $250 million in military aid for our allies. The president insisted the aid be held. Esper had to keep pressing Trump to release the support. “It would be an argument after an argument. And I’d have to say, ‘Look, Mr. President, at the end of the day, Congress appropriated. It’s the law. We have to do it.’” 

Illegal, unethical, bizarre ideas would come up on an almost weekly basis, Esper told Ms. O’Donnell, “and we’d have to swat ’em down.” Fortunately, he says, “I had good support from [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] General Mark Milley.” 

Esper said , for example, that the president wanted to hit Mexican drug cartels with Patriot missiles. He suggested that no one would ever know it was us – assuming no one else in the world had radar. 

Esper went on to say that in June 2020, with Black Lives Matter protests rattling the nation, and peaceful protesters right outside the White House gate, Trump lost his cool. He suggested calling in 10,000 troops to guard D.C. and wanted to know why the soldiers couldn’t just start shooting. When military leaders pushed back on the idea of shooting protesters (and the First Amendment) full of holes, Trump responded, “Just shoot them in the leg,” then.

 

O’Donnell asked Esper what was at stake if Trump ran for office again in 2024 and managed to win. He responded by describing the kind of candidate we needed – which Trump was not. 

“Number one, they have to put country over self, uh,” he replied. “Number two they have to serve with integrity, uh with principles, uh, number three they have to be able to work with other people. They have to be able to unify the country and lead and President Trump just doesn’t meet that for me.” 

“In your opinion is Donald Trump a threat to democracy in this country?” O’Donnell wondered. 

Esper left no doubt:

 

I think based on his actions on January 6 you can’t come to any other conclusion. I think he was trying to overturn the results of a legitimately certified election and the peaceful transfer of power, both of which are hallmarks of a democracy and we are the world’s oldest democracy and even attempting to do that really not just hurt our own republic but undermined the credibility of the United States in the world to speak of these principles.

 

In a new book, Esper explains how, in the summer of 2020, he and Gen. Milley came up with a system to stop an unbalanced president from doing anything rash leading up to the 2020 election. They called it “The Four Noes.” 

“One was no strategic retreats, no unnecessary wars, no politicization of the military and no misuse of the military. And so as we went through the next five or six months, that became the metric by which we would measure things.” 

Again: Esper’s comments are supported by others. Gen. Milley felt the need to come out in the last weeks before the election and assure anyone who was listening that the U.S. military would play no role in deciding the outcome. 

You have to be as dense as a bar of pig iron to miss the general’s warning. Only one man had the authority to call out troops to try to decide an election. Gen. Milley was making it clear ahead of time. 

He’d not follow an illegal order from Trump.

 

Esper had similar concerns. He, too, feared the president might attempt to use the military to change the outcome of the 2020 election. Once Biden was declared the winner, he feared the president would order soldiers to seize ballot boxes in key states. That is: in key states Trump lost.

 

Esper told the general commanding the National Guard to alert him if he were contacted by anyone from inside the White House.

 

“Without being too explicit, my message was clear: the US military was not going to get involved in the election, no matter who directed it. I would intercede,” Esper writes, according to The Guardian. 

 

As for why he wrote the book, he told O’Donnell he wanted to alert the American people, to chronicle the final year of a wild administration. He wanted us to know that Donald Trump should never be allowed to reenter the White House. He said he felt a duty, “to tell…about things we prevented. Really bad things. Dangerous things that could have taken the country in a dark direction.” 

Asked later, by another reporter, about some of these stories, Esper explained that the former president was “an unprincipled person who, given his self-interest, should not be in the position of public service.”

 

* 

One lowlight from these years deserves special notice. After Col. Alexander Vindman testified, under oath, during hearings related to the first impeachment, Trump set out to exact vengeance. “The president asked me a couple of times about Vindman, Esper said. “‘When will the Army kick him out?’ he would say. It was surprising how animated one Army lieutenant colonel was able to make the leader of the free world. I never understood it.” 

Trump and his enablers finally managed to have Vindman and his twin brother, Eugene, also a lieutenant colonel, both denied promotions. Army superiors had ruled that both men had earned advancement. 

But they were blocked.

One brother testified under oath - Trump took vengeance on both.

 

* 

Esper’s concerns should not be confused with what Trump’s first Secretary of Defense, Gen. James Mattis, said by way of warning. In the summer of 2020, Mattis called the president “a threat to the Constitution.” 

(He resigned and Esper took his place.)

 

*

“We did not swear it to an individual or a party.” 

Indeed, Esper and Mattis were not alone in their fears. On January 4, 2021, with talk of a military coup ramping up on the right, with President Trump refusing to concede defeat, the ten living former Secretaries of Defense issued the following warning. The bipartisan group wrote:

 

As former secretaries of defense, we hold a common view of the solemn obligations of the U.S. armed forces and the Defense Department. Each of us swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We did not swear it to an individual or a party.

 

American elections and the peaceful transfers of power that result are hallmarks of our democracy…This should be no exception.

 

Our elections have occurred. Recounts and audits have been conducted. Appropriate challenges have been addressed by the courts. Governors have certified the results. And the electoral college has voted. The time for questioning the results has passed; the time for the formal counting of the electoral college votes, as prescribed in the Constitution and statute, has arrived.

 

As senior Defense Department leaders have noted, “there’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election.” Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory…

 

Yet, several of President Trump’s most sycophantic advisors were whispering in his ear, telling him he could remain in office.

 

If only. If only he would call out the troops and march them into states which had voted for Biden and not him.

 

* 

We’ve often noticed that Trump tends to attract individuals with racist, misogynistic, and homophobic views. In June 2022, in a radio interview, Carl Paladino, who hoped to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives was asked how Republicans in New York State could stir up voter enthusiasm. 

We shall insert the word: STOP, every time Paladino should have had the sense to seal his lips. 

He replied: “I was thinking the other day about – somebody had mentioned on the radio Adolf Hitler and how he aroused the crowds [STOP],” Paladino responded, chuckling a little bit [STOP] as he said the Nazi dictator’s name. “And he would get up there screaming these epithets [STOP!!!] and these people were just – they were hypnotized by him [FOR GOD’S SAKE, STOP!]. That’s, I guess, I guess that’s the kind of leader we need today [NO, NO, NO. STOP IT, STOP!!]. We need somebody inspirational [HOLY SHIT, STOP, YOU DAMN FOOL!]”

 

To give you a sense of who Paladino is, and why this blogger might believe Trump and his crew should never be allowed to regain power, Paladino once said Michelle Obama should go back to Africa. There, he said, she should live in a cave, and mate with gorillas. He was a campaign manager for Trump at the time.

 

And, of course, when President Trump got mad at four Democratic women in Congress, all people of color, he said they should go back to the countries they came from – even though he stupidly failed to realize that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was from Puerto Rico, which is definitely part of this country, and that two of the other women were born in … um … the USA. Rep. Ayanna S. Pressley, who represented Massachusetts, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and her family arrived in America long before the first Trump ever set foot on American soil.

 

* 

“A risk to the nation.” 

Appearing on Fox News, Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas is asked about congressional hearings looking into the riot. He warns his entire party. “Republicans need to do a lot of soul-searching as to what is the right thing here and what is the right thing for our democracy in the future,” he explained, “and not simply adhere to the basic instincts of some of our base.” 

Trump, he continued, was “politically, morally” responsible for the attack on Capitol Hill on January 6. 

Later, he made it clear. As far as Mr. Trump, he said on CBS Mornings, “I will not be supporting him for 2024, he acted irresponsibly during that time, he was a risk to the nation, absolutely.”

 

* 

“A national shame.” 

Tired of the former president’s endless whining about a “stolen election,” the editors of The New York Post (owned by Rupert Murdoch), finally had all they could stand. They made it clear that they’d prefer to ditch the crazy guy they slobbered over for four years, and run someone else for president in 2024. 

It was time to move on from the 2020 election, they said. Only the former president couldn’t or wouldn’t. Probably both.

 

But rather than ignore it or look to the future, Donald Trump, the King Lear of Mar-a-Lago, decided to tweet – er, Truth – yet another statement confirming that he refuses to accept reality. “January 6th was not simply a protest,” he wrote, “it represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again.”

 

It wasn’t, of course. It was a national shame. One that neither Democrats nor Trump can stop obsessing over. It’s time for Republicans to move on.

 

…Trump has become a prisoner of his own ego. He can’t admit his tweeting and narcissism turned off millions. He won’t stop insisting that 2020 was “stolen” even though he’s offered no proof that it’s true.

 

* 

Rep. Dan Bacon of Nebraska tells Chuck Todd on ABC that he won’t be supporting Trump in 2024. He says voters liked Republican policies in 2020, which helped the party gain seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. But they were tired of Trump’s “name calling, the Twitter.” 

“We have to also learn the lesson, ‘Why did we lose [the presidency] in 2020?’ It was the comportment and the temperament, and yes, a democracy respects elections. And our president should have respected the conclusion,” Bacon said. 

As for Trump’s failure to act on January 6, to help quell the riot, Bacon admitted, “I think it was negligence. He should’ve done better.”

 

* 

Testifying before Congress, Judge J. Michael Luttig describes President Trump as a man willing to overturn or ignore, “fundamental truth,” “profound truth,” American “ground truth.”

 

* 

“Breathtaking and chilling.” 

The January 6 Committee hearings continue to paint a picture of Trump as an ill-informed, narcissistic, vengeful leader, willing to break the law.  Former Ohio Governor John Kasich, a Republican, tweets out this response:

 

Based on what we've seen in the #January6th Committee, it’s clear to me that as President, Donald Trump tried to overturn the election result. It is both breathtaking and chilling.

 

Never in my lifetime would I have imagined a President of the United States doing this.

 

I am happy to report that his tweet also piled up more than 60,000 “likes,” including my own.

 

* 

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, both of whom helped Rudy Giuliani “fight corruption” in Ukraine, while looking to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden in 2019, have now been sent to prison, for funneling foreign money into Republican campaigns. 

Worst corruption fighters ever! 

Meanwhile, Ex-President Blubber notes that “the greatest mayor in New York City history, Rudy Giuliani,” is in the hospital “with a big heart problem.” “Can you believe it, what they put Rudy through,” he complains, blaming Giuliani’s health problems on people on the Left, such as this blogger. 

Best wishes and speedy recovery, Mr. Mayor, and remember at least you have Obamacare coverage.

 

* 

Speaking of the ill-informed, former White House aide Peter Navarro appears on Newsmax to talk about the January 6 hearings, and his related legal problems. Navarro has been indicted for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. So you figure he’s more than a little miffed by what he’s been watching. 

This “miffery” causes Navarro to explode in a bizarre and potentially dangerous rant. He tells his host he believes Vice President Pence committed treason:

 

The reason why I think Pence is guilty of treason, to at least President Trump and perhaps to this country, is that he acted on the basis of a flawed legal opinion concocted by his own general counsel that he did not share with either the president or with the president’s White House legal counsel. Due process plus duty to the commander in chief required you to do that.

 

This idea – that you can commit treason to the president is stupid enough. It’s even stupider if you compare what Navarro says to what Trump’s former Chief White House Counsel Pat Cipollone testifies to in before the select committee. 

He tells lawmakers investigating the attack, that he agreed with Mr. Pence’s position. In fact, he believed Pence deserved a “Presidential Medal of Freedom” for taking a stand, although obviously not for Donald J. Trump.

 

* 

“An affront to this nation and its first principles.” 

On July 15, we learn that former White House lawyer Ty Cobb, who helped defend President Trump during the Russia investigation, has had his fill and more of Ex-President Blubber. 

In an interview on NBC, speaking of his old client, Cobb does not hold back.

 

He is a disaster for the Republican Party for which he prevented a Senate majority in 2020 and, as time will demonstrate, has already done the same for 2022 with his endorsements of unelectable candidates all based on their loyalty or his own driving desire for revenge. ... The Big Lie has been good only for Trump and has brought him millions in donations, which some evidence suggests may have been mishandled. The Big Lie, and the related violence, election interference and other perceived misconduct, was and is an affront to this nation and its first principles.

 

Trump, he continued, might be the Democrats best weapon in the coming midterm election:

 

One thing the Democrats know for certain is that Trump’s uncontrolled ego is his own worst enemy. They are praying they are able to goad him into an announcement for a 2024 presidential run. A 2024 declaration of his candidacy serves no interest but his self-defeating and overwhelming need for relevance, attention and money. Such an announcement also does not inoculate him from criminal investigation.

 

As for Trump’s Big Lie – that is, the last Big Lie of his presidency, the one he repeats endlessly to this day – that the election was stolen – and therefore his poor duped fans should keep denying Joe Biden is a legit president, Cobb was blunt.

 

It should be disqualifying for Trump and his political acolytes, and would have been at any other time in our history. To modify a well-known Seinfeld quote – SANITY NOW! The country needs desperately to move on with new and actual leadership from a younger generation.

 

* 

The people of Maryland wake up on July 22 to the fact that the Republican candidate for governor in the November election will be Dan Cox. Among his novel ideas, should he be elected, he thinks former Vice President Mike Pence should be tried for treason because he refused to help Donald J. Trump steal a second term as president. 

He also wants to audit the Maryland election results from 2020, even though Trump lost the state by 33 points. 

He spoke at a QAnon convention recently, which figures. 

Finally, he wants the Republican governor of the state, Larry Hogan, to be impeached because Hogan criticized Trump.

 

* 

A parade of witnesses appears before the January 6 Select Committee in Congress and testifies as to what they saw in the days and weeks following the November 2020 election. Almost without exception, they are Republicans, often White House aides, or members of the Trump administration or 2020 Trump campaign staff. Even people you might have expected to be loyal paint a damning portrait of Mr. Trump. 

Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon testifies. He had been assigned the task of reviewing claims of voter fraud during the election. He said he found nothing that would have altered the outcome – and said he relayed his findings to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

 

*

It would violate the oath, the basic principles of republican government, and the rule of law.” 

Arizona Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers says he voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. When pressured to hold a special legislative hearing, and help Team Trump overturn Arizona’s legitimate voting results, he refused. “It would violate the oath [to the U.S. Constitution], the basic principles of republican government, and the rule of law,” he told the January 6 Committee, “if we attempted to nullify the people’s vote based on unsupported theories of fraud.”

 

* 

Bjay Pak, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, and a Trump appointee, said his office looked into all allegations of voter fraud in that state. In particular, he mentioned the story of a magic “suitcase” filled with 18,000 bogus Biden votes – which Trump repeatedly claimed had been counted three times. Mr. Pak found it was an “official lock box.” “Nothing irregular” was found. 

The ballots were legit. 

And they were counted once. 

(Trump had Pak removed from office.)

 

* 

“There wasn’t evidence of eight.” 

Al Schmidt was the only Republican on the board that oversaw voting in Philadelphia, a city where Trump’s harebrained lawyers kept insisting there had been massive fraud. Rudy Giuliani was out there, claiming that 8,021 dead people had voted in Pennsylvania. Schmidt testified that “there wasn’t evidence of eight.” 

The president insisted that more people voted in the city than there were people living there. Schmidt said that was patently false. Bill Barr, before he resigned, called that particular claim “absolute rubbish.”

 

* 

Several members of the White House legal team testified, explaining how they confronted Dr. Eastman, concerning his plot to have Mike Pence overturn the electoral vote. Eric Herschmann was brutally frank. He told Dr. Eastman his plan “made no sense.” No way would the Founding Fathers ever have given a vice president power to change the outcome of an election by fiat.  

When Eastman insisted that they had, Herschmann replied, “Are you out of your f***ing mind?”

 

* 

“Just common sense.” 

Greg Jacob, legal counsel to Mr. Pence, agreed. Eastman’s plan, he explained, was a threat to democracy. “There was no way,” he told the January 6 Committee, that the Founding Fathers, who “abhorred concentrated power, who had broken away from the tyranny of George III, would ever have put one person, particularly not a person who had a direct interest in a role to have decisive impact on the outcome of the election.” That, he added, was “just common sense.”

 

* 

Pat Cipollone had balked at testifying, citing executive privilege. After Cassidy Hutchinson, a young female White House aide appeared and testified bravely, he relented. He could not say what he told the president. Nor could he relate what Trump told him. 

Executive privilege. Fair enough. 

He made his position and his sentiments clear in other ways. He was asked, for example, if he agreed with Barr’s assessment of the president’s claims (ongoing even now) of the election being stolen. Were such claims “bullshit?”  

“It is fair to say that I agreed with Attorney General Barr,” he replied. 

 

* 

“You’re challenging the Constitution.” 

Several top White House staffers were asked about the moment on Jan. 6, when Trump tweeted angrily, saying that Mike Pence lacked the “courage” to do what was right, and overturn the electoral vote. Sarah Matthews was frank in testimony, when asked about the tweet. “It was obvious,” she said, “it was him [Trump] giving people [the rioters] the green light.” She had attended many of the president’s rallies before. “I’ve seen the impact his words have on his supporters,” she continued. He wasn’t helping. He was stirring up the mob. 

Hutchinson expressing similar disgust. “We were watching the Capitol being defaced,” she said, “over a lie.”  

Matthews called January 6 “one of the darkest days in our nation’s history.” 

“What happened at the Capitol cannot be justified,” Cipollone agreed.

 

Matthew Pottinger, a former Marine, at the time of the riot Deputy National Security Advisor to President Trump, testified further that our enemies loved to watch the president deny his election defeat. It served their narrative – that U.S. democracy was a failure. On the morning of Jan. 7, testimony showed, White House advisors had already crafted a conciliatory speech for the president to deliver. The day passed. Trump balked. At that point, Pottinger explained, “You’re not just challenging the election, you’re challenging the Constitution.” 

He resigned in protest.

 

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was heard in recorded testimony. How would he describe Trump’s actions on January 6? “You’ve got an assault of the Capitol of the United States of America,” he said. “No call. Nothing. Zero.” 

Later, he told the reporter Bob Woodward he thought the president was a “traitor.”

 

Listening to the hearings, we learned that on Thursday, January 7, 2021, Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia sent the president a letter. He asked Trump to convene a full cabinet meeting – minus members who had resigned in protest. “I believe it is important to know that while President, you will no longer publicly question the election results – after Wednesday, no one can deny this is harmful.” 

 

* 

We didn’t know it at the time, but Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos admitted in June 2022, that in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot, she discussed with other cabinet members removal of Mr. Trump under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. “It wasn’t about the election results. It was about the values and image of the United States. It was about public service rising above self. The president had lost sight of that.” 

DeVos noted that in the last days of a doomed presidency, “more than a few people” inside the White House believed Trump should be removed from power. His failure to call off the attackers on that fateful day, the way he turned against Vice President Pence, she explained, “it was not defensible in any way.” 

She resigned only after it became clear that Pence, who would need to sign off on invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, was unwilling.

 

On January 7, 2021, Elaine Chao, Secretary of Transportation, resigned on similar grounds. These weren’t “Never Trumpers,” or “RINOs.” They were people who had worked with the president and found him wanting.

 

***

 

From this point forward, with minor exceptions for clarity, the voices of warning are listed chronologically.

 

These are almost exclusively Republican and conservative voices. They warned us, time and again, beware of Donald J. Trump.

2016 CAMPAIGN 

____________________ 

“A terrible human being.” 

Rep. Mick Mulvaney, describing Candidate Trump

____________________ 

 

“Donald, you know, is great at the one-liners. But he’s a chaos candidate. And he’d be a chaos president,” Governor Jeb Bush predicts. He also warns that his opponent is “unhinged.”

 

* 

Sen. Lindsey Graham describes Trump as, “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.”

 

* 

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry provides this assessment of Donald J. Trump: “He offers a barking carnival act that can be best described as Trumpism.” Perry describes it as “a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense” and “a cancer on conservatism.”

 

* 

Sen. Ted Cruz calls Trump “utterly amoral,” a “pathological liar,” a “serial philanderer” and a “narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen.” After Trump insults Cruz’s wife, Ted calls Donald “a sniveling coward.”

 

* 

The “party of Lincoln and Reagan and the presidency of the United States will never be held by a con artist,” Sen. Marco Rubio predicts. 

(Okay, bad prediction.)

 

* 

Gen. Colin Powell suggests that if Trump is elected, he will be a “national disgrace” and an “international pariah.” In a leaked email we learn Powell thought “the whole birther movement was racist.”

 

* 

“Unmoored in principle.” 

In a joint letter, former President George H.W. Bush and former President George W. Bush condemn Trump’s worldview. “His vision of American influence and power in the world is wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle.”

 

* 

David Johnson, who served first in the Iowa House of Representatives and later in the Iowa Senate, leaves the party, once Trump is the nominee. 

“I will not stand silent if the party of Lincoln and the end of slavery buckles under the racial bias of a bigot.” 

 

*

____________________ 

“There’s two people I think Putin pays. Rohrabacher and Trump.” 

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy

____________________ 

 

As you read (or skim, but hopefully you keep going), we should also remember a May 2017 report from the Washington Post. 

Not “Fake News,” as we are about to see: 

In a leaked recording of a meeting of top Republican lawmakers, from June 2016, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy can be heard joking, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: [Rep. Dana] Rohrabacher and Trump.” 

Eleven months later, when the story finally breaks, the Post explains:

 

Some of the lawmakers laughed at McCarthy’s comment. Then McCarthy quickly added: “Swear to God.”

 

“This is an off the record,” [Speaker Paul] Ryan said.

 

Some lawmakers laughed at that.

 

“No leaks, all right?” Ryan said, adding: “This is how we know we’re a real family here.”

 

“That’s how you know that we’re tight,” [Rep. Steve] Scalise said.

 

“What’s said in the family stays in the family,” Ryan added.

 

The remarks remained secret for nearly a year….

 

Evan McMullin [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted], who in his role as policy director to the House Republican Conference participated in the June 15 conversation, said: “It’s true that Majority Leader McCarthy said that he thought candidate Trump was on the Kremlin’s payroll. Speaker Ryan was concerned about that leaking.”

 

McMullin ran for president last year, as an independent and has been a vocal critic of Trump.

 

When initially asked to comment on the exchange, Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Ryan, said: “That never happened,” and Matt Sparks, a spokesman for McCarthy, said: “The idea that McCarthy would assert this is absurd and false.”

 

After being told that The Post would cite a recording of the exchange, Buck, speaking for the GOP House leadership, said: “This entire year-old exchange was clearly an attempt at humor. No one believed the majority leader was seriously asserting that Donald Trump or any of our members were being paid by the Russians. What’s more, the speaker and leadership team have repeatedly spoken out against Russia’s interference in our election, and the House continues to investigate that activity.”

 

“This was a failed attempt at humor,” Sparks said.

Two people Putin paid.

 

*

 

Finally, let us revel in the moment Rep. Mick Mulvaney referred to Mr. Trump as “a terrible human being.”

 

 

PREAMBLE TO DISASTER 

On November 10, 2016, just two days after Trump’s surprise win over Hillary Clinton, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks tells reporters, “There was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign.” 

The short list of those who knew at that instant that this was a lie would include, but not be limited to: 

Michael Caputo

Michael Cohen

General Michael T. Flynn

Rick Gates

Jared Kushner

Paul Manafort

George Nader

Carter Page

George Papadopoulos

Felix Sater

Roger Stone

Donald Trump Jr. 

All twelve of these men will eventually admit having met with Russians or having helped set up meetings with Russians during the campaign. 

Six (names italicized) will be indicted for lying about those very contacts and convicted. Paul Manafort, alone, will rack up an impressive ten felonies. Sater (also underlined) was already a felon when he went to work for Trump. All twelve will be caught in lies of greater or lesser magnitude. 

Hope Hicks’ statement is the Ur-lie of the Trump administration, the founding lie on which so much will be built.

Hope Hicks may not have know what she said was a lie. Others did.

 

 

TRUMP TAKES OFFICE 

These top officials at the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice, and unnamed FISA judges all come under attack by the president, as the Russia investigation expands. All of the following are Republicans: 

All four FISA judges who grant permission for surveillance of members of the Trump 2016 campaign. 

F.B.I. Director James Comey. 

F.B.I. Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. 

Deputy Assistant Attorney General Rob Rosenstein. 

Former F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller, soon to be Special Counsel in the Russia investigation. 

 

JULY 2017 

“Weak and sniveling.” 

Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter, blasts Trump. His “primary problem as a leader is not that he is impetuous, brash or naive. It’s not that he is inexperienced, crude, an outsider,” she says. “It’s that he is weak and sniveling.” 

That makes two votes for “sniveling.”

 

 

AUGUST 2017 

Conservative writer Max Boot sums up Trump’s performance in office to that point: “He seems as clueless today as he was on January 20.” 

 

* 

Geoffrey Kemp, who worked in the Ford and Reagan administrations, makes clear he does not believe the president is suited for office. “Trump has an appalling ignorance of the current world, of history, of previous American engagement, of what former presidents thought and did.”

 

*

_____________________  

“It’s like Trump is captain of the Titanic, but he’s actually aiming for the iceberg—and we’re all in danger of going down when the vessel hits.” 

Former C.I.A. Director and four-star Air Force General Michael Hayden

_____________________

 

 

Former C.I.A. Director and four-star Air Force General Michael Hayden offers this assessment of the president’s leadership after his first seven months in office. “It’s like Trump is captain of the Titanic, but he’s actually aiming for the iceberg – and we’re all in danger of going down when the vessel hits.”

 

* 

Eliot A. Cohen, who worked for Bush 43: “Trump is completely irredeemable. He has a feral instinct for self-survival, but he’s unteachable….This is a man who is idiotic and bigoted and ignorant of the law. 

 

* 

Julius Krein supported Candidate Trump in dozens of articles and TV appearances during his run for office. In the wake of the “Unite the Right” debacle at Charlottesville, where white supremacists erupt, he recants:

 

I can’t stand by this disgraceful administration any longer, and I would urge anyone who once supported him as I did to stop defending the forty-fifth president. Far from making America great again, Mr. Trump has betrayed the foundations of our common citizenship. For months, despite increasing chaos and incoherence pouring out of this White House, I have given Mr. Trump the benefit of the doubt.

 

Krein tried to convince himself that Trump wasn’t a racist and wasn’t catering to racists. “It is now clear that we were deluding ourselves,” he says. “Either Mr. Trump is genuinely sympathetic to the David Duke types, or he is so obtuse as to be utterly incapable of learning from his worst mistakes.”

 

SEPTEMBER 2017 

Rep. Mark Sanford says the president doesn’t care about party or principle. “He’s fundamentally, at the core, about Donald Trump.” 

 

OCTOBER 2017 

“An adult day care center.” 

“I think Sec. Tillerson, Sec. Mattis and Chief of Staff Kelly are those people that help separate our country from chaos,” says Sen. Bob Corker. “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center.”

 

* 

“We must never regard as ‘normal’ the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals,” Sen. Jeff Flake cautions.

 

* 

“We have a leader who has a personality disorder,” former Sen. Tom Coburn tells The New York Times.

 

*

 

At one point, Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State, famously referred to his boss as a “fucking moron.”

 

Later, he offered this assessment. Trump was, “A man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather just kind of says, ‘This is what I believe.’”

 

NOVEMBER 2017 

Former President George H. W. Bush says of Trump: “I don’t like him. I don’t know much about him, but I know he’s a blowhard.”

 

(Bush 41 admits he voted for Hillary Clinton.)

 

*

Former President George W. Bush says he’s worried he could be “the last Republican president.” “This guy doesn’t know what it means to be president,” Bush 43 says of Trump. You “can either exploit the anger, incite it, or you can come up with ideas to deal with it.”

 

He says he voted the straight Republican ticket in 2016 but left the choice for “president” blank.

 

*

 

“Legitimizing religious bigotry.” 

Sen. Lindsey Graham admonishes Trump after he retweets anti-Muslim videos from a group called Britain First. The president, he says is “legitimizing religious bigotry.”

 

* 

A spokesperson for Prime Minister Teresa May responds to President Trump’s choice for viewing:

 

Britain First seeks to divide communities in their use of hateful narratives which pedal lies and stoke tensions….[the] British people overwhelming reject the prejudice[d] rhetoric of the far-right, which is the antithesis of the values that this country represents; decency, tolerance and respect. It is wrong for the president to have done this.

 

*

 

Brendan Cox, whose wife Jo Cox, a British lawmaker, was gunned down by a man shouting, “Britain first!” has this to say. “Trump has legitimised the far right in his own country, now he’s trying to do it in ours. Spreading hatred has consequences & the President should be ashamed of himself.”

 

 

DECEMBER 2017 

Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee, reaches a breaking point. After the president endorses Judge Roy Moore in a special election for a seat in the U.S. Senate, Steele tweets, “Your refusal to acknowledge you’ve just endorsed a pedophile for the sake of a ‘vote’ tells me Roy Moore will be a Trump puppet and America no longer has a moral compass under your ‘leadership.’”

 

 

JANUARY 2018 

The president tells Kim Jong-un, via a tweet, that his nuclear button is bigger than his, and “my Button works!” Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center during the Bush 43 administration, labels the tweet “infantile.” Trump’s national security team is working to “control the drunk,” he warns, and keep him from ramming the car “into a wall.”

 

* 

David Frum, a conservative writer, warns that the Trump administration has “imported the spirit of thuggery, crookedness and dictatorship into the very core of the American state.”

 

* 

When President Trump calls the press “the enemy of the people” for the first time, Sen. Flake warns, “Our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies.”

 

* 

“One of the key pillars of democracy.” 

Sen. John McCain is next in line to condemn Trump’s attacks on the free press:

 

[The president] has threatened to continue his attempt to discredit the free press by bestowing “fake news awards” upon reporters and news outlets whose coverage he disagrees with. Whether Trump knows it or not, these efforts are being closely watched by foreign leaders who are already using his words as cover as they silence and shutter one of the key pillars of democracy.

 

* 

Former top White House aide Steve Bannon is quoted in Fire and Fury, Bob Woodward’s book, saying of the secret meeting in 2016, between top Trump campaign officials and Russians bearing dirt on Hillary Clinton:

 

The three senior guys in the campaign [Don Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort] thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers.

 

Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately. 

(See: Hope Hicks claim, November 10, 2016, above.)

 

* 

During a meeting with senators from both parties, to discuss immigration, the president refers to “shithole” countries like Haiti and Nigeria, with their dark-skinned populations. When the news breaks, Trump denies calling any countries “shitholes.” Republicans who attend the meeting issue non-denial denials, save for Sen. Lindsey Graham. 

He tells reporters,

 

Following comments by the President, I said my piece directly to him yesterday. The President and all those attending the meeting know what I said and how I feel. I’ve always believed that America is an idea, not defined by its people but by its ideals…Diversity has always been our strength, not our weakness. In reforming immigration we cannot lose these American Ideals.

 

* 

Tim Scott, South Carolina’s other Republican senator, and an African American, tells reporters that Graham confirmed the shithole comment. Scott calls the president’s response “incredibly disappointing.” 

(Shades of “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman.)

 

* 

Rep. Mia Love, herself of Haitian American descent, says Trump’s remarks “fly in the face of our nation’s values.” She adds, “This behavior is unacceptable from the leader of our nation.” 

 

FEBRUARY 2018 

Brandon DeFrain, the former chairman of the Bay County, Michigan GOP, explains his decision to resign:

 

I can no longer remain silent about our president. I have not seen a leader, I’ve only seen more of the same. More racism in our streets, on social media and schools; more hatred between family members; more people feeling as if their human and civil rights are being violated; more drug overdoses; and more people feeling tormented and discriminated against because of who they worship and who they love. I’m tired of attempting to defend a machine that does not defend the people I love.

 

* 

According to 170 historians, Trump does not rate as one of our greatest presidents, no matter how many times he says he gets an A+ for the work he’s done. In a poll conducted for Presidents’ Day, Donald J. displaced James Buchanan on the list, moving him up a notch. That means Trump now nails down last place. There’s nowhere to go but up for the man they label the “most polarizing” chief executive ever. 

Every subgroup in the survey, including self-identified conservative and Republican historians, had Trump in the bottom five.

 

 

MARCH 2018 

Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey tweets, “Reluctantly, I have concluded that President Trump is a serious threat to US national security. He is refusing to protect vital US interests from active Russian attacks. It is apparent that he is for some unknown reason under the sway of Mr Putin.”

 

* 

Former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and retired Admiral James Stavridis bemoans the departure of H. R. McMaster, who steps down as Trump’s second National Security Adviser. Like a good soldier Stavridis says, McMaster “shouldered the pack and stepped into the White House to do what he could to create at least part of a guardrail system around this mercurial and unstable President.”

 

 

APRIL 2018 

Right-wing banshee Ann Coulter gets mad and asks, “Did you know Trump is a shallow, lazy ignoramus?”

 

* 

“Mere propaganda machine.” 

Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, former military analyst for Fox News, explains why he quit the network: “Today, I feel that Fox News is assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers. Over my decade with Fox, I long was proud of the association. Now I am ashamed.” 

He warns that the network has morphed into a “mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration.”

 

 

MAY 2018 

At a graduation ceremony at VMI, former Secretary of State Tillerson has this to say, in reference to his old boss:

 

If our leaders seek to conceal the truth or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom….When we as people, a free people, go wobbly on the truth, even on what may see the most trivial of matters, we go wobbly on America.

 

 JUNE 2018 

Former Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner accuses many in his party of abandoning their principles to get along with the president. 

“There is no Republican Party,” he says. “There’s a Trump party. The Republican Party is kinda taking a nap somewhere.”

