Method to Madness

Illustration via La Cuadra Magazine, October 2013.

Marc Thiessen:

Incompetence is not an impeachable offense

Oh right. Hard to argue with that. If the Founding Fathers, in their practically infinite wisdom, had thought the nation should be enabled to do something when a president turns out to be an imbecile who believes in invisible airplanes, can't read, and changes his mind 120 times a day, surely they would have said something!

What we saw on display Wednesday were two dedicated, experienced career foreign policy officials who had been desperately trying to figure out what the president wanted — and inferring his intentions based on snippets of information from others. But their efforts to divine Trump’s desires presume that the president knew what he wanted. It’s not clear he did. His handling of Ukraine seemed less the execution of an intelligible plan than a chaotic mishmash of constantly changing urges and demands. According to Sondland, “President Trump changes his mind on what he wants on a daily basis.”

.... it looks as though the entire Ukraine debacle may be the result less of intent than incompetence. And unfortunately for Democrats, incompetence is not an impeachable offense.

Unfortunately for Democrats! Having a stupid, certifiable, uncontrollable maniac in the White House isn't a problem for the nation as a whole—in fact it's good for Republicans! Suck on it, libtards!

I can't help feeling there's something imprudent about choosing this hill to die on, as Republicans from Lindsey Graham

"It was incoherent," Sen @LindseyGrahamSC
says of Trump's Ukraine policy.

"They seem to be *incapable* of forming a quid pro quo." pic.twitter.com/rdZxyIazNj

— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) November 6, 2019

to Ben Shapiro

The fact is I’m a conservative, I’m a Republican. But the fact is, I don’t actually see objectively that Trump has ever had the level of intent necessary to do anything. I don’t think he's ever had the level of intent to put a, to eat a hamburger. I think it’s half accident when he eats a hamburger. [Laughs.] (transcribed by Roy Edroso)

appear to have done.

Not that one day the Democrats might elect an incompetent of our own and then Republicans won't be able to get rid of him or her (a future where every time Jonah Goldberg sneers at kale you will say "This is how you got Marianne Williamson"), the kind of stupid problem a journalist raises. In fact that will never happen because we'd never nominate somebody with an off-color reputation like Trump's and his incoherent and subliterate speaking style in the first place, and if a Democratic president began showing unexpected signs of incompetence after the election, like demanding briefings no more than a page long with plenty of graphics and appearances of his name, or not knowing that NATO members don't pay dues to belong to the club, or not knowing who pays import taxes, or passing classified information to the Russian foreign minister, we'd get rid of him pretty quickly.

But it really isn't good for the nation to have an incompetent branch of government. And I can't believe over the long run it's a good look for the party to insist on it. The large majority of the public has caught onto this and stopped finding it funny.

It's also possible that incompetence of Trump's kind is, in fact, impeachable, as Ezra Klein recently reported, not a high crime but very possibly a very high misdemeanor:

Impeachment, I learned, was richer, stranger, and more essential than I’d understood. For one thing, “high crimes and misdemeanors” didn’t mean literal crimes. As the Cato Institute’s Gene Healy notes in his excellent study, “Indispensable Remedy: The Broad Scope of the Constitution’s Impeachment Power,” the 1828 edition of Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language defined “misdemeanor” as “ill behavior; evil conduct; fault; mismanagement.” The dominance of the legal definition — a small crime carrying up to a year in jail — came later.

Even if his conduct didn't rise to the level of evil, as it does, he's clearly as ill-behaved and bad at management as they get.

But finally, this argument is playing a trick on the audience: using the fact that we basically know Trump is incompetent to distract us from the fact that he clearly did do this thing. Because he may change his mind constantly about things he doesn't care about, or more accurately he has an ability to contradict himself without being aware of it—when he says he wants to tax "hedge-fund guys" or wants to protect "the kids" of the DACA program he doesn't stop opposing these things, he just forgets—but there are some places where he's steadfast, and one of those has been his determination to get that announcement from the Ukrainian president to discredit the Mueller Report and throw suspicion on Joe Biden:

“Ambassador Sondland also told me that he now recognized that he had made a mistake by earlier telling the Ukrainian officials to whom he spoke that a White House meeting with President Zelenskyy was dependent on a public announcement of investigations — in fact, Ambassador Sondland said, ‘everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance,” Taylor said. “He said that President Trump wanted President Zelenskyy ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations.”

That was no "half-accident". Trump has wanted this ever since Giuliani told him about it, and he hasn't wavered at all. He may be—he is—incompetent, but he's very good at having an "intent" when he really means it.