The Trump Impeachment has run its predictable course. Step One: A scandal surfaces to be met with outraged denials. It’s fake news, a witch hunt, a disgrace. When further evidence keeps emerging the denial is followed by what the Nixon inner circle can be heard on one of the infamous tapes describing as “a modified, limited hangout.”
According to Wikipedia, the limited hangout is spy jargon used to describe how to cope when”a phony cover story to misinform the public” ceases to work. The solution is to admit to “some of he truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case.”
In the impeachenrt case, Trump’s Republican defenders employed a whole range of such responses. He did withhold funds from Ukraine but not to get dirt n Biden but because he is a crusader against corruption. Since he was being impeached for corruption after a real estate career studded with corrupt acts, this was a hard sell.
The next strategic retreat was to the argument that even if he did it, there’s nothing wrong with it. Or even if it is really wrong, it doesn’t rise to impeachable offense wrong. Or even if it is impeachable, impeachment is wrong. Let the voters decide in the election he was trying to rig. What’s the hurry?
Well, Trump was willing to ask Russia for help beating Hillary in 2016, and got it. Trump asked Ukraine for help beating Biden in 2019 and would have gotten away with it if pesky whistleblowers hadn’t piped up. Do we really suppose he will be chastened by being impeached and go straight when his own attorneys, echoing an unrepentant Nixon, claim that if a president breaks the law it isn’t a crime?
Isn’t it more likely that every day in every way Trump is going to keep getting dirtier and dirtier? The crooks who get away with it aren’t the ones who repent. We know for example he had a private meeting with Mark Zuckerberg recently, with the usual no cameras, no notes, no transcript, no agenda or report of the contents of the discussion.
Zuckerberg’s Facebook was the conduit through which much of the Russian and Trump campaign disinformation was disseminated in 2016, and Facebook has refused to reform its lax oversight of online fraud. It has been targeted by some lawmakers for possible regulation for monopolistic practices, and for profiting by permitting unpoliced fake news, conspiracy theories and hate speech to flourish.
It is not hard to imagine Trump reminding Zuckerberg in their secret meeting that he is an anti-regulation crusader and could be of service to Facebook if Congress gets ambitious, “but I want you to do me a favor though.”
Similarly, Trump has had numerous meetings and phone calls with Vladimir Putin, some lasting an hour or more, and once again there is no transcript, recording or readout of the contents available to the public. We do know, however, that Trump has repeated the Russian disinformation that the election interference of 2016 wasn’t perpetrated by them but by those wicked Ukraininas, We also know that Trump has tried to get Russia readmitted to the G-8 and has argued for rolling back sanctions on Russia. Why? Has he already asked for and received favors? It would explain his preference for Russia’s lies to his own intelligence services truth.
Do Trump’s anti-climate change policies represent invincible ignorance or did the he ask the fossil fuel companies to exchange a favor for a favor? When the president is famous for practicing the art of the dirty deal, it is reasonable to look at any policy he proposes to see who comes out ahead and how he my benefit from a favor.
Finding out the truth isn’t easy since Trump is the least transparent president in history. It took a whistleblower to uncover the sleazy web of henchmen, attorney’s and sycophants behind the Ukraine hi-jinx. A similar tangled wed was uncovered by the Mueller report and would have led to charges of obstruction if Trump’s Justice Department didn’t rule he was immune to prosecution. Those who came forward to testify were denigrated, vilified and put in danger. Truth tellers have lost their jobs while Trump retains his. Republican Senators were afraid to admit the evidence of their senses for fear of getting attacked during an election year by Trump’s machine.
We now live in a country where a president can commit crimes because he is protected by a partisan Attorney General and supine Senate. He can corrupt the electoral process, practice nepotism, turn the government into a family business, profit from the presidency despite the emoluments clause, keep his taxes and business records hidden, carry on public business privately with no record, stonewall investigations, subject every query for information to endless litigation, and deny investigative journalists access.
The question is not whether the president will continue to use the office for his own corrupt ends but what crimes he has already committed in the dark and what new crimes are inevitably going to be perpetrated in the years ahead with no oversight or penalty. We may never know since the Republican majority in the Senate has embraced to attitude of the man in the old Eddy Arnold song in love with a faithless women. “How many, how many I wonder, but I really don’t want to know.”