Six on Impeachment: GOP congressmen compare impeachment to crucifixion of Jesus, Pearl Harbor; Four New Resources For Teaching About Impeachment; There's a barking lunatic in the White House; Nancy Pelosi’s stomach-turning impeachment charade damages
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Thanks John and Gary
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Where the “Tell-Tale Heart” speaker imagines that the old man next door has the “eye of a vulture,” Trump has observed, with equal creepiness, that Pelosi’s “teeth were falling out.” He complains bitterly in the letter, blaming Pelosi for his impeachment and going full Poe: “It is a terrible thing you are doing,” he writes. “But you will have to live with it, not I!” The letter really does suggest he could benefit from inpatient care. ...
This is a very Trumpian cycle. Ever since he snapped, “No puppet, no puppet, you’re the puppet” at Hillary Clinton, then his presidential opponent, Trump has made it clear he lives and dies by projection. Whatever he fears in himself, he imputes to another person.
Read the Tuesday letter, and it’s clear: Trump is scared as hell. And scared people are scary.
Pelosi has signaled since September that the House is committed to a methodical impeachment process. But in spite of her prudence during the impeachment inquiry, Trump sees in her every kind of bellicosity. In the letter, the president charges her with “a full-fledged case” of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Likewise the Poe narrator imagines his placid, sleeping victim is deranged. He perceives an “overcharged” soul in the sleeping man’s snores. He believes he can hear the man’s heart beating and decides it’s a symptom of the man’s fear — and not his own.
Oh, projectors.
Trump solicited foreign intervention in the upcoming 2020 election, and multiple former federal prosecutors agree that he should be indicted on multiple counts of obstruction of justice. So Trump, as usual, offloads these facts onto Pelosi and the Democrats: “You are the ones interfering in America’s elections. You are the ones subverting America’s Democracy. You are the ones Obstructing Justice.”
Finally, like Poe’s narrator, Trump credits himself for stable ingenuity, even as every sentence he writes speaks to his madness. “There are not many people who could have taken the punishment inflicted during this period of time,” he writes, “and yet done so much for the success of America and its citizens.”
It’s a quiet sentence, a brief clearing in the forest of erratic capitalization and exclamation points. But it’s Trump talking to himself, telling himself, as Poe’s narrator does, that while everyone else is crazy, “I was singularly at ease.”
Alas, ease is in short supply. The president and Poe’s murderer both come across as trapped in their own heads, and surrounded by grating, menacing and deranged voices they try to tell themselves come from the outside."
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"At any rate, by last Sept. 24, with the 2020 election fast approaching and her icy relationship with Trump now a bonfire, Pelosi suddenly flip-flopped on impeachment. Her ostensible reason centered on the unverified claims of an anonymous whistleblower regarding Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine. The call, she was assured by the media and Rep. Adam Schiff, would amount to a smoking gun.
“The actions of the Trump presidency revealed dishonorable facts of betrayal of his oath of office and betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections,” she declared.
It felt like a fill-in-the-blank speech, one she had on the shelf ready to go as soon as she had an excuse to use it.
Twenty-four hours later, Trump released the transcript of the Ukraine call and it was benign in comparison to her inflammatory accusation. If only Pelosi had waited another day.
Watching the so-called debate Wednesday, I was struck by how the impeachers, desperate to inflate their base partisan passions into something noble, have cheapened our nation’s history and language.
They resembled Grade B actors performing for the cameras, their rehearsed references to oaths, prayers, the Founding Fathers, the rule of law, checks and balances and the Constitution itself all sounding contrived. Rather than reflecting actual gravitas, the words were trotted out to create the appearance of it.
That was consistent with Pelosi’s latest demand that her members stay “solemn” in public, so as not to give the impression that they were gloating and joyful. In other words, hide how you really feel so we can fool more people into joining us.
Only the damage to America is real."
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"As the impeachment inquiry of Trump unfolds, Johnson, never among America’s most famous presidents, though widely considered one of the worst, is attracting renewed attention.
Johnson was the first president to be impeached, by the House of Representatives in 1868. He escaped removal from office by a single vote short of the required two-thirds after his trial in the Senate, but was so disgraced he was denied his party’s nomination that year.
Trump and Johnson came from opposite ends of America’s social spectrum — Johnson from deep poverty, Trump from great wealth. Yet they shared bellicose personalities, a disdain for political niceties, and a penchant for divisive, sometimes racist rhetoric.
