President Trump, through his White House counsel, has gone full-blown “fuck you” to the U.S. Constitution, and if you listen closely, you can hear our swan song quietly in the background.
“President Trump and his Administration reject your baseless, unconstitutional efforts to overturn the democratic process. Your unprecedented actions have left the President with no choice,” reads a letter from White House counsel Pat Cippollone, in which Trump informed congressional Democrats that the administration will not comply with demands for documents and interviews related to their impeachment investigation.
This is Step 1 in a process I’ve been telling you for two years will take place when it comes to the 2020 presidential election, which is setting up to be an exercise in false imagery, in the sense that Trump will, under no circumstances, willingly give up power, should he lose, which he will.
What will happen, almost certainly, is that Trump will lose to Insert Name of Democratic Nominee Here, and then he will say, let’s look at Cippollone’s letter today for the wording, oh, here we go, the part about how the impeachment inquiry is an attempt to “overturn the results of the 2016 election.”
It doesn’t take much to imagine Trump framing a November 2020 loss as having been influenced by impeachment, the “Fake News,” the “deep state, Ukraine, whatever other boogieman can be conjured up, on his way to announcing that he’s not giving up power, and what are you going to do about it?
You have no answer for the what are you going to do about it, because there is no answer, as there’s no answer for what’s supposed to happen when a president just up and says, go ahead and have your impeachment fun, but I’m not going to cooperate.
This is why you see POTUS admitting publicly that there is nothing wrong with him strong-arming Ukraine into investigating his political opponents, and doubling down in then publicly asking China to do the same.
He got away with worse in 2016, when he publicly asked Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, and then Russian actors did just that, and used what they found to sow disinformation that helped tilt the scales in the 2016 election.
This is the kind of behavior you see in banana republics and totalitarian regimes.
News flash, my fellow Americans: guess what we are now?
Column by Chris Graham
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Chris Graham
