No One is Unimpeachable

The damn Democrats are officially launching an impeachment inquiry regarding President Donald Trump, with the blessing of very cautious House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and we can’t blame them. If a Democratic president was as credibly accused of doing what Trump stands credibly accused of doing a Republican majority in the House of Representatives would surely be doing the same, and we’d wish them well.

The proverbial straw that broke Pelosi’s rigid back is apparently the widely reported story about Trump asking the Ukrainian government to provide dirt on potential Democratic rival Joe Biden. Trump swears he’d never do such a thing, and is promising to release a transcript of the telephone conversation with the Ukrainian leader to prove it, so far now we’ll wait to see how that turns out, but given Trump’s past statements aabout his about his willingness to accept foreign interference in an election we’ll read that transcript with a suspicious eye.

Even if the latest Trump scandal about Ukraine doesn’t prove damning enough, which is quite possible given how slippery Trump has proved during his long career as a celebrity, and how loyal the hard-core fans are, the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives still has plenty to work with. There are the millions of dollars that are pouring into Trump-owned businesses with every presidential golf game, and more millions of dollars of arguably unconstitutional emoluments from foreign governments pouring into other Trump-owned properties, and the special counsel investigation that documented Russia’s meddling on Trump’s behalf and cited 10 different instances when Trump tried to impede an investigation into that, which used to be considered an abuse of power and obstruction of justice.

There are a number of other impeachable offenses Trump stands credibly accused of, from altering weather forecasts with a felt tip pen to his accommodationist policy toward Russia, and several more scandals we can’t currently recall might also appear in the impeachment bill, but for now that doesn’t much matter. Even if the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives votes to impeach Trump, as it might well do, there’s little chance that the razor-thin Republican majority in the Senate will provide the 67 votes needed to convict and remove a president.

If Trump is acquitted by the Senate in an impeachment trial he’ll run on for reelection as only the fourth president to be be impeached by the House of Representatives, and on unprecedented footing. All three of the previous impeached presidents faced judgment in their second terms. and although none were convicted in the Senate President Richard Nixon did resign rather than accept that inevitable fate. Trump might well use his vindication by a Republican-majority Senate to cast himself as a victim of a “deep state” conspiracy, and by a year from from next November he’ll probably have plenty of persuasive arguments against whatever nominee the damn Democrats come up with.

Rhese scandals have a cumulative effect, though, and we figure that come a year from next November the Democratic nominee will also have plenty to say. As Trump has boasted he really could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and not lose a supporter, but he doesn’t seem to be picking up any new votes.

— Bud Norman

Another Foreign Adventure

President Donald Trump is back at the White House after a Group of Seven summit in France, and it was as interesting as the rest of his foreign adventures. As usual Trump didn’t return with any economic or diplomatic or military deals worth bragging about, and as usual he had a number of cringe-inducing moments.

Trump skipped a meeting with the other heads of state about climate change, explaining that he was tied up at more urgent bilateral negotiations with the German Chancellor and Indian Prime Minister, but both leaders were clearly at the climate change confab. He told a reporter that he had entertained second thoughts about waging a trade war with China and that “I have second thoughts about everything,” and his communications team spent the rest of the next day explaining the very uncharacteristic statement by saying that the president misheard the questions and meant to say he regretted not waging the trade war with even higher tariffs. Trump did brag about the big trade deal he’d negotiated with Japan, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe explained that he’d only agreed to continue negotiations.

There was some further bragging that  two high-ranking Chinese officials had called Trump to indicate their willingness to negotiate a quick peace in the trade war, which heartened America’s stock markets, but by the closing bell the Chinese government denied that any such calls has been made. The president also continued to hector the other leaders about allowing Russian dictator Vladimir Putin back into the club, despite Russia’s continued occupation of Crimea, which Trump blamed on former President Barack Obama because “Obama was outsmarted” and “it could have been stopped with the right whatever.”

Trump also claimed credit that there was any trade talk at all, even though several meetings on the topic were on the schedules handed out the international press at the onset. On the way home Trump “tweeted” that what all other the leaders’ most asked question was why he gets such bad press at home when he’s clearly doing such a bang-up job, a question which none of the world leaders asked publicly.

The next annual G-7 summit is set to be in America, so Trump also made a sales pitch to hold it at his golf resort in Doral, Florida. He spoke of how close it is to the Miami airport, helpfully explained that Miami is a large American city, and went on a such length about the gorgeous rooms and golf course scenery and ample parking that he sounded like a timeshare salesman in Branson, Missouri. Back home the usual nitpickers were making their usual nitpicking gripes about the emoluments clause to the Constitution and how presidents aren’t supposed to be enriching themselves with their office, and the world leaders whose constituents aren’t much enamored of Trump were rolling their eyes the way you might during a sales pitch for a timeshare in Branson.