 

*

____________________ 

“The president’s poodles.” 

George F. Will

____________________

  

The Trump administration is busy locking up young children in cages and blaming the mess on President Obama. President Trump says there’s nothing he can do except follow the law. 

Obama did it! 

Sen. Susan Collins: “The fact is the administration has the authority to fix this immediately without legislation.”

 

* 

Sen. Graham doesn’t mince words. “President Trump could stop this policy with a phone call. I’ll go tell him: If you don’t like families being separated, you can tell DHS, ‘Stop doing it.’”

 

* 

Former First Lady Barbara Bush: “I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart.”

 

* 

“The way it’s being handled right now isn’t acceptable,” says Sen. Orrin Hatch. “It’s not American.”

 

* 

“I firmly detest the heartless and inhumane practice of separating children from their parents at the border,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick says in a statement. 

(I haven’t quoted a single Democrat, so far.)

 

* 

Sen. Ben Sasse: “This is wrong. Americans do not take children hostage, period.”

 

* 

George F. Will, lifelong Republican and conservative writer, warns in an editorial:

 

I believe that what this president has done to our culture, to our civic discourse ... you cannot unring these bells and you cannot unsay what he has said, and you cannot change that he has now in a very short time made it seem normal for schoolboy taunts and obvious lies to be spun out in a constant stream. I think this will do more lasting damage than Richard Nixon’s surreptitious burglaries did.

 

He later adds that GOP lawmakers have acted like the “president’s poodles.”

 

* 

In a tweet, Republican strategist Steve Schmidt announces he is reluctantly leaving the GOP: “29 years and nine months ago I registered to vote and became a member of The Republican Party which was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and stand for the dignity of human life. Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump.” 

“The first step to a season of renewal in our land is the absolute and utter repudiation of Trump and his vile enablers in the 2018 election by electing Democratic majorities,” he adds later.

 

* 

Pastor Danny Stockstill, a Republican candidate for Congress in Oklahoma’s First District, makes headlines when he offers up a truthful assessment of the president. Speaking before a forum of potential voters, he is asked if he considers the president a good role model for children. 

“We like President Trump because he says what he says and he means what he says,” Stockstill replies. “So why are we so afraid to say, ‘There’s no way I want my son to act like [Trump]?’”

 

If my daughter ever dates a man who treated her like he treats women, I’m going to use my Second Amendment. If I ever find out my son has treated women the way he has, I don’t care how old [my son] is, I’m going to come down on him. 

 

If we can’t stand up and say out loud, “I disagree with President Trump in the way he treats people,” shame on us.  

 

JULY 2018 

____________________ 

“One of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” 

Sen. John McCain

____________________

  

Bill Frist, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, warns, “Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is under assault, and that is wrong. No matter who is in the White House, we Republicans must stand up for the sanctity of our democracy and the rule of law.”

 

* 

President Trump stands beside Vladimir Putin at a conference in Helsinki and says the Russian leader has assured him that the Russians did not interfere in the 2016 election. Trump says he believes him!

 

____________________ 

“Over the course of my career…I saw Russian intelligence manipulate many people. I never thought I would see the day when an American president would be one of them. 

Rep. Will Hurd

____________________ 

 

* 

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a former officer in the U.S. Air Force, tweets: “The American people deserve the truth, & to disregard the legitimacy of our intelligence officials is a disservice to the men & women who serve this country. It’s time to wake up & face reality. #Putin is not our friend; he’s an enemy to our freedom.”

 

* 

Rep. Liz Cheney:

 

As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, I am deeply troubled by President Trump’s defense of Putin against the intelligence agencies of the U.S. & his suggestion of moral equivalence between the U.S. and Russia. Russia poses a grave threat to our national security.

 

* 

“This was not a golf outing.” 

Chuck Hagel is stunned. “This was not a golf outing,” he says of Trump’s performance on a world stage. “This was not a real estate transactional kind of arrangement. … Engagement must be connected to a strategic interest, a strategic purpose. I don’t know what that strategic purpose was. I am now convinced we didn’t have one.”

 

* 

 “The president,” says Sen. Rob Portman, “failed to stand up to Vladimir Putin on some of the most critical security issues facing our country and our allies.”

 

* 

Sen. McCain lambasts Trump:

 

Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake.

 

* 

Mark Lowenthal, former assistant director at the C.I.A, says of Trump, “He’s the best president that Russia’s ever had.” 

 

(Lowenthal may be a Democrat; I couldn’t find it out.)

 

* 

_____________________  

“Trump himself has shunned traditional norms…and his rhetoric seeks to chill freedom of the press and undermine the nation’s institutions of democracy.”  

Ret. Admiral James Stavridis

_____________________ 

 

“Trump himself has shunned traditional norms…and his rhetoric seeks to chill freedom of the press and undermine the nation’s institutions of democracy,” Admiral Stavridis warns.

 

 

* 

Dr. Fiona Hill, a key member of the National Security Council, was watching Trump’s performance. 

When Trump told amazed onlookers, and a worldwide audience, that he took Putin’s word over U.S. intelligence, and said he didn’t see why the Russians would have interfered in the 2016 election, Hill was stunned almost into inaction. “I couldn’t come up with anything that just wouldn’t add to the terrible spectacle,” she later admitted. 

“It was one of those moments where it was mortifying, frankly, and humiliating for the country.” 

It was so bad, she said, she considered faking a health emergency or pulling the fire alarm, if it would just shut Trump up.

 

 

AUGUST 2018 

Angered by the criticisms of former C.I.A head John Brennan and other former top intelligence officials, regarding links between his campaign and Russians, Trump revokes Brennan’s security clearance. This prompts a bipartisan group of more than 200 former intelligence experts to write a letter of protest. 

Signers include three former, Republican C.I.A. directors: Robert M. Gates, Porter Goss, and William H. Webster.

 

* 

“Enemies of the People.” 

Trump’s sustained attacks on the free press, calling critics “Enemies of the People,” prompt editors at 350 U.S. newspapers to respond. 

A quick sampling of responses should make the danger clear. The Des Moines Register explains: “The true enemies of the people – and democracy – are those who try to suffocate truth by vilifying and demonizing the messenger.” 

 

* 

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch warns: “Trump is inflicting massive, and perhaps irreparable, damage to democracy with these attacks.”

 

* 

The Swift County Monitor News (Minnesota) insists that Trump’s words will lead to attacks on journalists – what you might see in Russia, Myanmar or Venezuela, where the free press is “only a dream.”

 

* 

The Forward, a preeminent Jewish paper, writes:

 

More than 300 news organizations around the country, large and small and in-between, are publishing simultaneous editorials in support of a free press – a pillar of our Constitution enshrined in its very First Amendment, persistently under attack by the most potent symbol of our democracy, the president of the United States.

 

…We are not here only to say nice things about this or any other president. We are here to report the truth as best we can, so that an informed public can make its wisest decisions.

 

*

 

Michael London, a former member of the Trumbull, Connecticut Town Council announces he is quitting the Republican party. 

In an op-ed published by the Hartford Courant, London says his decision to register as an unaffiliated voter was “something that I never thought I would do.” 

 

I blame President Trump for turning the Grand Old Party into a lame, extreme right-wing group of people unwilling or unable to see the truth. But Trump is not alone in causing my disillusionment.

 

I have had it with the state and federal branches of the Republican Party that tolerated the president’s behavior. None of our GOP candidates for governor denounced Trump. None of the leaders of Connecticut’s GOP will speak out.

 

Trump, he added, with complete disgust, is “the worst president our country has had — ever.”

 

 

SEPTEMBER 2018 

An anonymous editorial appears in The New York Times. The title is: “I Am Part of the Resistance inside the Trump Administration.” 

Key passages include:

 

President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.

 

…The dilemma—which he does not fully grasp—is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

 

[We] believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.

 

That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.

 

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

 

It may be cold comfort…but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.

 

* 

“Spineless.” 

Billionaire Seth Klarman, normally a deep-pocket GOP donor, says Republicans in Congress have been “spineless” in the face of the president. “We need to turn the House and Senate as a check on Donald Trump and his runaway presidency,” Klarman says. “I think democracy is at stake.” 

He promises to donate $10 million to the Democratic Party, in hopes they can take back one or both houses of Congress in the midterms, and act as a critical “check and balance” on a president with dangerous instincts.

 

* 

Even after Sen. McCain dies, Trump continues to trash his memory. Nicole Wallace, host of an afternoon show on MSNBC, but a Republican, expresses her horror. “This is about the depravity of the United States President.”

 

* 

“No amount of Fred Trump’s money can buy for this man-child of a president the honor and the integrity of John McCain. So he acts out,” agrees former Rep. David Jolly, a guest on her show.

 

 

OCTOBER 2018 

Rep. Jolly announces he is leaving the Republican party. His decision is sparked by the knowledge that he and his wife are expecting their first child, a girl. He says he cannot look his daughter in the face someday and say he supported Trump.

 

* 

Three Kansas men are convicted in a plot to blow up mosques and the homes of Somali immigrants who work at meat packing plants in the state. Their lawyers beg for leniency, basically arguing that Trump made their clients do it. 

“The court cannot ignore the circumstances of one of the most rhetorically mold-breaking, violent, awful, hateful and contentious presidential elections in modern history, driven in large measure by the rhetorical China shop bull who is now our president,” the lawyers for one defendant write in their sentencing memorandum. 

Attorneys for a second man offer similar defense:

 

As long as the Executive Branch condemns Islam and commends and encourages violence against would-be enemies, then a sentence imposed by the Judicial Branch does little to deter people generally from engaging in such conduct if they believe they are protecting their countries from enemies identified by their own Commander-in-Chief.”

 

* 

Gen. Colin Powell warns: “We have come to live in a society based on insults, on lies and on things that just aren’t true. It creates an environment where deranged people feel empowered.”

 

 

NOVEMBER 2018 

During the Massachusetts gubernatorial debate, incumbent Charlie Baker is asked to describe President Trump in three words. 

“Only three?” he laughs. 

He makes his choices: “outrageous,” “disgraceful” and “divider.”

 

* 

Al Cardenas, former chair of the Florida Republican Party, responds to a hateful campaign ad from the president. “You are a despicable divider; the worse [sic] social poison to afflict our country in decades. This ad, and your full approval of it, will condemn you and your bigoted legacy forever in the annals of America’s history books.”

 

*                                                  

Longtime Hamilton County, Ohio official Phil Heimlich comes out against reelection of Rep. Steve Chabot. Heimlich endorses the Democrat. Heimlich is worried about the future of our nation. “As a former prosecutor, this makes me sick,” Heimlich says, referring to Chabot’s criticism of special counsel Robert Mueller. 

“I want to be on the right side of history. We are living under the most dishonest president in history.”

 

* 

Former White House aide Chris Sims decides to dish on the President of the United States, the man who picked him for his job, in a new book, Team of Vipers. You can tell by the title that Trump won’t like it – and, true to form, the White House announces it will try to block publication. 

Sims writes in part,

 

I suspect that posterity will look back on this bizarre time in history like we were living on the pages of a Dickens novel. Lincoln famously had his Team of Rivals. Trump had his Team of Vipers. We served. We fought. We brought our egos. We brought our personal agendas and vendettas. We were ruthless. And some of us, I assume, were good people.

 

I was there. This is what I saw. And, unlike the many leakers in the White House, I have put my name on it.

 

* 

As the Mueller investigation heats up, John B. Bellinger III, former White House lawyer under George W. Bush, and a group of like-minded Republicans warn: “Conservative lawyers are not doing enough to protect constitutional principles that are being undermined by the statements and actions of this president.” 

“We believe in the rule of law, the power of truth, the independence of the criminal justice system, the imperative of individual rights and the necessity of civil discourse,” the group says in a statement. “We believe these principles apply regardless of the party or persons in power.”

 

* 

Peter D. Keisler, former Acting Attorney General, and a member of the Bellinger group, offers this caution:

 

It’s important that people from across the political spectrum speak out about the country’s commitment to the rule of law and the core values underlying it –that the criminal justice system should be nonpartisan and independent, that a free press and public criticism should be encouraged and not attacked. These are values that might once have been thought so basic and universally accepted that they didn’t need defending, but that’s no longer clearly the case.

 

                                            

* 

Marisa Maleck adds her warning. Trump, she says, is trying gather the power of all three branches of government in his own hands. “The worst part about it is that he normalizes it. Most people don’t realize what he’s doing poses a threat to a constitutional democracy,” she adds.

 

* 

____________________ 

“The greatest threat to democracy” in my lifetime. 

Adm. William McRaven, warning against Trump’s repeated attacks on a free press

____________________

 

* 

When President Trump slams McRaven (for comments like the above), retired Major General Mark Hertling responds:

 

We can never become immune to this kind of narrative, to this kind of ‘jackassery,’

 

We serve in the military the Constitution of the United States. We don’t serve an individual, that’s what makes our military different from all the other militaries in the world. 

 

* 

After the president slams “Obama judges” who have thwarted his wishes, Chief Justice John Roberts releases this statement: 

 

We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.

 

Trump is not thankful. He believes he should get his way every time he goes to court. “Sorry,” he tweets, “Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges.’” 

“We need protection and security,” he adds, and “these rulings are making our country unsafe! Very dangerous and unwise!”

 

* 

Robert Carlson, president of the American Bar Association, releases a statement condemning Trump:

 

The American Bar Association is committed to an independent, impartial judiciary that is free from political influence. An independent, impartial judiciary is critical to upholding our democracy and our system of government.

We agree with Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’s observation that we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges, and that an independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.

 

“As we celebrate this Thanksgiving holiday,” Carlson concludes, “let us all count our blessings as Americans – free speech; free press; an independent, impartial judiciary; and the ability of every person in our country to stand up and speak out in favor of the rule of law.”

 

* 

After Trump suggests he may order U.S. troops guarding the border to fire on protesters who throw stones, Chuck Hagel has had his fill. “My reaction...is one of disgust. That is a wanton incitement of unnecessary violence. It is a distraction, it is a distortion, it is a rank political purpose to use our military like this.”

 

* 

“There was the belief that over time, he would better understand, but I don’t know that that’s the case,” says Col. David Lapan. The retired Marine served in the Trump administration in 2017, as a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. 

“I don’t think that he understands the proper use and role of the military and what we can, and can’t, do.”

 

* 

“If a president routinely and cynically leverages our nation’s armed forces for short-term political advantage, the professional ethos” of the officers’ corps will be degraded, retired Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, former commander of American forces in Afghanistan warns. “This, in turn, would threaten one of the foundational principles of our republic – that our military must remain outside of politics.”

 

* 

Grant Woods, formerly Arizona attorney general, changes his voter registration to “Democrat.” “The extremism of the current Republican Party is a losing strategy for the future,” he says. “In the Southwest in particular, where we’re talking about a diverse population and, increasingly, a younger population, people just aren’t going to put up with it.”

 

 

DECEMBER 2018 

Gen. Stanley McChrystal tells a reporter he would not work for Trump if asked. “No,” he replies. “It’s important for me to work for people I think are basically honest, who tell the truth as best they know it.”

 

* 

Kansas Sen. Barbara Bollier quits the Republican Party. “I cannot be complicit in supporting that,” she says, referring to Trump. “I can’t call it leadership. I don’t even know what to call him. He is our president, but he is not representing my value system remotely.”

 

 

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019 

(Nothing to report!)

 

 

MARCH 2019 

Gen. John Kelly, by then former White House Chief of Staff, speaks to an audience at Duke University:

 

We [in the military] have a long, long tradition of fighting the away game and have real sense that except for natural disasters, to interact domestically is something that most – I would say all – military people prefer not to do….I would look for another way to do it rather than deploy federal troops on the border.

 

As for working with Mr. Trump, let’s just say he’s sparing in praise. He tells the audience that working in the White House was “the least enjoyable job I’ve ever had.” He adds, with a bit of hope, that for eighteen months he “helped the administration, the president of the United States make the very best decisions that he could based on the information that we could provide him.” 

He doesn’t say Trump listened to anything he heard.

Kelly was a combat veteran before he took the White  House post.

 

 

APRIL 2019 

Rep. Andy McKean, the longest-serving Republican in the Iowa Legislature (41 years), jumps the GOP ship. He makes it clear his main problem is the President of the United States. “It is just a matter of time before our country pays a heavy price for President Trump’s reckless spending and shortsighted financial policies, his erratic, destabilizing foreign policy, and his disregard for environmental concerns.” 

The president’s “crude and juvenile” insults and bullying set a bad example for children, McKean adds. “If this is the new normal, I want no part of it.”

 

* 

Gov. Larry Hogan tells reporters what he thinks of the Mueller Report:

 

...Maybe there was not collusion with the Russians, which, there was a lot of hype about that from the Democrats for a long time and so now [Trump] gets to say that didn’t happen. But there was some really unsavory stuff in the report that did not make me proud of the president, and there’s certainly nothing to crow about and nothing to celebrate in that at all.

 

 

MAY 2019 

“Fearful of the future direction of the nation.” 

Retired Adm. McRaven expresses his deep concern, regarding the behavior of the 45^th president:

 

An attack on the press or an attack on the Department of Justice, or to imply that there are dirty cops at the F.B.I. or to ignore the intelligence community, I think, really undermines our institutions. And that makes me fearful of the future direction of the nation.

 

* 

Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (appointed by President Gerald Ford to his seat in 1975) already knows who he’s not voting for in 2020. 

During an interview with CNN, he’s asked if Trump understands the role of the judiciary in the U.S. government. 

His full answer: “No.” 

He adds later that he hopes this president won’t do “too much damage” to the federal courts.

 

* 

Larry Lindsey, a former economic adviser to President George W. Bush, was invited by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to speak to GOP lawmakers about the U.S.-China trade war. 

Although he agreed with President Trump on the need to be tough on China, he could not resist adding that he had asked two psychologists he knew to evaluate the president, as best they could. 

The professionals found Trump to be a “10 out of 10 narcissist,” he explained. “That’s what he scored.”

 

 

JUNE 2019 

In an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, President Trump admits that in 2020, he’d take the kind of help from foreign governments he denies taking in 2016. He doesn’t see any problem if he does. Stephanopoulos suggests that any candidate offered help by a foreign country should report such contact directly to the F.B.I. Trump says he wouldn’t. 

That’s not how the world works.

 

____________________ 

“When foreign governments seek to influence American politics, it is always to advance their own interests, not America’s.” 

Ellen Weintraub, chair of the F.E.C.

____________________ 

 

Ellen Weintraub, chair of the Federal Elections Commission is clear in response, issuing the following statement. First, she notes, “I would not have thought that I needed to say this.”

 

Let me make something 100 percent clear to the American public and anyone running for public office: It is illegal for any person to solicit, accept, or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election. This is not a novel concept. Electoral intervention from foreign governments has been considered unacceptable since the beginnings of our nation. Our Founding Fathers sounded the alarm about “foreign Interference, Intrigue, and Influence.” They knew that when foreign governments seek to influence American politics, it is always to advance their own interests, not America’s. Anyone who solicits or accepts foreign assistance risks being on the wrong end of a federal investigation. Any political campaign that receives an offer of a prohibited donations [sic] from a foreign source should report that offer to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

 

* 

Sen. Mitt Romney agrees. Accepting help from a foreign country, “would be totally inappropriate and it would strike at the heart of our democracy. I’ve run for Senate twice. I’ve run for governor once, I’ve run for president twice, so far as I know we never received any information from any foreign government …We would have immediately informed the F.B.I.”

 

* 

“Generally speaking, it’s a part of, in the case of like Russia, it’s an effort to disrupt our elections,” says Sen. Thom Tillis. “My first call would be to the F.B.I., my second call would be somebody to corroborate the information.”

 

* 

“I was just surprised he wouldn’t say he would immediately turn it over to F.B.I. or DOJ,” Sen. James Lankford admits.

 

* 

Sen. Cory Gardner is clear. Foreign offers of help “should be turned over to the FBI, plain and simple.”

 

* 

“You don’t ever want to take foreign money, that’s illegal. And the next route to money is information,” says Sen. Johnny Isakson. “So if you take information from somebody that’s foreign and it’s involved in your campaign, you’re inviting the risk of inviting foreign money into your campaign.”

 

* 

The Dali Lama sums up his opinion of Mr. Trump, telling BBC News, he thinks the man lacks a “moral compass.”

The Dali Lama nails it.

 

 

JULY 2019 

Rep. Justin Amash joins Democrats in a call for an impeachment inquiry. “Today, I am declaring my independence and leaving the Republican Party. No matter your circumstance, I’m asking you to join me in rejecting the partisan loyalties and rhetoric that divide and dehumanize us.”

 

* 

“I think it’s absolutely obscene.” 

Several retired generals are unimpressed with Trump’s decision to hold a military parade in Washington D.C. The main speaker for the day will be…Donald J. Trump. Front row seats will be reserved for GOP political figures and big GOP donors. 

“The president is using the armed forces in a political ploy for his reelection campaign and I think it’s absolutely obscene,” says Gen. William Nash, a veteran of Vietnam, the Gulf War, and peacekeeping operations in the Balkans.

 

* 

“This looks like it’s becoming much more of a Republican Party event – a political event about the president – than a national celebration of the Fourth of July, and it’s unfortunate to have the military smack dab in the middle of that,” said retired Army Lt. Gen. David Barno, who commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan under President George W. Bush.

 

* 

Former Republican senator and Secretary of Defense William Cohen also rains on Trump’s parade.

 

I think what the president has done in trying to promote this as a spectacular event, he’s sort of the ringmaster of the Greatest Show on Earth. And I think it comes at a time when he’s attempting to politicize the institutions in this country, which we like to think are being completely independent. He has referred to the military and to the generals as “my generals.”

 

It’s not his military. These are not his generals.

 

* 

Sir Kim Darroch, British ambassador ends up in hot water after disparaging cables he wrote about President Trump and his administration leak out. At one point he warned the home government, “I don’t think this administration will ever look competent.” 

Trump, he told superiors, fills his speeches with “false claims and invented statistics.” If you wished to talk to him, you have to pretend you’re talking to a seven-year-old. “You need to start praising him for something that he’s done recently,” the Ambassador advised. In talking to Trump, it was important to keep points “simple” and avoid stirring him up. “For a man who has risen to the highest office on the planet,” Darroch explained, “President Trump radiates insecurity.” 

Later, he describes Trump’s decision to abandon the Iran deal, to spite his predecessor, Barack Obama, as “diplomatic vandalism.”

 

* 

“I would say, generally.” 

On July 24, Special Counsel Robert Mueller testifies before Congress. Val Demings, a Florida Democrat, and former police chief of Orlando, asks Mueller why his team never asked Trump to sit down, face to face, and testify under oath. 

Mueller explains that the president and his lawyers stalled the investigation for a year, and it was important to turn the report over to Attorney General William Barr, so he might decide what would come next. 

Mueller tells her that Trump left several questions, submitted in writing by investigators, blank. 

“Did he plead the Fifth?” Demings wanted to know. 

Reticent by nature, and careful not to overstate a case, Mueller refuses to answer. “I’m not going to get into that,” he replies. He sticks to what is in the report.

 

The rest of her questioning goes like this.

 

“Trump did not answer follow up questions?” Demings asks, trying a different tack.

 

“No.”

 

“Many questions he didn’t answer at all?”

 

“True.”

 

“His answers were often contradictory and incomplete?”

 

“True.”

 

Did he give answers that “contradicted other evidence?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Could the Special Counsel say that “the President was credible?”

 

Mueller: “I can’t answer that question.”

 

Is it fair to say, she asked, that Trump’s answers “showed that he wasn’t always being truthful?”

 

“I would say, generally.”

 

Mueller was decorated for valor in Vietnam. Trump had bone spurs.

* 

“And a crime.” 

The best exchange of the day may have come when, during afternoon hearings, Adam Schiff, the Democratic chair of the House Intelligence Committee, asked Mueller a series of simple questions.

 

“I gather you think knowingly accepting foreign help in an election is an unethical thing to do?”

 

“And a crime,” Mueller interjected, his stoic manner suddenly animated.

 

“And unpatriotic?” Schiff added.

 

Mueller: “True.”

 

“And wrong?”

 

“True,” Mueller said again, betraying his true disgust with the current occupant of the Oval Office.

 

* 

Rep. Hurd, asked Mr. Mueller if he thought the Russians would try to interfere in the 2020 election. 

They were, said Mueller, interfering “as we speak.” 

A Democratic lawmaker asked the witness if he thought this was the “new normal,” that politicians would accept help from foreign powers to win future elections. 

“I hope this is not the new normal,” Mr. Mueller replied, “but I fear it is.”

 

* 

“Born in the United States.” 

President Trump lambasts four Democratic congresswomen, all persons of color, and says they should go back where they came from – despite the fact three of four were born in the United States. 

Asked if she found Trump’s tweets “racist,” Sen. Joni Ernst responded, “Yeah, I do.” 

 

* 

Rep. Hurd says he considers the president’s comments “racist and xenophobic.”

 

* 

Sen. Tim Scott admitted that Trump had engaged in “unacceptable personal attacks and [used] racially offensive language.”

 

* 

Rep. Chip Roy said Trump “was wrong to say any American citizen, whether in Congress or not, has any ‘home’ besides the U.S.”

 

* 

Rep. Elise Stefanik said she disagreed with the four Democrats on policies, but added, “the President’s tweets were inappropriate, denigrating, and wrong. It is unacceptable to tell legal U.S. citizens to go back to their home country.”

 

* 

“The worst president in the history of this country.” 

Texas judge Elsa Alcala announces on Facebook that she is leaving the Republican Party.

 

It has taken me years to say this publicly but here I go. President Trump is the worst president in the history of this country. Even accepting that Trump has had some successes – and I believe these are few – at his core, his ideology is racism. To me, nothing positive about him could absolve him of his rotten core. 

 

“Every day with the Republican Party seemed worse than the day before,” she says later, explaining her decision. “Trump speaks about brown people like me as lesser beings,” she tells reporters.

 

* 

Gov. Baker of Massachusetts also faults Trump for his attacks on the congresswomen. “The president’s tweets were shameful, they were racist and...they bring a tremendous amount of, sort of, disgrace to public policy and public life and I condemn them all.”

 

* 

Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan admitted that he was “appalled by the President’s tweets.”

 

* 

“Have We No Decency?” 

The three top religious officials at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington D.C. decide they must speak. The president’s attacks on Rep. Elijah Cummings, and the city of Baltimore, have proven to be the final hateful straw. In a statement titled, “Have We No Decency?” they write,

 

As faith leaders who serve at Washington National Cathedral – the sacred space where America gathers at moments of national significance – we feel compelled to ask: After two years of President Trump’s words and actions, when will Americans have enough?

 

We have come to accept a level of insult and abuse in political discourse that violates each person’s sacred identity as a child of God. We have come to accept as normal a steady stream of language and accusations coming from the highest office in the land that plays to racist elements in society [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted on this blog].

 

This week, President Trump crossed another threshold. Not only did he insult a leader in the fight for racial justice and equality for all persons; not only did he savage the nations from which immigrants to this country have come; but now he has condemned the residents of an entire American city….

 

Make no mistake about it, words matter. And Mr. Trump’s words are dangerous.

 

These words are more than a “dog-whistle.” When such violent dehumanizing words come from the President of the United States, they are a clarion call, and give cover, to white supremacists who consider people of color a sub-human “infestation” in America. They serve as a call to action from those people to keep America great by ridding it of such infestation. Violent words lead to violent actions.

 

When does silence become complicity? What will it take for us all to say, with one voice, that we have had enough? The question is less about the president’s sense of decency, but of ours.

 

As leaders of faith who believe in the sacredness of every single human being, the time for silence is over. We must boldly stand witness against the bigotry, hatred, intolerance, and xenophobia that is hurled at us, especially when it comes from the highest offices of this nation. We must say that this will not be tolerated. To stay silent in the face of such rhetoric is for us to tacitly condone the violence of these words.

 

 

AUGUST 2019 

“The president has blood on his hands.” 

In the wake of a massacre in El Paso, perpetrated by a right-wing nut spouting rhetoric similar to the president’s, former Massachusetts Governor William Weld blames Trump:

 

There’s no longer any doubt that the president has blood on his hands. You could draw a direct line from that manifesto from the shooter in El Paso to the Trump handbook. Every week it seems the president gets a bit more unhinged. He reminds me of Alex Jones, the right-wing conspiracy theorist, who says that Sandy Hook never happened.

 

* 

Former Governor Frank Keating of Oklahoma also blames the man in the White House for stoking hatred. “He needs to realize the lethality of his rhetoric. The truth is the president is the secular pope and he needs to be a moral leader as well as a government leader, and to say that this must not occur again – exclamation mark.”

 

* 

During a visit to New Hampshire, President Trump claims, once again, that the 2016 election was rigged. He insists busloads of people from strange places came into New Hampshire and stole the win from him. 

The chair of the F.E.C, has no choice but to respond. Appearing on CNN, Ellen Weintraub faults the president for what – if she were being frank – would be called a lie. 

She is discreet, saying only, “There is no evidence of rampant voter fraud in 2016 or really in any previous election.” 

In fact, she sent a letter to the president a few days before, asking him to share any evidence me might have to substantiate his claim. “To put it in terms a former casino operator should understand,” she wrote, “there comes a time when you need to lay your cards on the table or fold.” 

“Facts matter,” she tells Berman. “And the people of America need to be able to believe what their leaders tell them.”

 

* 

Jennifer Horn, former chair of the New Hampshire GOP, quits the party. In her letter of resignation, Horn notes that the president’s “regular verbal assaults against women, immigrants, elected members of Congress … and his willingness to stoke racial anger and unrest in order to advance his own political ambitions all subvert the founding principles of our great nation.”

 

* 

John S. McCollister, a state senator from Nebraska, issues a series of tweets, warning:

 

The Republican Party is enabling white supremacy in our country.  As a lifelong Republican, it pains me to say this, but it’s the truth.

 

I of course am not suggesting that all Republicans are white supremacists nor am I saying that the average Republican is even racist.

 

What I am saying though is that the Republican Party is COMPLICIT to obvious racist and immoral activity inside our party.

 

We have a Republican president who continually stokes racist fears in his base.  He calls certain countries “sh*tholes,” tells women of color to “go back” to where they came from and lies more than he tells the truth.

 

* 

GOP fundraiser and – briefly – White House Communications Chief, Anthony Scaramucci, tweets: “Trump isn’t racist. He’s worse. He’s so narcissistic he doesn’t see people as people. It’s why he doesn’t have any real friends. It’s why he gives a thumbs up next to an orphaned baby after a mass shooting. Everybody is an obstacle or a stepping stone.”

 

* 

Former GOP congressman Joe Walsh says he voted for Trump in 2016 but won’t repeat his error. 

“Mr. Trump is a racial arsonist who encourages bigotry and xenophobia to rouse his base and advance his electoral prospects. No matter his flag-hugging, or his military parades, he’s no patriot.”

  

SEPTEMBER 2019 

September will be consumed by a battle over whether or not President Trump’s call to Volodymyr Zelensky, the newly elected president of Ukraine, is grounds for impeachment. 

The call, itself, is made on July 25. In other words, Trump makes the call just one day after Robert Mueller testifies in Congress and says he fears foreign interference in U.S. elections will be the “new normal.”

 

____________________ 

He will lie big. He will lie small. He will lie, it seems, as if to stay in practice.

____________________ 

 

An interesting incident in September, trivial as it is, lends credence to the idea that Trump will lie at any time, on any topic, no matter how minor or how important. 

Hurricane Dorian, a Category 5 monster, bears down on the U.S. Mr. Trump warns people in its path, including people in Alabama. Seek safety.  

The National Weather Service gently corrects him, saying that Alabama is not in the path of the storm. 

For some reason – and this goes to the veracity of whatever Trump happens to be saying at any given moment – he cannot let this go. He shows up at a press conference with a map, crudely marked with a black Sharpie, his go-to-choice when coloring. (Here the blogger’s disdain spills out, as in the mocking word “coloring.”) An added black bubble now extends to show Alabama directly in Dorian’s path.

 

 

The experts immediately say this is no map they issued. A story posted by Business Insider, soon makes the relevance clear. 

The president – and here, it’s the blogger talking – is like a giant toddler, and whenever he faces criticism, he becomes enraged. If he makes mistakes, no matter how inconsequential, he will lie about what he has done. 

He will lie big. He will lie small. He will lie, it seems, as if to stay in practice. He will lie about the call to Ukraine, and in explaining his reasons for it, and he will lie about the doctored map. 

People close to President Trump have no illusions:

 

“No one knows what to expect from him anymore,” one former White House official [told Business Insider]. “His mood changes from one minute to the next based on some headline or tweet, and the next thing you know his entire schedule gets tossed out the window because he’s losing his s---.

 

“People are used to the president saying things that aren’t true, but this Alabama stuff is another story. This was the president sending out patently false information about a national-emergency situation as it was unfolding.”

 

* 

The story continues, with sources asking for anonymity, because they fear retaliation from the president.

 

“He’s deteriorating in plain sight,” one Republican strategist who’s in frequent contact with the White House told Insider on Friday.

 

Asked why the president was obsessed with Alabama instead of the states that would actually be affected by the storm, the strategist said, “you should ask a psychiatrist about that; I’m not sure I’m qualified to comment.”

 

* 

Nor was this behavior new.

 

More than that, one person who was close to Trump’s legal team during the Russia investigation told Insider his public statements were “nothing compared to what he’s like behind closed doors.”

