monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Jennifer Rubin

I've never been to a caucus, but they really sound like a lot of fun. I'd like to attend one.

Cenk Uygur

Depressed Democrat Turnout: The Iowa Story that Matters

When given the first opportunity to turn out and vote for a candidate to oppose President Donald Trump, Democrats largely shrugged and said, "Meh." Turnout was down almost 30% from 2008.

This is by far the most important story out of this primary, which is why it will be largely blacked out by the media.

This is by far the most important story out of this primary, which is why it will be largely blacked out by the media.

it's not really that big of a story.

they'd be raising the alarm. Stories like this would increase turnout, not depress it.

NBC News published an analysis warning the Democratic Party of overlooking the black vote in the 2020 presidential election due to lackluster voting from black Americans in the 2019 elections. The analysis, entitled, “Democratic wins come with a warning sign: Low African American voter turnout,” was penned by Dave Wasserman, an NBC News contributor and the House editor for The Cook Political Report. Wasserman has experience in analyzing electoral data and is considered to be non-partisan in his analysis.

I am a Republican and former federal prosecutor who voted for Donald Trump in 2016. But I was deeply dismayed by the way his lawyers defended his misbegotten dealings with Ukraine during the Senate impeachment trial. Unlike Mr. Trump’s supporters, I believe the president might well be guilty of breaking the law.

Even without the additional witnesses and documents that the Senate Republicans refused to subpoena, the evidence available to date has established a prima facie case of bribery, a felony under federal law, against Mr. Trump. The articles of impeachment do not use the word bribery, but the House Judiciary Committee did in a report, and for good reason: The proof is there, for the following reasons.

If the president corruptly demanded or sought anything of value to influence an official act, then he would be guilty of bribery. “In other words, for bribery there must be a quid pro quo — a specific intent to give or receive something of value in exchange for an official act,” the Supreme Court held in United States v. Sun-Diamond Growers of California in 1999.

Federal courts around the country have interpreted “anything of value” to include intangible things — in this case, the announcement by Ukraine of an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The official action in question to be offered in exchange was the release of American military assistance to Ukraine, a country at war with Russia. That military assistance was unlawfully withheld in contravention of the president’s constitutional obligation to “faithfully execute” the law as Congress enacts it, the United States Government Accountability Office found.

In fleshing out the constitutional requirement of high crimes and misdemeanors, the first article of impeachment tracks the language of bribery, saying that Mr. Trump sought to pressure the government of Ukraine “for corrupt purposes in pursuit of personal political benefit.” Mr. Trump’s lawyer, the Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, asserted that Mr. Trump can be convicted only for conduct “akin” to bribery and treason. Mr. Dershowitz has been wrong on the law many times in this trial, but even by his standard, the articles of impeachment express an impeachable offense.

The key evidence establishes several things. First, as The Times has reported, John Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, says in a forthcoming book that Mr. Trump directly told him that he wanted to withhold military aid to Ukraine until President Volodymyr Zelensky announced an investigation of the Bidens. (Mr. Trump has denied that.) This so clearly appears to be a quid pro quo that Mr. Trump’s own ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, actually called it such.

Second, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, told The Times that the president fired Marie Yovanovitch as ambassador to Ukraine after she tried to impede the efforts to investigate the Bidens. And finally, Mr. Trump, during a phone call on July 25, asked Mr. Zelensky for a “favor” to open investigations not only of the Bidens but also into a widely debunked theory that Ukraine had meddled in the 2016 election.

Despite all this, the Republican-controlled Senate on Wednesday appears all but certain to acquit Mr. Trump. The nation has been denied the chance to witness the impeachment managers and Mr. Trump’s lawyers fully interrogate or defend his behavior. The Senate had a constitutional duty to hold a real trial. Instead we got a show trial.

One more thing concerns me. During the House investigation, Mr. Sondland testified that Mr. Trump told him: “I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo. Tell Zelensky to do the right thing.” To me, a former federal prosecutor who has successfully argued cases before the Supreme Court and handled many organized crime cases, the words “do the right thing” recalled the way mob bosses made an offer that could not be refused — the threat and reward clear but unstated, without explicit incriminating language.

To those who find nothing wrong with the president’s words, I would just note that, according to Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in Evans v. United States in 1992, an official “need not state the quid pro quo in express terms” for a crime to have been committed.

I say all this as a Republican who worked for President Ronald Reagan and voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 because I believed that he would appoint Supreme Court justices who would “say what the law is,” not try to make it. Since then Mr. Trump has done several things that have made me question my choice, including asserting last year that Article II of the Constitution gave him “the right to do whatever I want as president.” That is not the Constitution I know.

As a freshly minted Army lieutenant, I took an oath at West Point that I would “to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” President Trump took the same oath when he became president. He should abide by it.

This is by far the most important story out of this primary, which is why it will be largely blacked out by the media.

Eric Kleefeld
@EricKleefeld
Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz, a former congressman, calls Nancy Pelosi’s act of ripping up Trump’s speech “over the top,” “immature,” “contrived,” and Dems’ behavior overall was “disgusting to see it.”

Chaffetz voted No on disapproval of Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” in 2009

How Rush Limbaugh made the Trump presidency possible

At his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, whose past recipients include Rosa Parks, Edward R. Murrow, Jonas Salk, and Nelson Mandela, to radio host Rush Limbaugh.

