This time Trump is in trouble
When the definitive history of the Trump presidency comes to be written, a major theme is sure to be the role that stupidity played in the 45th president’s eventual downfall. That’s not just the stupidity of one man – though an orange-tinged ego will figure prominently – but the institutionalised stupidity of a system of government that enabled an administration to defy every rule and shirk every convention.
Take, for example, the major development of the past few days. It would normally be the unbelievable plot twist of a spy thriller. It’s the stuff of “Three Day of the Condor”, Sydney Pollack’s wonderful but implausible 1975 political thriller, in which Robert Redford played an analyst in a small CIA office who witnesses his colleagues murdered in a hit. He then rings the CIA to report the incident, only for the message to go straight to the person who organized the hit. Such things just wouldn’t happen.
Right?
Well, consider the actual whistleblower system that the US intelligence service operates. This was the system that President Obama used to justify his condemnation of Edward Snowden after the contractor leaked information about the NSA’s covert operations against American citizens back in 2013. The whistleblower system was the legal way to report wrongdoing. Why would Snowden circumvent it and go straight to the media?
It was a fair question up to this week when we learned about the whistleblower who recently made allegations about the sitting president. If the system worked, the allegations would have gone straight to the House Intelligence Committee. Instead, the Acting Director of National Intelligence, Joseph Maguire, sent them to the White House and then to the Department of Justice, whose Attorney General, William Barr, was mentioned in the whistle blower’s claims.
Cut to Robert Redford smashing up a phone box in frustration at such a corrupt and self-serving system.
None of this is to excuse Snowden but it underscores the problems with a whistleblower system staffed, as it appears to be, by well-meaning men like Maguire, who testified to the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday. Career military, the acting DNI appeared to be a man of little imagination but considerable devotion to process. It was an awkward performance, a parody of bureaucratic obfuscation, and typical of officials promoted beyond their ability. Maguire saw a matter that involved executive privilege, so, in his unimaginative way, he went to that Executive to ask them to waive that privilege. It is laughable if it weren’t so serious. Almost as an incidental farce is that the identity of the whistleblower is slowly leaking. A CIA analyst, we’re told, but how long before that analyst has a name?
Then comes the matter of the complaint itself. If the Democrats seem to have gone from 0 to 120mph inside the week, it’s an indicator of the seriousness of the charges being levelled at the President but also the quality of the evidence that has now emerged. Trumpian ultras will cry “media hoax” but this process began with Trump appointees and a transcript of Trump’s phone call with the President of Ukraine, declassified on the order of the President himself. He had appeared supremely confident it was, in his words, a “perfect phone call” and the transcript would clear him.
If perfection is measured by the degree of culpability it revealed, then the transcript was most certainly perfect. It showed a president threatening to withhold military aid in order to extort opposition research from a foreign country. At the very least, it looks like Trump has again broken campaign finance law but that, really, is the least of his apparent crimes.
The transcript isn’t word-for-word (it’s termed a “memorandum of telephone conversation”) but, even in this form, it conveys enough of the underlying drama. It shows Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy ingratiating himself to the President. The young leader is clearly in a dire situation. Needing weapons to protect his nation from Russian aggression, he placates Trump and then prostrates himself before the Donald’s ego.
Trump, meanwhile, does exactly what we’d been warned he does by Michael Cohen, his long-term fixer (and now long-term resident of the Otisville Federal Correctional Institution). Trump doesn’t speak his threats directly. He talks around the subject, though the use of one “though” gives the game away.
“I would like you to do us a favor though”.
The “though” is the most important word in the document. The “though” connects the previous paragraph (Zelinskyy was talking about their wanting to buy Javelin missiles) to Trump’s demand for political dirt on Joe Biden. The “though” is the thing that makes this extortion obvious. The “though” might well become the most famous “though” in history. It might be enough to impeach a President.
It’s too early to write Donald Trump’s obituary but it would be wrong to mistake the new allegations as a replay of the Russian probe. Trump survived that investigation. Special Counsel Robert Mueller couldn’t quite link Trump to the crimes. Trump kept his hands clean and used cut-outs to ensure enough plausible deniability. At the most acute moments, the President had also been protected by Don McGahn, then the White House Counsel, who stood between Trump and his worst instincts.
But McGahn is long gone and, in his place, we have Rudy Giuliani, a man of mercurial nature and questionable ability. Giuliani seems to have spent the past year engaged in all manner of dark and barely concealed business. Consequently, this gets deep very quickly, especially given the evidence of a potential cover-up.
The whistleblower alleges that a computer system, normally used to secure codeword level covert activities, has been subverted to hide Trump’s conversations with world leaders. Putting ordinary conversations into that system is an indicator of how damaging these conversations might be. It might also indicate “consciousness of guilt”, as might the way Trump spoke to career diplomats at the US Mission to the UN on Thursday. The President alluded to “spies” inside his White House. He reminded them that in the “old days” treason was dealt with differently (spies were shot); a not-too-subtle threat to those that would leak information to the press.
The logic throughout the past two years is that a Republican Senate will never impeach this President. That logic still holds but with a few caveats. First, we’re already seeing a level of criticism from more traditional Republicans that we never saw during the Russian probe. Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair has written on how Fox News is reportedly in crisis. “[A]ccording to four sources,” he writes, “Fox Corp CEO Lachlan Murdoch is already thinking about how to position the network for a post-Trump future.” Even presidential mouthpiece, Sean Hannity, has apparently told friends that the allegations are “very bad” for the President. Second, Donald Trump’s fingerprints are all over this. This isn’t about the minutiae of the law but the cold hard reality of Trump’s words on a White House transcript. Third, the cover-up also implicates staffers inside a White House that has shown remarkably little loyalty to the President. We should expect more leaks. Lastly, this goes to those big issues of patriotism and national security that Republicans cherish above nearly any other. Republicans such as John Kasich (“Made me sick”) and Mitt Romney (“deeply troubling”) might be expected to oppose the president but that’s not the case with Ben Sasse, who needs the Presidential endorsement to win in Nebraska. “Republicans ought not to be rushing to circle the wagons and say there’s no ‘there’ there when there’s obviously a lot that’s very troubling there,” he said on Wednesday.
That’s the key point. There is a “there” here, even if it’s actually a “though”. This isn’t Russiagate. Nor is it Watergate. It is also not hyperbole to suggest it has the potential to be bigger than both.