 

“He’s like a bull seeing red,” this person added. “There’s just no getting through to him, and you can kiss your plans for the day goodbye because you’re basically stuck looking after a 4-year-old now.”

 

* 

Bruce Bartlett is listed as an “Independent” in politics. I will quote him because he worked in both the Reagan White House and in the George H. W. Bush administration. 

A British reporter wanted to know if Bartlett thought Trump lied so much because he was dishonest. Or were his false statements a function of profound ignorance? The Independent, a British paper sums up his response:

 

former Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary for Economic Policy Bruce Bartlett said it would be easier to list the number of subjects Trump understands than the ones he doesn’t understand. “Other than how to pander to right-wingers and get busty women to have sex with him, I can’t think of anything,” [that he actually understands].

 

* 

Trump’s first impeachment is triggered when a whistleblower reports that the president pressured Ukraine to help find dirt on the Biden family – or no military aid for them. That is: Trump put personal interests above national security interests, something no president should ever do. 

Former Trump transition adviser J. W. Verret appeared on television to sound alarm. “People have made the analogy to the Nixon-era scandals and Nixon’s resignation, but this is a lot worse than that,” Verret said. “Nixon was a patriot. Of all the crazy things he did, he never would have accepted help from a foreign power for his own personal interest in an election, particularly one that would compromise the U.S.’ strategic interests. This,” situation in Ukraine, “is much worse and I think momentum continues toward impeachment.”

 

 

OCTOBER 2019 

In October the leaves turn colors. A parade of witnesses testifies that the president put U.S. security at risk. 

He was willing to deny military assistance to our allies in Ukraine until they agreed to investigate the Biden family. 

(This matter is covered separately.)

 

*

 

Would President Trump ask a foreign country – such as Ukraine – to help him win the next election? His enablers say, he would never!

 

Trump undercuts that argument when he says publicly, he’ll ask China to investigate the Biden family.

 

So: the answer is yes. He would ask a foreign country to help, including one of our main enemies.

 

* 

The president’s lips move again, and a series of baffling whoppers come spilling out, this time on a different topic. For some reason, he insists that when he took office the U.S. military was hurting. 

We couldn’t even buy ammunition! Trump claimed “a top general, maybe the top of them all” told him about this sad state of affairs. But no top general comes forward to support his claim. 

Retired Gen. Mark Hertling, former commander of U.S. Army Europe, does respond. “For those interested,” he tweets, “this isn’t true. Actually, it’s ludicrous.”

 

* 

Next, the president decides to pull all U.S. forces out of Syria, and leave our Kurdish allies in the lurch. He has given the Turks, historic enemies of the Kurds, a green light to advance into Syria and drive them out. 

Sen. Rubio points out what everyone, save the president, seems to grasp. “We degraded ISIS using Kurds as the ground force. Now we have abandoned them. They face annihilation…We must always have the backs of our allies, if we expect them to have our back.” 

The Kurds have lost 11,000 dead in the fight. That allows the U.S. to avoid most of the bloodshed; and we lose only 88.

 

* 

Gen. Colin Powell sums up the situation. “Our foreign policy is in shambles right now.”

 

* 

U.S. troops who had been serving alongside the Kurds are aghast. One officer puts it this way. “They trusted us and we broke that trust. It’s a stain on the American conscience.” “I’m ashamed,” says a second.

 

* 

General John Allen, recently retired, is blunt. “There is blood on Trump’s hands,” he said, “for abandoning our Kurdish allies.”

 

* 

President Trump tries to explain his decision to withdraw from Syria. He says the Kurds are happy with the deal he made. 

Retired U.S. Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey sums up the reaction of many military men when he says Trump’s claim that the Kurds are happy, is “absurd, it’s cruel, it makes him look stupid.”

 

* 

“Tell the truth, for a change.” 

The impeachment inquiry continues. Former President Jimmy Carter offers advice to his successor, explaining how he might extricate himself from his troubles. “Tell the truth, for a change.”

 

* 

H.R. McMaster, Trump’s second National Security Adviser – his first is now a convicted felon – is asked his opinion. Is it ever appropriate to pressure a foreign power to interfere in the political processes of the United States? 

“Of course, no. No, it’s absolutely not.”

 

* 

After White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney admits (but then recants) that military aid to Ukraine was held up until our allies agreed to investigate Hunter and Joe Biden, calls for impeachment grow. Former Gov. John Kasich of Ohio says Mulvaney’s admission tipped him over the edge. 

He’s for Trump’s impeachment, too. There was no excuse, Kasich said, not when Ukraine “lives in the shadow of Russia, that’s got troops on their land.”

 

* 

Maryland Governor Hogan joined in support of the impeachment inquiry. “I don’t see any other way to get the facts,” he said.

 

* 

Having listened to Mulvaney, Sen. Lisa Murkowski made her disgust clear. “You don’t hold up foreign aid that we [Congress] had previously appropriated for a political initiative. Period.”

 

* 

“A dictator or a dictatorship.” 

Maine Republican, William Cohen, one of seven on the House Judiciary Committee to vote for the impeachment of President Nixon, went a step further. “I believe,” he told the Bangor Daily News, “the effort to obtain damaging information from a foreign government on a potential presidential candidate, and contemporaneously withholding needed military equipment would constitute an impeachable offense.” 

Speaking of Trump, Cohen explains: “He feels that he alone can take action, without regard to any of the other institutions which are there to make sure that the rule of law stays intact. And so that, ‘Only I can do this,’ and that has the sound of, you know, a dictator or a dictatorship.”

 

* 

Rep. Francis Rooney was the next GOP member in Congress to say he supported an impeachment inquiry. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, of Illinois, joined him in that stance. Neither said they had their minds made up on how they might vote. Both believed an investigation was warranted. “I’ve been real mindful of the fact that during Watergate, all the people I knew said, ‘Oh, they’re just abusing Nixon, and it’s a witch hunt,’” Rooney explained. “Turns out it wasn’t a witch hunt. It was absolutely correct. I’m definitely at variance with some of the people in [my] district who would probably follow Donald Trump off the Grand Canyon rim.” 

For his part, he noted, he had sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution. His loyalty was not to one man.

Trump supporters are always ready to follow off the cliff.

 

* 

The president tells reporters that he talked to Sen. Mitch McConnell about his telephone call with President Zelensky. “He read my phone call [the memorandum] with the president of Ukraine,” Trump claimed. “Mitch McConnell, he said, ‘That was the most innocent phone call that I’ve read.’ I mean, give me a break.” 

Alas, McConnell has to admit to reporters later that he had never talked to Trump about his call.

 

* 

Asked his reaction to testimony coming out of the House hearings on a possible impeachment, General McCaffrey puts it bluntly: “We have a rogue presidency.”

 

* 

John Sullivan, the #2 man at Department of State, and Trump’s choice to become next U.S. ambassador to Russia, is testifying at his confirmation hearing. Democrats have to ask. Did Sullivan believe it would be appropriate for the president to demand that foreign countries investigate political opponents?  

“I don’t think that would be in accord with our values,” Sullivan replies.

 

 

NOVEMBER 2019 

With President Trump under impeachment pressure, he and several allies in Congress begin demanding that the identity of the “whistleblower” be revealed. Even some Republicans balk. 

“We should follow the law,” Sen. Lamar Alexander says. “And I believe the law protects whistleblowers.” 

(It does.)

 

* 

“The whistleblower statute is there for a reason,” Sen. John Thune agreed. “And I think we need to respect the law where whistleblowers are concerned. Eventually that person may decide to come forward voluntarily.”

 

* 

Sen. Chuck Grassley, who worked for years to build up whistleblower protections, concurs. “All I can say is I expect whistleblowers to be protected according to what the law gives them,” he explains.

 

* 

Like a “squirrel caught in traffic.” 

Lt. Com. Guy Snodgrass, who served as Sec. of Defense James Mattis’s chief speech writer, paints an unflattering picture of President Trump. 

In one story, he describes the first meeting of Mattis with the new president. It’s a meeting for which Mattis has prepared at length. From the first, however, it proves impossible to keep the Leader of the Free World focused on problems round the world, which Mattis hoped to lay out. Trump veered from topic to topic – Syria – Mexico – a military parade he wanted, with tanks – a recent Washington Post story – like a “squirrel caught in traffic.” As Lt. Com. Snodgrass describes it, “The issues were complicated, yet all of the president’s answers were simplistic and ad hoc. He was shooting from the hip on issues of global importance.”

 

* 

In the wake of testimony by several witnesses in the impeachment inquiry, Rep. Mike Turner is asked by Jake Tapper if the testimony he has heard alarms him. “As I’ve said from the beginning, I think this is not OK,” Turner replies. “The President of the United States shouldn’t even in the original phone call be on the phone with the president of another country and raise his political opponent. So, no, this is not OK.”

 

* 

David French, a former major in the U.S. Army Reserve, writing in Time magazine, notes that “character is destiny.” Then he savages the president. “While we have seen the consequences of Trump’s character throughout his presidency, no series of crises has demonstrated his profound flaws more thoroughly than the twin foreign policy scandals in Ukraine and Syria.” 

Citing his abandonment of the Kurds in Syria and his strongarm attempts to force Ukraine to help him win the next election, French adds, “This is Trump unleashed. This is the man in full, and he is demonstrating that he is just as corrupt, unfit and incompetent as his critics feared.”

 

* 

Judge Paul L. Friedman of the District of Columbia was appointed to his post by President Bill Clinton. But his comments are noteworthy, whether he is a Democrat, a Republican, or an independent. 

After Trump attacks Judge Amy Berman Jackson, the trial judge in the Roger Stone case, Friedman, 75, comes to her defense and a defense of the judicial branch itself. Trump’s rhetoric, he warns, “violates all recognized democratic norms.”

 

We are witnessing a chief executive who criticizes virtually every judicial decision that doesn’t go his way and denigrates judges who rule against him, sometimes in very personal terms. He seems to view the courts and the justice system as obstacles to be attacked and undermined, not as a coequal branch to be respected even when he disagrees with its decisions.

 

* 

U.S. District Court judge, Ketanji Brown Jackson, rules against the Trump administration in a critical case. At issue is whether or not the White House can ignore a subpoena calling on Don McGahn, former Chief Counsel, to come before the House Judiciary Committee and give testimony. In her 120-page opinion, Judge Jackson rules that the answer is no. 

McGahn must appear.

 

____________________ 

“Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings.” 

U.S. District Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson

____________________ 

 

Jackson writes:

 

Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings. This means that they do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control. Rather, in this land of liberty, it is indisputable that current and former employees of the White House work for the People of the United States, and that they take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Moreover, as citizens of the United States, current and former senior-level presidential aides have constitutional rights, including the right to free speech, and they retain these rights even after they have transitioned back into private life.

 

The argument that had been put forth by President Trump’s lawyers, that Trump aides had “absolute immunity” from testifying, Jackson labeled a “fiction.” 

Blatant defiance of Congress’ power to compel witnesses to testify, she calls “an affront to the mechanism for curbing abuses of power that the Framers carefully crafted for our protection.”

 

* 

Former Republican congressman Charlie Dent tells CNN that colleagues in the House of Representatives are “absolutely disgusted and exhausted by the President’s behavior.” 

“Moving from one corrupt act to another,” Dent said. “I mean those types of head-exploding moments are just I think infuriating these members and I think they’d like to step out but they just can’t because of their base at the moment. I think a lot of members have to take a hard look at this,” Dent continued. “They can be more concerned about their election, or their legacies. And I would argue to many of them: your legacy is more important than the next election.”

 

 

DECEMBER 2019 

____________________ 

“The rule of law, something so precious it is greater than any man or administration.” 

Former F.B.I. Director William Webster

____________________ 

 

The impeachment hearings involving Trump and his questionable dealings with Ukraine take center stage.

 

* 

Having listened to witnesses testify about the president’s efforts to force Ukraine to dig up dirt on Hunter and Joe Biden, legal scholars from almost every prestigious U.S. college and university sign a letter calling for Trump to be ousted from office. Men and women versed in the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, from William & Mary – and Emory – and John Marshall School of Law – and Duke – and Yale – and the University of Alabama – and Catholic University – and Southern Methodist –and hundreds more add their signatures.

 

Almost 900 experts agree:

 

We, the undersigned legal scholars, have concluded that President Trump engaged in impeachable conduct.

 

We do not reach this conclusion lightly. The Founders did not make impeachment available for disagreements over policy, even profound ones, nor for extreme distaste for the manner in which the President executes his office. Only “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” warrant impeachment. But there is overwhelming evidence that President Trump betrayed his oath of office by seeking to use presidential power to pressure a foreign government to help him distort an American election. 

 

* 

Two former Republican senators, William Cohen of Maine and Slade Groton of Washington, appear on CNN and lay out their positions regarding the impeachment of President Trump. 

“I would say, listen to the witnesses. Listen to the professionals who came before the Congress to swear under oath,” Cohen explains. “You’re saying that all those people who came before the committee are lying under oath.” 

He urges lawmakers “to go back and look at the entire spectrum, including the Mueller report. There’s a pattern here of (Trump) saying, ‘I’m not beholden to anyone.’” 

Gorton says he feels “sorry for the people who are tying themselves so heavily to the President at this point. They should be waiting to hear all of the facts. I think it’s very easy for them to determine that the President did this, did what he’s accused of,” Gorton adds.

 

* 

After Trump gives a speech to an audience of Jewish Americans and says they should all vote for him, to protect their money, reaction is less than positive. 

Halie Soifer, executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, labels the president’s remarks “deeply offensive.”

 

* 

An open letter begins circulating, penned by 70 Inspector Generals, from across the U.S. government. They warn that whistleblowers, like the one at the heart of the impeachment process, are often instrumental in revealing the crimes and machinations of corrupt officials. 

They oppose Team Trump’s efforts to reveal the identity of, and punish, the whistleblower in the Ukraine matter.

 

* 

William Webster, 96, the only man ever to serve, as both director of the F.B.I. and, later, director of the C.I.A., issues a scathing rebuke of Trump’s conduct. 

In an opinion piece titled, “I Headed the F.B.I. and C.I.A. There’s a Dire Threat to the Country I Love,” Webster calls on all Americans to awake. He was chosen originally by President Jimmy Carter to head the F.B.I. – because he was a Republican – and the F.B.I. had fallen into disrepute during the Watergate era. 

Now, in the face of Trump’s and Trump enablers’ attacks on the F.B.I. and other law enforcement agencies, he says he considers it his duty,

 

to speak out about a dire threat to the rule of law in the country I love. Order protects liberty, and liberty protects order. Today, the integrity of the institutions that protect our civil order are, tragically, under assault from too many people whose job it should be to protect them.

 

Webster vehemently disagrees with those who say the Mueller Report cleared the name of the president. 

In fact, the report conclusively found that the evidence to initiate the Russia investigation was unassailable. There were more than 100 contacts between members of the Trump campaign and Russian agents during the 2016 campaign, and Russian efforts to undermine our democracy continue to this day. 

 

* 

Former GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina tells a reporter Trump’s conduct has been “destructive to our republic.” 

“I think it is vital,” she adds, “that he be impeached.”

 

* 

“The mercenary instruments of foreign corruption.” 

More than seven hundred historians sign a letter outlining support for the impeachment of President Trump:

 

President Trump’s numerous and flagrant abuses of power are precisely what the Framers had in mind as grounds for impeaching and removing a president….The President’s offenses, including his dereliction in protecting the integrity of the 2020 election from Russian disinformation and renewed interference, arouse once again the Framers’ most profound fears that powerful members of government would become, in Hamilton’s words, “the mercenary instruments of foreign corruption.”

 

Signatories include Pulitzer Prize winners Robert Caro and Ron Chernow and documentary film maker Ken Burns.

 

* 

With impeachment now on the table, Christianity Today weighs in on the matter. Editors admit the president has fought a good fight against abortion and defended freedom of religion. 

That’s not enough in this case. 

____________________ 

“The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration.” 

Christianity Today

____________________ 

 

But Christians can no longer afford to ignore the danger his behavior represents. In the matter of impeachment,

 

[The] facts…are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.

 

The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone – with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders – is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.

 

We believe the impeachment hearings have made it absolutely clear, in a way the Mueller investigation did not, that President Trump has abused his authority for personal gain and betrayed his constitutional oath. The impeachment hearings have illuminated the president’s moral deficiencies for all to see. This damages the institution of the presidency, damages the reputation of our country, and damages both the spirit and the future of our people. None of the president’s positives can balance the moral and political danger we face under a leader of such grossly immoral character.

 

If Christians don’t reverse course, editors warn, for decades to come no one will take them seriously when they talk about “justice and righteousness.” Abortion may be “a great evil.” Can they then “say that the bent and broken character of our nation’s leader doesn’t really matter in the end?”

 

* 

Rep. Dave Trott, who served in Congress, unloads on Trump. The impetus comes after he reads an article in The Atlantic, in which U.S. military leaders blast the commander-in-chief. 

In a letter to the editor of the Detroit Free Press, Trott writes:

 

Frightening. That is the only word to describe Mark Bowden’s article. President Trump’s inability or unwillingness to follow normal decision-making protocols has created chaos in our foreign policy and put our country at risk.

 

…Trump is psychologically, morally, intellectually, and emotionally unfit for office. We can only hope Congress impeaches and removes him so we have a choice between two adults in 2020. 

(Again, unless noted, none of these quotes come from Democrats or liberals.)

 

* 

Sen. Lankford admits what most Americans have figured out for themselves. 

On Face the Nation, he says: “I don’t think that President Trump as a person is a role model for a lot of different youth. That’s just me personally,” he says. “I don’t like the way that he tweets, some of the things that he says, his word choices at times are not my word choices. He comes across with more New York City swagger than I do from the Midwest and definitely not the way that I’m raising my kids.”

 

* 

Former Sen. Jeff Flake warns that GOP lawmakers, listening to – but ignoring a parade of witnesses in the impeachment hearings – are “denying objective reality” in their insistence that the president did nothing wrong in his dealings with Ukraine. 

Flake says the president will soon be on trial in the Senate. “So are my Senate Republican colleagues.” He addresses the following plea to his old friends in Congress:

 

As we approach the time when you do your constitutional duty and weigh the evidence arrayed against the president, I urge you to remember who we are when we are at our best. And I ask you to remember yourself at your most idealistic. We are conservatives. The political impulses that compelled us all to enter public life were defined by sturdy pillars anchored deep in the American story.

 

…The willingness of House Republicans to bend to the president’s will by attempting to shift blame with the promotion of bizarre and debunked conspiracy theories has been an appalling spectacle. It will have long-term ramifications for the country and the party, to say nothing of individual reputations.

 

 

JANUARY 2020 

Stuart Stevens, a GOP consultant, gets 2020 off to a rousing start when he describes the current state of his party:

 

Republicans are now officially the character doesn’t count party, the personal responsibility just proves you have failed to blame the other guy party, the deficit doesn’t matter party, the Russia is our ally party, and the I’m-right-and-you-are-human-scum party. Yes, it’s President Trump’s party now, but it stands only for what he has just tweeted.

 

*

____________________ 

“And I do consider him to be an existential threat to American democracy. He attacks the very concept of truth.” 

John Stipanovich

____________________ 

 

John Stipanovich tells a reporter he remembers first voting for Gerald Ford in 1976. He helped Ronald Reagan win election in 1984. He advised the Bush 43 team on how to win the 2000 Florida recount. 

Now he says he plans to dedicate the next chapter of his life to defeating Donald J. Trump in his bid for reelection. 

In an interview with Florida Politics he explains:

 

And I do consider him to be an existential threat to American democracy. He attacks the very concept of truth…

 

What Donald Trump represents, the tendencies he exhibits, the emotions he evokes, are frightening and they’re dangerous in my judgment. He’s the ultimate con man. He’s the carnival barker, and it’s just amazing how many rubes there are in the country.

 

Stipanovich says he plans to dig in and fight. He knows what he’s talking about. He served with the 1^st Recon Marines in Vietnam and took part in the bloody combat related to the Tet Offensive in 1968.

 

* 

As the Senate gears up for impeachment, Sen. Romney offers up a dose of hope. “I think it’s increasingly likely that other Republicans will join those of us who think we should hear from John Bolton. It’s important, he says, if they want “to be able to make an impartial judgment.”

 

* 

“If you have nine witnesses.” 

Hope that the Senate would perform its constitutional duties dies when Senator Lamar Alexander issues the following statement.

 

I worked with other senators to make sure that we have the right to ask for more documents and witnesses, but there is no need for more evidence to prove something that has already been proven and that does not meet the United States Constitution’s high bar for an impeachable offense.

 

There is no need for more evidence to prove that the president asked Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter; he said this on television on October 3, 2019, and during his July 25, 2019, telephone call with the president of Ukraine. There is no need for more evidence to conclude that the president withheld United States aid, at least in part, to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens; the House managers have proved this with what they call a “mountain of overwhelming evidence.” 

 

…It was inappropriate for the president to ask a foreign leader to investigate his political opponent and to withhold United States aid to encourage that investigation. When elected officials inappropriately interfere with such investigations, it undermines the principle of equal justice under the law. But the Constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year’s ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate.

 

Yes, the Democrats proved it. Yes, Trump did ask a foreign country to help him win the next election (and let’s not forget he and his aides were happy to take Russian help in 2016; and then to lie about it). 

Yes, it was “inappropriate.” 

Yes, what Trump did “undermines the principle of equal justice under the law.” But an esteemed U.S. senator does not wish to hear from a critical witness, whose testimony has been blocked by the president. 

Soon after, a Capitol Hill reporter tweets:

 

ALEXANDER tells me why he’s a NO on additional evidence: “I was concerned about the Senate as an institution... I’m pursuaded [sic] the President did what he did I don’t need to hear anymore. If you have 9 witnesses who say you left the scene of an accident you don’t need a 10th one.”

 

* 

When asked if he would believe John Bolton’s claim (as reported by The New York Times) that Trump told Bolton to keep holding military aid until Ukraine agreed to do the investigations he wanted, Gen. John Kelly is clear. “If John Bolton says that in the book [his book is also being blocked from publication by the White House at the time], I believe John Bolton. John’s an honest guy. He’s a man of integrity and great character, so we’ll see what happens.” 

As for a trial in the Senate, Kelly reiterates. Bolton is an honest guy, and also “a copious note taker.” 

“If I was advising the United States Senate, I would say, ‘If you don’t respond to 75 percent of the American voters [who want witnesses] and have witnesses, it’s a job only half done,” Gen. Kelly said. “You open yourself up forever as a Senate that shirks its responsibilities.”

 

* 

John Warner, a former longtime U.S. Senator from Virginia, issues this warning, to no avail:

 

Not long ago Senators of both major parties always worked to accommodate fellow colleagues with differing points of view to arrive at outcomes that would best serve the nation’s interests. If witnesses are suppressed in this trial and a majority of Americans are left believing the trial was a sham, I can only imagine the lasting damage done to the Senate, and to our fragile national consensus. The Senate embraces its legacy and delivers for the American people by avoiding that risk.

 

…I respectfully urge the Senate to be guided by the rules of evidence and follow our nation’s judicial norms, precedents and institutions to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law by welcoming relevant witnesses and documents as part of this impeachment trial.

 

 

FEBRUARY 2020 

The U.S. Senate conducts a “ghost trial” with no additional witnesses. (Bolton will later back up other testimony in his book, and agree that Trump put U.S. national security at risk for political benefit.) 

Even Republican senators who vote to acquit realize Trump’s behavior was questionable in the extreme. 

Sen. Rob Portman: “I have consistently said that Mr. Trump’s request for an investigation of Joe Biden and any effort to tie the release of military aid to investigations were improper and shouldn’t have happened.”

 

* 

“It is clear from the July 25, 2019, phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky that the investigation into the Bidens’ activities requested by President Trump was improper and demonstrated very poor judgment,” Sen. Susan Collins says on the Senate floor.

 

* 

Sen. Murkowski describes the president’s actions as “shameful and wrong.” “His personal interests do not take precedence over those of this great nation,” she adds. “Degrading the office, by actions or even name calling, weakens it for future presidents, and weakens our country.”

 

* 

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia holds out a false hope. “I think he’s learned that he has to be maybe a little more judicious and careful, the way he’s phrasing certain things,” she says of Mr. Trump.

 

She thinks it over a moment and adds, “Although he may not, because you know, as we’ve said, as was said, he is who he is.”

 

* 

David Pressman, the lawyer for Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a key witness against the president, is blunt in assessment of what happens later to his client: “The most powerful man in the world – buoyed by the silent, the pliable and the complicit – has decided to exact revenge.” 

Vindman will soon be forced into retirement, despite two decades of service, including a combat tour in Iraq.

 

* 

“If we are to sustain this experiment we call democracy.” 

Former Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer survived close contact, working for Trump. He now tells reporters that while he has been a “lifelong Republican,” and never voted Democratic in his life, he will be working to defeat his party leader in 2020. 

“I don’t care if you’re a Republican, you’re a Democrat or independent, if we are to sustain this experiment we call democracy, America needs the best leader available.”  It was “chaos” working for Trump, Spencer tells a reporter. When our military talked to allied militaries, there was great frustration. “It was fraying, it was confusing, it was exhausting. The message one way, the message the next way – it was untenable.” 

“We need honesty, we need integrity,” he says to Nora O’Donnell on NBC. A Marine Corps veteran, himself, Spencer is emphatic. “Loyalty is to the country, not to a person,” he says.

 

* 

Former Trump adviser Roger Stone faces a lengthy prison sentence. President Trump sticks his nose in where it doesn’t belong and says the sentence prosecutors are recommending is too harsh. The recommended sentence in the Stone case is reduced: from 7-9 years to 15-21 months. 

Sen. Murkowski responds: “I don’t like this chain of events where you have a ... proceeding, a sentencing, a recommended sentence, the president weighs in and all of the sudden Justice comes back, says ‘change the deal.’ I think most people would look at that and say ‘hmm, that just doesn’t look right.’ And I think they’re right.” 

Murkowski goes on to say, she doesn’t “think the president should be determining what the sentences are.”

 

*

Sen. Collins says the president “should not have gotten involved…I think the president would be better served by never commenting on a pending federal investigation. I said that back when the Mueller investigation was going on, and it’s certainly the case when you’re at a sentencing stage.”

 

* 

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham tells reporters he doesn’t think Trump is trying to “bully” the judge who will ultimately decide Stone’s sentence. Still, he adds, “I don’t think he should be commenting on cases in the system. I don’t think that’s appropriate.”

 

* 

Attorney General Bill Barr is at least a little more honest, admitting he has concerns, although he doesn’t have the courage to do much about it. He assures a reporter, “In fact, the president has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case.” 

However, to have the president making public comments,

 

about the department, about people in the department, our men and women here, about cases pending in the department, and about judges before whom we have cases, make it impossible for me to do my job, and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we’re doing our work with integrity.

 

That would be what, in any other administration, everyone would know was a very big deal and a very big threat to the rule of law.

 

* 

After President Trump has Lt. Col. Vindman fired from his White House job and removed from the premises without time to clear his desk. Gen. Kelly has harsh words for the president. When Vindman listened to Trump’s call on July 25 to the President of Ukraine, and came away disturbed, Kelly says he did exactly what young U.S. military officers are trained to do. “We teach them to always tell the truth, to tell truth to power,” Kelly says. “He did exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave.” 

When Vindman heard Trump tell his Ukrainian counterpart that he wanted to see the Biden family investigated, Kelly said that was like hearing “an illegal order.” 

“We teach them, ‘Don’t follow an illegal order. And if you’re ever given one, you’ll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this is an illegal order, and then tell your boss.’”

 

* 

Almost 2,700 veterans of the Department of Justice sign a letter calling for Attorney General William Barr to resign. 

This comes in the wake of his meddling with a sentencing recommendation involving Trump adviser Roger Stone:

 

As former DOJ officials, we each proudly took an oath to support and defend our Constitution and faithfully execute the duties of our offices. The very first of these duties is to apply the law equally to all Americans. This obligation flows directly from the Constitution, and it is embedded in countless rules and laws governing the conduct of DOJ lawyers. The Justice Manual — the DOJ’s rulebook for its lawyers — states that “the rule of law depends on the evenhanded administration of justice”; that the Department’s legal decisions “must be impartial and insulated from political influence”; and that the Department’s prosecutorial powers, in particular, must be “exercised free from partisan consideration.”

 

…President Trump and Attorney General Barr have openly and repeatedly flouted this fundamental principle, most recently in connection with the sentencing of President Trump’s close associate, Roger Stone, who was convicted of serious crimes.

 

* 

“Unfettered power in the executive branch.” 

Martin A. Hewitt, former Republican candidate for Congress, blasts his party and his party’s president:

 

I always hoped this day would never come and that the proud history of past Republican presidents Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower would save the party. Unfortunately, that is not where we are. Today the Republican Party has died. It has been replaced by a soulless beast that cares about neither the people nor the planet. Its only purpose is to grow and takeover its host - the United States of America.

 

The party died when the Senate voted against witnesses [in the impeachment trial]. It was the last chance for the leadership to actually lead and provide an essential check on what has now become unfettered power in the executive branch.

 

“I am forced to quit the Republican Party,” he says. He will fight for a better future for the country in his own way.

 

* 

One man who recognizes the threat to the rule of law is former Deputy Attorney General Donald Ayer. He served in that capacity under President George H. W. Bush. Sadly, he says, he had no choice but to label his colleague from the late 80s, now Attorney General Barr, as “un-American.” 

“The reason I say he’s un-American,” Ayer tells CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “is that the central tenet of our legal system and our justice system is that no person is above the law. Bill Barr’s vision is that there is one man – one person – who needs to be above the law and that is the president.” 

Mr. Ayer’s immediate cause for concern was the meddling in the criminal case of Roger Stone. He called that the “tip of the iceberg.” 

Then he slammed Barr for claiming in a 2018 memo that the president “is the executive branch and that he necessarily has complete and unlimited discretion to oversee criminal cases.” 

In an opinion piece for The Atlantic, Ayer went on to warn, “Bill Barr’s America is not a place that anyone, including Trump voters, should want to go. It is a banana republic where all are subject to the whims of a dictatorial president and his henchmen. To prevent that, we need a public uprising demanding that Bill Barr resign immediately, or failing that, be impeached.”

 

 

MARCH 2020 

Everyone is focused on the coronavirus.

 

 

APRIL 2020 

____________________ 

“When somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total. The governors know that.” 

Donald J. Trump

____________________ 

 

While most of us are busy trying to keep six feet away from other human beings, another Inspector General makes the news. This time, the IG in question is Michael Atkinson, a Trump choice for the job, and man in charge of keeping the intelligence community of the United States from breaking any rules. Atkinson has the misfortune to have done his job to the best of his abilities.

 

When a whistleblower complaint landed on his desk, involving President Trump’s questionable call to the leader of Ukraine, Atkinson determined that the complaint was valid.

 

As per the law, he sent it on to Congress.

 

Fired on Friday, he said in a statement, “It is hard not to think that the President’s loss of confidence in me derives from my having faithfully discharged my legal obligations as an independent and impartial Inspector General, and from my commitment to continue to do so.”

 

* 

In a wild and wooly press conference, President Trump insists he has “total authority” to reopen the country and get everyone back to work. When pressed by Kaitlyn Collins, a CNN reporter, who asked if he could cite a constitutional basis for such a claim, Trump grew agitated. 

“Look, look,” he fumed, “When somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total. The governors know that.”

 

Even many conservatives realized this was a bridge too far. Sen. Rubio said the final decision would rest with the governors of the territories and states. Federal guidance might help them to decide, Rubio admitted. “But the Constitution and common sense dictates these decisions be made at the state level.”

 

*

 

“The federal government does not have absolute power,” Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming tweeted in response to Trump’s claim of “total control.”

 

Then she quoted the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” 

 

 

 

*

 

Even John Yoo, who once claimed that George W. Bush had the right to torture terrorist suspects if he wanted, blasted Trump for overreach.

 

The Constitution’s grant of limited, enumerated powers to the national government does not include the right to regulate either public health or all business in the land. Our federal system reserves the leading role over public health to state governors. States possess the “police power” to regulate virtually all activity within their borders.

 

* 

President Trump gets mad when asked if the states have all the testing materials and supplies  needed to battle the coronavirus. He says they do. He goes off on a tangent and talks about cotton swabs, and how cotton is “easy to get.” 

You expect Democratic governors to push back. It’s Gov. Hogan who says this: “But to try to push this off, to say that the governors have plenty of testing and they should just get to work on testing, somehow we aren’t doing our job, is just absolutely false.”

 

* 

At one of his daily press conferences, President Trump causes amazement when he floats the idea that we could inject ourselves with disinfectant to kill the coronavirus. And if that doesn’t do the trick – ultraviolet light? Doctors, and even average human beings with a rudimentary grasp on science, are aghast. Dr. Scott Gottlieb, Trump’s own former FDA commissioner, responds,

 

“I think we need to speak very clearly that there’s no circumstance under which you should take a disinfectant or inject a disinfectant for the treatment of anything, and certainly not for the treatment of coronavirus. There’s absolutely no circumstance under which that’s appropriate, and it can cause death and very adverse outcomes.”

 

* 

“These [disinfectant] products have corrosive properties that melt or destroy the lining of our innards,” McGill University thoracic surgeon Dr. Jonathan Spicer warns.