It was one of those distinctly Trumpian moments, both repulsive and utterly predictable, the former because there may be no single person who has injected more hate into American public discourse in the last few decades than Limbaugh, and the latter because it is not an exaggeration to say that Limbaugh made the Trump presidency possible.

Limbaugh did that in three important ways. First, he spread to an enormous national audience many of the ideas and tropes that would later become key to Trump’s rhetoric. Second, he brought naked and relentless race-baiting to that audience, making sure whiteness stayed at the core of conservative identity. And third, long before Trump ran for president, he was telling conservatives that there is no such thing as truth and any news source that might report something you don’t like should be ignored.

Limbaugh was hardly the first angry radio host, but when his show exploded across the country in the early 1990s, it gave millions of listeners hours every day of the same message that Newt Gingrich was promoting in Washington: Both Democratic leaders and the people they represented were irredeemable enemies toward whom the only appropriate feeling was a burning hatred, because they are literally trying to destroy you and everything you stand for.

Limbaugh was also one of the key purveyors of the idea that Trump would later take up, that liberals use “political correctness” to silence conservatives. In between the complaints about everything you’re not allowed to say, Limbaugh would be as offensive as possible, whether it was talking about “feminazis,” or making a cruel joke about a 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton being ugly.

And perhaps more than any other conservative media figure, Limbaugh took Barack Obama’s election as an opportunity for a ceaseless campaign of race-baiting. Again and again, Limbaugh told his audience that any given Obama policy was actually “reparations,” an effort to punish white people for sins in which they had no part.

When some kids had a fight on a school bus in St. Louis not long after Obama took office, Limbaugh railed, “in Obama’s America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering ‘yeah, right on, right on, right on.’" Limbaugh would sometimes speak in an exaggerated “black” accent to make his point.

Limbaugh’s rhetoric about race has always been about convincing his largely white audience that they are under threat from racial minorities who are both criminal and lazy on one hand and seeking to take power from whites on the other. The effect is to increase the salience of whiteness as an identity and locus of oppression, an idea that came to fruition in Trump’s presidential candidacy.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, Trump is “the first white president,” in that he is the first president who elevated white identity to such a central place in his political project.

That brings us to the final way Limbaugh helped sow the seeds that would grow into the Trump presidency: The emphatic rejection of the very idea of objective truth.

There may be no more characteristic feature of Trumpism than his unrelenting assault on reality, not only in the shamelessness and sheer volume of his lies, but in his insistence that his supporters can and should reject any information that does not come from him or approved sources like Fox News.

But Limbaugh was telling people to do just that years before. In 2009, he described what he called “The Four Corners of Deceit: Government, academia, science, and media." Those institutions, he said, "are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit.” Nothing that any of those institutions said could be believed; the only people you should listen to were Rush and those like him.

Without the large conservative media universe Limbaugh helped build — the most important nodes of which are his show and Fox News — it wouldn’t be possible to give the Republican rank-and-file that instruction. That was always the goal: Not just to give conservatives an alternative to the mainstream media, but to base conservative news and talk on the idea that you should only get information from conservative media, because everything else is a lie.

When Trump came along and said that he and the news outlets that support him are the only source of truth and everything else you might encounter — even the evidence of your own eyes — is a lie that must be rejected, Republicans were ready and eager to agree.

So Trump has every reason to be thankful to Limbaugh.

Limbaugh recently announced that he has been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. There are some who say that when a public figure is ill or die, one should refrain from criticizing them. I emphatically reject this idea and always have.

The most important and influential people in our society must be understood in full, for both the good and bad they do. One cannot consider Limbaugh without an accounting of the poison he has gleefully poured into our national bloodstream for so long — and the way he created the conditions that allowed Trump to become president.

To do otherwise is to close our eyes to the awful truth of who he has been and what he has done.

The State of the Union address drew a considerably smaller audience on the broadcast networks than it did a year ago, at least in the preliminary ratings from Tuesday.

President Trump's address and the Democratic response averaged 15.23 million viewers from 9 to 11 p.m. ET on ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC in Nielsen's fast national ratings. That's down about 25 percent from the comparable figure last year...

But for those of us who actually know The Simpsons well, Pompeo may not have fully appreciated the point he was inadvertently making.


The image the cabinet secretary promoted came from a 1991 episode called, “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington.” In it, Lisa, inspired after a trip to Springfield Forest, writes an essay on American greatness. Her work, “The Roots of Democracy,” was so well received that she qualified for a trip to Washington, D.C.

While in the nation’s capital, however, she overheard a lobbyist paying a bribe to a congressman for the rights to tear down Springfield Forest. Heartbroken, Lisa tears up her essay, replacing it with a new one: “Cesspool on the Potomac.” She tells the essay-contest judges, “The city of Washington was built on a stagnant swamp some 200 years ago, and very little has changed. It stank then and it stinks now – only today it is the fetid stench of corruption that hangs in the air.”

In other words, the image Pompeo saw as apt was symbolic of disillusionment in the face of corruption. The image showed a patriot, eager to see the best in her country, disgusted by those who fail to honor the nation’s highest ideals.

What African American turnout in Iowa?

So why didn't they black out

Impeachment Theater Could Not Have Gone Worse For Democrats

1. Donald Trump’s Numbers Went Up, Not Down
2. Joe Biden’s Candidacy Was Irreparably Harmed By Impeachment Facts
3. Republicans Were Accidentally Forced Into Their Position of Maximal Strength