Things were not well in the Kingdom of Donnie this week. Despite a pair of extended length rallies—at one of which Donald Trump gave a genuinely disturbing imitation of Meg Ryan in that diner scene—all the sneers, snarling, and fake-O face in the world could not make up for what happened out in the real world. On Friday alone, Trump lost cases in five different courts. He lost on hiding his taxes. He lost on appropriating money for his border fence. He lost on setting arbitrary standards for immigrants. While he was losing in court, former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was talking to Congress to tell them about how Trump and Rudy Giuliani hounded her out of office using lies and conspiracy theories because she refused to cooperate in their extortion scheme.
And after ten hours of testimony, the best line of attack the Republicans came up with, the absolute best, was that it was “bullying” for the House to bring in Ambassador Yovanovitch and make her talk. About how she had been fired. For no good reason. By Trump.
Within two days of the announcement of the impeachment inquiry, after Trump released the not-a-transcript of his “perfect” call to the Ukrainian president, support for impeachment had jumped into positive territory. But since then it has kept going up. Independents voters are now net positive on impeaching Trump. Even Republican support for impeachment increased this week. Though really, you have to hand it to Democratic women—86% net support for impeachment is really hard to top.
With that kind of week, it’s no surprise that Trump has decided to strike back in the way he knows best. He’s going to sue. Hes going to sue everybody. Seriously, if you’re not yet being sued by Donald Trump, you will be. Speaking at the Values Voter Summit (an annual candidate for the the nation’s most mislabeled event), Trump said he had told his lawyers to look into suing Democrats. "We're going to take a look at it,” said Trump. “We're going after these people. These are bad, bad people." And if his lawyers determined that they could not sue Rep. Adam Schiff? "Sue him anyway, even if we lose, the American public will understand."
Yes. The America public will definitely understand. We will understand that Trump never read Article 1, Section 6 of the Constitution. That’s the part that says of Congress “... for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.” In other words you cannot sue a member of the House or Senate for anything said on Capitol Hill. But there’s no point in asking if Trump ever read that section. Because in the same speech he screwed up on some much more fundamental issues. "Or we should just impeach them,” said Trump.
Oh, yeah. Please. Knock yourself out.
Now, let’s go read pundits.
Charles Pierce sings the praises of Masha Yovanovitch, American hero.
Esquire
On Friday, the scandals undermining this administration* and this presidency* like one of those thousand-acre mushrooms in Michigan finally produced a hero whose name we now know. Up until this point, the heroes have been anonymous: "sources close" to whatever the atrocity of the day was, whistleblowers, leakers, and other figures in the shadows. Now, though, there is Marie Yovanovitch, and she was once the United States ambassador to Ukraine, until she wasn't, and she didn't come to Washington on Friday to fck around. …
She was a hero even before she hit the hearing room. She told them to stuff their directives, she would answer a congressional subpoena like a citizen is supposed to do. And she didn't sneak in through the basement. She walked into the Capitol through the front doors, and she didn't do so to fck around.
By just walking in that door, Yovanovitch showed everyone what happens when you defy the White House and testify before Congress — you get to tell your story, in your own words. And Donald Trump can do exactly nothing about it.
The crooks and the grifters with their hands on the country's throat did not scare Marie Yovanovitch. She saw through the bluster and the fog and the empty threat gestures that are nothing more than another count on the eventual indictments and articles of impeachment. She shone a light through it all, and she showed the way as well. If anyone has the guts to follow, we're going to have to see.
As I’ve been reading for APR this morning, two separate sources have indicated that when Ambassador Gordon Sondland sits down in the witness chair this week, he intends to testify that after Charges d’Affairs William Taylor texted to say that holding Ukraine hostage for a personal political favor was “crazy,” Sondland called up the White House. And it was Trump who actually provided the statement that Sondland tweeted five hours later claiming “no quid pro quo.” So … this should be another fun week.
Jonathan Chait takes pleasure in some of the best news of the week.
New York Magazine
The role of a defense lawyer is to help the client minimize or avoid legal jeopardy. Generally speaking, you do not want your lawyer himself to be the subject of a criminal investigation. Yet that is the position President Trump finds himself, as his lawyer Rudy Giuliani is the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation being conducted by federal authorities, according to ABC News.
Giuliani has been working closely since at least March with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. Giuliani’s role has been to enlist the two former Soviet émigrés to pressure Ukraine to investigate various domestic opponents of President Trump — focusing first on law enforcement officials who conducted the Russia investigation, and later on Joe Biden.
Why did he get involved with Parnas and Fruman, and what did they have to offer? Parnas owns a club called Mafia Rave. He is, amazingly, the less shady of the two. Fruman has ties to Russia mafia figures and runs a company called Fraud Guarantee. If you were looking to undertake an aboveboard investigation into political corruption, those are not the two people you would pick to run it.