 

* 

Dr. Donna Farber, an immunologist at Columbia University is stunned by Trump’s suggestion that we might use ultraviolet (UV) light to kill the virus. The idea, she said, was “not practical.” UV rays don’t go deep enough. The rays would  never get to the lungs; but you could suffer DNA damage, as a result. Dr. Farber was blunt. Any radiation that would penetrate deeply enough “would cause so much damage” that you’d be “better off with coronavirus.”

 

* 

 “Inhaling chlorine bleach would be absolutely the worst thing for the lungs,” warned Dr. John Balmes, a San Francisco pulmonologist. “Not even a low dilution of bleach or isopropyl alcohol is safe. It’s a totally ridiculous concept.”

 

* 

“This is one of the most dangerous and idiotic suggestions made so far in how one might actually treat COVID-19,” a British expert told U.S. News and World Report. “It is hugely irresponsible because, sadly, there are people around the world who might believe this sort of nonsense and try it out for themselves.”

 

* 

Finally, Dr. Vin Gupta, a global health policy expert, told NBC News:

 

This notion of injecting or ingesting any type of cleansing product into the body is irresponsible, and it’s dangerous...It’s a common method that people utilize when they want to kill themselves...Any amount of bleach or isopropyl alcohol or any kind of common household cleaner is inappropriate for ingestion even in small amounts. Small amounts are deadly.

 

Gupta said he found watching the president’s press conferences “demoralizing.” He was horrified to think Trump’s loyal listeners might trust in what he offered as advice. “It’s exceptionally dangerous,” Dr. Gupta warned.  There were people “who hang on to every word” the president says.

The CDC is forced to issue this warning.

 

 

MAY 2020 

Joe Walsh offers this description of the president: “He’s cruel. He’s dishonest. He’s malignantly narcissistic. He’s disloyal to country. He’s cultish. He’s ignorant. He’s authoritarian. He’s corrupt. He’s lawless.”

 

* 

The latest victim of a Trumpian desire to rule like a king – the fourth Inspector General he has fired in two months – is the IG for the State Department, Steve Linick. According to multiple reports, Linick had opened at least one investigation into possible illegal actions by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. So, Pompeo recommended his firing. 

(I can find only one example of President Obama relieving an IG in eight years as president. I also find one case where President George W. Bush was asked to fire an IG. Robert W. Cobb resigned instead.) 

As usual, most Republicans were too cowardly to complain about the president’s assault on the rule of law. One U.S. Senator did show a dash of courage. A second protested, but we’ll have to wait to see if there are any results. A third expressed concern.

 

Starting with the last of the three: Sen. Susan Collins, who finds herself is in a fight to retain her seat in November, went on record via Twitter:

 

I have long been a strong advocate for the Inspectors General. They are vital partners in Congress’s effort to identify inefficient or ineffective government programs and to root out fraud and other wrongdoing.

 

The investigations and reports of IGs throughout the government help Congress shape legislation and oversight activities – improving government performance, providing important transparency into programs, and giving Americans better value for their tax dollar.

 

The President has not provided the kind of justification for the removal of IG Linick required by this law.

 

* 

Chuck Grassley, GOP chair of the Senate Finance Committee is blunt. But the question remains. Will he act? 

He makes it clear to reporters that inspectors-general are “crucial in correcting government failures and promoting the accountability that the American people deserve.”  Congress, he points out, “requires written reasons justifying an IG’s removal. A general lack of confidence,” which Trump had cited as his reason for dumping Linick, would not “satisfy Congress.”

 

* 

Sen. Mitt Romney, who seems to be the only GOP senator still in possession of a pair of nuts, was more direct. He warned that Trump’s firings of multiple inspectors-general were “unprecedented” and “doing so without good cause chills the independence essential to their purpose….It is a threat to accountable democracy and a fissure in the constitutional balance of power.”

 

* 

“The unlimited power of our Military and many arrests.” 

When protests over the death of George Floyd spread, and sometimes end in destruction, President Trump tweets:

 

Crossing State lines to incite violence is a FEDERAL CRIME! Liberal Governors and Mayors must get MUCH tougher or the Federal Government will step in and do what has to be done, and that includes using the unlimited power of our Military and many arrests.

 

The “unlimited power of our Military?” What in god’s name does President Trump mean this time? 

Once again, a few Republican voices rise in protest. “I think it’s just the opposite of the message that should have been coming out of the White House,” Maryland’s Governor Hogan, responds.

 

* 

“The country is looking for healing and calm. And I think the president needs to project that in his tone. He masters that sometimes,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune of South Dakota. “That’s the tone he needs to strike right now.” Several other GOP lawmakers tepidly agree with Thune.

 

* 

Sen. Romney has no illusions about who we’re dealing with in the Oval Office. “I don’t think there’s a speech the president can give at this stage that’s going to calm things down,” he tells reporters. “The call today with the governors, as it was reported, doesn’t calm things down.” 

In that call, Trump told mostly Democratic governors and mayors that they were “weak” and looking like fools.

 

 

JUNE 2020 

_____________________ 

“We have a Constitution. We have to follow that Constitution. And the president’s drifted away from it.” 

Former Sec. of State Colin Powell

_____________________ 

 

On the first day of June, the President of the United States orders officers from various federal agencies, and active duty military police to forcefully disperse peaceful protesters in front of the White House. 

After a path is cleared, he stands before St. John’s Episcopal Church. There he raises a Bible and says something about protecting law and order.

 

* 

“Never did I dream.”

 

A storm of protest is soon heard. First to raise the battle cry, is Trump’s former Secretary of Defense and former Marine commandant, Gen. James Mattis. Writing in The Atlantic, he offers stark warning. “I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled,” he began. “The words ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court,” he noted. “This is precisely what [Black Lives Matter] protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind.”

 

When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens – much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.

 

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people – does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

 

*

 

Sen. Murkowski admitted what many Republicans had to be thinking. “I thought General Mattis’ words were true and honest and necessary and overdue. Perhaps we’re getting to the point where we can be more honest with the concerns that we might hold internally, and have the courage of our own convictions to speak up.”

 

*

 

General Kelly elaborates on his thinking in an interview, making it clear on whose side he comes down, in the confrontation between Mattis and the president:

 

He’s quite a man, General Jim Mattis, and for him to do that tells you where he is relative to the concern he has for our country. 

 

I agree with him. I think we need to step back from the politics. I think we need to reestablish, and I’m not a constitutional scholar but boy do I read a lot and I’ve re-read an awful lot in the last three weeks about the thinking that made our Constitution what it is, the men who made that Constitution, who developed that Constitution. And the separation of powers is very, very, very important. No president ever is a dictator or a king.

 

*

 

Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, is equally appalled by Trump’s threat to quell protests using active duty troops. “The idea that the military would be called in to dominate [Trump’s word] and to suppress what, for the most part, were peaceful protests – admittedly, where some had opportunistically turned them violent – and that the military would somehow come in and calm that situation,” he said, “was very dangerous to me.”

 

*

 

A second former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, expresses similar fear. He cautions that the country is at an “inflection point.” He says it finds it “impossible to remain silent.” The president’s decision to clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Park was “sickening.”

 

*

 

Ret. Vice Admiral Joseph Maguire tells The New York Times, “Jim Mattis, Mike Mullen and Marty Dempsey are all good friends, and I respect them tremendously. I am in alignment with their views.”

 

*

 

Ret. Army Gen. Tony Thomas makes clear his opposition to the idea of using U.S. military forces to quell protests: “Not what American needs to hear...ever, unless we are invaded by an adversary or experience a constitutional failure...ie [sic] a Civil War...”

 

*

 

A third former Joint Chiefs chairman, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, registers disgust. He described his reaction as he watched what happened in Lafayette Park:

 

The first thing was just absolute sadness that people aren’t allowed to protest and that, as I understand it, that was a peaceful protest that was disturbed by force, and that’s not right. That should not happen in America. And so I was sad. I mean, we should all shed tears over that, that particular act. ...I’m glad I don’t have to advise this President. I’m sure the senior military leadership is finding it really difficult these days to provide good, sound military advice.

 

*

 

“I never believed that the Constitution was under threat.”

 

Former Marine four-star Gen. John Allen offered up biting criticism in an interview and essay. On CNN, he described Trump as “assaulting” the First Amendment rights of peaceful demonstrators. “I’ve fought in overseas wars,” he says, “and I never believed that the Constitution was under threat until recently.” 

“The slide of the United States into illiberalism may well have begun on June 1, 2020,” Gen. Allen also wrote. “Remember the date. It may well signal the beginning of the end of the American experiment.”

 

The president of the United States stood in the Rose Garden of the White House on Monday, railed against weak governors and mayors who were not doing enough, in his mind, to control the unrest and the rioters in their cities, and threatened to deploy the U.S. military against American citizens.

 

Even more horrifying, “Trump was clear he views those engaged in the unrest and criminal acts in these riots as terrorists, an enemy.”

 

* 

Former Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell also made headlines, telling CNN that the president’s actions were “dangerous for our democracy” and “dangerous for our country.”

 

* 

A letter signed by 89 generals, admirals, and former top defense department leaders is published.

 

They noted that while,

 

several past presidents have called on our armed services to provide additional aid to law enforcement in times of national crisis – among them Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson – these presidents used the military to protect the rights of Americans, not to violate them.

 

All those who serve in the military and government take an oath to support the U.S. Constitution. By contrast, they warn, “We are alarmed at how the president is betraying this oath by threatening to order members of the U.S. military to violate the rights of their fellow Americans.”

 

A quick check of names reveals that more than half the signatories are Democrats, but a variety of retired military added their names. Several prominent Republicans are also listed. 

A few examples:

 

William Cohen, former Secretary of Defense.

 

Michael B. Donley, former secretary of the U.S. Air Force.

 

John W. Douglass, retired brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force and former assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy.

 

Retired U.S. Air Force general; former director of the National Security Agency and CIA, Michael V. Hayden.

 

Former secretary of the U.S. Navy Sean O’Keefe.

 

*

 

In his book, Rage, Bob Woodward – a book for which the president provided multiple interviews – gathers a variety of descriptions from those who worked in the White House with the man.

 

According to Woodward, Secretary of Defense Mattis would go to church every Sunday and pray for the country, not in the ordinary way, but in full knowledge of the kind of danger his boss represented.

 

“Truth,” Mattis explained, “is no longer governing the White House statements.” Like Tillerson, he described a president who didn’t like to read, who was ill-informed, and too intellectually incurious to understand the nuances of foreign policy. Mattis called him “felony stupid.”

 

* 

Reporter Jonathan Martin says he was unable to get one Republican senator on the record. He did report, however, that while that senator was  “publicly supporting the president,” he admitted in an interview

 

that he might prefer a Biden victory if the G.O.P. managed to preserve its Senate majority. This lawmaker, like a number of Republicans, is uneasy with Mr. Trump’s behavior and weary from the near-weekly barrage of questions from reporters about the latest presidential eruption.

 

“There is an organized effort about how to make our voices useful in 2020,”, another “No Thanks, Donald” Republican, tells Martin.

 

* 

“These people should be executed.” 

Early excerpts from a book by John Bolton paint an unflattering picture of President Trump. Start with small idiocies. Bolton said his boss had to ask if Finland was part of Russia. (Dear MAGA fans: It’s not.) Trump also had to ask if Great Britain, one of our closest allies, had nukes. (It has since 1952). 

“I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure,” Bolton writes, “that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations.” 

Bolton also says he suspected ulterior motives from the start, in President Trump’s dealings with the Ukrainians. As related by The New York Times:

 

On Aug. 20 [2019], Mr. Bolton writes, Mr. Trump “said he wasn’t in favor of sending them anything until all the Russia-investigation materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over.” Mr. Bolton writes that he, Mr. Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper tried eight to 10 times to get Mr. Trump to release the aid.

 

That, according to Bolton, is the famous “quid pro quo,” which Republicans in both the House and Senate swore at great length never existed. 

On another occasion, an angry president suggested that “these people,” his critics in the free press, “should be executed.” 

Peter Baker, a correspondent for The New York Times, has read the Bolton book and notes that the author describes his old boss, variously, as “irrational,” “impulsive,” “erratic,” and “stunningly uninformed.” Trump, he argues is not “fit for the job” and lacks the necessary “competence.”

 

How does the president decide what to do? According to Bolton, there’s a basic calculation at play. “There really isn’t any guiding principle that I was able to discern other than what’s good for Donald Trump’s re-election.”

 

* 

Michael Bender in his book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost tells the story of how Trump wanted to handle protesters outside the White House. “That’s how you’re supposed to handle these people. Crack their skulls!” the president insisted, in reference to the protestors. He wanted the military to go in and “beat the f--k out” of them, saying “just shoot them” multiple times. 

“Well, shoot them in the leg – or maybe the foot,” Trump reportedly said. “But be hard on them!” 

 

* 

“The last guardrail…the election this November.” 

Martha Raddatz is a veteran journalist for ABC News. During an hour-long interview she elicits a number of startling responses from Mr. Bolton. “I don’t think he’s fit for office,” Bolton says of President Trump, near the start. “I don’t think he has the competence to carry out the job.” 

As National Security Adviser, John Bolton’s job was to offer advice on foreign policy and issues from around the world of importance to the nation. Trump’s whole approach to such matters, Bolton said, was that there was no “guiding principle” that he could discern. Trump’s only real focus: “What’s good for Donald Trump’s reelection.” 

What was Trump like, when it came to intelligence briefings, Raddatz asked at one point? Most presidents take briefings every day. Under this president, Bolton said, “The intelligence briefings took place perhaps once or twice a week.”

 

Bolton: Well, I think he was so focused on the reelection that longer term considerations fell by the wayside. So if he thought he could get a photo opportunity with Kim Jong Un at the demilitarized zone in Korea, or he thought he could get a meeting with the ayatollahs from Iran at the United Nations, that there was considerable emphasis on the photo opportunity and the press reaction to it and little or no focus on what such meetings did for the bargaining position of the United States, the strength that our allies saw or didn't see in our position, their confidence that we knew what we were doing. And I think it became very clear to foreign leaders—that they were dealing with a president who just wasn’t serious about many of these issues, to our detriment as a country.

 

But he wanted a probe of Joe Biden in exchange for delivering the security assistance that was part of the congressional legislation that had been passed several years before. So that in his mind, he was bargaining to get the investigation, using the resources of the federal government, which I found very disturbing.

 

And I found it using national security to advance his own political position. Now, in the course of the impeachment affair, the defense of the president was he cares about the general corruption in the Ukraine. And that was on his mind. That’s utter nonsense.

 

Who did Bolton think knew about the quid pro quo?

 

Bolton: Well, I think Secretary Pompeo understood. I think the Pentagon understood. I think the intelligence community understood. I think people in the White House understood. He wasn’t – president wasn’t shy in voicing the view of the Ukraine – that, that’s what he wanted.

 

Raddatz: The New York Times reported on that August conversation. And the president denied it, tweeting, “I never told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens.” Is the president lying?

 

Bolton: Yes, he is. And it’s not the first time, either. This is why I think it’s important to get these kinds of facts out on the table. 

 

…There was no doubt this was political. And what he was able to do during impeachment was convince people that somehow he only had the issue of corruption in the Ukraine in mind. And that was the least of his concerns.

 

He tells Ms. Raddatz he’s fearful if Trump should manage to secure a second term. Impeachment didn’t sober him. The president, Bolton says, “didn’t learn lessons from it, other than that he could get away with it, which leaves only the last guardrail…the election this November.”

 

Bolton: I hope it will remember him as a one-term president who didn’t plunge the country irretrievably into a downward spiral we can’t recover from. We can get over one term. I have absolute confidence – even if it’s not the miracle of a conservative Republican being elected in November.

 

Two terms, I’m more troubled about…

 

*

 

“Attention span of a fruit fly.”

 

In an interview later, National Security Advisor Bolton says it was impossible to keep the president focused on foreign policy. Trump, he explained, had the “attention span of a fruit fly.”

 

Bolton also says the president absolutely put self-interest ahead of U.S. national security in his dealings with Ukraine – behavior which led to the first of two impeachments. (The White House blocked Bolton from testifying during the first impeachment proceeding, but he later backed up almost everything other witnesses had said.

 

* 

Top officials at the Department of Justice decide to warn Congress that Attorney General Bill Barr has been giving Roger Stone breaks because he’s a friend of President Trump. Aaron Zelinsky, one of four prosecutors who resigned in protest, tells lawmakers his team was prepared in February to hit Stone with a steep sentencing recommendation. This, they believed, would be merited, due to Stone’s “long-term lying to impede an investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, a grave national security matter.”  

Sixty-five law professors and faculty members at George Washington University Law School, Barr’s alma mater, offer support for the prosecutors who decided to resign. Barr’s actions as attorney general, they write, “have undermined the rule of law, breached constitutional norms, and damaged the integrity and traditional independence of his office and of the Department of Justice.” 

Among the Attorney General’s sins, they note that he

 

obfuscated and misled the American public about the results of the Mueller investigation. He wrongfully interfered in the day-to-day activities of career prosecutors, and continues to do so, bending the criminal justice system to benefit the President’s friends and target those perceived to be his enemies.

 

Finally, they add, “We include members of both major political parties, and of none. We have different legal specialties and represent a broad spectrum of approaches to the law.” 

JULY 2020

 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel clearly has Trump in mind (though she does not name the president) when she compares her approach to handling the COVID-19 crisis to his. “As we are experiencing firsthand, you cannot fight the pandemic with lies and disinformation any more than you can fight it with hate or incitement to hatred,” she tells reporters. 

“The limits of populism and denial of basic truths are being laid bare.”

 

*

 

President Trump issues a full pardon for seven-time, jury-convicted perjurer, Roger Stone. Six of his felonies involve lying to protect…Donald J. Trump. The seventh is for witness intimidation: that is, trying to get another witness to lie to protect the president.

 

Sen. Romney tweets condemnation: “An American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president.” He describes Trump’s decision to keep a pal out of the slammer as a case of “unprecedented, historic corruption.”

 

* 

Robert Mueller, whose investigation helped bring Stone to justice, and, again, has been a Republican his entire life – not counting toddlerhood – breaks his silence in an editorial:

 

I feel compelled to respond both to broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper, and to specific claims that Roger Stone was a victim of our office.

 

[When a witness lies repeatedly]…it strikes at the core of the government’s efforts to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable.

 

* 

In a TV interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News, the president says he wants people to have their freedom. So, he’s not going to push anyone to wear masks. 

After watching a clip of Trump’s interview, Dr. Jonathan Reiner tells CNN that there is “no downside” to wearing masks. If all of us did, we would have a much better chance of reopening schools safely. We could revive a stalled economy and even save fall sports, like NFL football. “He’s unteachable,” Dr. Reiner grimaced, when asked about Trump,

 

and I can’t understand it. His failure to understand this simple public health measure, his reluctance to accept the advice of all his public health experts, makes me wonder whether he really is qualified to manage this. This is not a sophisticated question where experts differ.

 

Dr. Reiner said Trump’s failure in regard to such a simple matter “raises serious doubts about his competence.”

 

* 

With Black Lives Matter protests (and also rioting) continuing in several cities, Trump orders federal agents to Portland, Oregon.

Tom Ridge, the first head of the Department of Homeland Security, makes it clear he believes the president has leaped over the line by sending paramilitary forces to cities and states where mayors and governors have not asked for help. Ridge notes that his department was established to protect America from “global terrorism.” 

In a radio interview he is blunt:  “It was not established to be the president’s personal militia.” 

Ridge says he would have been happy to work with local and state leaders if they asked him. Otherwise, “it would be a cold day in hell before I would consent to an uninvited, unilateral intervention” into any American city.

 

* 

“We still have a Constitution.” 

Michael Chertoff, the second head of Homeland Security, also faults the president for tone and tactics. Trump, he says, isn’t helping with his “very belligerent, aggressive tone.” Nor does Chertoff like the look of federal agents in battle gear roaming Portland streets, grabbing protesters, and tossing them into unmarked vehicles. “Whatever the statutory authority is, we still have a Constitution and that requires reasonable suspicion to stop somebody,” he tells reporters. We require, “probable cause to arrest them. And it’s not clear to me that that is being applied in this case.” 

Chertoff later speaks to the Washington Post, and expresses his concern because Trump has singled out Democratic cities. “Essentially, he’s suggesting this is a political maneuver. As someone who’s spent four years at the department, the idea that people would be suggesting that it’s going to be a tool of political activity is very unsettling.” 

“It’s very problematic legally as well as morally,” he added.

 

* 

Retired three-star Gen. Russell Honoré has not forgotten the oath he took to defend the U.S. Constitution. 

In a televised interview, he blasts Team Trump for sending men in uniform to crush protests in U.S. cities. That uniform, he says, “represents the cloth of our nation” and “it’s not to be used as an instrument of protest suppression.” Real soldiers, he added, “don’t just walk up to people and start beating them…with batons.” 

Watch this, he says. A film clip runs, and a man in paramilitary garb beats a protester who we later find out is a U.S. Navy veteran. “What kind of bullshit is this?” Gen. Honoré fumes.

 

 

*

 

Major Adam DeMarco braved enemy fire during a combat tour in Iraq. As a top commander in the Washington D.C. National Guard, he issues a statement about the events of June 1. That was the evening when peaceful protesters were driven away from the White House. He also agrees to testify before Congress. 

DeMarco’s statement makes clear. He will testify in keeping with his “oath to support and defend the Constitution.” He will describe the scene that night. Park Police, he will note, were armed with tear gas. He was told it was not to be used. “From what I could observe,” he will say, “the demonstrators were behaving peacefully, exercising their First Amendment rights.”

 

* 

In an op-ed piece Dr. Steven Calabresi, professor of law at Northwestern and co-founder of the Federalist Society, thunders disdain for the president, after Trump suggests in a tweet that perhaps we should delay the coming election. 

As Fox News explains, the Federalist Society helped craft the lists of judges with whom Trump filled the many open seats on the federal bench once he took office. (Many of those openings remained because Senate Leader Mitch McConnell blocked President Obama from filling them during the last two years he sat in the Oval Office.) Calabresi tells reporters he has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980, ever since he first cast a ballot. 

Dr. Calabresi also notes that he defended Trump against what he called an “unconstitutional investigation” by Robert Mueller. Now, even a defender of the president is scared, and rightfully so. 

He writes:

 

I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again ... and his removal from office by the Senate.

 

Calabresi calls on “every Republican in Congress” to tell the president that postponing the election would be “illegal, unconstitutional, and without precedent in American history. Anyone who says otherwise,” he adds, “should never be elected to Congress again.”

 

* 

Rarely, if ever, have so many members of one political party made disdain for their party’s candidate so clear. Republicans of principle are standing up and saying they won’t vote for Trump. 

Jimmy Tosh, a Tennessee hog-farmer, lifelong member of the GOP, and sometimes big donor, says he agrees with 80% of what Trump does, but “I just cannot stand a liar…I made the decision I will not support a Republican candidate in an election until Trump is gone.”

 

* 

Also supporting groups working to defeat Trump are hedge fund billionaire Andy Redleaf, a Federalist Society board member, and Sidney Jansma Jr., an oil and gas executive and frequent donor to Republican candidates and causes. 

Redleaf tells reporters that Joe Biden will be the first Democrat he has ever voted for to be president.

 

 

AUGUST 2020 

In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, now-retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman speaks out against the president. 

After 21 years, six months, and ten days, Vindman has left the U.S. Army. Vindman is a patriot and was scheduled for promotion to colonel. The Army review board said his service had been meritorious. He deserved to be advanced. 

President Trump had other plans. A campaign of retaliation commenced. The promotion was blocked.

 

____________________ 

“At no point in my career or life have I felt our nation’s values under greater threat and in more peril than at this moment.” 

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman

____________________ 

 

Vindman, of course had told lawmakers in Congress that he had heard Trump’s call to the President of Ukraine. In his view, it was a craven attempt to force the Ukrainians to help him win re-election in 2020. A national security expert, Lt. Col. Vindman warned that in holding up military aid to Ukraine, until the Ukrainians  agreed to “play ball,” Trump had put U.S. national security at risk. 

(This was what Dr. Fiona Hill and other White House security experts also said in their testimony. Their claims were eventually bolstered by Trump’s former National Security Advisor, the less-than-courageous John Bolton. Bolton saved his “testimony” and put it in a book for sale.) 

Now, Vindman promised that in retirement he would not flinch. He would speak out against any “attacks on our national security,” as he saw them. 

He would do all he could to “keep our nation safe and strong against internal and external threats.” 

It is those “internal threats” that moved Lt. Col. Vindman to warn:

 

At no point in my career or life have I felt our nation’s values under greater threat and in more peril than at this moment. Our national government during the past few years has been more reminiscent of the authoritarian regime my family fled more than 40 years ago than the country I have devoted my life to serving.

 

An immigrant from the old Soviet Union, along with the rest of his family, Vindman’s career had been destroyed by “a mendacious president and his enablers.” Still, he did not despair.

 

He continued:

 

During my testimony in the House impeachment inquiry, I reassured my father, who experienced Soviet authoritarianism firsthand, saying, “Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth.” Despite Trump’s retaliation, I stand by that conviction. Even as I experience the low of ending my military career, I have also experienced the loving support of tens of thousands of Americans. Theirs is a chorus of hope that drowns out the spurious attacks of a disreputable man and his sycophants.

 

When a member of the congressional committee asked how he had the confidence to reassure his father that way, Vindman was clear. “Congressman, he replied, “because this is America. This is the country I have served and defended, that all my brothers have served, and here, right matters.” 

He remained hopeful despite his own fate. He had earned a promotion. It had been denied. “To this day, despite everything that has happened, I continue to believe in the American Dream. I believe that in America, right matters. I want to help ensure that right matters for all Americans.”

 

* 

Phil Heimlich, a lifelong Republican from Cincinnati, writing for a group of like-minded members of his party, warns us about the president. In an opinion piece in USA Today, he sums up the threat posed by Donald J. Trump:

 

In 2016, many of us who wanted change in the White House took a chance on Donald Trump. We thought he’d lead as a conservative Republican. Instead, he has imperiled our republic.

 

We are alarmed by the anti-democratic tactics and flagrant abuse of power committed daily by Donald Trump. 

 

Heimlich continues:

 

He has created a culture of fear within the Republican Party as well as across the country, demonizing anyone with differing opinions. He belittles, berates, and ruins the careers of all who oppose him — including his own appointed government agency heads, respected military leaders and war heroes.

 

He has undermined the rule of law, obstructed justice, and issued pardons and commutations to personal cronies who helped cover up his misdeeds.

 

* 

Another former member of the Trump administration turns on his old boss. This time, it’s Miles Taylor, a lifelong Republican, albeit a young one. Taylor served in the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, and rose to chief of staff under Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

 

“What we saw week in and week out…was terrifying.” 

In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Taylor offers withering assessment of the man he was at first glad to serve. The “frequent follies” of Trumpian behavior, Taylor warns, put “the safety of Americans at risk.” 

“I can attest that the country is less secure as a direct result of the president’s actions,” he adds. 

In a separate video, Taylor tells the story of a meeting DHS officials had with the president after California suffered through a devastating summer of forest fires. “He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down from a wildfire because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him and that politically it wasn’t a base for him.” 

Finally, he notes:

 

The president’s bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic is the ultimate example. In his cavalier disregard for the seriousness of the threat, Trump failed to make effective use of the federal crisis response system painstakingly built after 9/11. Years of DHS planning for a pandemic threat have been largely wasted.

 

“What we saw week in and week out, for me, after two and a half years in that administration, was terrifying,” Taylor recalls in a video out this week. That video is the work of a group of Republicans who support Joe Biden in the coming election. For Miles Taylor, the choice is clear:

 

Given what I have experienced in the administration, I have to support Joe Biden for president and even though I am not a Democrat, even though I disagree on key issues, I’m confident that Joe Biden will protect the country and I’m confident that he won’t make the same mistakes as this President.

 

* 

A group called “Republican Voters Against Trump,” has created an online collection of more than 500 selfie videos from Republicans, making clear their contempt for President Trump. They rue the day they voted for Trump and vow not to repeat the mistake. 

Josh Harrison, 40, is typical. “Hi, my name is Josh. I live in North Carolina, and I voted for Donald Trump,” he explains in his video. “My bad, fam. Not my proudest moment. I will not be voting for him again.” 

He makes it clear, 2020, will be different. “It’s the first time I’ve ever voted for a Democrat,” he says. “But if Joe Biden drops out and the D.N.C. runs a tomato can, I will vote for the tomato can, because I believe the tomato can will do less harm than our current president.”

 

* 

“Biden has my vote because we need to do whatever we can to get that monster out of the White House,” says Kelly from Florida.

 

* 

Speakers at the Democratic National Convention, or speaking about the choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in November, are clear. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, comes out in favor of Mr. Biden. 

We have, Powell said, a nation divided, and “a president doing everything in his power to keep it that way.”

 

* 

Powell, a lifelong Republican, was joined by former GOP senator Chuck Hagel, who accused the president of “dereliction of duty.” Trump, warned Hagel, “has degraded and debased the presidency and our country in the eyes of the world.”

 

*

____________________  

“I never thought I would have a president who is a danger to national security.”  

Retired Lt. Gen. Jack Weinstein

____________________ 

 

Retired Lt. Gen. Jack Weinstein added his voice to the chorus. Citing his 36 years in uniform, he said, “I never thought I would have a president who is a danger to national security.”

 

* 

With QAnon conspiracy theories gaining traction, reporters ask President Trump if he believes in “Q’s” theories. He decides to play dumb, and says all he knows is that these people who believe “Q” like him. 

Rep. Liz Cheney describes the QAnon movement as a “dangerous lunacy that should have no place in American politics.”

Making America safe from imaginary pedophiles.

 

* 

Rep. Kinzinger sums up the secretive musings of “Q” this way, tweeting: “Could be Russian propaganda or a basement dweller. Regardless, no place in Congress for these conspiracies.”

 

* 

Sen. Ben Sasse slams Trump, without naming him. “QAnon is nuts,” he tweets, “and real leaders call conspiracy theories conspiracy theories.”

 

* 

Gov. Jeb Bush tweets, derisively, “Why in the world would the President not kick Q’anon supporters’ butts? Nut jobs, rascists [sic], haters have no place in either Party.”

 

* 

Vice President Pence is put on the spot and asked by reporters if he believes in a secret cabal of cannibals and pedophiles, who happen to be Democrats, working against his boss and hoping to destroy America? 

Pence does his very best to change the subject before finally admitting, “I dismiss it out of hand.”

 

* 

Even Sen. Graham weighs in. “Well,” he tells an interviewer, “QAnon is batshit crazy. Crazy stuff. Inspiring people to violence. I think it is a platform that plays off people’s fears, that compels them to do things they normally wouldn’t do. And it’s very much a threat.”

 

* 

Miles Taylor and Elizabeth Neumann, both of whom served in the Department of Homeland Security, as gears in the machine of the Trump administration, have started a new group. The Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform (REPAIR) “will include people who work or have worked for Trump but want to elect Biden and reform the Republican Party.” 

Taylor and Neumann hope to get 20 to 40 others to join.

 

* 

A group of 27 former GOP members of Congress, of similar mind, has announced plans to fight reelection of the president. They cite Trump’s “corruption, destruction of democracy, blatant disregard for moral decency, and [an] urgent need to get the country back on course.”

 

* 

Members of the Lincoln Project, another renegade Republican group, have a similar goal. Former RNC chair Michael Steele joined today. Steele explained his decision in words that echo Taylor and many others. “The chair behind the Resolute Desk has always been bigger than any political party,” he said. “Sadly, we have witnessed its occupant devolve into preying upon fears and resentments with narcissism that nurtures only chaos and confusion.”

 

 

SEPTEMBER 2020 

____________________ 

“I believe the current administration is a real threat to the republic.” 

General Peter Chiarelli

____________________ 

 

*

 

In his book, Rage, Bob Woodward quotes a number of figures from the Trump administration. On one occasion, Sec. of Defense Mattis warned Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, “The president has no moral compass.”

 

“True,” Coats replied. “To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”

 

*

 

Gary Cohn, Trump’s first chief White House economic advisor, describes his old boss as “a professional liar.”

 

* 

Trump’s first White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, offered a clear-eyed view of Mr. Trump. “The president,” he said, “has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way.”

 

* 

Woodward also cites Gen. Kelly, who replaced Priebus. “The president’s unhinged,”  Kelly warned staff at one point. “He’s an idiot,” he said after another disastrous meeting. “It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in crazytown.”

 

* 

The federal courts continue to operate, although if Trump wins a second term, they may be superfluous. A former federal judge and prosecutor named John Gleeson has issued a scathing denunciation of the Department of Justice’s decision to drop prosecution of a case against Gen. Michael T. Flynn. Flynn admitted to a charge of perjury, and in return avoided several additional felony counts. 

Under Attorney General Bill Barr, the DOJ somehow decided it would be great if the entire case were dismissed. 

Siding with the trial judge who had refused to drop the case, Gleeson described the move by Barr and his minions as a “corrupt and politically motivated favor unworthy of our justice system.” 

According to Gleeson, calling the decision by DOJ to drop the Flynn case “highly irregular” would be “a study in understatement.” 

Nor did Gleeson have any doubt where the push originated. “In the United States,” Judge Gleeson said, “Presidents do not orchestrate pressure campaigns to get the Justice Department to drop charges against defendants who have pleaded guilty – twice, before two different judges – and whose guilt is obvious.”

