"Trump lawyers begin studying impeachment," announces a headline I saw somewhere. Perhaps they were waiting for the President to admit in a tv interview that he has obstructed justice. Of course, impeachment by the House and a vote to convict by two-thirds of the Senate would result in President Pence, whose most public and formal role to date has been that of manager of the Trump transition--which means, I think, that he signed off on Michael Flynn for National Security Advisor. He should be less persnickety about having a cocktail out of his wife's presence and more persnickety about who has security clearances at the highest levels of our government.
Anyway, a study of the impeachment process reveals that, unless Trump loses support of Republicans, he's safe until after 2018. (Googling "impeachment" reveals that by the time you've typed "p" the fairies in the ether know exactly what you're interested in.) It therefore is a matter of practical interest to take note of what Republicans are saying about Trump. Asked this morning on one of the gabfest shows about the President having disparaged James Comey in an Oval Office confab with a couple of Russian thugs, John McCain said:
I'm almost speechless because I don't know why someone would say something like that. . . . Mr Comey was highly respected and highly regarded, so I can't explain it. Honestly, I cannot explain a lot of the President's actions.
On NPR this morning, Representative Mike Coffman, Republican of Colorado, had the following exchange with interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro:
Garcia-Navarro: How concerned are you about the president--how the president has handled himself this past week?
Coffman: For just this week (laughter)? Concerned about the president from Day 1. I think he's - I think he's so - he stumbled coming out of the block. And as far as I'm concerned, he's never recovered. He is - he's not been able to make the pivot between being candidate Trump and being President Trump, and he needs to be able to do that. And I worry about his ability to do that.
Garcia-Navarro: [T]here were reports last week that the president disclosed sensitive intelligence information from Israel to Russian diplomats in an Oval Office meeting. You're a veteran. Do you have any concerns about the president's national security judgment, just briefly?
Coffman: Well, I'm not sure why he was meeting with the Russians anyway. I think he better learn that they're not our friends, No. 1. I mean in the Oval Office. And No. 2, I think the president lacks discipline, and he needs to, you know, get that. He - I think he's still - and again, in seeing himself as a candidate Trump, one of the things I think that his basis of what appreciated about him was the fact that he sort of spoke whatever was on his mind. Well, I don't think that works in the Oval Office. It doesn't work as president. You have to be very disciplined. You have to be very deliberative. Every word matters, and this president really needs to tighten up.
Then there's the conservative commentariat. Jonah Goldberg, in National Review:
The idea that the media or some shadowy cabal of "Never Trumpers" forced the president to fire James Comey in a comically incompetent manner is ludicrous. No one was holding Ivanka hostage in a Motel 6 when Donald Trump confessed to Lester Holt that his administration's explanation for why Comey was fired was a lie or forced Trump to admit that he fired Comey for his handling of the Russia investigation.
Ross Douthat in The New York Times:
[A president] needs some basic attributes: a reasonable level of intellectual curiosity, a certain seriousness of purpose, a basic level of managerial competence, a decent attention span, a functional moral compass, a measure of restraint and self-control. And if a president is deficient in one or more of them, you can be sure it will be exposed.
Trump is seemingly deficient in them all.
David Brooks, on NPR:
To me, the story of today, you know, we used to have a better class of criminal. When a president obstructed justice, he didn't brag about it.
Can't remember the last time I heard so much good sense from Republicans.
Comments