Pax on both houses: Forget Trump’s “Meltdown”—Follow The Impeachment Inquiry Revelations

Friday, October 18, 2019

Forget Trump’s “Meltdown”—Follow The Impeachment Inquiry Revelations

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Forget Trump’s “Meltdown”—Follow the Testimony.

On a week of revelations in the House’s impeachment inquiry

Susan B. Glasser

The New Yorker

Excerpt: Mulvaney went on to make the breathtaking argument that, in effect, the President is entitled to do all of the things that are alleged about Ukraine policy, including holding military assistance hostage in exchange for a foreign investigation into one of Trump’s favored conspiracy theories about the 2016 U.S. election. Instead of denying a quid pro quo, Mulvaney said, more or less, “So what? It happens all the time.” When an incredulous Jonathan Karl, the ABC News correspondent, followed up to ask if Mulvaney was acknowledging that the President had, in fact, been involved in a quid pro quo with Ukraine, the chief of staff responded, “I have news for everybody: get over it. Elections have consequences, and foreign policy is going to change from the Obama Administration to the Trump Administration.”

It was jaw-dropping, or it would have been if there hadn’t been so many other jaw-dropping events to process. After all, at the start of the briefing, Mulvaney had announced that Trump would hold next year’s Group of Seven summit meeting at his golf resort in Doral, Florida, a self-dealing conflict of interest so brazen it seemed impossible to believe that it was actually happening. This is the sort of thing that would get an official in any other Administration fired or arrested, or both.

No wonder the alarming significance of the testimony in the impeachment inquiry has been hard to focus on. The signal-to-noise ratio in our politics, already unbearable, has, in recent days, become deafening. Trump has always been a master of distraction, and one of his favorite tactics has been to embark on new controversies as a way of diverting from the old ones. On Wednesday, one thousand days into his Presidency, Trump had what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called a complete “meltdown” at a White House meeting with congressional leaders about the week’s other disaster, Trump’s decision to abandon U.S. Kurdish allies and pull out of Syria, enabling a Turkish invasion.