 

* 

The National Academy of Scientists and the National Academy of Medicine, appalled by the president’s approach to dealing with the pandemic, both warn, “We find ongoing reports and incidents of the politicization of science, particularly the overriding of evidence and advice from public health officials and the derision of government scientists to be alarming.”

 

* 

Olivia Troye, who worked for VP Pence until recently, says White House officials often discussed what would have to be done if Trump lost in November and refused to leave office. 

 

* 

His former National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster, said the president’s failure to condemn white supremacy, namely the Proud Boys, during a recent presidential debate was like blowing a wide open layup in basketball.

 

* 

As the election approaches, it’s telling in the extreme to note how many prominent Republicans and conservatives find it impossible to support the leader of the party. Sen. Romney, the GOP nominee for president in 2012, plans to write in some name other than “Trump” in November.

 

* 

Carly Fiorina, who campaigned to win the GOP nomination in 2016, has said she will vote for Joe Biden. She calls the Democratic candidate “a person of humility and empathy and character.”

*

 

Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who also fought to win the 2016 nomination for president, is another firm “no” and will vote for Biden. Like almost everyone else quoted for this post, he considers Trump to be a man of no character and, worse, a threat to the rule of law.

 

*

 

Two current Republican governors have said they will not support Trump’s reelection. Gov. Hogan has already voted early. He tells reporters he wrote in Ronald Reagan’s name instead.

 

* 

Governor Phil Scott of Vermont says he will not vote for Trump.

 

* 

Former Michigan governor, Rick Snyder, plans to cast a vote for Biden. “Trump lacks a moral compass,” he says by way of explaining his decision. 

Trump “ignores the truth.”

 

*

 

“You can’t trust him.” 

A new critic of the president emerges. This time it’s his sister and federal judge, Maryanne Trump Barry, 82. In secret tapes of conversations with her niece, Mary, who wrote a book about her uncle, we hear what a family insider thinks. “He has no principles,” his sister tells the author. “You can’t trust him,” she adds, her comments based on intimate knowledge gained over decades observing her brother. She tells Mary that Donald had someone take his SAT test for him. “He doesn’t read,” she notes. As for his performance in office, the president’s sister has this to say. “The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy sh*t.” 

 

*

 

During a campaign call a constituent asks Sen. Sasse why he has been critical of Mr. Trump.

 

Sasse unloads. He explains that the man in the Oval Office “kisses dictator’s butts” and “sells out [our] allies.”

 

Sasse wondered rhetorically why his party ever signed on for four years of Trump. “What the heck were any of us thinking that selling a TV-obsessed narcissistic individual to the American people was a good idea?” The president, he added, “mocks evangelicals behind closed doors,” mistreats women and totally mishandled the coronavirus crisis. Trump spends federal dollars “like a drunken sailor” and “flirted with white supremacists.” Sasse added that the American people were tired of the president’s “stupid political obsessions,” his “rage tweeting” and the fact “his family has treated the presidency like a business opportunity.”

 

 

* 

Gen. McMaster warns that Trump is “making it easy” for Russia to interfere in the 2020 election. 

“It’s just wrong...it’s just really important for our leaders to be responsible about this.” Putin, he reminds anyone who might have forgotten, is our enemy and wants to sow division.

 

* 

The head of the Centers for Disease Control, Dr. Robert Redfield, was overheard during a flight to say, “Everything he says is false,” in reference to COVID-19. Dr. Redfield later admitted he made that comment. 

The “he” Dr. Redfield was talking about is Dr. Scott Atlas, now the president’s favorite person to get terrible advice from on defeating the coronavirus.

 

(Dr. Atlas is a radiologist, a smart man, but not an expert on infectious diseases.)

 

Dr. Redfield and other members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force testify before Congress. Redfield is clear. Masks are “the most powerful public health tool” we have in the fight against the virus. “We have clear scientific evidence they work, and they are our best defense. I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine.” 

 

He can’t promise lawmakers a vaccine will be ready by the end of the year. Even if it is: wear a mask. “If I don’t get an immune response, the vaccine’s not going to protect me. This face mask will,” he says.

 

*

 

Adm. Brett Giroir agrees. Wearing a face covering “is one of the most important things we can do to prevent spread.”

 

Dr. Birx, left, Dr. Fauci, right, in masks.

 

* 

A group of 34 Republicans who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, issue a letter, in support of Mr. Biden:

 

What unites us now is a deep conviction that four more years of a Trump presidency will morally bankrupt this country, irreparably damage our democracy, and permanently transform the Republican Party into a toxic personality cult.

 

*

 

More than a hundred former staffers for John McCain sign a letter saying, like the late senator, they will put, “Country first.” They will work to elect Biden. Their effort is led by Mark Salter, Sen. McCain’s former chief aide and speechwriter. “We have different views of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party platform – most of us will disagree with a fair amount of it – but we all agree that getting Donald Trump out of office is clearly in the national interest,” Salter says.

 

* 

Breaking with tradition dating back to Zachary Taylor, editors of the Scientific American say they are “compelled” to support Joe Biden.

 

The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people – because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives by the middle of September. He has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its greatest challenges.

 

That is why we urge you to vote for Joe Biden, who is offering fact-based plans to protect our health, our economy and the environment…[He will] set the country back on course for a safer, more prosperous and more equitable future.

 

The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic…He has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its greatest challenges.

 

* 

A coalition of 170 environmental groups signs a joint letter calling on all those who care about the future of the planet to vote Biden/Harris. “Only by rallying behind the Democratic Party can we end the Trump administration’s unprecedented malignancy, fear mongering, pathological lying, and atrocious policy making. This is not the year to…waste a single vote.”

 

*

 

Christine Todd Whitman, former Republican governor of New Jersey, will be backing Biden. She considers Trump’s environmental policies a disaster. “It’s mind-boggling, the ignorance that he displays on this subject. He doesn’t understand climate change. He doesn’t particularly believe in science.”

 

* 

Tim Miller, former spokesman for the Republican National Committee, lets rip after watching Trump conduct a campaign rally in Henderson, Nevada. Bad enough, in these days of mass coronavirus spread, that he joked about his followers crowding together and howling in anger. “The spittle was flying,” Miller says. “So were the lies.” He called the whole affair “a public-health monstrosity.” He went on to describe the president’s appearance as “a shocking and unimaginably wheels-off undertaking given that it came amid a pandemic that is still killing a thousand Americans a day and with wildfires making much of the West Coast uninhabitable.” 

“Everything about it,” Mr. Miller said of the rally, “was fucking appalling.”

 

In fact it was so appalling that it would stand out as the single most appalling and reckless political event hosted by any presidential nominee in my lifetime before yesterday by a long shot, if you just didn’t count anything else that Donald Trump did.

 

And that’s the problem. Somewhere along the way he removed many people’s ability to be appalled. 

 

*

 

Josh Veneble, former chief of staff to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, announces that he will be working to defeat Donald Trump in the coming election.

 

* 

____________________ 

U.S. officials and candidates “should use the absolute greatest amount of restraint and caution if they are considering publicly calling the validity of an upcoming election into question.”

 

Senate Intelligence Committee Report, unanimous conclusion

____________________ 

 

With  almost every poll showing him going down to defeat, President Trump claims we’ll never know who won. Recently, he tweeted ominously, that “result may never be accurately determined, which is what some want.” 

Sen. Rubio and other Republicans in the Upper House must once again clean up after their standard bearer.

 

“I don’t think we’ll have inaccurate election results,” Rubio contradicted. “They may take a lot longer than they ever have because of the amount of mailed ballots that are going to come in and so forth. But I don’t have any concerns about the accuracy of the election.”

 

In a recent report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously endorsed the conclusion that U.S. officials and candidates “should use the absolute greatest amount of restraint and caution if they are considering publicly calling the validity of an upcoming election into question.”

 

“Such a grave allegation can have significant national security and electoral consequences,” including aiding foreign intelligence services, the report adds.

 

* 

We should note that 489 former U.S. intelligence leaders, including nearly two dozen retired four-star officers, have signed a letter endorsing Joe Biden for president. 

They simply state that our “current president” is not “up to the enormous responsibilities of his office.”

 

Signatories include Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who served as the Army’s second-ranking officer before retiring in 2012. Until now, he tells NPR, he has never been involved in politics; but this election is different.

 

“I believe the current administration is a real threat to the republic.” He cites the president’s “attacks on institutions” and his “failure to lead,” especially on a coronavirus response. It “makes me ill,” he adds, to see that the president has politicized the wearing of masks to prevent the spread of virus. “I believed I had to stand up and be counted,” he gives as a reason for signing the letter. 

Signatories include Trump’s former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired Air Force General Paul J. Selva, retired Navy SEAL Vice Admiral P. Gardner Howe, III, who served as CIA’s director of military affairs, and retired Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Paul Zukunft.

 

Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security is the bluntest of all. The young Republican says he’ll vote for Biden in November and gives his reasons. “I’ll take him – and left-leaning policies – over Donald Trump – and the republic-breaking danger he poses – any day of the week.”  

Reporters for Time magazine also note:

 

One former senior official who regularly briefed the President is considering speaking out against his former boss, too. “Everything, every decision, was made based on his re-election as opposed to what’s good for the country,” the official says of Trump. “There is no bottom to this guy … There is no level so low that he will not stoop to. And his sycophants will support him every step of the way.”

 

* 

President Trump spends the last weeks of the 2020 campaign calling for the Department of Justice to prosecute political opponents. At his rallies he says Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama should be in jail. 

Jonathan Turley, a legal scholar at George Washington University, warns: “Many of us have criticized President Trump for these reckless comments.” 

Turley was the only legal scholar called to testify, by Republicans, during impeachment hearings. He alone of four who did, argued that what Trump had done in his call to the President of Ukraine was not grounds for removal from office. Now, he says that the president’s demands for retribution “undermine not just the Justice Department but his administration.”

 

* 

Former acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein agrees with Professor Turley. “The Department of Justice,” he says bluntly, “will ignore the president’s remarks about indicting political opponents just as the department has always done in the past. It may be legal for the president to make those requests, but it is not legal for the attorney general to act on them.”

 

* 

In an article in The Atlantic, unnamed sources say the president referred to Marines killed in World War I as “losers.” Jennifer Griffin, longtime Fox News Pentagon reporter, is able to confirm many of the damaging revelations in the story. Sources also tell her that Trump called the Vietnam War “stupid.” 

“Anyone who went,” he told aides, “was a sucker.”

 

* 

“Hitler was right…gas the Jews.”

 

During the first presidential debate Trump refuses to condemn the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group.

 

As one supporter of the Boys admitted, if most members of the group “were pressed on the issue… 90% of them would tell you something along the lines of ‘Hitler was right. Gas the Jews.’” 

*

 

Republican mega-donor Meg Whitman will vote for Biden.

 

*

 

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is another “no” on Trump. 

 

* 

Jennifer Horn, former chair of the Republican Party for New Hampshire and a founding member of the Lincoln Project, explains the group’s support for Biden.

 

I mean, I’m not trying to tell people that Joe Biden is going to be a conservative president, but what I think is…generally true about Joe Biden, I think he’s a decent person. And I think that he cares about the country more than he cares about himself. And I think that those two things alone put him light years ahead of Donald Trump for being qualified to be president, the United States.

 

* 

Several billionaires and their wives have signed on with the Lincoln Project because no tax cut, no amount of money you can make, can ever make up for the desecration of the U.S. Constitution.

 

* 

A group called 43 Alumni for Biden issues a letter, signed by 21 staffers who worked for George W. Bush. They also announce they will support the Democratic candidate in November. They explain:

 

The onslaught of insults and vulgarity we have witnessed in recent years must stop. Our children are watching us. If we explain away misogyny and racism as political tactics we are complicit in normalizing completely inappropriate behavior. This is not who we are as a nation. Americans want a successful country, but how is that possible if what we see modeled from the White House is disrespect and outright hate?

 

*

 

We know the ghost of the GOP nominee for president in 2008 would vote for Biden if angels had access to absentee ballots. Sen. McCain once called Trump a danger to the nation. Cindy McCain, his wife, has announced she will vote Biden/Harris: “Joe Biden is a wonderful man and a friend of the McCain family.”

 

*

 

Meghan McCain, a staunch conservative, will vote for Biden, having made it clear she cannot stomach the current occupant of the White House.  

 

*

 

Retired four-star general and former Secretary of State Powell has announced he will vote for Joe Biden.

 

*

 

“Lost the right and authority to be commander in chief.”

 

After Trump tells reporters that top Pentagon leadership keeps “endless wars” going to ensure arms contractors keep profiting, retired four-star Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni airs his profound disgust:

 

Trump has lost the right and authority to be commander in chief. His despicable comments used to describe the honorable men and women in uniform, especially those who have given the last full measure, demonstrated the lack of respect for those he is charged to lead. He must go.

 

I have too many friends resting in Arlington to allow his disgraceful comments to stand.

 

*

 

A group of seventy-three top former Republican intelligence officials, announce they will vote for the challenger in November. In a full-page ad, in the Wall Street Journal, they explain their reasoning:

 

Trump has demonstrated that he lacks the character and competence to lead this nation and has engaged in corrupt behavior that renders him unfit to serve as president….We have concluded that Donald Trump has failed our country and that Vice President Joe Biden should be elected the next President of the United States.

 

*

 

Ret. Admiral William McRaven, who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, will vote for someone besides Donald J. Trump.

 

*

 

Former Republican congressman Charlie Dent is voting Biden/Harris. He sets forth his reasons:

 

For me, it’s about right or wrong. Stability vs. instability, security vs. insecurity, normal vs. abnormal. That’s why I’m doing this because I feel that we need to return some sense of normalcy to the function of government. We simply don’t have that now. And that’s why I’m going to be voting for Joe Biden for president.

 

There are greater principles involved like the rule of law. We have to defend democratic values….A free press, an independent judiciary. These are things that are very important.

 

*

 

Picking one voter out of tens of millions doesn’t prove anything. But Ed Good, 95, a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, and a lifelong Republican, is too good to miss. He voted for Trump in 2016 but says he will not make the same mistake twice.

 

Trump, he says, is the “worst president we have ever had.”

 

* 

“It’s derailed by the person at the very top.” 

A top aide to Vice President Pence, and until recently a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, has said she will vote for the challenger in November. Olivia Troye, who joined the Task Force when it formed in January, says she wanted the American people to know the truth. She describes the president as “disruptive” during meetings and unable to “focus.” 

Troye calls herself a lifelong Republican. She speaks well of everyone else involved in the work of the Task Force. She’s blunt about the president: “Everything that you’re putting in place is derailed not just by a random person – it’s derailed by a No. 1. It’s derailed by the person at the very top.”

 

 

OCTOBER 2020 

Former Montana governor and head of the Republican National Committee, Mark Racicot announces that he is not crazy.  

“Even as a Republican, I will not be supporting Donald Trump for president,” he says, “and I will not be voting for him. That means that I’ll be voting for Joe Biden for president.” A chief executive, at any level, he notes, must have “a sense of decency, a sense of respect, a sense of hard work.” 

Racicot added that he did not expect to agree with many of Biden’s policies, adding, “The content of a man’s character” was “more important than any other issue.”

 

* 

Several hundred former judges, state and local bar leaders, and three past-presidents of the American Bar Association, promise “broad support in the legal community” for current members of the Department of Justice who wish to protest against the politicization of the DOJ, at the behest of President Trump and with the acquiescence of Attorney General Bill Barr.

 

We support DOJ attorneys and personnel who stand by their oaths and the Department of Justice’s duty to do justice for the public by not participating in partisan misuse of the DOJ. They honor the rule of law, our profession, and the country as we face this crucial test for our democracy.

 

Mr. Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transition of power – even if solely intended as another effort to discourage voters – heightens our concern about what actions the Attorney General might take that would undermine the vote and the rule of law.

 

The fact that 895 leaders in the field of American jurisprudence feel a need to warn us that democracy is at risk should tell you all you need to know before you vote.

 

* 

For the first time in more than a century, the conservative newspaper, the New Hampshire Union Leader, endorses a Democrat for president. 

Union Leader editors explained:

 

We were hopeful with Trump’s win that he might change, that the weight and responsibility of the Oval Office might mold a more respectful and presidential man. We have watched with the rest of the world as the mantle of the presidency has done very little to change Trump while the country and world have changed significantly.

 

President Trump is not always 100 percent wrong, but he is 100 percent wrong for America.

 

They cite, for example, the “7 TRILLION in new debt,” the president and his GOP enablers have rolled up in just four years. 

They go on:

 

Donald Trump did not create the social-media-driven political landscape we now live in, but he has weaponized it. He is a consummate linguistic takedown artist, ripping apart all comers to the delight of his fanbase but at the expense of the nation. America faces many challenges and needs a president to build this country up. This appears to be outside of Mr. Trump’s skill set.

 

*

____________________

 

“Instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to uninformed ‘opinion leaders’ and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies.”

 

The New England Journal of Medicine

____________________

 

 

The most evocative description of Trump’s handling of the pandemic comes from the esteemed New England Journal of Medicine. Editors sum up his handiwork this way: “Instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to uninformed ‘opinion leaders’ and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies.”  

The Journal almost never steps into the political fray, but the experts in medicine watched how Trump addressed the challenge, and came away shocked and disgusted:

 

Anyone else who recklessly squandered lives and money in this way would be suffering legal consequences. Our leaders have largely claimed immunity for their actions. But this [2020] election gives us the power to render judgment. Reasonable people will certainly disagree about the many political positions taken by candidates. But truth is neither liberal nor conservative. When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.

 

The editors said that the Trump administration had “taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.” 

So, a taste of what so many have said over the last four years. And now we return to the beginning.

 

* 

Twenty former U.S. attorneys, all Republicans, also sign a letter Tuesday, warning, in a way, that this blogger has been right all along. President Trump, they say, is “a threat to the rule of law in our country.”

 

“The President has clearly conveyed that he expects his Justice Department appointees and prosecutors to serve his personal and political interests,” said the former prosecutors in an open letter. They accused Trump of taking “action against those who have stood up for the interests of justice.”

 

“He has politicized the Justice Department, dictating its priorities along political lines and breaking down the barrier that prior administrations had maintained between political and prosecutorial decision-making,”

 

Greg Brower, a former U.S. attorney for Nevada, served during the first years of the Trump administration as the F.B.I.’s assistant director for congressional affairs. He explained why he added his signature to the letter. “I had a up-close view of how the President and the White House dealt with the Justice Department in recent years,” he told a reporter. “It’s clear that President Trump views the Justice Department and the FBI as his own personal law firm and investigative agency,” Brower added. “He made that clear privately – and publicly.”

 

 

NOVEMBER 2020 

Four former communications directors for the Republican National Committee explain that they have cast early ballots for… 

Joe Biden - 3 

Mitt Romney – 1 

Donald J. Trump - 0

 

One, Ryan Mahoney, even posts this picture on Twitter:

 

Trevor  Francis and Lisa Miller join Mahoney in casting ballots for Biden. Doug Heye writes in the name of Sen. Mitt Romney.

 

* 

The National Committee of Asian American Republicans also announces it will be supporting the Democratic challenger!

 

* 

Even leading disease experts on the White House Coronavirus Task Force appear to be turning on the boss. Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator warns in an email obtained by the Washington Post, that the country is “entering the most concerning and most deadly phase of the pandemic.” 

Whereas Trump has said repeatedly that the country is “rounding the corner.” Birx, by contrast, calls for “much more aggressive action” to battle the spread.

 

* 

Dr. Anthony Fauci has warned that the United States is “in for a whole lot of hurt” going into fall and winter. 

This has prompted the president to suggest that he might fire Fauci. At a recent campaign rally, the president responded to a chant, “Fire Fauci!” in typical fashion. He can’t say he’ll fire him before the voting begins, because most Americans trust the doctor far more than the president. Trump grins, and responds, “Don't tell anybody, but let me wait until a little bit after the election.”

 

* 

Once the election is held, and it becomes clear that Biden has won, world leaders begun to call and congratulate him and Ms. Harris. More than a few react like the Munchkins when Dorothy’s house landed on the Wicked Witch of the East. “The world sort of survived four years with a somewhat restrained Trump,” the former Swedish prime minister, Carl Bildt, tweeted on November 4. “A world with a triumphant Trump could well (have been) a different thing,” he said.

 

* 

In Paris, church bells rang at the news of Trump’s defeat. The mayor tweeted, “Welcome back, America.”

 

* 

The prime minister of Sweden tweeted: “Looking forward to strengthening excellent US-Swedish relations and to work jointly for multilateralism, democracy and global security. Together, we can lead a green transition creating jobs for the future.”

 

* 

“We have a lot to do to overcome today’s challenges,” President Emmanuel Macron of France wrote, adding, “Let’s work together!” With Trump, of course, that had proved impossible.

 

* 

Heiko Maas, Germany’s foreign minister no doubt spoke for many of our allies. “This is a moment of relief and joy,” he admitted.

 

* 

While it may be true that the nations of the world do not know exactly what they must do to address the threat of climate change, there was palpable relief that now, at least, the greatest nation in the world would be led by a man who doesn’t deny science. The prime minister of the Fiji Islands realizes his tiny nation could be submerged if nothing is done to halt the slow rise in ocean levels. “Now, more than ever, we need the USA at the helm of these multilateral efforts (and back in the #ParisAgreement – ASAP!),” Frank Bainimarama wrote. 

 

* 

“Take us into a really dark direction.” 

Another cabinet member bites the orange dust. This time it’s Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, who gets fired via tweet. 

In an interview with Military Times magazine, Esper admits he expected to be ousted. He said he knew he was in trouble when he pushed back hard in June, after Trump floated the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in active duty U.S. troops to quell protests in Washington, D.C. – an 1860’s “Civil War” kind of move. “The option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations,” Esper said at the time, directly countering the president’s threatening message. “We are not in one of those situations now,” he continued, adding, “I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.” 

“I was really concerned,” he admitted, “that that continued talk about the Insurrection Act was going to take us in a direction, take us into a really dark direction,” Esper told Military Times. 

You don’t need any great reading skill to figure out what Esper was worried about most – and it wasn’t protesters. 

“And I wanted to make clear what I thought about the situation as secretary of defense and the role of the active-duty forces. And to kind of break the fever, if you will, because I thought that was just a moment in history where…” 

He hesitated a moment before continuing, “…if somebody doesn’t stand up now and say something and kind of push the pause button, then ... it could spiral.”

 

Esper explained why he went along with the president as often as he did. If he had a fight with the president, he could live with that, but if he were fired, he had to think, “Who’s going to come in behind me? It’s going to be a real ‘yes man.’ And then God help us.”

 

He did not mean, “God help us,” because our enemies were on the march. He meant, “God help us,” if Trump had had free rein.

 

* 

“There is no evidence.” 

The members of Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council Executive Committee, including Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Assistant Director Bob Kolasky, U.S. Election Assistance Commission Chair Benjamin Hovland, National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) President Maggie Toulouse Oliver, and National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) President Lori Augino (whose job it was to safeguard the election) issue the following statement:

 

The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result. 

 

When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.

 

Other security measures like pre-election testing, state certification of voting equipment, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) certification of voting equipment help to build additional confidence in the voting systems used in 2020.

 

While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too. When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections.

 

As for who they might have in mind, spreading “unfounded claims” and “misinformation,” you can puzzle that out yourself. 

It’s worth noting that Mr. Hovland is a Trump appointee, Bob Kolasky at CISA, works for Charles Krebs, also a Trump appointee. The other signatories represent bipartisan groups of state election officials.

 

* 

Benjamin Hovland, Chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, tells CNN that while the president has made a number of “bold claims” of voter fraud, “we’ve seen zero evidence.” There’s “nothing that we’ve seen that would cause any real doubt in the integrity of the election.”

 

*

 

Mr. Krebs, the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security, continues to stand by this statement: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” during the recent election.

 

*

 

Naturally, Trump fires Krebs for telling the truth. Republican lawmakers are taken aback by the president’s decision. 

Sen. Shelly Moore Capito had intended to meet with the head of DHS cybersecurity on Wednesday. “I was going to tell him thank you for a good job,” she told reporters. “I’m still going to tell him that – just not today.” 

Capito said she was “disappointed” and flummoxed by the president’s personnel decisions: “I can’t explain it.”

Krebs - he was fired for telling the truth.

 

* 

Sen. Mitt Romney called Trump’s move a “terrible mistake,” adding that Krebs is “an extraordinary talent who does a superb job overseeing the protection of our cyber capabilities.”

 

* 

“It’s the president’s prerogative, but I think it just adds to the confusion and chaos,” Sen. John Cornyn, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, admitted to reporters. “And I’m sure I’m not the only one that would like some return to a little bit more of a – I don’t even know what’s normal anymore.”

 

* 

Three Republican members of the U.S. House go on record. When asked about Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, Rep. Kay Granger, a veteran Texas lawmaker, told CNN she had “great concerns about it,” adding, “I think that it’s time to move on.”

 

* 

When asked if Trump should concede, Fred Upton, a senior Michigan Republican who was targeted by Democrats but won reelection by 16 points, said, “Yeah. I think it’s all said and done.” 

What about voter fraud in his home state? “No one has seen any real identification of any real fraud,” Upton said.

 

* 

Even more to the point – long term – Rep. Kinzinger said he worried that Trump’s claims were shaking the core of democracy. “What I have a real issue with is making unfounded claims of fraud and illegitimacy,” Kinzinger said. “And that has a real damaging effect.”

 

* 

Referencing the president’s ploys to convince Michigan election officials to do his bidding, and just give him the state’s electoral votes, Sen. Romney was brutally honest. “Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the President has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election,” he said. “It is difficult to image a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President.”

 

* 

When Trump refuses to concede that he lost, and begins stirring up supporters with daily claims of a “rigged” election, Stephen Saltzburg, who served in the Justice Department during the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations, and now serves as a professor at the George Washington University School of Law, tells ABC that what Trump has been doing is a scandal. 

“If any other president were to have ever attempted what this president has been doing, people would begin to look at conspiracy to violate election laws.”

 

* 

“Undermining democracy and misleading…his own supporters.” 

“This is delusional,” Mark Braden, the former chief counsel at the Republican National Committee agrees. “I’m a professional Republican so it’s not easy for me to have to deal with my friends on this. Look – voter fraud occurs. I’ve seen it. It happens. But you have to be realistic about the size and scope of it.” 

Republican lawyers told reporters that Trump’s “early legal challenges on voter fraud were defensible and reasonable, even if they had no chance of changing the outcome of the election.” Now, they admit to being “disturbed by the dark turn things have taken,” and worry that Trump’s claims were “undermining democracy and misleading millions of his own supporters.” 

Braden, for one, has no use for a bizarre new argument put forward by Rudy Giuliani and the rest of Trump’s current legal team. “The Venezuelans didn’t screw around with the voting machines,” he grimaces.

 

That’s 100 percent total nonsense. I don’t know what’s going on here. It’s very dangerous that we’re undermining the system. Democracy isn’t a God-given right. It’s a fragile process. The two most important things are that the person with the most lawful votes wins, and that the people who voted for the losing side also believe their candidate lost. This is undermining that idea and it’s a dangerous thing.

 

* 

Sen. Sasse mocks the president’s attorneys making an allegation of “grand fraud” but so far refusing to take the claim in front of a judge. 

“When Trump campaign lawyers have stood before courts under oath, they have repeatedly refused to actually allege grand fraud because there are legal consequences for lying to judges,” he explains.

 

* 

The editorial board at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which endorsed Trump twice and was owned by GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson, said the president was doing a “disservice to his more rabid supporters by insisting that he would have won the Nov. 3 election absent voter fraud.”

 

* 

The editorial board at the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post calls on Mr. Trump to “stop the stolen election rhetoric” and “get Rudy Giuliani off TV.” Tranquilizer darts, a big net, tackle the poor sweating fool.

 

Rudy melting on TV.

.

 

* 

Rep. Anthony Gonzalez calls a press conference by Giuliani, in which the president’s lawyer claims widespread election fraud, “embarrassing.” He says that comments from Sidney Powell undermine voters’ confidence in the democratic process. He argues that the president’s lawyers need to hold “real investigations” focused on “real claims. Not whatever it was Sidney Powell was talking about.” 

Gonzalez is aghast. “I mean the Sidney Powell claims were, I don’t even know how to describe it, I mean they were beyond the pale. If you’re going to allege that communists’ money and Hugo Chavez rigged the Dominion voting system to overturn millions of votes over decades, you better have sufficient proof, and I didn’t see anything that was even close to that.”

 

* 

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, GOP strategist Karl Rove, who has been close to the top brass at the Trump campaign, is frank. “This election won’t be overturned.”

 

* 

Jonathan Turley, the constitutional scholar who defended the president during the first impeachment hearings in the House may regret what he said then. That is, he did not think Trump’s conduct involving his pressure on Ukraine merited removal from office. 

Now, in the wake of the 2020 election, he lambasts Trump’s legal team. “They’re claiming to have evidence, but that evidence has not been filed. They’ve filed a large number of affidavits stating voting irregularities, but they haven’t filed anything to support these sweeping claims about an international conspiracy. That’s what’s breathtaking.”

 

* 

Rep. Cheney says it is time for Trump’s legal team to start producing real evidence, not make absurd claims about Venezuelans and the ghost of Hugo Chavez.

 

America is governed by the rule of law. The President and his lawyers have made claims of criminality and widespread fraud, which they allege could impact election results. If they have genuine evidence of this, they are obligated to present it immediately in court and to the American people.

 

I understand that the President has filed more than thirty separate lawsuits. If he is unsatisfied with the results in those lawsuits, then the appropriate avenue is to appeal. If the President cannot prove these claims or demonstrate that they would change the election result, he should fulfill his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States by respecting the sanctity of our electoral process.

 

* 

“No basis in fact or in law.”

 

It fell to U.S. District Court Judge Steven Grimberg, after a three-hour virtual hearing, to blast one Trump legal case to bits. 

Grimberg, a Trump appointee to the federal bench, first ruled that L. Lin Wood, a Trump ally, lacks legal standing as an individual to mount a challenge to Georgia’s election procedures. But Grimberg doesn’t stop there, noting that “evidence of improprieties,” as presented by Mr. Wood, “seemed limited to isolated cases and far short of what would be needed to justify a federal judge stepping in to alter the state’s election results.” 

“It would require halting the certification of results in a state election in which millions of people have voted,” the judge continued. “It would interfere with an election after the voting was done.” 

“It harms the public interest in countless ways, particularly in the environment in which this election occurred,” Judge Grimberg said. “To halt the certification at literally the 11th hour would breed confusion and potentially disenfranchisement that I find has no basis in fact or in law.”

 

* 

In another lawsuit, challenging the vote totals in Pennsylvania, U.S. Middle District Judge Matthew Brann rules that Trump lawyers presented “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” that were “unsupported by evidence.” 

Judge Brann continued in his opinion: “In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.” If that wasn’t clear enough, he continued, “One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption. That has not happened.” 

Poor Rudy Giuliani had to have been miffed, after Judge Brann described the legal case he helped craft a “Frankenstein monster” badly stitched together. In any case, he pointed out more than once that Brann was an “Obama judge,” hinting that he was therefore not to be trusted. 

It took only a little digging to learn that Brann was a Republican official in Pennsylvania, before he became a judge, and remains a registered Republican to this day.

 

* 

A chorus of concerned Republicans could be heard, calling on the president to face reality at last. Trump’s biggest donor on Wall Street, Steve Schwarzman, said it was clear Biden won. It was time to “move on.”

 

* 

Gov. Hogan said the president’s refusal to concede was harming the country. “We were the most respected country in respect to elections,” he noted. “And now we’re beginning to look like we’re a banana republic.” It was time, he said, for the president to “stop golfing and concede.”

 

* 

Sen. Murkowski agreed it was time for Trump to stop insisting he had been cheated. His behavior, she said, was “inconsistent with our democratic process.”

 

* 

Former Gov. Chris Christie, who pointed out that he had voted for Trump twice, described the conduct of the president’s legal team as “a national embarrassment.” He was not the only observer to note a strange anomaly in every court proceeding to that point. That is, Trump’s lawyers “allege fraud outside the courtroom, but when they go inside the courtroom, they don’t plead fraud and they don’t argue fraud.” Christie, a former federal prosecutor, noted that you can’t go into court and lie to a judge. So, Trump’s lawyers have to worry about being disbarred. 

He went on to add that “elections have consequences, and we cannot continue to act as if something happened here that didn’t happen. You have an obligation to present the evidence. The evidence has not been presented.”

 

* 

Sen. Lamar Alexander tells reporters that “the presidential election is rapidly coming to a formal end.” He is hopeful, that the president will finally admit it. “Since it seems apparent that Joe Biden will be the president-elect, my hope is that President Trump will take pride in his accomplishments, put the country first and have a prompt and orderly transition to help the new administration succeed. When you are in public life, people remember the last thing you do.”

 

*

 

“Dangerous and extra-legal efforts to intimidate.”

 

More than 100 leading Republican national security experts write:

 

We are former senior national security officials who served in Republican administrations under Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and/or Donald Trump or as Republican Members of Congress. We believe that President Trump’s refusal to concede the election and allow for an orderly transition constitutes a serious threat to America’s democratic process and to our national security. We therefore call on Republican leaders – especially those in Congress – to publicly demand that President Trump cease his anti-democratic assault on the integrity of the presidential election.

 

The signers included Tom Ridge, who served as homeland security secretary under President George W. Bush, former CIA director Michael Hayden and John D. Negroponte, the first Director of National Intelligence, also under George W. Bush.