Yeah, but Giuliani wasn’t looking to run an investigation of any sort. Neither was Trump. All they wanted was someone who would claim to be opening an investigation into Biden, or claim to have some information on (big sigh) Hillary’s emails. They didn’t want an actual investigation. In fact, that was the last thing they were after.
What laws Giuliani may have allegedly broken in this process, we don’t know yet. Asked about his work for Parnas’s aptly named firm, Giuliani told the New York Times, “All I can tell you is that most of the Fraud Guarantee work, in fact the Fraud Guarantee work, which — or I should say — I can’t acknowledge it’s Fraud Guarantee, I don’t think.”
We got to see Paul Manfort locked up, and it was good. We got to see Roger Stone arrested, and that was even better. But Rudy Giuliani Arrest Day needs some confetti and balloons. It deserves a theme song.
Joan Walsh on Trump lining up the order in which people go under the bus.
The Nation
After weeks of ever-worsening news about how Donald Trump, according to multiple accounts, held up military aid to Ukraine until the country promised to investigate Joe Biden’s (fabricated) corruption and Trump’s nutty conspiracy theories about the origins of the Russia probe, it remains remarkable how this godless New York grifter so thoroughly took over a political party that pretended to be about sober conservatism, Christian piety, and balanced budgets. Let’s look at four administration stalwarts up to their necks in this mess: Vice President Mike Pence, Attorney General William Barr, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. Together they represent the four tent poles of the modern GOP circus: the extreme Christian right, the stolid GOP establishment, the corporate Koch brothers wing, and the allegedly anti-deficit, actually white nationalist Tea Party. When those tent poles go down, they could bring the whole sad party with them.
Honestly, I want them to fail so badly that future kids will be confused about whether the Republican Party came before or after the Whigs.
And now, a special note on William Barr.
Barr’s perfidy shouldn’t surprise us. Instead, it should remind us that the Ukraine scandal is less like Watergate—which, bad as it was, involved only domestic politics—and more like the Reagan-Bush Iran-contra scandal and its aftermath, in which Barr was also implicated as George H.W. Bush’s attorney general. While arms for hostages might sound marginally more honorable than arms for political dirt, the attempted trades are comparable: two efforts backed by a GOP White House to subvert the bipartisan foreign policy appropriations of Congress and advance Republican interests. (In case you missed the connection, Trump gave Reagan’s attorney general Ed Meese the Presidential Medal of Freedom on October 8.) Barr, who advised Bush to pardon the indicted conspirators of Iran-contra, is up to his neck in both betrayals of his country. He helps prove that even the pre-Trump Republican Party was more interested in power than rectitude. If Congress is not too busy, Barr should be impeached.
This is your “gotta read it all” of the morning.
Will Bunch on the ludicrous smears that are making Elizabeth Warren stronger.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Winning a U.S. presidential election takes a lot — stamina, gumption, charisma, and before 2016 that list also included brains and something called gravitas. But it really, really helps to have good timing — to capture the lightning bolt of political and cultural zeitgeist, whether it’s Ronald Reagan and a 1980s electorate wanting the triumphalism of “Morning in America” or Barack Obama tapping into “Hope” after the gloom of the Iraq War years.
It’s hard not to notice that Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has surged in recent weeks to the very top of the Democratic 2020 polls — Real Clear Politics, which aggregates all the leading polls, just moved her ahead of the no-longer-inevitable Joe Biden …
This week, a conservative publication called the Washington Free Beacon was sure it found the magic bullet to prove that the 70-year-old Warren is just another hysterical woman making stuff up. Its editor sifted through records from 1971, when the future Harvard Law professor was briefly a schoolteacher in New Jersey, and insisted her campaign-trail story that she was fired for getting pregnant couldn’t be true because the board had rehired her (albeit a couple of months before she was abruptly gone).
But the article had more than enough holes to fill the Albert Hall — Warren wouldn’t have been visibly pregnant at the time of her rehiring, nor would there likely be a written record of the principal ordering her to skedaddle once it did become noticeable. A couple of Warren’s contemporaries from Riverdale, N.J., who’d somehow been invisible to the Washington Free Beacon emerged elsewhere to say, yup, forcing out pregnant women was exactly what their district did at the end of the Mad Men era — as did almost every other school back then.
Honestly, with all the practice they’ve had, how are Republicans in 2019 so bad at coming up with a scam? From debunked Biden dirt to Pelosi’s drug dealer, it’s hard to believe that anything they’re selling will stick to anyone not wearing a ‘Q‘ pin somewhere on their body.
Nancy LeTourneau dissects Trump’s Minnesota rally.
Washington Monthly
Having only lost Minnesota by 1.5 percentage points in 2016, the Trump campaign has made it clear that they think they can win the state in 2020. That’s what Thursday night’s rally in Minneapolis was all about. Peter Nichols wrote about the strategy.
