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The public phase of the House impeachment inquiry into President Trump begins Wednesday. Here’s how it will unfold.
November 12, 2019Read More
Any discussion of Wednesday’s impeachment hearings should begin with two acknowledgements.First, regardless of what happens, no matter how many stories are written about the testimony of an ever-increasing number of witnesses with varying degrees of credibility or how dastardly the plot is made to sound on cable television and on the campaign trail, the result is going to be anticlimactic. Even if the current proceedings eventually lead to an up-or-down vote on impeachment (which is far from certain), the Republican-controlled Senate is not going to remove President Trump from office. As Matthew Continetti put it recently, it’s like knowing what the score of a football game is going to be before the opening kickoff.The second thing worth pointing out is that Republicans have no idea how they are going to talk about Trump’s guaranteed victory going forward. Being on the same page with this White House has never been easy, and the president’s own preferred arguments for his innocence change daily, sometimes even hourly. But sooner or later his party is going to have to decide what exactly they are acquitting him of.The current line about there being no quid pro quo is, I think, untenable. Some of the president’s supporters will insist (correctly) that Ukraine did in fact receive the aid it had been expecting and that no investigation of the Biden family’s activities in that country ever took place. But the Watergate burglary was a failure too. The relevant question here is about what Trump attempted to do, not whether it worked.This is why Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana is right to call the endless wrangling about quid pro quo a “red herring.” But he gets no closer by attempting to apply a bizarre “intentions” test to Trump’s actions. Whether he had “a culpable state of mind” is a question for the president’s confessor, not for members of Congress.As far as I am aware, with the exception of Matthew Whitaker, the astonishingly indiscreet former acting attorney general, the only Republican official of any consequence who seems to understand the reality of the situation is Rand Paul. The junior senator from Kentucky rightly observes that the disbursement of foreign aid is always contingent. The United States gives billions of dollars to other countries each year on the condition that they will behave in a manner that aligns with America’s national interest.How exactly we define the national interest is an open question. But politicians have a curious way of making it line up neatly with their own political fortunes at home. Was the four-day Operation Desert Fox bombing of Iraq by Bill Clinton at the height of his own impeachment in the national interest? What about Richard Nixon’s attempt to sabotage Lyndon Johnson’s peace talks in Vietnam in advance of the 1968 election? Nixon genuinely believed that the appearance of success in Paris would lessen his chances of being elected, which would mean that Hubert Humphrey, whom he considered less likely to bring the war to a swift and honorable conclusion, would be in charge.This is not cynicism. A president cannot do what he thinks is right for the country abroad if he is hampered by difficulties at home, including the difficulty of not being elected (or re-elected) president. Since the conduct of foreign policy is the prerogative of the chief executive, without whom we could not have relationships with other leaders, it is difficult to draw hard-and-fast distinctions between what is good for the president and what is good for the country — at least ones that do not depend upon our prior judgments about the president in question.Paul, of course, does not quite frame his argument this way. As befits a libertarian, he uses his own well-established opposition to foreign aid to argue that the whole process is inherently corrupt, which makes Trump no more or less guilty than any other president who has ever dangled something in front of a Third World honcho in the hope of securing certain real or perceived advantages for himself and the nation. This is not quite synonymous with claiming that the granting of foreign aid is straightforwardly within the purview of the executive branch and thus not a legitimate subject of congressional scrutiny, much less grounds for impeachment and removal from office. But it amounts to the same thing.What are the rhetorical advantages of putting the issue this way, as opposed to the proceduralist grumbles and semantic splitting of hairs about quid pro quos offered by Paul’s colleagues thus far? The main one is simply that it is true. Instead of asking Republicans and the voters with whom they will be communicating to inhabit a universe in which Trump is a Boy Scout, admitting that he did exactly what his opponents have accused him of keeps everyone firmly within what we might call the reality-based community.More important still, I think this line is a winner. I would very much like to know how many of the people who voted for Trump in 2016 did not expect to learn that this president would be doing things like this. When you elect the guy who wrote The Art of the Deal, you expect him to spend at least some of his time making deals, including ones that involve giving people things in exchange for screwing over the bad guys. The supposed Ukraine scandal is, whether shown in its barest outline or presented with every excruciatingly tedious chronological detail, a perfect illustration of Trump’s pitch to voters from 2015 onward: Here is a guy who realized that he was probably going to have to do this thing — give the Ukrainians money — no matter what. So he decided to see whether he could get something — an investigation of the no-good very-bad Bidens — for nothing, as it were. It didn’t work out that way, but oh well. Like the man himself said: “I keep a lot of balls in the air, because most deals fall out, no matter how promising they seem at first.” This is how you double down on Trump as our dealmaker-in-chief, someone who has done his best to win for the American people everywhere — in China and North Korea, in Canada and Mexico, at our own southern border, and now in Ukraine — despite constant cynically minded obstruction.Democrats think they have found a smoking gun? Great. Reload it and keep firing.Want more essential commentary and analysis like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Week’s “Today’s best articles” newsletter here.More stories from theweek.com The coming death of just about every rock legend The president has already confessed to his crimes Why are 2020 Democrats so weird?