 

* 

Longtime conservative writer, Max Boot, warns in an opinion piece that the president’s desperate attempts to overturn the results of the election represent “the last gasp of a pathetic presidency in its dying days.” If Trump decides to run again in 2024, Boot says, the Republican Party “will do nothing to check his authoritarian impulses.” 

“Much of the GOP,” he adds, “has already decided that achieving its policy preferences is more important than preserving America’s democracy.”

 

* 

“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,” 

The Trump campaign’s continuing effort to prove “massive fraud” landed in the U.S. Third District Court. Writing for a three-judge panel, Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee to the bench, with the concurrence of two other Republican-appointed judges, made short (relatively) work of another legal filing claiming election fraud. The three judges considered the evidence presented. “Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,” Bibas wrote and tossed the hot mess out. “Charges of unfairness are serious,” he said in his ruling Friday. “But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.” 

“Voters, not lawyers, choose the President,” Bibas wrote. “Ballots, not briefs, decide elections.” 

 

* 

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court throws out the Trump legal team’s lawsuit asking for 2.5 million mail-in ballots to be disqualified. 

The ruling is unanimous, ending the case with “prejudice,” meaning Team Trump could not rework a few details and resubmit. The Court cited a lack of “due diligence,” noting that the law creating no-excuse mail-in voting in Pennsylvania passed in October 2019. The lawsuit was filed a year late, too late for the judges to overturn an entire statewide election. 

In a concurring opinion, Justice David N. Wecht noted that petitioners “failed to allege that even a single mail-in ballot was fraudulently cast or counted.”

 

* 

A little extra digging proves that Republicans – who controlled the Pennsylvania legislature at the time of the bill’s passage, okaying no-excuse mail-in voting, had had this to say: 

“This bill was not written to benefit one party or the other, or any one candidate or single election,” said House Majority Leader Bryan Cutler. “It was developed over a multi-year period with input of people from different backgrounds and regions of Pennsylvania. It serves to preserve the integrity of every election and lift the voice of every voter in the commonwealth.”

 

* 

Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman agreed. “The people of Pennsylvania have sent divided government to Harrisburg and, with that, this is what governing looks like,” he said. 

“We are thankful for the governor’s willingness [Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf] to work with us to enact the most historic change in how we cast votes since the election code was enacted in 1937.” 

Corman went on to tout the law: “Compromise has given Pennsylvanians a modernized election code that preserves the integrity of the ballot box and makes it easier for voters to choose the people who represent them.”

 

* 

As the calendar ticks away the days, and November comes to an end, at least one former Republican member of Congress has had all he can stand. Paul Mitchell describes himself in his Twitter bio as an “Opinionated defender of our Constitution and nation.”  

He tweets:

* 

In faraway Arizona, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey takes a stand for election integrity, and makes it clear Trump lost. “We do elections well here in Arizona. The system is strong,” he says.

 

 

DECEMBER 2020 

____________________

 

“I believe that history will not be kind to those who are cognizant of the truth and yet choose silence for political expediency.” 

Brian Corley, Florida elections official

____________________ 

 

Attorney General William Barr has this to say about the “stolen” election: “To date, we [at the Department of Justice] have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.”  

As for one particular Trump campaign claim, that Dominion Voting Machines were rigged to steal Trump votes and give them to Biden, Barr is clear. “There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and DOJ have looked into that,” he continued, “and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.” 

 

* 

In Georgia, Gabriel Sterling, a top election official under Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, pleads for Trump to chill his fiery rhetoric about how the vote was rigged. “Someone’s going to get hurt, someone’s going to get shot, someone’s going to get killed,” Sterling warns. “It’s not right.” 

He cites a Twitter thread that accused a young technician working on the Georgia recount of altering votes. This led to his identity being released online and calls for him to be “hung for treason.” 

Sterling explains that the young tech was “transferring a report on batches of votes from an EMS to a county computer so he could read it.” 

“His family is getting harassed now. There’s a noose out there with his name on it. And it’s not right,” he continues. “I’ve got police protection outside my house. Fine. You know, I took a higher-profile job. I get it, the secretary [Georgia Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger] ran for office; his wife knew that, too. This kid took a job. He just took a job, and it’s just wrong.” 

“It has to stop,” Sterling adds. “Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators [Loeffler and Perdue], you have not condemned this language or these actions. This has to stop. We need you to step up. And if you take a position of leadership, show some.” 

Meanwhile, unproven allegations that Dominion machines were rigged against the president lead to crazy right-wing types putting a $1,000,000 bounty on the head of Dr. Eric Coomer, security director for the company. 

(Coomer has since won a settlement for damages from Newsmax, the right-wing media company.)

 

* 

“Precious little proof.” 

In Georgia, Team Trump enjoys a ray of sunshine in the battle to overturn the results of the election. A federal judge agrees to freeze the Dominion Voting Machines used in three Georgia counties. This came in response to a lawsuit brought by Sidney Powell, once an important cog in the Trump legal campaign. 

Those “rigged” machines, according to Powell, were central to Trump’s efforts to change the outcome. 

In a four-page directive, U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten Sr. granted Powell her wish – to have the machines checked – writing: “Defendants are hereby enjoined and restrained from altering, destroying, or erasing, or allowing the alteration, destruction, or erasure of, any software or data on any Dominion voting machine in Cobb, Gwinnett, and Cherokee Counties.” 

The sun quickly disappeared again behind the clouds when Judge Batten noted there was “precious little proof” to back up any of Powell’s claims. 

Powell claimed to be representing a congressional candidate in one lawsuit she filed. The candidate said he had no idea who Powell was. An “expert witness” in another case, claiming voter fraud in Michigan, cited illegal voting in Edson County. This would be difficult to prove since there is no “Edson County” in that state.

Sidney Powell gazes at portrait of the president.

 

* 

In Wisconsin, the Trump campaign licked fresh wounds, after a $3 million recount of two counties, for which they paid, showed Biden gaining votes. Having nothing to show for their efforts, they filed another legal challenge, asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to disqualify 221,000 votes, most of which, it was assumed had gone to Biden. 

On a 4-3 vote, the  court passed on the chance to overturn the Wisconsin results. Two of the three judges, in dissent, said they would have taken the case under review, but questioned the idea that disqualifying hundreds of thousands of votes was the proper legal remedy.

 

* 

Considering Trump’s wild claims, regarding the election, Michael Frisch, the ethics counsel at Georgetown Law School, said the president was trying to sow doubt on the legitimacy of an election that he lost by creating a narrative “that’s very much like birtherism.”

 

* 

Rusty Bowers, the Republican Speaker of the House in Arizona, calls claims made by Rudy Giuliani, and repeated by President Trump, about fraud in the Arizona election “breathtaking.” 

“I and my fellow legislators swore an oath to support the U.S. Constitution and the constitution and laws of the state of Arizona,” Bowers says. “It would violate that oath, the basic principles of republican government and the rule of law if we attempted to nullify the people’s vote based on unsupported theories of fraud.”

 

* 

Trey Grayson, former Kentucky secretary of state, refers to the president’s repeated claims of election fraud as “unfounded,” and pleads with members of his party to defend the election process.

 

* 

“My own moral compass.” 

The chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, in Arizona makes it clear he will not “violate the law or deviate from my own moral compass,” even though that’s what the President of the United States wants him to do. 

“No matter how you voted, this election was administered with integrity, transparency, and most importantly in accordance with Arizona state laws,” Clint Hickman says.

 

* 

Brian Corley, GOP election supervisor of Pasco County, Florida decides to speak out. Trump won his county by 20 points; yet Corley releases a statement saying he feels compelled both in his professional capacity and as an “American citizen” to respond to all the lies about the process.

 

“I cannot stand by as my work, and the work of all professional elections’ administrators, becomes the scapegoat of those seeking political gain,” he explains. “I believe that history will not be kind to those who are cognizant of the truth and yet choose silence for political expediency.” 

“It just it boggles my mind that these appeals are still being believed with no evidence," Grayson adds.

 

* 

Rudy Giuliani is traveling the country claiming he has evidence that millions of votes have been stolen from Trump. He says Trump votes were lost in rivers (false claim) and hidden under rocks (also false).

 

* 

Dr. Deborah Birx, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, reaches her breaking point. “I hear community members parroting back those situations, parroting back that masks don’t work, parroting back that we should work toward herd immunity, parroting back that gatherings don’t result in super-spreading events,” she says in a Sunday morning interview. 

“And I think our job is to constantly say those are myths, they are wrong, and you can see the evidence base.”

 

* 

“Fanning of the flames around misinformation.” 

Another top Georgia state official, Lt. Governor Geoff Duncan, makes clear he, too, has reached a breaking point. 

Commenting on a Trump rally in Valdosta, Georgia, during which the president claimed yet again that the election had been stolen, Duncan told Jake Tapper of CNN that Trump’s “mountains of misinformation” were hurting the Republican Party in his state. “I worry that this continuous…you know…fanning of the flames around misinformation puts us in a negative position with regards to the January 5 [U.S. Senate] runoff.” 

Duncan also made clear, he was “disgusted” by the president’s behavior since the election, an election during which he campaigned for Mr. Trump. Trump’s sustained allegations regarding a “stolen” election, and his attacks on Georgia officials for not helping him turn the state’s vote around, had led to death threats aimed at many of those officials and their family members. 

Duncan continued:

 

All of us in this position have got increased security around us and our families and it’s not American, it’s not what democracy is all about but it’s reality right now. So we are going to continue to do our jobs. Gov. Kemp, Brad Raffensperger and myself all three voted and campaigned for the President but, unfortunately, he didn’t win the state of Georgia but it doesn’t change our job descriptions.

 

“If I had a chance to spend five minutes with every single person in Georgia that doubted the election results, I think I’d be able to win their hearts over, show them the facts and figures, separate fact from fiction,” he said during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union. He did not, of course, have time. 

Duncan was clear. Trump lost the vote in Georgia. Biden would be the next President of the United States. 

“The Constitution is still in place. This is still America,” he added. “As the lieutenant governor and a Georgian, I’m proud that we’re able to look up after three recounts and watch and be able to see that this election was fair.”

 

* 

Sterling – also a target of death threats – spoke out Sunday. He categorized Trump’s statements at the rally the night before as “false.” 

“They’re misinformation, they’re stoking anger and fear among his supporters,” Sterling said in an interview on NBC’s Meet The Press. “And hell, I voted for him. The situation is getting much worse.”

 

* 

Team Trump suffered a series of courtroom beat-downs on December 7. First, a federal judge (and a Trump appointee to his post) threw out a lawsuit filed by Sidney Powell, in which she asked to overturn Biden’s Georgia victory. 

Powell had promised to “unleash the Kraken,” a legal monster made up of irrefutable evidence of massive fraud. 

No dice ruled Judge Batten. Plaintiffs in this case, he said, were asking “this court to substitute its judgment for two-and-a-half million voters who voted for Joe Biden. And this I am unwilling to do.”

 

* 

“The People have spoken.” 

A second federal judge threw out a lawsuit seeking to overturn the vote in the state of Michigan. 

Powell had claimed that certain voters were treated differently in different counties. That meant plaintiffs had been denied “equal protection under the law.” For example, in some counties, election officials called voters who had flawed mail-in ballots and allowed those flaws to be “cured.” According to Powell, that meant all mail-in ballots in Michigan should be tossed. 

Even if this were true, that some voters were treated differently, U.S. District Court Judge Linda Parker ruled, “alleged injury does not entitle [Plaintiffs] to seek their requested remedy because the harm of having one’s vote invalidated or diluted is not remedied by denying millions of others their right to vote.”

 

This lawsuit seems to be less about achieving the relief Plaintiffs seek – as much of that relief is beyond the power of this Court – and more about the impact of their allegations on People’s faith in the democratic process and their trust in our government. Plaintiffs ask this Court to ignore the orderly statutory scheme established to challenge elections and to ignore the will of millions of voters. This, the Court cannot, and will not, do. The People have spoken.

 

With nothing but speculation and conjecture that votes for President Trump were destroyed, discarded or switched to votes for Vice President Biden, Plaintiffs’ equal protection claim fails.

 

* 

The bad news for Team Trump piled higher when Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Trump supporter, went ahead and certified the state’s election results. 

“Today is an important day for election integrity in Georgia and across the country,” he said. Then, he couldn’t resist a little dig. “The claims in the Kraken lawsuit prove to be as mythological as the creature for which they’re named. Georgians can now move forward knowing that their votes, and only their legal votes, were counted accurately, fairly, and reliably.”

 

* 

Fifteen hundred attorneys from across the country sign a letter condemning the behavior of the president’s legal team. 

In a statement they warn of growing danger:

 

More than 35 losses in election-related cases have made one thing painfully clear: President Trump’s barrage of litigation is a pretext for a campaign to undermine public confidence in the outcome of the 2020 election, which inevitably will subvert constitutional democracy. Sadly, the President’s primary agents and enablers in this effort are lawyers, obligated by their oath and ethical rules to uphold the rule of law.

 

* 

On December 8, The Trump campaign briefly manages to advance a legal case to the U.S. Supreme Court. They ask the nine justices to block certification of Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes. 

Forty minutes after the case is filed, the court rules: 

“DENIED.”

(The full court ruling follows, below.)

 

The president had pinned his fondest dream of being gifted a second term in the White House on this particular case. Tuesday afternoon, with the decision imminent, he tweeted out his dream.

 

Now, let’s see whether or not somebody has the courage, whether it’s a legislator or legislatures, or whether it’s a justice of the Supreme Court, or a number of justices of the Supreme Court – let’s see if they have the courage to do what everybody in this country knows is right.

 

As it turned out, exactly zero judges on Supreme Court seemed to agree on what “everybody in this country knows is right.” 

Not even Justice Samuel Alito, who had agreed to allow the case to reach the court, seemed inclined to rule in favor of Trump and advance his quixotic quest for reelection. 

The full decision, which affirmed a unanimous decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, read as follows: “The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied.”

The Supreme Court shoots Trump down.

 

* 

“But would not grant other relief.” 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton files suit with the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming Texas has been harmed because other states apply different rules in holding their own elections. He seeks remedy, insisting the electoral votes of those states should not be counted in the election.

 

It takes more than 18 words this time, but the U.S. Supreme Court shoots down Team Trump yet again: 

 

Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.

 

Statement of Justice Alito, with whom Justice Thomas joins: In my view, we do not have discretion to deny the filing of a bill of complaint in a case that falls within our original jurisdiction. See Arizona v. California, 589 U. S. ___ (Feb. 24, 2020) (Thomas, J., dissenting). I would therefore grant the motion to file the bill of complaint but would not grant other relief, and I express no view on any other issue.

 

In other words, Justices Alito and Thomas would have agreed to hear the challenge – and then would have shot it down. 

 

* 

Sen. Sasse issues the following statement:

 

Since Election Night, a lot of people have been confusing voters by spinning Kenyan Birther-type, “Chavez rigged the election from the grave” conspiracy theories, but every American who cares about the rule of law should take comfort that the Supreme Court – including all three of President Trump’s picks – closed the door on the nonsense.

 

* 

A federal judge, and a Trump appointee to the bench, throws out another challenge to the November voting results, this time in Wisconsin. It’s Team Trump’s seventh court loss in ten days. 

Describing the case as “extraordinary,” U.S. District Judge Brett Ludwig rules that state officials followed the law when they conducted the Nov. 3 election. 

 

A sitting president who did not prevail in his bid for reelection has asked for federal court help in setting aside the popular vote based on disputed issues of election administration, issues he plainly could have raised before the vote occurred. 

 

This court allowed the plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits. In his reply brief, plaintiff “asks that the Rule of Law be followed.” It has been.

 

* 

Sen. John Thune, the second ranking member of the U.S. Senate, says it’s time to move on: Joe Biden won the election. Lindsey Graham, a Trump loyalist, Rob Portman, Roy Blunt, the Senate’s No. 4 Republican, and Shelley Moore Capito concur.

 

* 

Sen. Bill Cassidy is clear. On January 20, Joe Biden will take over. “Obviously, he is the president-elect. He has 270 Electoral College votes. As we’re a nation of laws, and this is the Constitution, and this is the law, and this is how it breaks out, and the courts have ruled, then President Biden’s going to be our next president.”

 

* 

“There comes a time when you have to realize that, despite your best efforts, you’ve been unsuccessful,” Sen. John Cornyn agrees, “that’s sort of the nature of these elections. You’ve got to have a winner. You’ve got to have a loser” he tells reporters at the U.S. Capitol.

 

* 

On December 14, the Wisconsin Supreme Court rejects Team Trump’s final appeal to overturn the state’s election results. Two hours later Wisconsin electors cast their votes (10) for Joseph R. Biden Jr.

 

* 

Attorney General Bill Barr hands in his resignation. He tells reporters that while he is “sure there was fraud in this election,” he has seen no evidence to indicate that it was so “systemic or broad-based” that it would change the outcome. He could see “no basis now for seizing [voting] machines by the federal government.” Nor would he name a special counsel to explore the “stolen election” allegations. 

“If I thought a special counsel at this stage was the right tool and was appropriate, I would name one, but I haven’t, and I’m not going to.”

 

* 

“Get this thing fixed up.” 

We won’t know this until months later, but on Christmas Eve, Trump lawyer Rudi Giuliani puts in a call to an Arizona elections official. Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates is recipient and Rudy leaves a message. The message eventually ends up in possession of the Arizona Republican:

 

Bill, it’s Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s lawyer. If you get a chance, would you please give me a call? I have a few things I’d like to talk over with you. Maybe we can get this thing fixed up. You know, I really think it’s a shame that Republicans sort of are both in this, kind of, situation. And I think there may be a nice way to resolve this for everybody.

 

Gates smells the same kind of rat smelled by Georgia election officials. He tells reporters he never called Giuliani back.

 

* 

On the final day of 2020, a handful of U.S. senators and almost half of all Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives make it clear. They support a challenge to the counting of the electoral votes, that count scheduled for January 6. 

“I’m finishing 36 years in the Senate and I’ve cast a lot of big votes,” Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tells a reporter. “And in my view, just my view, this will be the most consequential I have ever cast.” He is opposed to any effort to block the counting of the electoral votes.

 

* 

Sen. Pat Toomey insists that his state’s votes were counted fairly. He says Trump lost. If challenges are issued to the Pennsylvania results, he promises to respond in detail and at length. He calls the president’s efforts to throw out the state’s election results, “completely unacceptable.”

 

* 

“The president and his allies are playing with fire.” 

Sen. Sasse is blunt, warning that “the president and his allies are playing with fire.” 

“Let’s be clear what is happening here,” he says. “We have a bunch of ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage. But they’re wrong – and this issue is bigger than anyone’s personal ambitions. Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government,” he adds.

 

* 

Many Republican senators have now made clear: They believe Mr. Biden won and the November election was fair. 

Those likely to vote down any challenge to the electoral vote include Mitt Romney of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Marco Rubio of Florida, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, Sen. Roy Blount of Missouri, Sen. Shelly Moore Capito of West Virginia, and Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio. 

“I think we need to respect this process the Founding Fathers established,” Portman says, “and we must respect the will of the voters. The orderly transfer of power is a hallmark of our democracy.”

 

* 

____________________ 

“Every time that the science clashed with messaging, the messaging won.” 

Kyle McGowan

____________________ 

 

With the clock winding down on the Trump presidency, The New York Times publishes a damning story of another sort. This time it concerns two Trump appointees who went to work at the Centers for Disease Control in 2018. Kyle McGowan was chosen to serve as chief of staff at CDC. Amanda Campbell was installed as his deputy. 

Both were young, originally from Georgia, and happy to return to their home state, where CDC is headquartered. They imagined these would be dream jobs. 

In August 2020, both resigned. Until now they had not explained why. “Everyone wants to describe the day that the light switch flipped and the C.D.C. was sidelined,” during the epidemic, McGowan said. “It didn’t happen that way. It was more of like a hand grasping something, and it slowly closes, closes, closes, closes until you realize that, middle of the summer, it has a complete grasp on everything at the C.D.C.” 

Both McGowan and Campbell told the Times they tried to protect the scientists at C.D.C. from political meddling. It was a constant battle. Political appointees repeatedly asked the agency to change statements and alter advice about how to handle the crisis, particularly if such advice was seen, by implication, as criticism of President Trump. Kellyanne Conway would complain to C.D.C. and ask for restrictions on church choirs and limits on communion to be changed. Ivanka Trump would call with suggestions about how to open up schools.

 

Debate and disagreement are to be expected, McGowan said, but then let rip. “Every time that the science clashed with the messaging, messaging won.” 

The Times continued:

 

Ms. Campbell said that at the pandemic’s outset, she was confident the agency had the best scientists in the world at its disposal, “just like we had in the past.”

 

“What was so different, though, was the political involvement, not only from H.H.S. but then the White House, ultimately, that in so many ways hampered what our scientists were able to do,” she said.

 

Even when scientists were right, if their message clashed with the mixed-up message Trump was sending, the scientists paid a price.

 

Mr. McGowan said he was especially unnerved last winter when officials in Washington told the C.D.C. that regular telephone briefings with another senior scientist, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, were no longer needed because Mr. Trump had his own daily briefings. Dr. Messonnier angered the White House in late February when she issued a public warning that the virus was about to change Americans’ lives.

 

“There’s not a single thing that she said that didn’t come true,” Mr. McGowan said. “Is it more important to have her telling the world and the American public what to be prepared for, or is it just to say, ‘All is well?’”

 

“It’s demoralizing to spend your entire career preparing for this moment, preparing for a pandemic like this. And then not be able to fully do your job,” Mr. McGowan said. “They need to be allowed to lead.”

 

At one point, funding for C.D.C. was pillaged for political purposes. Some $300 million was diverted from scientific work to fund a “vaccine public relations campaign” designed to burnish the president’s severely damaged image. That campaign collapsed after the press started raising questions.

 

 

JANUARY 2021 

____________________ 

This call illuminates the soul of Donald J. Trump

____________________ 

 

On January 2, the president calls Georgia election officials and pleads with them to “find” just enough votes to eliminate Biden’s Peach State margin of victory. We already know, from the Mueller Report, that you can’t indict a sitting president. But the plan the president was floating would have garnered a felony charge for anyone else. 

If you can bear to listen to the entire 62-minute recording, you’ll hear Trump saying he’s not asking for much. Just 11,780 votes, one more than needed to take the state’s 16 electoral votes away from his opponent and put them in his win column. Really, just one little felony is all he needs! 

In the recorded call, he repeatedly claims to have won the state by “hundreds of thousands” of votes. At one point, he says he won by “400,000 votes.” At another: “500,000.” All he’s asking for is a little help. You know, maybe Georgia officials could “recalculate” their totals. 

If they could just “find” 12,000 votes, a nice, round number, well, then, who could ever complain?

Mr. Raffensperger will later testify under oath - he calls the call threatening.

 

In an effort to spare you as much time and effort as I can, here are the key moments from the call. The first nineteen minutes consist of Trump rattling off huge numbers of votes, in multiple categories, that he claims were fraudulently cast or cast for him and then stolen for Mr. Biden. Dead people by the thousands voted. People who had moved out of Georgia still voted in Georgia. People who had moved out of Georgia and died came back (from heaven) to cast ballots. Some evil Democratic lady pulled 18,000 votes out of a “suitcase,” hidden under a table. Those votes were counted once…twice…three times. All those 54,000 votes went to Biden. 

The Georgia officials on the receiving end of the call – three Republicans – Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, his deputy, Jordan Fuchs, and a state lawyer, Ryan Germany, listened patiently. Only in the second half of the call did they have a chance to try to talk sense into Trump.

 

* 

This call illuminates the soul of Donald J. Trump. He’s amoral on a good day, immoral on a bad. He’s crude. Unethical. Ill-informed. He’s logic impaired. Twice he insists there’s no way he could have lost the election in Georgia because his rallies drew bigger crowds than Biden’s. 

In Fulton County, he says, the “rumor” is that thousands of ballots were “shredded.” In his mind a “rumor” equals proof. 

At one point, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, also participating in the call, interjects. “What I’m hopeful for is there some way that we can, we can find some kind of agreement to look at this a little bit more fully?”  

Trump does most of the talking. He justifies his request by repeatedly piling up massive numbers to show he was cheated out of a landslide win. He just needs a little nudge to get him over the finish line. During the call he cites “5,000” as the figure for the number of dead people who voted, and that’s at “minimum.” He pulls another number out of thin air, insisting there were “300,000 fake ballots.” Next, we have a classic bit of Trumpian proof:

 

Then the other thing they said is in Fulton County and other areas. And this may or may not be true…this just came up this morning, that they are burning their ballots, that they are shredding, shredding ballots and removing equipment. They’re changing the equipment on the Dominion machines and, you know, that’s not legal.

 

Trump injects another dose of Trump Math (also known as “making shit up”), saying that “they supposedly shredded I think they said 300 pounds of, 3,000 pounds of ballots. And that just came to us as a report today. And it is a very sad situation.” 

Yes, “very sad.” Even though it might be 300 pounds. Or a ton-and-a-half. Just make some big number up. 

Georgia officials tell him bluntly that the rumor is not true.

 

Naturally, Trump hammers away at one of his bugaboos. Dominion Voting Machines were rigged! He and most of his fans believe that software used in those machines was set to steal votes from one deserving orange hero and give them to one underserving socialist, Joe Biden. Raffensperger says he can’t vouch for other states which used the machines, but notes,

 

I don’t believe that you’re really questioning the Dominion machines. Because we did a hand re-tally, a 100 percent re-tally of all the ballots, and compared them to what the machines said and came up with virtually the same result. Then we did the recount, and we got virtually the same result. So I guess we can probably take that off the table.

 

Trump tries again. He has heard that county officials are getting rid of the machines, or replacing the software parts, to hide their crimes. 

All he needs is a little help. “What’s the difference between winning the election by two votes and winning it by half a million votes,” he wonders. “I think I probably did win it by half a million.” 

Trump and Meadows, and several of their lawyers may be careful not to come out and say, “Steal the goddam votes we need, Brad.” They’re close. Trump insists he won by hundreds of thousands; and now all he needs is a little boost.

 

And the people of Georgia are angry, the people of the country are angry. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, that you’ve recalculated….I mean, they’re all exact numbers [the litany of claims Trump has just piled up] that were done by accounting firms, law firms, etc. And even if you cut ’em in half, cut ’em in half and cut ’em in half again, it’s more votes than we need.

 

“Well, Mr. President,” Raffensperger replies, “the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong.” 

He mentions a signature check done in Cobb County, involving 15,000 names. Only two were fraudulent it turned out. 

The president insists he was robbed and that’s it. “I mean, look, you’d have to be a child to think anything other than that. Just a child.” 

He and his lawyers insist that they have video showing “suitcases” full of bogus votes for Biden being rolled out and counted in Fulton County. The Georgia officials tell them they’re wrong. 

This exchange follows:

 

Trump:  For some reason, they put it in three times, each ballot, and I don’t know why. I don’t know why three times. Why not five times, right? Go ahead.

 

Raffensperger:  You’re talking about the State Farm [Center] video. And I think it’s extremely unfortunate that Rudy Giuliani or his people, they sliced and diced that video [emphasis added] and took it out of context. The next day, we brought in WSB-TV, and we let them show, see the full run of tape, and what you’ll see, the events that transpired are nowhere near what was projected by, you know –

 

Trump: But that was – and Brad, why did they put the votes in three times? You know, they put ’em in three times.

 

Raffensperger:  Mr. President, they did not put that. We did an audit of that, and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times.

 

Ryan Germany, the attorney for the Secretary of State’s office, identifies himself on the call. The story of the thrice-scanned votes is false. “We had our law enforcement officers talk to everyone who was, who was there after that event came to light. GBI was with them as well as FBI agents.” 

 

Facts are stumbling blocks for most people. 

Facts are stumbling blocks for most people. Not Trump. “Well, there’s no way they could – then they’re incompetent. They’re either dishonest or incompetent, okay?” Investigators couldn’t be right. “There’s only two answers, dishonesty or incompetence. There’s just no way. Look. There’s no way.” 

Balked at one turn after another, the president shifts again. What about all the people who voted who didn’t live in Georgia? There were at least 4,500, possibly “in the 20s.” Or: 20,000 plus. 

 

Germany: We’ve been going through each of those [claims] as well…Every one we’ve been through are people that lived in Georgia, moved to a different state, but then moved back to Georgia legitimately. And in many cases –

 

Trump:  How many people do that? They moved out, and then they said, “Ah, to hell with it, I’ll move back.” You know, it doesn’t sound like a very normal…you mean, they moved out, and what, they missed it so much that they wanted to move back in? It’s crazy.

 

Germany:  They moved back in years ago. This was not like something just before the election. So there’s something about that data [Trump’s] that, it’s just not accurate.

 

Trump’s lawyers complain at length about being denied information they need to prove their case: That billions of fraudulent votes were cast in Georgia. That the gates of Hell were sprung; and the dead poured out to vote. 

The Georgia officials point out that information Trump and his lawyers are demanding is shielded by state privacy laws. 

Once again, Trump makes it clear he won in a landslide and all he needs is a teeny-tiny bit of help.

 

I won this election by hundreds of thousands of votes. There’s no way I lost Georgia. There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes. I’m just going by small numbers, when you add them up, they’re many times the 11,000. But I won that state by hundreds of thousands of votes.

 

Trump circles back to an earlier claim: That in Fulton County, tons of bogus votes had been shredded.

 

Trump:  Do you think it’s possible that they shredded ballots in Fulton County? Because that’s what the rumor is. And also that Dominion took out machines. That Dominion is really moving fast to get rid of their, uh, machinery. Do you know anything about that? Because that’s illegal, right?

 

Germany:  No, Dominion has not moved any machinery out of Fulton County.

 

Trump:  But have they moved the inner parts of the machines and replaced them with other parts?

 

Germany:  No.

 

Trump:  Are you sure, Ryan?

 

Germany:  I’m sure. I’m sure, Mr. President.

 

Trump: What about, what about the ballots. The shredding of the ballots. Have they been shredding ballots?

 

Germany:  The only investigation that we have into that – they have not been shredding any ballots. There was an issue in Cobb County where they were doing normal office shredding, getting rid of old stuff, and we investigated that. But this stuff from, you know, from you know past elections.

 

Trump:  It doesn’t pass the smell test because we hear they’re shredding thousands and thousands of ballots, and now what they’re saying, “Oh, we’re just cleaning up the office.” You know.

 

Raffensperger:  Mr. President, the problem you have with social media, they –  people can say anything.

 

Trump:  Oh this isn’t social media. This is Trump media. Social media is Big Tech. Big Tech is on your side, you know. I don’t even know why you have a side because you should want to have an accurate election. And you’re a Republican.

 

Raffensperger:  We believe that we do have an accurate election.

 

Trump:  No, no you don’t. No, no you don’t. You don’t have. Not even close. 

 

Flummoxed in regard to the imaginary shredding, the president and his team try a new tack. Since the signature check proved the votes were tallied accurately in Cobb, Trump wants to know, how come they didn’t investigate Fulton County? 

“We chose Cobb County,” Mr. Germany explains, “because that was the only county where there’s been any evidence submitted that the signature verification was not properly done.” 

Trump switches to an attack on Democratic leaders in Georgia who organized a turn-out-the-vote campaign. “Look. Stacey, in my opinion,” he grumbles, “Stacey is as dishonest as they come.” Stacey Abrams has “outplayed” and “outsmarted you at every step,” he tells the three Republicans. 

He continues to adhere to the basic line: “I think it’s pretty clear that we won. We won quite substantially.” 

His frustration begins to show:

 

Trump: We can go through signature verification, and we’ll find hundreds of thousands of signatures, if you let us do it…in Fulton, where they dumped ballots, you will find that you have many that aren’t even signed and you have many that are forgeries.

 

Okay, you know that. You know that. You have no doubt about that. And you will find you will be at 11,779 within minutes because Fulton County is totally corrupt, and so is she [Abrams] totally corrupt.

 

And they’re going around playing you and laughing at you behind your back, Brad, whether you know it or not, they’re laughing at you. And you’ve taken a state that’s a Republican state, and you’ve made it almost impossible for a Republican to win because of cheating, because they cheated like nobody’s ever cheated before. And I don’t care how long it takes me, you know, we’re going to have other states coming forward – pretty good.

 

I think you’re going to find that they are shredding ballots because they have to get rid of the ballots because the ballots are unsigned. 

 

 

“That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense.” 

The state officials have already explained that the machine count of votes, and the hand-count of votes and then a second machine count all substantially match. The ballots are still there. They weren’t “shredded.” 

They weren’t basted or broiled. 

They’re still there. 

Finally, the president makes what most listeners on such a call would consider a threat. Bad enough, he says, that Abrams and the Democrats stuffed ballot boxes. Worse:

 

And you are going to find that they are – which is totally illegal – it is more illegal for you than it is for them because, you know, what they did and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. And that’s a big risk.

 

Then you get the ask, in bluntest terms. Trump wants election officials to “flip the state.”

 

And you can’t let it happen, and you are letting it happen. You know, I mean, I’m notifying you that you’re letting it happen. So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.

 

And flipping the state is a great testament to our country because, you know, this is – it’s a testament that they can admit to a mistake or whatever you want to call it. 

(As noted earlier, if any of us tried this, a jury would call it a felony.)

 

I don’t know, look, Brad. I got to get . . . I have to find 12,000 votes, and I have them times a lot. And therefore, I won the state. 