Trump might yet swing the deal, though, and he needs it. Business is reportedly down in Doral since Trump became president, and Trump is lately griping that he’s losing billions he could have been making on paid speeches and other business deals he could be making if only he hadn’t so selflessly offered himself as a candidate for President of the United States. The nitpickers will nitpick, but Trump will pay them no mind. There’s a good chance the Democrats won’t get the Senate supermajority needed to kick him out office even in the more likely case they can muster an impeachment vote, while the die-hard fans haven’t minded the hundreds of millions his very frequent golf outings to his own wholly courses are costing the taxpayer, they and won’t begrudge him a few hundred million more in payments from foreign governments. By the time all those state attorneys general wend their way through the Trump-packed courts with their emoluments clause lawsuits he will at least be out of office.

The rest of the G-7 might well meekly going along with it, too, but we don’t see America getting a similarly sweet deal.

— Bud Norman

Trump Comes Out of the Woods

President Donald seems to have had a nice break from his political torments over Father’s Day weekend. The barrage of bombshell revelations about the Russia thing with Trump and Russia largely ceased fire, the other bad news didn’t implicate him directly and was largely overlooked, and after a long separation he got to spend some quality time with his youngest son.

We truly hope the father-and-son interactions went well, as the kid seems all right to us — by “the kid” we mean the son — and the old guy lately seems in need some of calming quiet time. The weekend was largely spent at Camp David, we note, and we also hope that helped with both the family dynamics and the political problems.

A military-run facility a short helicopter ride away from the White House but hidden in one of the last rural areas of Maryland, Camp David has been the preferred presidential get-away since President Franklin Roosevelt converted the Works Progress Administration’s High Cactocin resort project to an executive retreat and re-named it “Shangri-La.” Former small town Kansas boy President Dwight Eisenhower was particularly fond of the remote location and rustic atmosphere of the place, and re-named it again in honor of a recently born grandson. Since then every president has taken frequent advantage of the world-famous Camp David, with President Jimmy Carter using the place to finalize the “Camp David Accords” that brought a still-lasting peace between Israel and Egypt, President Bill Clinton attempted to use it for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians that didn’t work out so well, while all the Republicans reasonably preferred to use it as a convenient and relatively low-cost way to escape from all that for a weekend and get back to nature and play some golf or shoot some skeet.

Until this past weekend, though, Trump had conspicuously avoided the place. After a brief tour of Camp David he told an interviewer that it was “a place you’d like really like, for about 20 minutes,” and seemed to make clear that remote and rustic were not qualities that appealed to his rich New York City tastes, not matter how any previous sorts of Republicans might have liked that kind of thing. In the bitterly cold months of his early presidency Trump preferred to have both his get-away time and his high-level diplomatic negotiations at his very ritzy and wholly-owned Mar-a-Lago resort outside Palm Beach, Florida, and as summer arrived and South Florida seemed less suited to golf and other high-level negotiations he moved his second White House to another very ritzy and wholly-owned resort in the last sparsely-populated portion of New Jersey.

That arrangement worked out well for Trump in financial terms, with much of the even-bigger-than-Obama travel-and-security-and-entourage costs flowing directly into the coffers of wholly-owned Trump businesses and all sorts of people paying higher prices for entree due to the sudden cachet, but it was taking a political toll. All the opinion polls show Trump widely unpopular, even that outlier Rasmussen survey that shows him with a mere 50 percent disapproval rating, and the Palm Beach Post was delighted to inform its recently tax-burdened readership that some more specific polling shows that the extravagant weekends at the wholly-owned properties were unpopular even with Trump’s most loyal supporters. Two state and district attorneys general and a couple hundred members of Congress have lately filed suits about how Trump business are profiting from the Trump presidency, too, so Trump’s many public and private lawyers were probably also recommending some rest and relaxation at Camp David. Call us cynical, but we suspect all that had something to with Trump’s Father’s Day itinerary.

Even so, we truly hope that the rather abbreviated time they spent together at Camp David did both Trump and son some real good. At this point we have an admittedly mythic conception of Camp David, and although we’re pretty sure it’s quite ritzy by our prairie standards we also imagine that there really is something remote and rustic about the place by presidential standards, and we’d like to think that’s what every previous sort of Republican and even the Democrats found so quintessentially American and rejuvenating about it. There’s something remote and rustic about getting away from it all and back to nature that puts things in perspective, even it is still ritzy, and a rich New York City sensibility probably needs that more than most.

We hate to drag Trump’s kid into the this, as he seems all right, and nothing that’s happened is any more his fault that anything all those previous presidential children were dragged into, but he’s there in the news and we can’t help thinking how very weird his life must be, and how much good even a brief connection with the universal experience of nature might do him. By our own good fortune we had a better dad than that kid does, and he often took us out into the woods with guns and fishing rods and cameras to demonstrate the profound life lessons he had learned under the open sky, and although we never acquired his appreciation of hunting and fishing and photography the lessons about the beauty of the natural and good order have served us well, and we hope that the youngest Trump picked up something of that along the way.

Today is Monday and the barrage of bombshell revelations about the Russia thing with Trump and Russia will probably continue, and there will be more bad news that people will say implicate Trump, but here’s hoping that a father-and-son weekend at Camp David will mitigate at least some of that.

— Bud Norman