Hi It's Stupid: Concern Trolling

Troll, via.

Hi, it's Stupid to tell Republican senators they'd be smart to join Democrats in sufficient numbers to convict Trump or even better send that delegation over to the White House in the next few weeks if that had a chance of getting him to move out.

Not that I do concern trolling, and I don't think I have any Republican senator readers anyway, but I think one could make a pretty solid Brooks-style argument that Speaker Pelosi has just offered them the best deal they're likely to get:

Yes, Trump Is Guilty, and Republicans Ignore That at Their Peril

This political brawl could permanently break the party.

I don't mean it could split your party leadership into irreconcilable factions of Trumpers and anti-Trumpers as if the latter, an insignificant minority, could pose an existential threat to the former, instead of just slinking out almost unnoticed like Kristol or finding a way of getting along like Brooks. I mean it could leave the party voted nearly out of existence in November 2020 and unable to reconstruct itself, like the Whigs in 1852. But before I get to that, senators, let me appeal to the better angels of your nature.


The main thing is that, as you know, Trump is guilty. Guilty, for sure, of trying to shake down President Zelensky for Ukrainian cooperation in his personal political projects (encouraging the belief that Russia had nothing to do with the theft of DNC emails in 2016, trashing Vice President Biden) in return for allowing Ukraine to have the Javelin antitank missiles that the US Congress had already decided they should have.

He's almost certainly guilty of doing the same thing in 2018, somewhat more successfully, with the same missiles but a different project (quashing Ukraine's cooperation with the Mueller team in the investigation of Paul Manafort), with then-president Poroshenko, but we don't have the smoking gun yet. On the other hand, now we know for sure how Trump does it, thanks to the Zelensky call and Trump's and Rudolph Giuliani's sputtering admissions, and also where the Trump staff keeps his embarrassing or incriminating diplomatic communications, so perhaps we soon will.

We're also learning he keeps records of phone calls with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and the president of the Russian Federation in the same secret electronic storage, and we'll be reading them too sooner or later. Most of the awful aspects of Trump's Saudi policy, from condoning the murder of Jamal Kashoggi to beefing up US complicity in the kingdom's bombing and blockading of the civilians of Yemen, seem like things Trump might well be glad to do without urging because he delights in cruelty, but then there are the persistent stories that he and Jared Kushner have taken financial help from Saudi royals while Kushner has supplied MBS with US intelligence to help him stamp out dissidence, and those need to be addressed.

On Vladimir Putin, we know a lot about the favors he did for Trump during the 2016 campaign, thanks to Robert Mueller's volume I, and a lot about the things Trump has been trying to do for Putin ever since, especially his extraordinary effort to block, stop, or stall sanctions on Russia over its seizure of Crimea and war on Ukraine and murders and attempted murders of Putin enemies in England and attempt to interfere with US elections, which I've summarized here and here. Trump, Flynn, Manafort, Junior, and others were able to prevent Mueller from finding out how the two are connected, with their lies and stonewalling, but they obviously are, and that too is going to come out eventually, maybe with evidence from the same digital storage unit. With that, we'll know exactly what Trump has been trying to cover up in the train of attempts to obstruct investigation amply demonstrated in Mueller's volume II.

Perhaps more significant than that is the increasing certainty that Trump has been using the office of the presidency and position as head of the Republican party to prop up his failing businesses, getting them infusions of cash from Republican campaign organizations and think tanks and the like holding events in them; from his own employees, from staffers enjoying after-work drinks at his Pennsylvania Avenue bar to the attorney general of the United States booking the place for a $30,000 ceilidh in December; from international diplomats and officials, including of course tons of Saudis booking Trump hotel rooms all over the US and Scotland and Ireland, in violation of the foreign emoluments clause of the Constitution; and from the United States government, paying the per diem expenses of who knows how many people taken out of their way to stay at one of his properties (so far we know mostly about the State Department and Defense Department and the Air Force), in violation of the domestic emoluments clause.

Take careful note of that last, senators: that's taxpayer money, and taxpayers are voters, and Trump is committing crimes every day when he puts it in his pocket. As all of these things continue to emerge over the coming months, which will be happening whether there's an ongoing impeachment process or not, as Democratic presidential candidates get a grasp on the details and start talking about it, some people are going to start catching on.

Speaker Pelosi, in offering a narrowly targeted impeachment process to focus on the Ukraine scheme and probably winding up before the end of the year, is offering you a deal you should not refuse, for the following reasons:

Refusing is bad for national unity. Many of your voters, I realize, believe Trump is some kind of semi-divine figure who is saving the nation from terrible, nameless disasters (actually they do have names, like "race suicide", but it's not nice to talk about that). You know that's ridiculous, but you've been mostly playing along since the 2016 Cleveland convention because you need their votes. In so doing, you are encouraging an unbridgeable divide in the population between those who believe in American democracy and those who believe in the God-Emperor and may even be ready to take up arms against our government, with their precious AR-15s that they believe are precisely for that purpose, though I'm not really afraid of that (the most fanatical are too elderly and too prosperous to run the risk).

