ProPublica documents that Trump has been proclaiming his interest in the Ukraine investigation on Twitter for months. Why are we surprised when he has told the story out loud for months?
Conspiracy theorists convinced him long ago that Ukraine—not Russia—interfered in the 2016 election, to aid the hated Hillary. He also telegraphed his belief that Ukraine leaked damaging information about Paul Manafort (accurate but that’s beside the point).
Rudy Guiliani’s trips to Ukraine were no secret.
It was all out there.
Why are we surprised?
Trump seems to believe that if you commit a crime, an indiscretion, a betrayal of your oath of office to protect the country, and you do it in plain sight, it’s just fine. If they catch you, your defense of “So what?” is good enough for his fanatical base. This is the base that Trump predicted would not care if he murdered someone in Fifth Avenue in broad daylight.
Will they now tolerate his invitation to Ukraine to smear Joe Biden?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
IQ45 just retweeted Pastor Robert Jeffress, saying, “If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.”
Sounds like something that would be said by someone who is still fighting the Civil War. LMAO.
And Trumpty Dumpty sure does have an inflated view of himself, huh? Big, OK? Really, really big. I mean, YUGE!!!
What a surprise.
How to explain the impeachment proceedings to your child: “OK. Suppose I handed you two cookies and told you to give one to your brother. Suppose you then said to your brother, ‘I have two cookies. You can have one. But I need a favor. I need you to give me your blue marble.’ Why wouldn’t that be OK?”
This is scary. I just saw that Trump is now seeing if he can arrest Adam Schiff for treason. You know, because it is illegal for someone to say something “false” about the President (“false” is defined as something that the President says is “false”). Because, you know, when Trump was telling people that Obama was an illegitimate President who was born in Kenya and that Trump had the birth certificate that proved it, that was perfectly fine.
Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his supporters would be okay with it. If Trump manages to use his corrupt and unethical White House to successfully cover up his crime, and the Republican Senate refuses to remove him, then I think every non-Fascist American should take a vow to never say that the Democratic nominee (whoever he or she is) is “no better than Trump”. There is not a candidate running in the primary — many of whom I despise — who is not 1,000,000x better. Because with democracy, you need to elect someone who actually believes in democracy so you can live to fight another day.
Of course, if Trump just cancels the election and declares himself President for life, this is all moot.
Everything that the Whistleblower said was confirmed by the summary of the phone call released by the White House.
I saw SE Cupp on CNN yesterday saying that Trump was screaming “Presidential Harassment” and she reviewed the many times he tweeted that Obama was not born in the USA but was an illegitimate president. That, she said, was genuine “presidential harassment.” Then there the many Trump tweets complaining about how much Obama spent to go golfing and Trump has passed that figure in his first two years in office.
Forget Ukraine; Trump should be impeached for inciting political violence. To me this far outweighs the rest of his wickedness.
I long to see Trump and Miller in the dock at the International Criminal Court for large-scale, ethnically motivated child abuse and kidnapping/separation of children. If there were any justice. . . .
Trump’s misadministration just changed the rules in such a way as to remove half a million to three million kids from the free lunch rolls. Stealing food from the mouths of poor children.
This is a level of amorality that exceeds even the mobsterlike threatening and quid pro quo stuff that has always been the Trump stock-in-trade.
I think what Trump has always been has been clear long before he was elected. That is part of why I was so outraged that a few progressives kept normalizing Trump and acting as if he was no worse than the average Democrat.
This is the man that spent years claiming he had Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate. We all know Trump didn’t have Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate and he knew he didn’t have it. Trump just got his jollies drumming up hatred toward Obama. So he figured why not devote his time to convincing gullible right wingers that Obama was an illegitimate President. With lies. Because the media let him.
Trump did the same thing when he took out an ad demanding the death penalty for the teens arrested in the Central Park jogger case. Trump didn’t really care about the jogger or even what happened to the teens. It didn’t really matter to Trump whether the teens were executed or spent their lives in prison. What mattered was Trump getting his jollies by getting attention with his ad.
Trump has shown us classic sociopath behavior for many decades. I really do not understand how anyone could be surprised. The only thing that shocks me are those who insisted that Trump was not all that bad when they had a chance to prevent him from becoming President.
Plausible, but I think that he really did care about Obama’s origins and about the Central Park jogger case because both are in line with one consistency in Trump’s “thinking,” if you could call it that–the only real idea the moron has ever had is that some people (non-white ones) are “losers” and others (write, northern European ones) were “winners” because the latter have “good genes.” He has talked about this over and over and over again for decades, and his long, sordid history of racism shows these to be part of a pattern.