 

 So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. You know, we have that in spades already. 

 

The answer he wants is clear: What the Georgia folks are expected to do is “find” enough votes for Trump to carry the state. Say whatever else you want about the president’s claims. He’s asking officials to break the law. 

Trump rehashes several of his claims, including the 18,000 fake ballots x’s 3. His frustration is mounting. His target is new – and his thinking increasingly dangerous:

 

Trump:  And every single ballot went to Biden, and you didn’t know that, but now you know it. So tell me, Brad, what are we going to do? We won the election, and it’s not fair to take it away from us like this….And I think you have to say that you’re going to reexamine it, and you can reexamine it, but reexamine it with people that want to find answers, not people that don’t want to find answers. 

 

Raffensperger:  Mr. President, you have people that submit information, and we have our people that submit information. And then it comes before the court, and the court then has to make a determination. We have to stand by our numbers. We believe our numbers are right.

 

Trump:  Why do you say that, though? I don’t know. I mean, sure, we can play this game with the courts, but why do you say that? First of all, they don’t even assign us a judge.

 

Trump has made this clear before. He hates a three-branch form of government and if he had his way, there would be only one. He hints that he’ll make sure Raffensperger’s career is over if he doesn’t cave. 

Same for the governor of the state:

 

You just say, you stick by, I mean I’ve been watching you, you know, you don’t care about anything. “Your numbers are right.” But your numbers aren’t right. They’re really wrong, and they’re really wrong, Brad. And I know this phone call is going nowhere other than, other than ultimately, you know – Look, ultimately, I win, okay? Because you guys are so wrong. And you treated this. You treated the population of Georgia so badly. You, between you and your governor, who is down at 21, he was down 21 points. And like a schmuck, I endorsed him, and he got elected, but I will tell you, he is a disaster.

 

The people are so angry in Georgia, I can’t imagine he’s ever getting elected again, I’ll tell you that much right now. But why wouldn’t you want to find the right answer, Brad, instead of keep saying that the numbers are right? ‘Cause those numbers are so wrong?

 

Discussion follows about setting up a meeting to address some of the president’s concerns. He wants more. “I’m just saying, you know, and, you know, under new counts, and under new views, of the election results, we won the election. You know? It’s very simple. We won the election.  

Kurt Hilbert, a Georgia attorney working for Trump, suggests that lawyers from both sides sit down and look at just four categories, totaling 24,149 votes. Why not “compromise?” 

Hilbert explains:

 

That [number] in and of itself is sufficient to change the results or place the outcome in doubt….And if you can convince us that 24,149 is inaccurate, then fine. But we tend to believe that is, you know, obviously more than 11,779. That’s sufficient to change the results entirely in and of itself. So what would you say to that, Mr. Germany?

 

Meadows jumps in and says it sounds like they have an agreement to meet and discuss the numbers. “Is that correct?”

 

Germany:  No, that’s not what I said. I’m happy to have our lawyers sit down with Kurt and the lawyers on that side and explain to him, hey, here’s, based on what we’ve looked at so far, here’s how we know this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong.

 

Germany makes clear again, that some of the information Trump’s lawyers are demanding is shielded by law. He doesn’t intend to violate state law. 

“But you’re allowed to have a phony election? You’re allowed to have a phony election, right?” Trump complains. 

“No, sir,” Germany responds. 

Trump has the last word. He wants help. He deserves help. He expects help. And he has a warning, too. His supporters,

 

…They hate the state, they hate the governor, and they hate the secretary of state. I will tell you that right now. The only people that like you are people that will never vote for you. You know that, Brad, right? They like you, you know, they like you. They can’t believe what they found. They want more people like you. So, look, can you get together tomorrow? And, Brad, we just want the truth. It’s simple.

 

And everyone’s going to look very good if the truth comes out. It’s okay. It takes a little while, but let the truth come out. And the real truth is, I won by 400,000 votes. At least. That’s the real truth. But we don’t need 400,000 votes.

 

He only needs one more than Joe Biden received. That’s the truth as Donald J. Trump sees it, with time running out.

Trump is asking Georgia officials to commit election fraud.

 

*** 

“A deliberate assault on Democracy.” 

When rioting explodes on Capitol Hill on January 6, it’s obvious who the rioters are – people who love Trump more than they love democracy. 

A number of world leaders are clear: 

Ireland’s Foreign Minister Simon Coveney calls the scenes in Washington “a deliberate assault on Democracy by a sitting President & his supporters, attempting to overturn a free & fair election!”

 

* 

“I supported the ideas and positions of the Republicans, of the conservatives, of Trump,” says Italy’s far-right League party leader Matteo Salvini. “But a legitimate vote is one thing, going to parliament and clashing with the police is quite a different matter. That’s not political vision, that’s madness.”

 

* 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, of Canada tells reporters at a press conference, “What we witnessed was an assault on democracy by violent rioters, incited by the current President and other politicians.”

 

* 

Jean Asselborn, Luxembourg’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, was blunt in a way that diplomats rarely are. In a radio interview he called President Trump a “criminal” and a “political pyromaniac.”

 

* 

French President Emmanuel Macron sounds a note of sadness: “When, in one of the world’s oldest democracies, supporters of an outgoing president take up arms to challenge the legitimate results of an election, that one idea — that of ‘one person, one vote’ — is undermined.”

 

* 

“Unbelievable scenes from Washington D.C. This is a totally unacceptable attack on democracy. A heavy responsibility now rests on President Trump to put a stop to this,” Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg says. 

 

* 

Sen. Pat Toomey rips into the president. “We witnessed today the damage that can result when men in power and responsibility refuse to acknowledge the truth,” he says. “We saw bloodshed because a demagogue chose to spread falsehoods and sow distrust of his own fellow Americans.”

 

* 

In the wake of the riot, Sen. Romney is clear. The riot was the result of “a selfish man’s injured pride, and the outrage of supporters who he has deliberately misinformed for the past two months and stirred to action this very morning. What happened today was an insurrection incited by the president of the United States.”

 

* 

Sen. Sasse also blames Trump. “Lies have consequences,” he says. “This violence was the inevitable and ugly outcome of the president’s addiction to constantly stoking division.” Instead of acting for the good of the country, he accuses the president of “cowering behind his keyboard.”

 

* 

Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican, tells Fox News: “There is no question that the president formed the mob, the president incited the mob. ... He lit the flame.”

 

* 

Sen. Mike Rounds said he hadn’t seen all of the president’s comments during his speech earlier that morning, but “he certainly did not help.” 

“If anything, he urged in a very emotional situation, very inappropriate action by people that appear to be his supporters.”

 

* 

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) has this to say: “Today in watching [the president’s] speech, I have to admit I gasped. I mean, first of all his treatment of Mike Pence ... if there was nothing else, his treatment of Mike Pence is unjustified, wrong and really unfortunate.” Cramer lacks courage to say more, adding that the president's treatment of his No. 2 was “really irritating.”

 

* 

Leaving the Capitol hours later, Sen. Roy Blunt is asked if he wants to hear what Trump had to say about the violence. Blunt, a member of GOP leadership, said he didn’t “want to hear anything.” 

“I think it was a tragic day and he was part of it,” Blunt said.

 

* 

Rep. Chip Roy said opposing Trump’s attempts to overturn the election “may well sign my political death warrant. So be it.”

 

* 

Sen. Tom Cotton, who has aligned himself closely with Trump, releases a statement calling on him to concede. “It’s past time for the president to accept the results of the election, quit misleading the American people, and repudiate mob violence.”

 

* 

“He screwed the country.” 

Politico talks to several top Republican operatives: “He screwed his supporters, he screwed the country and now he’s screwed himself,” a 2016 Trump campaign official tells reporters.

Rioters storm the Capitol - for Trump.

 

* 

“Donald Trump caused this insurrection with lies and conspiracy theories about the election being rigged against him,” said Scott Jennings, a former aide to President George W. Bush who remained close to the Trump White House. “The election was not stolen but this madness was fomented by the president and his top advisers.”

 

* 

“Every day, every person chooses to be either part of the problem or part of the solution,” said former White House assistant press secretary Austin Cantrell. “President Donald Trump and other Republican leaders should immediately denounce today’s illegal action as an affront to the American experiment of self-government and take into account the power their words have to heal or harm our Republic.”

 

* 

Tom Bossert, the president’s former Homeland Security and Counterterrorism adviser, said Trump had “undermined American democracy baselessly for months” and was

therefore “culpable for this siege.”

 

* 

“I just spoke with Vice President Pence,” Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien tweets. “He is a genuinely fine and decent man. He exhibited courage today…I am proud to serve with him.”

 

* 

“The highest honor of my life.” 

Reporters soon tracked down the story of what happened on the morning of January 6, when the president made a desperate last plea to Vice President Pence. He insisted Pence could overturn the electoral votes – could overturn the entire election – and invalidate the votes of more than 150,000,000 Americans. When Pence said he had no such authority, Trump erupted. “You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy.” 

Having been pressed relentlessly to overturn the vote, Pence asked his lawyers to consult with J. Michael Luttig, “a former appeals court judge revered by conservatives” and other constitutional scholars. Judge Luttig made it clear there was no constitutional path the vice president could follow to void the electoral votes. 

Reached in the wake of the riot on Capitol Hill, the judge told reporters it had been “the highest honor of my life” to play a role in preserving the U.S. Constitution.

 

* 

Joe Grogan, Trump’s former domestic policy adviser, summed up the situation in even starker fashion. “We’re very lucky that the vice president isn’t a maniac,” he said.

 

* 

Three men Trump had picked to lead the Department of Defense quickly weighed in on the president and his responsibility for the January 6 debacle. 

Former Sec. of Defense James Mattis:

 

Today’s violent assault on our Capitol, an effort to subjugate American democracy by mob rule, was fomented by Mr. Trump. His use of the Presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice. 

 

* 

Former Sec. of Defense Mark Esper:

 

This afternoon’s assault on the US Capitol was appalling and un-American. This is not how citizens of the world’s greatest and oldest democracy behave. The perpetrators who committed this illegal act were inspired by partisan misinformation and patently false claims about the election. 

 

* 

Acting Sec. of Defense Christopher Miller also felt a need to reassure the country.

 

I strongly condemn these acts of violence against our democracy. I, and the people I lead in the Department of Defense, continue to perform our duties in accordance with our oath of office, and will execute the time-honored peaceful transition of power to President-elect Biden on January 20.

 

*

 

The president’s second National Security Advisor, Gen. H. R. McMaster, said our country was in a fix because “the sad reality [is] that President Trump and other officials have repeatedly compromised our principles in pursuit of partisan advantage and personal gain.”

 

* 

Former White House communications director, Alyssa Farah, said she saw trouble brewing in December and so stepped down. She told Politico she knew there was no evidence of fraud on a scale to have tipped the election. People around her made it clear that was not “the message” they wanted to put out. 

Farah explained:

 

I made the decision to step down…because I saw where this was heading, and I wasn’t comfortable being a part of sharing this message to the public that the election results might go a different way. I didn’t see that to be where the facts lay.

 

So to me, it was time. And then Wednesday was really a boiling point showing that misleading the public has consequences. And what happened was unacceptable. It was unpatriotic. It was un-American. And I certainly fault the protesters – frankly, we should call them terrorists, but I fundamentally fault our elected leadership who allowed these people to believe that their election was stolen from them. The president and certain advisers around him are directly responsible.

 

* 

Even for many of the most loyal Trump aides, the attack on Capitol Hill was too much. Stephanie Grisham, the First Lady’s chief of staff and former White House press secretary, quit in disgust.

 

* 

Sarah Matthews, the White House deputy press secretary, made it clear she had had her fill. While she was “honored to serve in the Trump administration and proud of the policies we enacted,” she could not go on. 

As  “someone who worked in the halls of Congress,” she explained, “I was deeply disturbed by what I saw.” 

“I’ll be stepping down, effective immediately,” Matthews added. “Our nation needs a peaceful transfer of power.”

 

* 

Sen. Murkowski summed up her contempt for the president, saying emphatically, “I just want him gone.”

 

* 

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said the president had committed “impeachable offenses.”

 

* 

Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger, who had done excellent work in addressing the coronavirus outbreak, resigned his post.

 

* 

Even Mick Mulvaney, who replaced Gen. Kelly as White House Chief of Staff, resigned as special envoy to Northern Ireland in protest. Mr. Mulvaney explained, “I can’t stay here, not after yesterday.”

 

* 

“The client has used the lawyer’s services to perpetrate a crime.” 

The New York Times also noted:

 

Even one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers in his bid to reverse the election results in Pennsylvania, Jerome M. Marcus, broke with him on Thursday, filing a motion withdrawing because “the client has used the lawyer’s services to perpetrate a crime and the client insists upon taking action that the lawyer considers repugnant and with which the lawyer has a fundamental disagreement.”

 

* 

Gabriel Noronha, a Trump appointee at the State Department, tweeted that the president was “entirely unfit to remain in office.”

 

* 

Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao was the first cabinet member to quit. “Yesterday, our country experienced a traumatic and entirely avoidable event as supporters of the president stormed the Capitol building following a rally he addressed. As I’m sure is the case with many of you [in this country], it has deeply troubled me in a way that I simply cannot set aside.”

 

* 

Sec. of Education Betsy DeVos exited next, but not before laying responsibility for the riot at the Oval Office doorstep. “There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me,” she wrote, explaining to the president her decision to leave.

 

* 

“Trump is a political David Koresh.”

 

The final word, and the critical point to be made, goes to Billy Piper, former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader McConnell. Referring to Trump, he chose an apt, but chilling comparison. He likened the president to the religious cult leader who died with most of his followers in a fiery cataclysm at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas in 1993.

 

“Trump is a political David Koresh,” Piper said. “He sees the end coming and wants to burn it all down and take as many with him as possible.”

 

* 

Gen. Powell announced he could no longer consider himself a Republican. Would he support impeachment again? “Of course,” he told a reporter, although he doubted there was time for it to do much good.

 

* 

The day after the riot, the Wall Street Journal, owned by longtime Trump supporter Rupert Murdoch, either to resign or be impeached.

 

When some in the crowd turned violent and occupied the Capitol, the President caviled and declined for far too long to call them off. When he did speak, he hedged his plea with election complaint.

 

This was an assault on the constitutional process of transferring power after an election. It was also an assault on the legislature from an executive sworn to uphold the laws of the United States. This goes beyond merely refusing to concede defeat. In our view it crosses a constitutional line that Mr. Trump hasn’t previously crossed. It is impeachable.

 

With less than two weeks until his term is ended, why impeach at all? The Journal explains:

 

The best case for impeachment is not to punish Mr. Trump. It is to send a message to future Presidents that Congress will protect itself from populists of all ideological stripes willing to stir up a mob and threaten the Capitol or its Members.

 

* 

Even Brit Hume, of Fox News, offered up a realistic assessment of what had occurred on Jan. 6, and why. Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show, he was blunt about the president’s post-election performance. “All of that stuff he said for weeks on end after the election – that he’d won it in a landslide, and that it was all stolen from him, and that Mike Pence had the authority, which he most certainly did not, of reversing the results at the last minute last week. That was utter balderdash,” Hume said, “and he fed it into the veins of his supporters, and one could make a pretty good case that that’s part of what got them into a fever that led to last week’s events.”

 

* 

Newly-elected Congresswoman Nancy Mace, who worked for Trump’s 2016 campaign, places blame where it belongs.

 

“I’m disappointed right now. I think that after last night — and I’m on my 100th hour of being a member of Congress, I’m working on about two hours of sleep — I’m distraught,” she tells CNN. “We’ve got to rebuild our nation, and we’ve got to rebuild our party. This is not who we are. It’s extremely distressing. And it’s saddening. It’s heartbreaking.”

 

As for Trump, “everything that he’s worked for ... all of that — his entire legacy — was wiped out yesterday. We’ve got to start over.”

 

* 

Others are no less horrified. Former U.S. forces-Afghanistan commander Gen. John Allen offers this assessment:

 

After four years of seemingly unending outrages, it’s time. U.S. President Donald Trump must go, and the vice president must rescue the country’s democracy by leading the cabinet in invoking the 25th Amendment. After a long series of offenses – a list that would exceed the space available here – the culmination of Trump’s criminal attempts at election tampering and his incitement of insurrection on Wednesday lead us to the point of an unavoidable national reckoning.

 

* 

Former U.S. Special Operations commander Gen. Raymond Thomas expresses his outrage: “UNAMERICAN! My blood is literally boiling. We allowed this to happen in a slow boil. Meanwhile Nero fiddles…on Twitter. So sad for our country right now.”

 

* 

General Kelly is just one leading name who calls for Vice President Pence and the cabinet to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment and remove Trump from office. On January 7, he unloads in an interview on CNN. “What happened on Capitol Hill yesterday is a direct result of his poisoning the minds of people with the lies and the fraud,” he tells Jake Tapper. He labels the president’s behavior on January 6, and in the weeks and months before and since the election “outrageous.” 

Finally, he makes it painfully clear what he discovered while working for the 45^th President of the United States and why he remained at his post as long as he did. “It’s impossible to understand who he actually is, but when you work closely with him, you understand he’s a very flawed human being,” Gen. Kelly adds. “When you first meet or start working with him — in my case, no idea of the flaws — and you start working for him and begin to understand how flawed he is, then it’s a matter of staying in the job as long as you can to prevent some sort of disaster.”

 

*

 

Former Director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, also warns against the danger represented by Trump.

 

* 

“Then what is an impeachable offense?” 

The U.S. House of Representatives took up the question of impeachment for a second time. Only a double handful of Republican lawmakers had courage to advance the impeachment to the U.S. Senate for trial. 

Rep. Tom Rice, one of ten House Republicans to vote to impeach, releases a statement explaining his vote.

 

Under the strict definition of the law, I don’t know if the President’s speech last Wednesday morning amounted to incitement of a riot, but any reasonable person could see the potential for violence.

 

Once the violence began, when the Capitol was under siege, when the Capitol Police were being beaten and killed, and when the Vice President and the Congress were being locked down, the President was watching and tweeted about the Vice President’s lack of courage.

 

For hours while the riot continued, the President communicated only on Twitter and offered only weak requests for restraint.

 

…It is only by the grace of God and the blood of the Capitol Police that the death toll was not much, much higher.

 

It has been a week since so many were injured, the United States Capitol was ransacked, and six people were killed, including two police officers. Yet, the President has not addressed the nation to ask for calm. He has not visited the injured and grieving. He has not offered condolences. Yesterday in a press briefing at the border, he said his comments were “perfectly appropriate.”

 

I have backed this President through thick and thin for four years. I campaigned for him and voted for him twice. But this utter failure is inexcusable.

* 

Rep. Kinzinger, an Air Force veteran, voted in favor. “There is no doubt in my mind that the President of the United States broke his oath of office and incited this insurrection,” he explained. “So in assessing the articles of impeachment brought before the House…if these actions – the Article II branch inciting a deadly insurrection against the Article I branch – are not worthy of impeachment, then what is an impeachable offense?”

 

* 

Rep. John Katko of New York was equally clear: “It cannot be ignored that President Trump encouraged this insurrection.”

 

* 

Rep. Pete Meijer told reporters that a GOP colleague told him that he or she would have voted in favor of impeachment. Concern “about the safety of that individual’s family” dissuaded him or her from taking the risk. 

“That is where the rhetoric has brought us,” Meijer said sadly. “That is the degree of fear that’s been created.”

 

* 

On January 13, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy stood up in the House and correctly stated that Trump bore “responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.” 

McCarthy had already explained, the day before, that he did not support an impeachment charge, and instead expressed a hope that lawmakers, animated by “an even deeper sense of service” could “move forward with a renewed clarity of purpose – both for our shared principles and for the future of our nation.” 

Despite a claim by Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, that Antifa troublemakers had been identified in the mob on January 6, McCarthy noted that there was “undisputedly” no evidence of that. “Some say the riots were caused by antifa. There is absolutely no evidence of that,” he continued. “Conservatives should be the first to say so.” 

McCarthy also said it was not “the American way” to contest a fairly decided election. “Let’s be clear, Joe Biden will be sworn in as president of the United States in one week because he won the election.”

 

* 

Doug Leone, a billionaire backer of Trump renounces his support. “After last week’s horrific events,” he explains, “President Trump lost many of his supporters, including me. The actions of the President and other rally speakers were responsible for inciting the rioters.” 

He and his wife Patti had donated $700,000 to the president’s reelection. Money they’d probably like back.

 

* 

“Death spiral of democracy.” 

With momentum moving toward a second impeachment, on January 19, Sen. McConnell offered this epitaph for the Trump presidency. “The mob was fed lies,” he said. “They were provoked by the president and other powerful people. And they tried to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government which they did not like. But we pressed on.” 

If VP Pence had tried to void the electoral votes, as the president wanted, Sen. McConnell noted, it would have touched off the “death spiral of democracy.” 

He continued:

 

There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking. No question about it. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president. And having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.

 

This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories orchestrated by the outgoing president, who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.

 

* 

The trial in the Senate was anticlimactic. Only seven GOP senators were willing to join fifty Democrats and independents and vote to find Trump guilty. Sen. Susan Collins, one of the seven, said what many members of her party knew in their hearts, but lacked courage to say:

 

Instead of preventing a dangerous situation, President Trump created one. And rather than defend the constitutional transfer of power, he incited an insurrection with the purpose of preventing that transfer of power from occurring. His actions – they interfere with the peaceful transition of power, the hallmark of our constitution and our American democracy – were an abuse of power and constitute grounds for conviction.

 

* 

Sen. Toomey explained his “guilty” vote:

 

I was one of the 74 million Americans who voted for President Trump, in part because of the many accomplishments of his administration. Unfortunately, his behavior after the election betrayed the confidence millions of us placed in him. His betrayal of the Constitution and his oath of office required conviction.

 

* 

Sen. Burr of North Carolina, had at first be disinclined to vote for impeachment. The presentation of the case altered his thinking. “I have listened to the arguments presented by both sides and considered the facts. The facts are clear,” he said. “By what he did and by what he did not do, President Trump violated his oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

 

* 

Sen. Bill Cassidy also opposed impeachment, but the president’s refusal to accept defeat or apologize for stirring up a riot, convinced him to vote “guilty.”

 

He brought together a crowd but a portion of that was transformed into a mob, and when they went into the Capitol it was clear that he wished lawmakers be intimidated. And even after he knew violence was taking place, he continued to basically sanction the mob being there. And not until later did he actually ask them to leave. All of that points to a motive and a method and that is wrong – he should be held accountable.

 

* 

Sen. Murkowski had already explained that she was inclined to support a “guilty” verdict. The Republican from Alaska said in a statement that the decision to impeach President Trump was “appropriate.” She promised to listen to “both sides” when the trial began.

As for Mr. Trump’s role in the tragedy that took place on January 6, she was clear:

 

President Trump’s words incited violence, which led to the injury and deaths of Americans...the desecration of the Capitol, and briefly interfered with the government's ability to ensure a peaceful transfer of power.

 

For months, the President has perpetrated false rhetoric that the election was stolen and rigged, even after dozens of courts ruled against these claims. When he was not able to persuade the courts or elected officials, he launched a pressure campaign against his own Vice President, urging him to take actions that he had no authority to do.

 

Such unlawful actions cannot go without consequences and the House has responded swiftly, and I believe, appropriately, with impeachment.

 

* 

Sen. Capito emphasized that her vote to acquit was “solely” based on the constitutional question – can you impeach a person no longer in office – while adding: “The actions and reactions of President Trump were disgraceful, and history will judge him harshly.”

 

* 

Sen. Portman explained: “I have said that what President Trump did that day was inexcusable because in his speech he encouraged the mob, and that he bears some responsibility for the tragic violence that occurred.”

 

* 

Sen. Dan Sullivan: “I condemn former president Trump’s poor judgment in calling a rally on that day, and his actions and inactions when it turned into a riot. His blatant disregard for his own Vice President, Mike Pence, who was fulfilling his constitutional duty at the Capitol, infuriates me.”

 

* 

John Thune: “My vote to acquit should not be viewed as exoneration for his conduct on January 6, 2021, or in the days and weeks leading up to it. What former president Trump did to undermine faith in our election system and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power is inexcusable.”

 

* 

“The definition of a cult.” 

The former chair of CPAC, Rep. Mickey Edwards, offers up this obituary for the GOP that once was. “The Republican party really no longer stands for any kind of principles,” he said on CNN, “conservative or otherwise.” 

“The party seems now to be completely following the lead of one man wherever he goes, which is the definition of a cult,” he continued. “Now all that matters is, ‘Trump is for this, we’re for this.’ And that includes denying truth, denying fact, denying reality. It’s such a disconnect from what’s really happened in the world.”

 

* 

With the failure of the rioters to thwart democracy, various Trump loyalists were reduced to throwing political “Hail Mary” passes. All fell, incomplete, or were intercepted. In Arizona GOP Party chair Kelli Ward called on lawmakers to censure the governor, a Republican, for his refusal to overturn the vote. 

As Politico reported, reasonable members of the GOP were not amused.

 

“The craziness from the state Republican Party … it’s pretty embarrassing,” said Kirk Adams, a former Republican state House speaker and former chief of staff to [Governor] Ducey. “We have been fed a steady diet of conspiracy theories and stolen election rhetoric and, really, QAnon theories from the state Republican Party since before the election, but certainly after.”

 

“Let us be clear: we find the weeks of disinformation and outright lies to reverse a fair and free election from the head of the Arizona Republican Party and some elected officials to be reprehensible,” read a full-page ad in The Arizona Republic this week from Greater Phoenix Leadership, a group of CEOs. “The political party organization and these elected officials, which some of us have supported in the past, have again embarrassed Arizona on a national stage.”

 

* 

When Gov. Doug Ducey again defended the integrity of the Arizona vote, Ward replied on Twitter, “STHU.”

 

* 

Having had several days to ponder the sad state of his party, Sen. Sasse offered renewed and harsh assessment of what had happened.

 

The violence that Americans witnessed [on January 6] – and that might recur in the coming days – is not a protest gone awry or the work of “a few bad apples.” It is the blossoming of a rotten seed that took root in the Republican Party some time ago and has been nourished by treachery, poor political judgment, and cowardice.

 

When Trump leaves office, my party faces a choice: We can dedicate ourselves to defending the Constitution and perpetuating our best American institutions and traditions, or we can be a party of conspiracy theories, cable-news fantasies, and the ruin that comes with them. We can be the party of Eisenhower, or the party of the conspiracist Alex Jones. We can applaud officer [Eugene] Goodman or side with the mob he outwitted. We cannot do both.

 

The conservative swaths of this media landscape were primed for Trump’s “Stop the steal” lie, which lit the fuse for the January 6 riot. For nine weeks, the president consistently lied that he had “won in a landslide.” Despite the fact that his lawyers and allies were laughed out of court more than 60 times, he spread one conspiracy theory after another across television, radio, and the web. For anyone who wanted to hear that Trump won, a machine of grifters was turning clicks into cash by telling their audiences what they wanted to hear. The liars got rich, their marks got angry, and things got out of control.

 

That, this blogger would argue, is a pitch-perfect assessment of what went wrong on Capitol Hill, and who deserved blame.

 

*

____________________ 

“The GOP faces an inescapable choice between a future of extremism, treachery and losses, or of truth, principle and leadership.” 

Former Rep. Evan McMullin

____________________ 

 

Republican leaders realized they had a problem in the eyes of most Americans, one they had created themselves. Former GOP Congressman Evan McMullin was  not sympathetic, tweeting:

 

Rand Paul warns that if Senate Republicans convict Trump, a third of the party will break off. So be it. The GOP faces an inescapable choice between a future of extremism, treachery and losses, or of truth, principle and leadership. Both paths are difficult, but only one is good.

 

* 

Bobby Christine, Acting U.S. District Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, a recent Trump appointee to his post, announced that his office would not bother to pursue two challenges to the Georgia election results filed by President Trump’s legal team. 

“I can tell you I closed the two most – I don’t know, I guess you’d call them high profile or the two most pressing election issues this office has,” he explained to staff, in a recording obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. 

“I said I believe, as many of the people around the table believed,” Christine is heard saying, “there’s just nothing to them.”

 

*

Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican election lawyer who had worked for multiple presidential campaigns – but not Trump’s, is pained by what he witnesses in Trump’s last days in office. 

After the departing president issues pardons to some of his aides and allies, including one in the last forty-five minutes he’s in office, Ginsberg expresses his disgust. “The granting of even more sleazy crony pardons as the clock ran out on his one term,”  he says, “will define the nature of his presidency.”

 

*** 

POST-PRESIDENCY 

____________________ 

“The most dangerous and unsettling thing about President Donald Trump was his sociopathic tendencies.” 

Peter Wehner

____________________ 

 

There is hope, after January 20, that the Trump fever might break. Peter Wehner, a lifelong Republican, who served in the Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43 administrations, has a great deal to say in a New York Times essay:

 

This is a text I received from a prominent conservative Christian minutes after President Biden’s Inaugural Address: “I broke down sobbing. It’s been a long five and a half years.”

 

Shortly after that, Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Wash., emailed me a note that said, “I never thought I would be moved to tears watching a Democratic president get sworn in, but I was. It just felt so good to hear someone who understands and loves this country and Constitution, and is an honorable person, take the oath. I’m praying for healing.”

 

Wehner lists a number of Trump’s most egregious sins, then adds:

 

But the most dangerous and unsettling thing about President Donald Trump was his sociopathic tendencies. It should have been obvious to everyone that Mr. Trump was unstable, impulsive, compulsively dishonest and staggeringly narcissistic. 

 

One prominent Republican who has served in Congress told me recently, “Trump sunk much lower than I thought he would.”

 

* 

In his first interviews since the departure of Mr. Trump, Dr. Fauci seemed almost giddy to be able to appear at a press conference and speak freely. Asked how he felt, now that Biden was in charge, he answered, “It’s obviously a very different situation. It’s complete transparency. Nobody is telling you what to say, at all. They are just saying go out there and let the data guide you on what you are saying.” 

“There were things that were said, be it regarding things like hydroxychloroquine and other things like that,” when Trump was in charge, “that really was an uncomfortable thing because they were not based on scientific fact. I can tell you, I take no pleasure at all being in a situation with contradicting the [previous] president.” 

He went on to say, “Particularly when you’re in the situation of almost being in a crisis with the number of cases and hospitalizations and deaths that we have – when you start talking about things that make no sense medically and no sense scientifically, that clearly is not helpful.” 

He added, finally, that it’s “not helpful” when “you’re starting to go down paths that are not based on any science at all.”  

 

“Based on no data, just anecdote.” 

In a second interview, Dr. Fauci had this to say:

 

This is my seventh administration…and I’ve been advising administrations and presidents on both sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats, people with different ideologies, and even with differences in ideology, there never was this real affront on science. So it really was an aberrancy that I haven’t seen in almost 40 years that I’ve been doing this. So it’s just one of those things that is chilling when you see it happen.

 

In a third interview, he elaborated on his work with the Trump administration.

 

And the other thing that made me really concerned was, it was clear that he was getting input from people who were calling him up, I don’t know who, people he knew from business, saying, “Hey, I heard about this drug, isn’t it great?” or, “Boy, this convalescent plasma is really phenomenal.” And I would try to, you know, calmly explain that you find out if something works by doing an appropriate clinical trial; you get the information, you give it a peer review. And he’d say, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this stuff really works.”

 

He would take just as seriously their opinion – based on no data, just anecdote – that something might really be important. It wasn’t just hydroxychloroquine; it was a variety of alternative-medicine-type approaches. It was always, “A guy called me up, a friend of mine from blah, blah, blah.” That’s when my anxiety started to escalate.

 

Even worse, he added, the president surrounded himself “with people saying things that didn’t make any scientific sense.”

 

* 

“Always.” 

Dr. Birx, once a key member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force was asked if she had ever considered leaving the team. “Always,” she remarked, without hesitation. 

“I saw the president presenting graphs that I never made,” Birx added.” “So, I know that someone – or someone out there or someone inside was creating a parallel set of data and graphics that were shown to the president.” 

Birx said she wrote 310 detailed daily reports, but didn’t know if her boss read them. “I had very little exposure to President Trump,” she admitted. 

“There was no team, full-time working in the White House on coronavirus,” she continued. So she had to recruit her own help. Dr. Birx, a former colonel in the U.S. Army, had 41 years’ service in the government and called on people she knew from her previous work. 

She told host Margaret Brennan that she believed her science-based guidance was being censored by the White House. She was eventually blocked from appearing on the news. Instead, she went out on the road, to speak to state and local healthcare providers. “That was the place where people would let me say what needed to be said about the pandemic, both in private with the governors and then in following up, doing press to talk to the people of that state.”

 

* 

Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the Centers for Disease Control, was asked what his “greatest disappointment” was in not being able to better mitigate the spread of COVID-19. 

“My greatest disappointment was the lack of consistency of public health messaging and the inconsistency of civic leaders to reinforce the public health message.” He continued, “I’m very disappointed that some civic leaders decided to make this issue of mitigation a political football, rather than embracing the public health measures.”

 

* 

In the waning days of January, David Millage, longtime conservative activist and member of the Iowa Republican Party, is ousted from his posts of leadership in the Iowa GOP. Millage’s sin: speaking his mind to a reporter on the evening of January 6. “I think they ought to impeach” him, he said, answering a question the reporter didn’t ask. 

“For the president to egg them [the rioters] on is just atrocious conduct,” Millage added. 