As patriotic Americans and especially as leaders, it is your duty to help your constituents understand that they've been fooled. Liberals are not a diabolical force trying to turn them all gay and abort all their pregnancies but people like themselves with a different set of priorities in what they think the country needs, and Trump is not a savior working a miraculous transformation of American society but the head of a criminal enterprise trying to shake us all down. They're not stupid or incapable of understanding that; they just don't see the point of understanding it, and you should be out there showing them a reason, as soon as possible, because it's only going to get more difficult with those people as time goes on. Pelosi gives you an early moment with a clearly valid case (Trump has basically confessed already) in which you could start explaining it.

Refusing allows Trump to keep committing crimes. There's been a good deal of Constitution-chatter about how it should be the people who decide who's president (though the chatterers don't go so far as to complain about the Electoral College, oddly enough), not 100 senators who merely represent the people, especially with a presidential election coming up so soon, and I'm sympathetic to that. But in the meantime, as I say, Trump is committing crimes every day, you know he is, and there's a chance he could keep doing it until January 2025. The people pretty much know he's a criminal, too—last time the question was asked, in March, 64% agreed that he had committed crimes before he became president, while just 45% against 43% believed he had done it in office—but they don't fully realize that he's doing it all the time today. You can stop him, by voting to convict, and explain it to your constituents. They're largely ready to hear it.

Refusing isn't the same as refusing to convict Clinton.  Pundits and politicians seem to have the hardest time understanding the crucial difference between impeaching Clinton and impeaching Trump, which is that Clinton was really not guilty, or at least not guilty of anything you could call high crimes and misdemeanors, but the American people can understand it very easily—there are a lot of people in this country who have engaged in oral sex with people they shouldn't have and lied about it afterwards (if you don't know any ask ex-Speaker Newt Gingrich, mastermind of the Clinton impeachment who resigned from the House in electoral disgrace before the case got to the Senate), but practically none of us have threatened to stop somebody from defending himself against Russian invaders if they didn't help us out in our election campaign. Don't worry about Trump becoming more popular as the process goes on.

Refusing will prevent Republicans from selecting a better candidate. This is the heart of why you should vote to convict now, on Pelosi's skinny impeachment proposal, for the party's sake. Trump has very little chance of getting reelected in 2020 anyway, and that's going to get worse as the revelations continue. The sooner he's gone the sooner you have a chance of finding somebody who may lose but won't drag the party down with him. I don't think it's the last chance to impeach, either; I think if Pelosi decides she doesn't have enough bipartisan participation she'll drag out the process longer, with more attention to the Russian and Saudi connections and the emoluments cases.

Do you really want to go to your convention in June stuck with a candidate who's in the middle of being impeached over a lot more than a Ukrainian phone call? Better remove him from office now and get started with some primaries while you can. Pence and Rubio are panting for the opportunity.

Refusing will not cover your ass. Nixon loyalists in the year of Nixon's resignation didn't get much out of their loyalty. In 1976, they gave up control of Congress to Democrats for the next 18 years, and if not for the stupid, stupid, unforgivably stupid split between the Carter and Kennedy factions, we could have transformed the country.

Nancy Pelosi is giving you a one-time opportunity to make your own part in the story strictly about this crazy Ukraine story, in which you're completely innocent; you voted for Ukrainians to get the Javelins every time, without preconditions, after all. She's given you a chance to detach yourself from all the other crimes.

Take it. If you stop the impeachment now by voting with Trump, and the information on Trump's criminality continues to emerge at the current rate, you will have doomed yourself, and and your colleagues, to the wilderness while a President Warren or Sanders, perhaps, leads a unified Democratic party who knows where. I have hopes that may happen anyway, just because you've disgraced yourselves so deeply over the past three years,  but you do have an option to mitigate your disaster: you can help remove Trump from office by Christmas and restore a little dignity to the Republican party, as Goldwater and Scott and Rhodes and the others did then.

This is not my preferred outcome. I regard the Republican party as wholly responsible for Trump, his creators and enablers, I think this episode has revealed their real nature as a party of and for the rich trying to maintain power at any cost, up to the destruction of our planet, and I'd like to see them destroyed root and branch. But for the sake of national unity I urge you to do it. Save yourselves and let that mobster go.

Another approach, from Sarah Longwell, at NBC News.