If you think about it, Trump has been doing that since he used hateful rhetoric during the campaign talking about the “rapists” and “criminals”. Unfortunately, not only did that not bother the Republicans, it didn’t even bother some non right-wingers who kept insisting that Trump was no worse than the Democrat.
^meant to reply to Ponderosa
Impeachment of a Republican President (a womanizer with children from 3 different women who paid for a porn star’s silence and, whose personal lawyer, campaign staff and associates are in jail unrelated to politics and, who left creditors without payment multiple times limiting his access to capital, and who is a racist calling Neo-nazis, “good people” and, who got $30,000,000 in campaign funds from the Russian-cozy NRA) …provokes evangelicals to be angrier now than ever. They’re angrier now than when their religious leader told them to view Jews as going to hell and Mormonism as heresy from the pit of hell.
America needs no enemies, it has Trump’s friends.
The Trump political party inexplicably has Christians including Catholics and Mormons supporting it.
Greed and Power are their religion. No supreme being needed, no morals expected.
“They’re angrier now than when their religious leader told them to view Jews as going to hell…”
The majority of Evangelical Christians I know are so partial to Jews that they cannot see when Israel commits an outrage. They have no problem with Judaism. Only a fringe selection are anti-Semitic. This is actually a tradition in Protestantism going all the way back to Cromwell, who denounced Catholicism but accepted Judaism.
The quote is from pastor Jeffress. Trump publicly echoed Jeffress’ prediction of future American civil war. If the prediction is correct and 80% of Jewish people stand with Democrats in the battle, what can be expected from the alliance of GOP-supporting prosperity Catholics and evangelicals?
There’s a lot of posturing in the Betsy religious camp. Steve Bannon is
our view from the inside. The alliances Roy alludes to may be voided when Jewish assets are coveted by a rich class who are in the religious majority.
“Will they now tolerate his invitation to Ukraine to smear Joe Biden?”
Trump’s baseless, clueless, biased, hate-filled, rabid, ignorant loving supporters drank the same Mind Hacking Kool-Aid that Trump swilled and that happened years ago.
Most of them probably think the earth is flat, God created all life including dinosaurs and humans at the same time about 6,000 years ago, that Biden and Hillary are guilty as hell (they don’t know what Biden and Hillary are guilty of but that isn’t important to them), and Trump is the “Chosen One”. They also do not care what chose Trump and sane people know it wasn’t God.
Trumpty Dumpty wanted a wall.
He wanted it big; he wanted it tall.
But all of Barr’s forces, and all of his sins,
Couldn’t put Trumpty together again.
Barr is visiting other nations in an effort to find “evidence” that the US intelligence community was wrong about Russian election interference in 2016. Why does Trump insist on relitigating 2016?
This is because his job is not to serve as administrator of the nation’s justice system but as Trump’s personal lawyer. Trump had to go through a few AGs until he found one willing to do that.
Barr must be thinking, OMG, I just threw away my career and reputation for this buffoon. If I don’t fix this, I will be remembered not for anything substantive I’ve done in the past but for being the moron’s lackey, toadie, patsy, yes man. What a cause to hitch one’s star to! Defense of Don the Con.
Ah, but Barr is also thinking if Trump triumphs and come out on top, Barr will be in a position to hold great power over everyone but the Trump Dynasty’s heirs. Barr is gambling his tyrant will win.
Why do the Democrats refuse to accept the outcome of the election? He won fair and square. Why not just move on and field candidates whom centrists could vote for?
Harlan, Trump did NOT win fair and square.
The evidence is overwhelming that he won because of the Russian meddling, but Muller couldn’t connect the dots that the Russian meddling could be linked to Trump, meaning they could not prove Trump cooperated with the Russians. That does not mean Trump didn’t do it.
Now we have really strong evidence that Trump called the leaders of two countries, Ukraine and Australia, and used pressure to get them to come up with evidence to discredit Mueller (Australia) and Biden (Ukraine), and Trump’s people attempted to hide what Trump did.
And Mueller did find enough evidence that Trump attempted to Obstruct Justice TEN TIMES during Muller’s investigation, enough evidence that Mueller could not find Trump innocent and left it up to Congress to find guilt or innocence.
No Congress is acting and that starts with the House. Right now, they are examining all the evidence and looking for more before they decide to go ahead and vote to recommend the Senate impeach Trump.
