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Tag: Trump

Reasons for Donald John Trump.

Posted in society by Adam
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Trying to understand potential motivations of people who support Donald John Trump.

Daddy figure

Lots of people had fathers in their lives, and lots of those fathers were imperfect and believed dumb things and acted like entitled asses and so forth. In that respect, one of the archetypes Trump embodies is that sort of father figure to a lot of Americans.

Reluctant Astronaut

There’s an old Don Knotts film called The Reluctant Astronaut (also includes Leslie Nielsen in a straight role) where Knotts gets sent to space to prove America’s space systems are so damn simple that a janitor could run them (after the Soviets announce they’ll send a dentist up).

Trump is a despicable loser, and the fact America has fared as well as it has proves our system isn’t entirely dependent on good leadership. Take that, Soviets! The problem with this motivation is that a good many Republicans now seem pro-Russia (if not pro-Soviet), on the basis of Trump’s own failure to once rebuke or say anything negative about that dictatorial slum of a regime in Moscow.

Variety pack or Doorstop

Different supporters get different things out of it. Most of them like that he was a doorstop against legislation that they falsely believe, based on false conservative media reports, would curtail their way of life now or in the distant future. For some it’s guns, others religious freedom, and others still business practices like pollution or employee treatment.

Placebo and Convenient excuse

Some supporters have no good reason other than the Trump presidency offered a chance, after eight years of Obama, to simply pretend the world was different even if there was no material improvement to anything specific in their lives or in how the government operated toward them. In that respect, a placebo.

A Fad for Those Who Miss Fads

When was the last big fad? Beanie Babies, 20 years ago? The Internet has changed Faddom. Most fads die swiftly as the next one comes along. There are a ton of tiny microfads. Sure, we’ve had the occasional dance fad, or things like the ice bucket challenge, but they weren’t full-blown, multi-year fads. Obama had some fad-like qualities in the early years, as did the Tea Party, but neither were really that faddy.

Donald John Trump was the biggest fad we’ve seen in a long time. The caps. The cheesy slogans. The dumb-guy personas Republicans all adopted. The hateful, repetitive rallies.

The crossover of fads and Republicans may warrant more study. I seem to recall the obsessions over George W. Bush during his tenure in the office having their own fad-like aspects. Reagan had his fanatical supporters. And so on.

You also have their policy obsessions over time, including the crusade against healthcare, refusing to make a deal on immigration, continually cutting taxes and regulation (none of which are ever enough). Some of that is borne on their denial of reality, some on their cult-like media bubble, but some of it may be a general desire to whine a lot about something or other.

Fear

The final result may not give Republicans enough credit. They may actually know climate change is real, but their framework for governance cannot cope. The contradiction has broken them, like HAL 9000. They are afraid of the very real future. They truly believe the solutions will cause negative results, but don’t see any alternative, so they simply try to stop the inevitable. Even if it means going along with an insane twit like Donald John Trump. They fear America becoming responsible more than they fear it becoming a dictatorship run by a kleptocratic dipshit. Or, they still believe they can control him enough that it won’t come to the worst while, apparently, reducing carbon emissions would be like digging their own graves.

Happy New Year! Biden gets sworn in in about two weeks.

If Impeachment, then Trial.

Posted in unAmerican by Adam
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Thoughts about how impeachment will proceed from the House to the Senate.

There’s a lot of questions floating around the journals of late about impeachment. The basic flavor, from both the left in fret and the right in hope, is will the Senate shrug? The majority leader has said they will take them up, but then came suggestions of the inevitable motion to dismiss.

The first thing is that you will never see articles move out of the House unless Speaker Pelosi and her colleagues find them damning enough for four or more Republicans to vote with the Democrats against dismissal on at least one of the articles. Perhaps the only way the House moves on articles without that locked down is if the Senate Republicans signal they have given up entirely on their oaths and take to the Mall to fly kites. At that point, the House would vote articles to place an asterisk on this chapter in American history so that future generations will note how craven a party can become under the poison spell of a filthy fool like President Donald John Trump.

To go through preliminaries—which they’ll need to before they can receive a motion to dismiss—and then accede to such a motion would be disastrous. They would have set the stage for a trial, with the public’s understanding already formed, and then said there’s nothing to be done about that understanding. It would speak against the entire purpose of the separation of powers—that, the executive being unable to properly investigate and indict emself, must have eir actions subject to review by a separate branch. If that separate branch cannot bring itself to successfully review executive actions, we have a whole systemic breakdown.

From the timber of the Trump–Ukraine (now –China?) scandal to-date, at least a handful of Republicans should vote against dismissing some of the articles. Such motions are a low bar in all but the most worthless cases, whether civil or criminal. The fact of the coverup using the code-word NSC system, the fact of the attempts by Secretary of State Pompeo to block testimony, the facts of Attorney General Barr and the citizen Giuliani jetting about and phonecalling to dig up dirt, all point to there being enough witnesses and awareness of the wrongdoing to push this into the territory of impeachment. There was something else…. Oh—the call itself, where the President directly asked a foreign government for dirt on a political opponent!

The other reason that the Senate would want to hold a full trial is that they should want the thing put to bed, either way. If they refused to hold a real trial upon the basis of valid and dire articles of impeachment, the House could simply reissue them again and again, to drive home the point much the way that parents waking their children find particularly grating ways. If the Senate dispensed anything approaching real justice, allowing for the case to be presented, and then decided to acquit, at least history would be served, if not justice.