Millage, 67, had voted for Trump twice, but the president’s anti-democratic tendencies had proven too much. First, he cozied up to dictators. Now the riot. “That he would rather have state legislatures and judges appoint our president rather than the voters, and then what he did on Jan. 6 was just over the top.”

 

* 

The party of QAnon. 

Jacob Monty, another life-long Republican and a major donor, saves the Trumpophiles the trouble of castigating him. “If you stay in the Republican Party, you have to pay homage to Trump and I don’t do that. I don’t pray to any man,” he explains. When asked if he thought the GOP was now the party of QAnon, he replied, “Absolutely. Trump owns the party and Trump has always loved the conspiracy theories and this is Trump’s party now.” He quits the party.

 

 

MARCH 2021 

In a recent interview with Vice on Showtime, former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller posed this question: “Would anybody have marched on the Capitol, and overrun the Capitol, without the president’s [Jan. 6] speech? I think it’s pretty much definitive that wouldn’t have happened.” 

“It seems cause-and-effect,” he added. “The question is, did he know he was enraging the crowd to do that? I don’t know.”

 

* 

F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray (Trump’s pick for the job) testifies before Congress. He calls the attack on Capitol Hill on January 6 “domestic terrorism.” When Republican lawmakers try to hint at the possibility that left-wing types were really to blame, Director Wray says, in the tone you might use to tell a needy girlfriend that it’s over, that there is “no evidence” Antifa played any role.

 

____________________ 

“Tolerating it would make a mockery of our nation’s rule of law.” 

F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray

____________________ 

 

“I was appalled that you, our country’s elected leaders were victimized right here in these very halls,” Wray continued. “That attack, that siege was criminal behavior, plain and simple and is behavior that we, the FBI view as domestic terrorism. It’s got no place in our democracy and tolerating it would make a mockery of our nation’s rule of law.” 

Pressed for more detail, he said most of the attackers could be categorized as mili

tia extremists, including some the F.B.I. would place in the “racially motivated extremist bucket.”

F.B.I. Director Wray is a Trump appointee.

 

* 

Meanwhile, Dr. Birx comments on one of the great moments of the pandemic: the day Trump said we might drink disinfectant to protect ourselves from the virus. As a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, she admits now that she was stunned. 

As she explains, “Frankly, I didn’t know how to handle that episode. I still think about it every day.” 

“You can see how extraordinarily uncomfortable I was,” Birx says now. Trump’s comments were foolish. But how could she say that during a press conference? “Those of you who have served in the military know that there are discussions you have in private with your commanding officers and there’s discussions you had in public.” 

Dr. Birx went on to say she and Dr. Fauci talked “all the time” about “how to correct the record.” 

“I can’t tell you how many discussions we had on, how do we get the message out realizing what’s happening at the most senior levels of the White House,” she said finally.

 

 

APRIL 2021 

____________________

President Trump “incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November.”

Former Republican House Speaker John Boehner, in a new book

____________________ 

 

Former Speaker of the House John Boehner has a new book published. To say he’s not a fan of his party’s last president would be an understatement. The New York Times provides excerpts:

 

Mr. Boehner writes that Mr. Trump’s “refusal to accept the result of the election not only cost Republicans the Senate but led to mob violence,” adding, “It was painful to watch.”

 

At another point, he writes, “I’ll admit I wasn’t prepared for what came after the election — Trump refusing to accept the results and stoking the flames of conspiracy that turned into violence in the seat of our democracy, the building over which I once presided.”

 

He adds: “Watching it was scary, and sad. It should have been a wake-up call for a return to Republican sanity.” Nodding to the divisions between the parties in Congress now, he writes, “Whatever they end up doing, or not doing, none of it will compare to one of the lowest points of American democracy that we lived through in January 2021.”

 

Mr. Trump, he goes on, “incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November.” Mr. Boehner writes, “He claimed voter fraud without any evidence, and repeated those claims, taking advantage of the trust placed in him by his supporters and ultimately betraying that trust.”

 

The riot on January 6 left the former Speaker feeling nothing but “disgust” for what the Republican Party had become. As USA Today explained, Boehner sounded a warning on January 7.

 

“I once said the party of Lincoln and Reagan is off taking a nap,” he said on his @SpeakerBoehner account. “The nap has become a nightmare for our nation. The GOP must awaken. The invasion of our Capitol by a mob, incited by lies from some entrusted with power, is a disgrace to all who sacrificed to build our Republic.”

 

Now he elaborated:

 

“I don’t think it was just about him showing up at a rally on Jan. 6^th…The comments that were made all summer about the election was going to be stolen from him, all the follow-up noise that occurred after the election – I kept looking for the facts.”

 

“What struck me, especially after the election, was, here’s all these people loyal to Donald Trump, and he abused them,” Boehner said. “He stepped all over their loyalty to him by continuing to say things that just weren’t true.”

 

* 

Winter turns to spring. Republicans in Congress begin to realize that the Trump base still loves the former president, riots, and all. And if they hope to remain in office, they will have to go along for the ride. When Rep. Cheney continues to criticize the ex-president’s post-election behavior and role in instigating the January 6 riot, it becomes necessary to silence her as much as possible. 

In April, Rep. Cheney warns her party, and anyone else listening, about the ex-president again:

 

His message: I am still the rightful president, and President Biden is illegitimate. Trump repeats these words now with full knowledge that exactly this type of language provoked violence on Jan. 6. And, as the Justice Department and multiple federal judges have suggested, there is good reason to believe that Trump’s language can provoke violence again. Trump is seeking to unravel critical elements of our constitutional structure that make democracy work — confidence in the result of elections and the rule of law. No other American president has ever done this. …

 

The question before us now is whether we will join Trump’s crusade to delegitimize and undo the legal outcome of the 2020 election, with all the consequences that might have. I have worked overseas in nations where changes in leadership come only with violence, where democracy takes hold only until the next violent upheaval. America is exceptional because our constitutional system guards against that…

 

In the short term, Cheney writes, there may be political gains. Sadly, to support Trump’s lies risks, “profound long-term damage to our party and our country.” 

She continues:   “Trump has never expressed remorse or regret for the attack of Jan. 6 and now suggests that our elections, and our legal and constitutional system, cannot be trusted to do the will of the people.”  The party must once more “stand for genuinely conservative principles, and steer away from the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.” 

The party can recover, she suggests, but not if it follows a man with only one guiding principle – what’s good for him.

 

 

MAY 2021 

The GOP caucus in the House of Representatives votes on May 12, to remove Cheney from her position of House leadership.

 

“I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office,” Ms. Cheney tells reporters afterward. “We have seen the danger that he continues to provoke with his language. We have seen his lack of commitment and dedication to the Constitution.”

 

* 

That same day Minority Leader McCarthy claims the legitimacy of the election is now settled. “I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election. I think that is all over with,” he says. 

Donald J. Trump clearly has other ideas. Indeed, he’s still spreading the same basic lies in May, issuing, for example, the following statement:

 

The major Michigan Election Fraud case has just filed a bombshell pleading claiming votes were intentionally switched from President Trump to Joe Biden. The number of votes is MASSIVE and determinative. This will prove true in numerous other states. All Republicans must UNIFY and not let this happen. If a thief robs a jewelry store of all of its diamonds (the 2020 Presidential Election), the diamonds must be returned. The Fake News media refuses to cover the greatest Election Fraud in the history of our Country. They have lost all credibility, but ultimately, they will have no choice!

 

On May 18, Circuit Court Judge Kevin Elsenheimer dismisses the “bombshell” case. The legal issues cited in the lawsuit, he rules, are moot. The election results in Antrim County, where the bomb was supposedly planted, have been verified more than once – by Republican county election officials. The bomb turns out to be another in a long string of the legal duds.

 

* 

“We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer.” 

Balked in Michigan, Trump continued to insist that the entire voter database of Maricopa County had been “deleted” in the midst of a recount being conducted by a group called the Cyber Ninjas. Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer couldn’t take it anymore. “Wow. This is unhinged,” he responded on his personal Twitter account. I’m literally looking at our voter registration database on my other screen. Right now,” he wrote. “We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country. This is as readily falsifiable as 2+2=5. If we don’t call this out…”

 

* 

After Arizona Senate President Karen Fann wrote an open letter, insisting she had “serious issues” regarding two previous official recounts of the Maricopa County votes, Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers felt compelled to respond. 

“After reviewing the letter with County election and IT experts,” Sellers explained, “I can say the allegations are false and ill-informed.” Fann’s claims were “completely baseless.” 

He went on to say, “Moreover, the claim that our employees deleted election files and destroyed evidence is outrageous, completely baseless and beneath the dignity of the Arizona Senate. I demand an immediate retraction of any public statements made to the news media and spread via Twitter,” Sellers added.

 

* 

Former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer chimed in. “I think they [the people pushing the Cyber Ninja audit] should maybe just call it quits. I don’t think that it’s going to serve any purpose. It’s not going to change the election,” she said. “The votes have been certified. Biden is the president. It’s not changing. I say move on.”

 

* 

“But the way they’re doing it, it’s embarrassing,” Sen. Paul Boyer added. “It makes me embarrassed to be a [Arizona] state senator at this point. I feel like we’re in this fantasy land. I still have yet to see any evidence [of fraud], and I don’t think it’s coming.”

 

* 

Senate Leader Fann admits in a closed session with GOP lawmakers earlier in the week, “I have said from the get-go I am relatively sure [we] weren’t going to find anything of any magnitude that would imply that any intentional wrongdoing was going on. I believe that we were going to find what we’ve known all along and some of the things is we could do a better job.” 

Her sudden change of tone is due largely to the fact that the five members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors – which includes four member of her Republican party – had been threatening to file defamation suits against anyone who said the county election was fixed and that they conspired to break the law.

 

* 

If you ever wonder what people who worked for President Trump thought about him, a plan to “catch” one of his critics, hatched by loyal insiders in his administration provides a dose of unintended insight. The best part of this story, which breaks in May 2021, comes when a young woman with a hidden camera, using a fake name, visits a restaurant where H.R. McMaster, Trump’s National Security Advisor at the time, is known to dine. The plan is to catch him making intemperate remarks about the boss. 

Why? 

Because Trump allies believe that in pervious conversations, McMaster has told companions the president is an “idiot” with a grasp on national security equal to a “kindergartner.” 

A second woman was allegedly offered $10,000 dollars to go under cover and help trap McMaster, but refused.

 

* 

Asked in late May, by Dana Bash on CNN, if he thought the ex-president was to blame for the events of January 6, former GOP Sen. Scott Brown, who served as Trump’s ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, didn’t mince words. “Absolutely, I mean he bears responsibility. I think his presidency was diminished as a result of this, and I think he’s paying a price. He’s been impeached twice. He was impeached for those actions.”

 

 

JUNE 2021 

C-Span polls a panel of 142 historians and experts on the presidency, which is done every time a new administration takes office. 

Those historians rank Mr. Trump the 

41^st best president.

 

Since Grover Cleveland counts twice (22^nd and 24^th president), having served two non-consecutive terms, that means Donald J. Trump beats out only three men: 

Third from the bottom: Franklin Pierce (admit it, you didn’t know he was a president) 

Second worst: Andrew Johnson (took over when Lincoln was assassinated, first president ever impeached) 

Worst: James Buchanan (left a mess for Lincoln to inherit; our only bachelor president; couldn’t even get a wife) 

In fact, Trump finishes dead last when rated for “moral authority” and dead last again on “administrative skills.”

 

* 

“I already feel that he is the worst,” said Ted Widmer, professor of history at the City University of New York, noting that as bad as [James] Buchanan was – and he was very bad indeed – he was “not as aggressively bad as Trump.” 

“Andrew Johnson and Nixon would be the two others in the worst category, and I think Trump has them beat pretty handily, too,” he added. “He has invented a whole new category, a subbasement that no one knew existed.”

 

* 

“I would say that before the election it depended on one’s political outlook,” with conservatives applauding his tax cuts, deregulation policies and judicial appointments, said William J. Cooper Jr., professor emeritus of history at Louisiana State University. “But from the election forward, I don’t see how anyone could feel that Trump’s behavior was anything but reprehensible or that he hasn’t completely destroyed any legacy he would have left.”

 

* 

Douglas G. Brinkley, professor of history at Rice University and a member of the advisory panel for C-SPAN’s Presidential Historians Survey, said that Mr. Trump “was a bad president in just about every regard.” 

“I find him to be the worst president in U.S. history, personally,” Mr. Brinkley said, “even worse than William Henry Harrison, who was president for only one month. You don’t want to be ranked below him.” 

Mr. Brinkley brought up Richard Nixon, the only president to resign in disgrace. “At least when Nixon left, he put the country ahead of himself at the last minute,” Mr. Brinkley said. “Now he looks like a statesman compared to Trump.”

 

* 

Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton University, said that Mr. Trump was the worst president in history, hands down, citing “the brazen, almost psychedelic mendacity of the man.”

 

* 

Doris Kearns Goodwin: “History will look with grave disfavor on President Trump for the crisis he created.”

 

* 

In June 2021, Jack Ciattarelli defeats three other Republicans in a primary, and will be the party nominee for New Jersey governor in November. We make note because Ciattarelli knocked out two Trump-loving sycophants in the process, and because he once correctly referred to Trump as a “charlatan.” 

“The fact is, I’m an Abraham Lincoln Republican,” he announced, after his primary victory, “one who believes in tolerance, mutual respect and the power and beauty of diversity.” 

Or: not Trump. 

When this hard-working blogger does a little extra checking, which he always tries to do, he turns up a story from December 10, 2015, in the New Jersey papers. 

After Trump suggested during a presidential debate that all Muslims should be banned from entering the United States, Ciattarelli sent out an email, warning members of the party. “Sitting silently and allowing [Trump] to embarrass our country is unacceptable. He is not fit to be president of the United States.”

 

* 

The blogger also stumbles upon this old take on Trump, from none other than Sen. Lindsey Graham. 

As he explained that same December, “You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”

 

“He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for. … He’s the ISIL man of the year.”

 

Graham said Trump’s rhetoric benefits ISIS in helping them recruit people to their cause. He said having traveled to the Middle East 36 times as a lawmaker and in the Air Force reserve, he knows the troops and diplomats on the front lines are very concerned.

 

“What Mr. Trump is doing – and I don’t think he has a clue about anything. He’s just, just trying to get his numbers up and get the biggest reaction he can,” Graham said. “He is helping the enemy of this nation. He is empowering radical Islam. And if he knew anything about the world at all, you would know that most Muslims reject this ideology.”

 

* 

In June, former White House Chief Counsel Don McGahn finally has a chance to testify before Congress. (For obvious reasons, President Trump had blocked his testimony for years.) McGahn promptly testified under oath that his old boss did ask him to fire Robert Mueller. 

Repeatedly. 

Asked how he felt about being pressured to do something illegal, McGahn told lawmakers, “After I got off the phone with the president, how did I feel? Oof. Frustrated, perturbed, trapped. Many emotions.” He “felt trapped,” he explained, “because the president had the same conversation with me repeatedly, and I thought I conveyed my views and offered my advice, and we were still having the same conversation.” 

McGahn said he refused to call Rod Rosenstein, at the time the acting attorney general, and ask him to fire Mueller. “If the acting attorney general received what he thought was a direction from the counsel to the president to remove a special counsel, he would either have to remove the special counsel or resign.” That is: break the law and help obstruct justice. As Trump desired. 

Or resign.

 

* 

A Republican-led Michigan Senate committee completes its investigation into accusations of voter fraud in the lost presidential election. The top-line conclusion: “This committee found no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigan’s prosecution of the 2020 election.”  

Instead, the committee report suggests that the Michigan attorney general, a Democrat, “consider investigating those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends.”  

One typical conspiracy theory, pushed to the max by Trump fans, was that a mistake in transposing numbers in Antrim County, quickly rectified, was proof of widespread voter fraud. 

The right-wing Voter Integrity Project had claimed that 289,866 illegal votes were cast in Michigan. The committee selected 40 at random from the list of those who supposedly received absentee ballots without asking. 

Let’s see how VIP did:

 

o   38 said they did request absentee ballots, and everything was cool.

 

o   1 said he or she did not (but happened to be on Michigan’s permanent absentee ballot list.

 

o   1 said he or she voted absentee in the 2020 primary election, and may or may not have  checked the box to request an absentee ballot in the general election.

 

Meaning, VIP had an impressive 97.5% error rate, at least, and very possibly an unbeatable 100%. 

Yes, the committee found, there was chaos at one large vote-counting center in Detroit. That chaos was the fault of…Trump supporters, who tried to storm the location. “The Wayne County Republican Party and other, independent organizations, ought to issue a repudiation of the actions of certain individuals that created a panic and had untrained and unnumbered persons descend on the TCF Center.” 

The committee examined the claim by Jovan Pulitzer, who said he had access to manipulate vote tallies on Dominion Voting System machines. Mr. Pulitzer’s testimony, the committee found,

 

has been demonstrated to be untrue and a complete fabrication. He did not, at any time, have access to data or votes, let alone have the ability to manipulate the counts directly or by the introduction of malicious software to the tabulators. Nor could he spot fraudulent ballots from non-fraudulent ones.

 

A widely circulated photo of “bogus ballots” being “secretly” delivered to a vote-counting center in the dead of night turned out to be a picture of…a “WXYZ-TV photographer hauling his equipment.” 

As for Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy and Trump supporter most in favor of having the U.S. military overturn the November vote – let’s just say the report labels him “ignorant.” 

Speaking of ignorant, former-President Trump’s claim, repeated multiple times, that more people voted in Detroit than people living there was amazingly false. Not only did more people not vote in the city than lived there, only 50% of eligible voters cast ballots in 2020.

 

 

JULY 2021 

J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, is running as a Republican for a soon-to-be-open U.S. Senate seat. 

Back in 2016, he proudly noted that he had voted for Evan McMullen, not for Trump. Vance went to Yale. So he’s no dope. 

As for Trump’s anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant views, Vance described them at the time as “reprehensible.”

 

* 

You may have heard Rejected-President Trump talk about voter fraud in Arizona. It was massive. It was historic. 

Even cacti voted for Joe Biden! 

Having listened to poor Donald’s incessant whining, the Associated Press set out to find all the fraudulent voters in that state. 

County election officials, the AP found, had so far identified 182 possible cases out of three million actual votes cast. 

Of those, four cases had led to charges. 

FOUR.

 

* 

“Can’t + won’t snap its fingers + change the outcome of the election.” 

If we needed any more proof of how dangerous a defeated Donald J. Trump was, we had it on July 30. Only then did we learn, by way of the House Oversight Committee, that while still president, he called top officials at the Department of Justice and asked them to declare the November election “corrupt.” 

As ABC News explained,

 

At one point in the conversation, the notes show, Acting AG Jeffrey Rosen told Trump that the Justice Department “can’t + won’t snap its fingers + change the outcome of the election, doesn’t work that way.”

 

Trump responded by saying: “Don’t expect you to do that, just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen,” according to the notes taken by Richard Donoghue, who was then Rosen’s deputy and who was also on the call.

 

“We have an obligation to tell people that this was an illegal, corrupt election,” the president insisted. 

This call, logged on December 27, came even after Trump’s own Attorney General Bill Barr had made it clear there was no evidence the election was determined by fraud. Then he resigned. 

Fox News has the same story, but adds a bit more detail. The Acting Attorney General and other officials on the call reassured the president – if he actually cared about fair elections. “Sir we have done dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews, major allegations are not supported by evidence,” Rosen and Donoghue said according to notes. “We are doing our job.”   

“Much of the info you’re getting is false,” they added.  

There’s nothing in the notes to indicate Trump cared whether or not his information was true. 

In fact, the most ill-informed man to ever be elected president – and then remain ill-informed after four years in office – insisted people were “angry.” That much was true. Mostly because he kept telling his equally ill-informed followers that the entire election was a cheat.

 

“You guys may not be following the internet the way I do,” he added. Yes. Twitter. Facebook. Parler. QAnon websites. Just where you’d look for evidence that the outcome of an election was determined by fraud. 

(These DOJ notes are consistent with accounts offered by Republican officials in Georgia and Arizona, indicating corrupt intent on the part of the president, when he told them to “find” enough votes in Georgia to give him the state’s electoral votes, and in Arizona, where he wanted GOP officials in Maricopa County to stop the vote counting with him ahead.) 

We have quoted almost no other Democrats on this post in an effort to support our points. In this case the chair of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, puts the nail in the orange coffin. “These handwritten notes show that President Trump directly instructed our nation’s top law enforcement agency to take steps to overturn a free and fair election in the final days of his presidency.” 

The Justice Department has approved six witnesses, including Rosen and Donoghue, to appear before the panel and provide “unrestricted testimony.”  DOJ cites public interest in the “extraordinary events” of those critical weeks when a defeated president tried to steal back an election that wasn’t stolen to begin.

 

* 

According to two reporters for the Washington Post,  Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, in the days leading up to the 2020 election, with the president insisting the vote would be rigged, the Joint Chiefs of Staff began planning how to respond if Trump and his allies tried to stage a coup. 

If you’re a hardcore Trump supporter, you no doubt saw the words “reporters” and “Washington Post,” and your eyes glazed over, and your brain shut down. “Fake News,” you might have muttered, reflexively. 

We had already had signs of concern in August 2020, when Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sounded alarm. When Democratic members of the House Armed Services Committee asked about any possible role the military might play in the November election, Milley responded pointedly. “I believe deeply in the principle of an apolitical U.S. military,” he assured lawmakers. “In the event of a dispute over some aspect of the elections, by law U.S. courts and the U.S. Congress are required to resolve any disputes [emphasis added] not the U.S. military. I foresee no role for the U.S armed forces in this process.” 

And let’s be frank. Joe Biden wasn’t howling about how the coming election was going to be “rigged.” 

No chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had ever felt a need to reassure lawmakers and, if they were listening, members of the American public. 

No, the U.S. military would not interfere in any election if ordered…by the only person in position to order them. 

TRUMP.

 

* 

“The gospel of the Führer.” 

Now, reporters were adding depth to the story. The Joint Chiefs, they said, had discussed a plan to defeat any takeover by resigning in order of rank if Trump commanded the military to interfere in the election. Gen. Milley, as chairman, would refuse to carry out such orders and resign. Then other members would resign in protest, by order of rank. 

Or as Gen. Milley put it bluntly during one conversation with top officers, referring to Trump and his minions and any plan for a coup. “They may try, but they’re not going to f****** succeed,” he said. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.” 

Concern only increased after the election, with the president stirring up supporters with a litany of lies. “This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley warned top military leaders. In the days leading up to the attack on Capitol Hill, he believed Trump was preaching, “the gospel of the Führer.”

Gen. Milley came to believe the president was a theat to the nation.

 

* 

Thank you, Gen. George Washington, for setting that precedent in 1782, when some of your officers suggested you might make a good king. 

So even an acknowledgement that the story was true would be to interject the military into political discourse. 

A few days later, Gen. Milley was pressed to respond. His non-answer was really a fairly obvious answer. It’s an answer that had never before been necessary in the long history of the United States.

 

I, the other members of the Joint Chiefs, and all of us in uniform, we take an oath, an oath to a document, an oath to the Constitution of the United States, and not one time do we violate that. The entire time, from time of commissioning to today, I can say with certainty that every one of us maintained our oath of allegiance to that document, the Constitution, everything that’s contained within it.

 

I want you to know, and I want everyone to know, I want America to know, that the United States military is an apolitical institution – we were then, we are now – and our oath is to the Constitution, not to any individual at all. And the military did not and will not and should not ever get involved in domestic politics. We don’t arbitrate elections.

 

“We don’t arbitrate.” That’s the same answer the officials at DOJ gave, when they said, “we don’t snap our fingers.” 

Good, decent men had chilled the worst instincts of the worst president in American history, who desperately wanted to serve a second term his own officials were telling him he hadn’t won. 

His evidence was “false.” Attorney General Barr had told him so. Rosen and Donahue said the same. State and federal courts had turned back his fictitious claims of a “stolen election” in more than sixty cases. 

The U.S. Supreme Court blocked him, in one case, using all of eighteen words, one sentence, to deny his suit claiming that the Pennsylvania vote had been totally rigged against him. 

Trump knew on December 27, that he was running out of options, and top military leaders feared he would resort to violence. 

See: January 6.

 

* 

____________________ 

“They are misleading millions of people who have wishful thinking that the president is going to somehow win this thing.” 

Justin Reimer, chief counsel for the Republican National Committee

____________________ 

 

We learned, because we now have a copy of the email, what Justin Reimer, chief counsel for the Republican National Committee, said last November 28, about the “Stolen Election” myth being trumpeted daily by other lawyers for Mr. Trump. “What Rudy and Jenna are doing is a joke and they are getting laughed out of court,” he wrote to Liz Harrington, a former party spokeswoman, referring to Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis. “They are misleading millions of people who have wishful thinking that the president is going to somehow win this thing.”

 

* 

“The election wasn’t stolen. He blew it.” 

Jason Roe, the executive director of the Michigan Republican Party, tells Politico what he thinks of the “Big Lie,” that the 2020 election was stolen from a deserving Donald J. Trump. Then he steps down from his post:

 

The unfortunate reality within the party today is that Trump retains a hold that is forcing party leaders to continue down the path of executing his fantasy of overturning the outcome – at their own expense. Frankly, continuing to humor him merely excuses his role in this. The election wasn’t stolen, he blew it. Up until the final two weeks, he seemingly did everything possible to lose. Given how close it was, there is no one to blame but Trump.

 

* 

U.S. District Court Judge Linda Parker must decide on a filing by top members of Trump’s legal team whether or not to overturn the results of the Michigan vote. 

To say Her Honor was less than impressed with the slapdash work of Sidney Powell and the rest of her crew, would be to do an injustice to justice. In reference to the court filing in support of decertification of the Michigan vote, Parker marveled, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen an affidavit that has made so many leaps. How could any of you as officers of the court present this affidavit?” 

Parker described the filing as “layers of hearsay,” “obviously questionable,” “fantastical,” “speculative,” and offered in “bad faith.” 

Powell, who was also involved in the hearing, pointed out that the pile of shit was 960 pages long. 

Judge Parker replied, “Volume, certainly for this court, doesn’t equate with legitimacy or veracity.” 

The lawyer for Emily Newman, one of the lawyers who also signed onto the decertification petition (that tells you something about the nature of this mess), decided it would be best if he pointed out that his client spent only five hours on preparing the petition. Why, Ms. Newman hardly stuck her hands in that pile at all! Her role was “de minimus,” he argued. Or: as defined by the dictionary, “too trivial or minor to merit consideration, especially in law.”

 

 

SEPTEMBER 2021 

Congressman Anthony Gonzales, previously referred to as a “rising star” in the Ohio GOP, announces that he will not run for re-election in 2022. One of only ten members of his party to vote in the House to advance articles of impeachment against President Trump, the former football star and graduate of Stanford calls Donald J. Trump a “cancer for our country.” 

In addition, he cited as his reason for walking away, “the current state of our politics, especially many of the toxic dynamics inside our own party,” calling that “a significant factor” in his decision. 

Finally, he wanted his wife and children to be safe – and told reporters he’s received numerous death threats.

 

* 

Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan describes Loser Don (my label, not his) as “looking for a party’s soul to steal.” 

Trump, he said, “continues to be painfully comfortable peddling his baseless conspiracy theories of widespread election fraud. Last week, he fired off a disjointed and juvenile letter to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger asking him to ‘decertify’ the results of the election,” as Duncan explained. 

In that letter, Trump “respectfully” requests that Georgia authorities “start the process of decertifying the Election, or whatever the correct remedy is, and announce the true winner.” 

We know today, after Trump was thumped in the 2020 election, that his supporters still believe the election was stolen. Facts bounce off their craniums like bullets ricocheting off granite boulders.

Ellis once told the truth about Trump.

 

So it can be amusing to consider what a lawyer named Jenna Ellis once said about Candidate Trump, back in 2016. 

We’ll see where she fits into this broader story in a moment. I was simply curious to see what she might have said about the future president back when he was a mere candidate for the highest office in the land. 

 

“Unethical, corrupt, lying, criminal, dirtbag.” 

In this case, CNN did what any news network could have done – and this blogger did – to get the story straight. They went to Ellis’s old social media posts and they (and I) replayed old radio appearances from February 2016. Even People magazine did due diligence in this regard.  

In other words, this isn’t “Fake News.” It’s research. 

In one old Twitter post, from March 2016, it was discovered that Ms. Ellis had referred to the New York mogul as an “unethical, corrupt, lying, criminal, dirtbag.” 

In another post she wrote, “I could spend a full-time job just responding to the ridiculously illogical, inconsistent, and blatantly stupid arguments supporting Trump. But here’s the thing: his supporters DON’T CARE about facts or logic. They aren’t seeking truth.”

 

In a radio interview from that period, Ellis talked about the candidate and warned, “his crazy is coming out.” Her host, Jordan Harbinger, agreed. “I’m fearful for the republic right now,” he said. Ellis wondered, if Trump won the Republican nomination, how “we’re going to preserve the republic.” 

It’s a conservative talk show. So, Harbinger mentions two dictator wannabes. Obama, of course, is one. (You expect that from a right-wing type, so you can tune out 95% of this kind of commentary – which is also true when left-wing types bash Republicans.) 

Trump is the other. 

“This guy can’t take criticism,” the host says. Ellis agrees. She calls Trump a “typical bully” (go to around the 19:30 mark on the tape). The host plays a recording of Trump at one of his rallies, threatening, if elected, to make it easier to sue newspapers for libel. “That is about one of the scariest things, and you know what’s even scarier than what he said?” Harbinger asks. 

“Is there something that’s scarier than that?” Ellis interjects. 

Yes, he says, “The crowd’s reaction.” 

Ellis agrees. 

“That’s the sound of liberty dying,” Harbinger posits. 

“It is,” she agrees. 

“That’s the sound of a dictator taking over,” he says. (The crowd can be heard cheering.)

 

Ellis warns that people don’t understand that “this is going against the First Amendment right to free speech, right to freedom of the press, that the government doesn’t give us that right, it’s an unalienable right.” 

Harbinger asks Ellis, in a joking reference to Trump, “Why do you hate the Supreme Leader?” 

“I still value my First Amendment rights,” she replies. 

 

“I don’t think he wants to.” 

Just before the 28:00 minute mark, Harbinger wonders if Trump – should he be elected – can “work within the confines of the Constitution?” 

“I don’t think he wants to,” Ellis replies. She doesn’t think Trump is stupid. She admits he has run a strong campaign. But “he wants to go against the Constitution.” 

Around the 37:00 minute mark, she warns that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, the only GOP candidates left who still had a viable chance to stop Trump, really needed to focus on “how unpredictable and insane this guy is.” 

So, why start this document with the story of Jenna Ellis? Four years later, she will be one of the lawyers arguing that the man she labeled an “unethical, corrupt, lying, criminal, dirtbag” had been cheated out of a second term. She, along with Rudy Giuliani, would help support an assault on democracy, filing case after case in state and federal courts, arguing that the election in 2020 was stolen. 

That’s truly insane. 

And – we might add – Ellis and Trump’s other lawyers never won one.

 

 

OCTIBER 2021

 

In Ohio, Josh Mandel and J.D. Vance are vying for the Republican nomination to run for an open U.S. Senate seat in 2022. Mandel tries to toast his opponent, noting what Mr. Vance said about Mr. Trump back in 2015-2016. 

“I’m a never Trump guy. I don’t like him,” Vance can be heard saying in Mandel’s commercial. “As somebody who doesn’t like Trump, I might have to hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton.” 

In various tweets, Vance says of then-Candidate Trump: “I think that he is noxious.” “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.” 

“I didn’t vote for Trump because I can’t stomach Trump,” he admits. 

In a final tweet, included in the commercial, he says of the candidate, “My God what an idiot.” 

Exactly what Mr. Blogger has been saying for the last five years.

 

* 

A little more digging takes us back to what then-future White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnaney said about then-Candidate Trump in 2015. She correctly describes him as a “showman,” not a “serious candidate.” She mentions his previous support for Democratic and progressive positions. She assures Don Lemon on CNN, “the fact that the Republican Party is now having to claim him is both unfortunate and to me inauthentic.” McEnaney says she doubts Trump will even finish in the top five during the GOP primaries, insisting that conservatism is “about love.” 

Asked about his famous comment on Mexican immigrants, as “rapists” and “killers,” she responds exactly as this blogger did – and Sen. Lindsey Graham did – and so many other good-hearted human beings. “To me, a racist statement is a racist statement,” she says. “I don’t like what Donald Trump said. She called his remarks “derogatory” and “hateful,” which was patently true.

 

 

JANUARY 2022 

A year has passed since the deadly attack on Capitol Hill. Tom Rice of South Carolina, one of ten House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump for what happened on January 6, calls it

 

the day we nearly lost the country our founders fought for.

 

Any reasonable person could have seen the potential for violence that day. Yet, our president did nothing to protect our country and stop the violence. The actions of the president on Jan. 6 were nothing short of reprehensible.

 

* 

Karl Rove, a top Republican strategist, writes in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that “those Republicans who for a year have excused the actions of the rioters who stormed the Capitol, disrupted Congress as it received the Electoral College’s results and violently attempted to overturn the election,” should be ashamed. “There can be no soft-pedaling what happened and no absolution for those who planned, encouraged and aided the attempt to overthrow our democracy,” he warns. “Love of country demands nothing less. That’s true patriotism.”