The opinion expressed in the title of this post is almost certainly a minority position among the Bearing Drift editors and contributors. It is still my view, however. While I have multiple reasons, I will focus on the most recent one to come to light: President Trump’s attempt to strong-arm the popularly elected leader of Ukraine to smear an American political opponent.
That attempt was revealed last week, ironically by the Trump Administration itself, via the Memorandum of Telephone Conversation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (via Washington Post [1]). For anyone who grew up in the Tri-State Area (North Jersey, West Connecticut, NYC, Long Island, and Downstate NY) – as Trump did – it reads as a classic Mafioso conversation: Nice country you have there, Volodymyr; be a shame if something happened to it.
What makes this worse – and more obvious – is that something is happening to Ukraine – it’s being invaded by Putinist Russia. Zelensky himself noted his country’s need for military support – right down to the specific missile type he thought would be most helpful for his military. Trump – who had already frozen Congressionally-appropriated aid for Urkaine, over the objections of his own Pentagon (WaPo [2]) – responds with a request for two personal political favors.
The first is a bizarre request to “get to the bottom of” a mythical conspiracy theory involving Ukrainian officials and Democrats supposedly framing his campaign and Putin. David French explains the horror in National Review Online [3]:
In fact, his commitment to this absurd theory is so complete that he apparently tossed aside his advisers’ repeated warnings that it had been debunked and allowed it to taint American diplomacy. This weekend, former Trump homeland-security adviser Thomas Bossert spoke on the record [4] to ABC News and the New York Times and noted that members of the administration had “repeatedly” tried to convince Trump that there was nothing to the notion [5] that a Crowdstrike server in Ukraine held the key to questioning the reality of Russian election interference.
…
Think of Zelensky’s position. His nation desperately needs American military assistance, and so he makes a direct ask for a key weapons system. Trump responds not with a reasonable request but rather with a question about a conspiracy theory, and then he urges Zelensky to work not just with the proper conduit for investigations of election interference, Attorney General Bill Barr, but also with his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani — the same man who Bossert said would “feed” him “all kinds of garbage,” including that conspiracy theory.Trump was thus placing immense pressure on the government of Ukraine to validate a thoroughly debunked theory, and in so doing to place an even greater strain on American politics.
Amazingly enough, this wasn’t even the worst of the call. After dropping this whopper, Trump went on to smear Joseph Biden – insisting that Biden demanded the firing of Ukrainian prosecutor Victor Shokin to stop an investigation into Hunter Biden in 2016. The problems with that assertion are legion and well known: Shokin had stopped probing the owner of the firm for which Biden worked a year prior; the events under investigation were before Hunter Biden came on board; Biden was joined by nearly all the democratic world in demanding Shokin’s ouster (WaPo [6] and Bloomberg [7]).
In other words, the President of the United States used hundreds of millions in taxpayers’ money (in theory in the phone call and in practice by holding up Congressional appropriations) to strong-arm another nation into smearing his political opponents. As Tom Nichols put it (cited by yours truly last week [8]): “If this, in itself, is not impeachable, then the concept has no meaning.”
As if that wasn’t enough, Trump has spent the last week threatening to execute the sources of the information provided in the initial whistleblower complaint on this matter – itself an impeachable offense on multiple fronts, as Nichols noted in USA Today [9].
I will acknowledge that I am the loudest Trump critic here on Bearing Drift (and, as far as I know, the only conservative Democrat among the editors and contributors). I am also aware that even if the House chooses to impeach the president, the Senate is likely to acquit him. That doesn’t mean the effort shouldn’t be taken. This kind of abuse of power must be resisted with every effort – even if the effort fails.
Donald Trump has attacked – and arguably destroyed – several of the constitutional “guard rails” that were supposed to limit him. He has used a fake national emergency to run roughshod over Congress’ power of the purse. He has defied court orders and Congressional subpoenas on a massive scale. He has used his EPA to cripple states rights in order to score political points against California …
… and now, it has been shown that he has been abusing the power of his office to roll a fellow democracy into smearing his political opponents.
The Founders specifically had behavior like this in mind from a president when they considered the Impeachment and Trial method of removing a president from office. Congress must use the tools given them by the Constitution to remove the threat of further abuses of power. This can only be done by impeaching, convicting, and removing Donald Trump.