I think that explains why Trump is going ape shit crazy and claiming the impeachment is a Civil War. I heard on the news that in the last 24 hours, Trump sent out a 100 tweets raging about this. He is scared, crazy, insane scared. He knows he is guilty.
Please do not forget Don Jr.’s meeting in Trump Tower with Russian lawyer and government operative Natalia to talk about “adoptions” (a code word for the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on Russia for gross abuses of human rights—-Russia retaliated by suspending adoptions). And Don Jr.’s e-mail to a friend in Russia who claimed to have dirt on Clinton: “I love it!”
There is so much we could list that Trump has done or has been alleged to have done that we don’t have time in a 48 hour day to get it all listed.
Trump, with William Barr as his AG is doubly dangerous for not on the US Constitutional Republic but the entire world.
If Trump succeeds and stays in power, the only way the U.S. will get rid of him will be if the entire world turns on him and invades the United States to take him out, and that World War would probably destroy the environment we need to live on this planet.
Trump has set a goal to create the Trump Dynasty that will survive for a thousand years just like Hitler wanted for the Nazis.
An article in today’s Washington Post referred to Trump’s “one-man government” because he has taken control of every department and agency and eliminated their independence.
They serve him, not the nation.
Addendum from LA Times: a: a guy named McDonnell at Homeland Security resigned today. He has been cutting programs designed to protect us from WMD.
From the LA Times:
WASHINGTON — James F. McDonnell – a presidential appointee who over the last two years downsized the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to prevent terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction – has agreed to resign, sources said.
McDonnell’s resignation, they said, comes at the request of Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan and would become effective at Thursday, according to an e-mail McDonnell sent his staff at 12:57 p.m. EDT on Wednesday. McDonnell’s seven-sentence memo did not provide a reason for his resignation, saying only it was “time for a new leadership team to take things to the next level.” When reached Monday morning by telephone, McDonnell said only, “I don’t have any comment. Thanks for calling.”
Press aides at the department did not answer written questions about the matter. A spokesman for McAleenan, Victor Brabble, said Monday afternoon by email that Homeland Security would provide a statement “as quickly as we can.”
President Trump appointed McDonnell to posts in 2017 and 2018 at Homeland Security, where he has led the department’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office and its predecessor, the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office.
Trump won the election. Why does he keep relitigating it? Why has he sent Barr around the world in search of evidence that the American intelligence community was wrong in criticizing Russia for hacking in the DNC emails? Why doesn’t he move on? Why has he ordered the State Department to reinvestigate Clinton’s emails? What’s wrong with this man?
William Barr believes in the Imperial Presidency and that explains everything he is doing to support Trump. He believed in the Imperial Presidencey when G. W. Bush was president, too.
There is a lot of info detailing what William Barr believes and it is frightening.
“The Barr Memeo and the Imperial Presidency”
… “The independent agencies are unconstitutional. William Barr’s view of presidential power would hold independent agencies unconstitutional, overturning nearly a century of Supreme Court precedent and upending dozens of regulatory agencies. It would be shocking enough for the Barr Memo to assert that the Supreme Court’s most foundational decisions relating to the constitutionality of the regulatory state have been consistently wrong for nearly a century. The Barr Memo does not even note that it is irreconcilable with these decisions, let alone attempt to explain why they should be disregarded.” …
https://www.acslaw.org/expertforum/the-barr-memo-and-the-imperial-presidency/
If character is destiny, the next few years will be very interesting for Don the Con.
Don the Con is a gambler, and he is doing all he can to get his supporters to start a Civil War and install him as the first life-long president of the Trump family dynasty.
DT is not an honest gambler and not a good one, but he has been a successful crook for a very long time and he thinks he is smarter than everyone else.
He’s not a smart guy. And he has completely limited his exposure to the masses to these hermetically sealed rallies of his rapid, know-nothing Trumpeteers. So, he’s believing his own bs. It must really bother him to see all the stories that are being printed, now, about how many Republican Senators secretly despise him. He has long, long avoided media on the other side and goes nuts when he encounters anything but adulation.
Trumpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Pride cometh before a fall.
One Republican said that if the Senate vote were a secret ballot, Trump would lose 30 GOP Senators. Now is their chance to get rid of the tyrant.
Many are totally sick of him, and of the party Limbo dance.
Trump’s line of defense came from Roy Cohn. Deny, deny, deny. Attack the accuser again and again.