November 12, 2019Read More
In the last minute of a Today interview on her new book Tuesday, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley described President Trump as a “truthful” person. Did Haley have “any doubt about his truthfulness, his ability to tell the truth?” asked host Savannah Guthrie. “Did you think he was a truthful person?””Yes,” Haley replied. “In every instance that I dealt with him, he was truthful, he listened, and he was great to work with.”It is possible, I suppose, that Haley’s personal interactions with the president were so limited that she either never encountered or never recognized any of the literally thousands of lies — many of them petty, obvious, and apparently pointless — he has told on record while in office. More likely, however, is that Haley is using “truthful” to mean something more like “authentic.” But these are not the same thing, and they should not be conflated.Authenticity as it is commonly used today is about self-representation. When we say people are authentic, we mean they are not pretentious. They do not disguise their character (or lack thereof) or bow to social convention. They are unfiltered in their language and open about their flaws. In this paradigm Trump is “perhaps the most authentic” president ever, as former White House communications aide Cliff Sims put it earlier this year, because he “basically looked at the American people and said, ‘This is who I am. You know everything about me.'”Truthfulness is about accurate conveyance of reality, not personal affect. Granted, being truthful will sometimes entail being truthful about oneself, but one also could be quite personally guarded — “inauthentic,” if you will, even operating under anonymity or pseudonymity — and yet be truthful. Older models of authorship and commentary, which did not rely on establishment of a personal brand and platform as is generally required now, permitted writers to publish without revealing much, if anything, about themselves. By our standards this may be deemed inauthentic, but it does not mean their work failed to communicate truth.Conversely, an authentic person can be a habitual liar. The president is an exemplar here. Trump is demonstrably not truthful, to the point that the brazenness of his lies has become part of his authenticity. His deception is shameless and communicative. He tells us what he wants to be true as if it were true, and that works as a sort of self-revelation.For example, Trump wanted the largest inaugural crowd, so he claimed he had it. Truthful? No. Authentic? Well, the lie did clearly convey his priorities and character. Or consider Trump’s net worth, which he infamously said in a 2007 deposition “fluctuates, and it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even [his] own feelings.” So he lies about his money but in doing so communicates authentically how he feels about himself. Or take his announcement, on the occasion of GDP growth falling from 2 to 1.9 percent at the end of October, that this is the “Greatest Economy in American History.” Unrestrained, counterfactual boasting is authentic Trump, but his superlative is clearly a lie. This is who he is. You know everything about him.Of late Trump has been preoccupied with the impeachment inquiry congressional Democrats have opened against him, and his self-defense is predictably authentic and untruthful. His tweeting pace has accelerated since the inquiry began — he posts at a dizzying pace, seemingly sharing every thought as soon as it comes to mind — and so has his rate of lies, moving from an average of 14 false claims per day to 22, as measured by the Washington Post’s fact-checkers. He has claimed, among other impeachment-related counterfactuals, that the whistleblower is not actually a whistleblower; that his administration is the “most Transparent … in history;” and that the whistleblower’s report “bore no relationship to what the call was.”No doubt they authentically express the president’s feelings and desires, but these are not truthful statements. They do not correspond to reality.Maintaining the distinction between authenticity and truthfulness is imperative. Authenticity as we talk about it in politics is mostly a matter of personal style — maybe you like the unfiltered, “what you see is what you get” presentation, or maybe you prefer more propriety and discretion — but truthfulness is not subject to taste. The very act of mislabeling authenticity as Haley has done is negligence toward the truth, and the truth is Trump is a liar, however authentic he may be.Want more essential commentary and analysis like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Week’s “Today’s best articles” newsletter here.More stories from theweek.com The coming death of just about every rock legend The president has already confessed to his crimes Why are 2020 Democrats so weird?
November 12, 2019Read More
Trump didn’t mention the name of the new target, but he is likely referring to Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the man who has been named to replace Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as head of the terror group. Al-Baghdadi took his own life last month as U.S….
November 12, 2019Read More
Temperatures have plummeted across the eastern United States, but spare a thought for McAllen, Texas, where the drop was precipitous.
November 12, 2019Read More
The Salt Lake Tribune just became the first legacy newspaper to become a non-profit. It hopes the move will bolster its financial prospects as daily newspapers continue to close.
November 12, 2019Read More
The community of Morton, Miss., is still dealing with the biggest single-state work site immigration raid in U.S. history. Seven chicken plants were raided and 680 people arrested.
November 12, 2019Read More
Protests have intensified in Hong Kong after one activist was shot and a pro-Beijing supporter set on fire. The protests are in their fifth month now.
November 12, 2019Read More
A local official for a Lebanese political party was shot dead by soldiers trying to open a road closed by protesters in southern Beirut late Tuesday, the army reported, marking the first death in 27 days of nationwide protests. The incident was sure t…
November 12, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — Boris Johnson deployed extra troops to help flood-hit parts of Northern England as he tried to ensure that a natural disaster didn’t damage his election chances.The prime minister convened a meeting of the government’s “Cobra” emergency …
November 12, 2019Read More
The university, which owns the license for NPR Illinois, says the station’s journalists are bound by Title IX rules and can’t promise confidentiality to sources reporting sexual misconduct.
November 12, 2019Read More
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