Which brings us to Chief Justice Roberts. He will preside over any presidential impeachment. He represents the third branch, but the main reason for his presence is that a removal of a president automatically elevates the vice president, which means the vice president has a natural conflict. To obviate the conflict, the chief justice presides in his place. And in that role, he is the presiding officer of the body, including the fact that he may break ties on votes requiring a majority. Under Senate precedents, Roberts will offer preliminary rulings on legal questions before the body, subject to reversal or affirmation by a majority of the body. He also reads out the questions posed by senators, in writing.

All of which is to say that the Senate has that extra reason to behave in the midst of an impeachment trial. They will not want to make Roberts look bad. They will not want to cast a bad reflection upon our judiciary.

A reminder: impeachment and removal are there to fix the government. They are not punishment; any criminal behavior can be prosecuted after removal and punished accordingly. The question of removing President Trump boils down to the fact of his abuse of our standing in the world to seek personal benefits, which is a matter that surely harms our national interest and our security particularly.

For now the matter remains in the House, where the inquiry is getting started. It’s unclear how the House will proceed, with some folks on the right calling for it to be formally voted as an inquiry and held inter partes as the Nixon and Clinton inquiries were. If the House Republicans wish that vote so badly, they are free to push a resolution to that end and vote for its adoption (rather than the feckless resolution they’re seeking on Representative Schiff for paraphrasing the readout of the Trump–Zelensky call). Instead, their entire strategy seems to be more about the lack of any defense for the president’s wrongdoing. That said, one expects a vote at some point, and that the president’s counsel will be allowed to participate, if only to ensure the get a close-up view of the grave position this White House is now in.

This Trump–Ukraine Business

Posted in unAmerican by Adam
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A run-down of the situation that may lead to President Trump’s impeachment and a subsequent trial in the US Senate.

There is a myth in the media about impeachment, that it’s some state of being rather than a particular act by the House. It’s not. Impeachment happens when the House approves one or more articles of impeachment against any officer of the executive branch or judicial branch. That’s it. That’s all impeachment is.

Impeachment inquiries are oversight that someone has decided looks like it will probably end in a vote on at least one article of impeachment.

There are no additional powers unlocked by calling oversight an impeachment inquiry. Those who say there are do not know what they are talking about. The House can empower and entrust committees with additional powers or modify their processes, but that has nothing to do with the constitutional power of impeachment and everything to do with the clause that gives the chambers of the legislature control over their own rules.

Now, this business with Trump and Giuliani and a whistleblower (House Intelligence Committee: 26 September 2019: PDF of IC Whistleblower Complaint) and a coverup and seeking dirt on Joe Biden from Ukrainian President Zelenskyy. Is it impeachable conduct, to send your personal attorney under quasi-diplomatic cover to work on getting dirt on a political rival and precondition a phone call with a foreign leader on discussing said dirt, and dangle nearly half a billion dollars and a visit to the White House during that call?

I don’t know. I mean, what is the purpose of government if not to bribe, to conspire to defraud your fellow citizens, to abuse your power? That would be rather boring, wouldn’t it, to have a non-corrupt government that simply did its best to clear away the bullshit in peoples’ lives and let them get on with living? That glowed bright against corruption and stood for justice and democracy? So, yes, obviously it is impeachable. And no, it wouldn’t be boring in the least. It would be a welcome fucking change.

There are those who are afraid the Democrats are moving too fast on impeachment. We’ll see. There are those who worry it will help Trump electorally. Could be, but if we’re going to keep going on with having a country, we have to actually adhere to the law. If the nation decides it yearns for corruption and poison air and all those flavors of hell that so many fought, toiled, and died to stop and avoid, then that’s what it decides. A large number of us will never agree to such regression.

But we’re a country that supposedly cherishes justice, and that means we have to have trust in our executive. We do not have that trust. He has lied at every turn, burned every bridge, and he will be held to account under the law.

So, go ahead and play count-the-votes on your abacus, while the Democrats under Speaker Pelosi try to keep the Republic. They aren’t to impeachment yet. The probability they get there is much higher today than it was a week ago. The new conduct is more damning than anything we’ve seen before.

The charges, as they stand:

  1. President Trump’s administration withheld fund appropriated by Congress from Ukraine to leverage that government to aid Trump’s reelection by gathering or fabricating evidence on a political rival. (He may have also been dangling a White House meeting to further entice President Zelensky.)
  2. President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, repeatedly sought that same goal.
  3. President Trump conducted a telephonic conversation with Ukrainian President Zelensky that had as a precondition the discussion of working on gathering that political fodder.
  4. President Trump’s administration fraudulently employed the classification system to cover up the call.
  5. President Trump’s administration violated the law by not forwarding the whistleblower complaint and by actively and willfully minimizing it in the face of stark evidence.
  6. President Trump’s administration did not employ proper recusal procedures in evaluating criminal complaints that were forwarded to the Department of Justice.

And that’s just for starters. We do not know the extent of the involvement of some figures, including Secretary of State Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr. We do not know the exact nature of Giuliani’s work—who paid for it, and whether any of it was officially sanctioned by the State Department. We also know that Vice President Pence was blocked from attending Zelensky’s inauguration, and the president has insinuated that Pence’s own conversations with Ukrainian officials may be incriminating, but we do not know any details yet.

To be perfectly clear: the ask for targeted prosecution itself, without any promise of payment, is impeachable. But: due to the relationship between the United States and Ukraine, it is impossible to make any such request without it being a de facto quid pro quo—the United States is obviously in a powerful position compared to Ukraine, and Ukraine is reliant on the United States to help protect it. All the more reason that the USA has a duty to such foreign governments and their people to be an honest broker and not add to the woes of corruption and stressors that they have to deal with. The very fact that President Donald John Trump would attempt to take advantage of that country is dirty and corrupt.

The 2020 election takes place in 57 weeks. Keep following the candidates, as we all have a duty to try to pick the best of the lot.