Jon Meacham, a presidential historian who wrote a chapter on Johnson’s case in a recent book on impeachment, has drawn a harsh comparison after Trump suggested that four activist Democratic congresswomen of color “go back” to countries “from which they came.” Coupled with other statements by Trump, Meacham says Trump “now ranks with Andrew Johnson as perhaps the most racist of our presidents.”
Meacham sees other parallels as well.
“Like Trump, Johnson was a temperamentally tumultuous man who defied norms of the era,” Meacham said in an email. “In Johnson’s case, he actively sought to undo the verdict of the Civil War as the Republicans of the day saw it; in Trump’s case, he is actively seeking to nullify the constitutional order by using his powers to undo the sovereignty of our elections.”
Johnson, a Democrat, became vice president under Republican Abraham Lincoln on a unity ticket during Lincoln’s reelection campaign amid the Civil War in 1864. Johnson became president after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865."
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"In other words, when it comes to Trump, everyone knows. As the Republican caucus members fell into line on Wednesday, they revealed themselves. No one defended Trump on the merits, on the facts—not with any conviction or coherence. Who came to praise his character or values? No one. Instead, there were only counter-accusations, smoke-bomb diversions about procedure, ill will, and even talk of the President’s martyrdom. Barry Loudermilk, a Georgia Republican with a name fit for Mencken, was distinguished in his metaphors, yet hardly eccentric among his caucus, when he said, “Before you take this historic vote today, one week before Christmas, keep this in mind: when Jesus was falsely accused of treason, Pontius Pilate gave Jesus the opportunity to face his accusers. During that sham trial, Pontius Pilate afforded more rights to Jesus than Democrats have afforded this President in this process.” Democrats, in fact, had offered the President the chance to defend himself, but he had declined to do so. His “defense” was to hold back as much evidence and as many witnesses as he could.
No one marshalled any evidence to dispute that the President had dispatched Giuliani and others to assist him in manipulating and muscling the Ukrainian government into doing him a “favor.” No one denied with any conviction that Trump had asked for foreign help in 2016 (“Russia, if you’re listening…”) and was looking for it this time around, too. Not only had Trump not apologized or denied it, he doubled down. Hadn’t he asked the Chinese, in October, to carry out an investigation of the Bidens right there on the White House lawn?
Republican members may sincerely admire the judges whom the President has appointed, the tax cuts for the wealthy that he has supported, and the ad-libbed trade war that he has waged. But they also know that Trump is, as Adam Schiff put it in the most eloquent speech of the day, a cheat. On July 24th, Trump watched as the special counsel Robert Mueller testified, damningly but ineffectively, in Congress. On July 25th he called the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, and asked for his “favor.” On July 26th, he called his million-dollar campaign donor and Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, at a restaurant in Kyiv, to make sure that the Ukrainians were going to do it—that they were going to investigate the Bidens, on his behalf. He didn’t care about corruption in Ukraine, or the war Russia was waging against Ukraine. He cared only about “big stuff,” as Sondland put it. He cared about himself. And he was willing to extort an ally to get what he desired.
On Wednesday evening, the commentators on television solemnly invoked the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, history. Everyone went full-on Jon Meacham.
But Trump made it plain that he would not nod to any sense of grace or occasion. During his impeachment crisis, President Andrew Johnson was quick to the bottle and revealed, in many speeches, a deep streak of self-pity. “Who has borne more than I?” he asked an audience Cleveland, in 1866. Trump is certainly as thin-skinned as Johnson was. Consult his Twitter feed. And yet just around the moment when the House passed the first article of impeachment, Trump was trying his best to do a rhetorical devil-may-care act at a rally in Battle Creek, Michigan, asserting that real Air Force pilots were more handsome than the “Top Gun”-era Tom Cruise. He improvised. He did shtick. He threw out one random insult and Dada observation after another. He talked about Beto O’Rourke. (Remember Beto O’Rourke?) He talked about showers. He talked about sinks. He talked about many other things. He performed as if none of what was happening in Washington mattered. He was now impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, but he felt safe. He had his party. He had Fox News and his Twitter followers. He had his base. He could not be touched. “It’s impeachment lite,” he told the crowd. “I don’t know about you, but I’m having a good time.”
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