One Republican operative close to the White House, speaking anonymously to discuss campaign strategy, told me that Trump is convinced of the old political adage “The race will hinge on turnout.” If he can mobilize and excite his base voters, they’ll show up in force, much as they did in 2016, impeachment be damned…
“His message is so edgy, and his core support is so intense and enthusiastic, and the rallies are so unlike anything we’ve seen in the modern era,” the strategist told me. “Arithmetically speaking, this election is about jacking up turnout of your own supporters on the theory that no one on their side of the ball excites them the way Trump excites us,” he said, referring to the Democrats.
If that’s the plan, then we can look at Thursday night’s speech to see how Trump plans to excite his supporters in order to get them to show up in force.
As Nichols pointed out, the first half of Trump’s speech was all about his personal grievances. He mocked FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, said that Joe Biden was “only considered a good vice president because he understood how to kiss Barack Obama’s ass,” called Ilhan Omar an “American-hating socialist,” and referred to congressional Democrats as “sick” for pursuing an impeachment inquiry.
Then Trump engaged in his second strategy for exciting his voters: racism. Because Minnesota is home to the largest concentration of Somalis in the country, they became his target.
Racism. And hate. Hate and racism. Oh, and nationalism. So hate, and racism, and nationalism. There should be a name for that.
Michael Tomasky is, I hope, wrong about this one.
Daily Beast
This is a crucial week in this war. Romney must not back down. This is how Trump always wins. He bullies and cows people, and they tuck tail. Romney and other Republicans have histories of using pretty tough words and then retreating into laughter and forgetting.
Not this time. He has a chance here to show that Trump’s MO doesn’t always work. That you can punch a bully back, and he won’t know what to do.
Trump is surely right that there are a lot of Utah Republicans who are mad at Romney for daring to speak ill of the emperor. They’re a pretty extreme bunch—remember, they dumped a longtime incumbent senator, Robert Bennett, for an extremist Tea Partier, Mike Lee, in 2010. And they did it not by ballot but at a party nominating convention—the kind of event that longtime incumbents are supposed to have wired to the teeth. So I’m sure there are many thousands of jumpy Trumpies out there who are furious at Mitt.
These are desperate times. But no time is so desperate that I will pin my hopes on Mitt Romney doing the honorable thing.
On the other hand, Trump isn’t that popular in the state overall. He’s slightly underwater, in fact. Utah is very Republican, but it’s not Alabama. The LDSers are different. Bless their old-fashioned hearts, they—unlike, conspicuously, Christian evangelicals—actually expect integrity in their public servants. As far as Utah is concerned, I bet Romney can win a fight with Trump, in terms of public opinion, although he might well lose a renomination fight at a state party convention to a Trumpie, just as Bennett lost to a Tea Partier.
Good to know that Republicans are protecting their party from democracy at every level.
Leonard Pitts warns that this moment is one where things can go badly wrong for America.
Miami Herald
As a child, you see, I had a morbid fear of accidents. So somehow, I convinced myself we were immune to them. Oh, they might happen to people who were not us, but we were special somehow, protected somehow, exempt somehow.
America, I’d say, lives by a similar delusion where fascism is concerned. We can only hope last week’s extraordinary letter from White House counsel Pat Cipollone will serve the same corrective function for the country as a car window once did for me.
In it, Cipollone declares the administration’s intent to stonewall the House of Representatives in its impeachment investigation. Subpoenas will be ignored, documents withheld. The White House, writes Cipollone, “cannot participate” in the probe. Given that he writes on behalf of a president who calls himself “the chosen one,” brags of his “great and unmatched wisdom” and muses about staying in office beyond two terms, this letter, essentially placing that president above the law and beyond the Constitution, is cause for grave concern.
One need not be a legal scholar to know Cipollone has written constitutional gobbledygook. For instance, he complains the House has denied the president “the right to cross-examine witnesses, to call witnesses, to receive transcripts of testimony.” Given that the impeachment is only at the investigatory phase, that’s like a murder suspect complaining that he doesn’t get to tag along with detectives building the case against him. And since when can a president just decline to “participate” in an investigation?
In the last couple of days, it’s become clear that the author of the gobbledygook letter was actually Donald Trump, who turned his attorney into a stenographer as he dictated a rally-worth of lies and hate in the form of a White House letter. Somehow … I don’t think that hurts Pitts’ argument.
Take it as a reminder of how fragile freedom is. The power of a democracy, you see, lies less in the force of its laws and customs than in mutual, unspoken agreement to be bound by those laws and customs. The First Amendment has power because we agree it does. The courts have the final say because we agree they do. And you obey subpoenas because you obey subpoenas.
But what if some of us refuse to be bound by that social covenant? And what if one of them is president?
And of course you should go read the rest.