Editorial: President Trump Needs to Resign

The Connecticut Post editorial board has come out and demanded that Donald Trump resign from office based on his efforts to secure interference by a foreign government in the 2020 presidential election with the withholding of military aid as the lever to push the president of Ukraine to aid Trump in his personal re-election effort.  Part of the editorial states "He has repeatedly proven himself unfit for office and appears to view the presidency as a position meant to benefit himself personally, not as one that must represent the interests of an entire nation."  Trump cares about only himself and has the morality of a Mafia crime boss.  The piece makes clear that Trump's own release of a redacted transcript proves his unforgivable transgression. Here are highlights from the editorial:

Even given the incredibly fast pace of news in the Trump era, the speed with which the Ukraine scandal has moved from vague complaint to impeachable offense has been stunning. Though we’re still at the beginning of the process, there is already a mountain of evidence implicating President Donald Trump with conduct far outside the accepted norms of a democratic leader.

The most damning evidence came from [Trump] the president himself. It centers around a phone call with the president of Ukraine in which Trump raises the issue of investigating the son of presidential hopeful Joe Biden, and the implication of Trump’s words is clear as day. He asks for an investigation that would benefit him politically and has nothing to do with legitimate U.S. interests, and he brings it up repeatedly, including immediately upon the Ukrainian president mentioning the need for U.S. security aid.

This is an impeachable offense. Republicans spent Wednesday arguing there was no explicit quid pro quo, but there is seemingly no line the president can cross that would inspire them to put the public good ahead of politics. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, joined by the entirety of Connecticut’s congressional delegation, has called for impeachment proceedings, and that process must now begin in earnest.

The proper next step for the president is clear. He should resign. He has repeatedly proven himself unfit for office and appears to view the presidency as a position meant to benefit himself personally, not as one that must represent the interests of an entire nation.
Because there’s almost no chance he is going to step down, Congress’ work becomes that much more vital.

The truth is that Trump has been breaking laws and norms with impunity from the beginning. For instance, the U.S. Constitution forbids federal officeholders from receiving any gifts or payments from foreign entities, but in the same phone call with the Ukrainian president we see evidence that Trump is in violation. “I stayed at the Trump Tower,” President Volodymyr Zelensky says of his last trip to the U.S. Since Trump never divested himself from his business and continues to profit from it, he’s in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, according to many legal scholars, and it’s just one of countless examples on that score.

It’s not clear how much worse the Ukraine scandal will get. The summary of the phone call was released by the White House without need for a subpoena, but it is apparently abridged and does not represent all the whistleblower complaint that set the issue in motion. It’s easy to imagine that what we don’t know could be much worse than what we do.

But what we know is enough, and because it’s from [Trump] the president himself, there’s no reason to question its veracity. There’s no going back from here. The long, bumpy ride of the Trump era may have turned a corner, but it’s nowhere near over.

The Inevitability of Impeachment

Chaos continues to reign in Washington, DC, most of it stemming from the out of control occupant of the White House who has forced portions of the federal government into shut down and roiled the stock market making it look like a roller coaster.  At some point even Congressional Republicans will likely say enough is  enough.  Therefore, a well reasoned column in the New York Times lays out an argument as to why Trump will eventually be impeached or forced to resign before the end of his term. Simply put, at some point Trump becomes too big a liability for the GOP and fears of his unwashed, knuckle dragging base will be overwhelmed by more pressing concerns for self preservation.  It is a prospect that many long for even with the specter of Pence moving to the White House - assuming Robert Mueller doesn't have the goods on him as well as Trump.  Here are column highlights:

An impeachment process against President Trump now seems inescapable. Unless the president resigns, the pressure by the public on the Democratic leaders to begin an impeachment process next year will only increase. Too many people think in terms of stasis: How things are is how they will remain. They don’t take into account that opinion moves with events.

Whether or not there’s already enough evidence to impeach Mr. Trump — I think there is — we will learn what the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has found, even if his investigation is cut short. A significant number of Republican candidates didn’t want to run with Mr. Trump in the midterms, and the results of those elections didn’t exactly strengthen his standing within his party. His political status, weak for some time, is now hurtling downhill.

The midterms were followed by new revelations in criminal investigations of once-close advisers as well as new scandals involving Mr. Trump himself. The odor of personal corruption on the president’s part — perhaps affecting his foreign policy — grew stronger. Then the events of the past several days — the president’s precipitous decision to pull American troops out of Syria, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s abrupt resignation, the swoon in the stock market, the pointless shutdown of parts of the government — instilled a new sense of alarm among many Republicans.

The word “impeachment” has been thrown around with abandon. The frivolous impeachment of President Bill Clinton helped to define it as a form of political revenge. But it is far more important and serious than that: It has a critical role in the functioning of our democracy.

Impeachment was the founders’ method of holding a president accountable between elections. Determined to avoid setting up a king in all but name, they put the decision about whether a president should be allowed to continue to serve in the hands of the representatives of the people who elected him.

Lost in all the discussion about possible lawbreaking by Mr. Trump is the fact that impeachment wasn’t intended only for crimes. For example, in 1974 the House Judiciary Committee charged Richard Nixon with, among other things, abusing power by using the I.R.S. against his political enemies. The committee also held the president accountable for misdeeds by his aides and for failing to honor the oath of office’s pledge that a president must “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

The current presidential crisis seems to have only two possible outcomes. If Mr. Trump sees criminal charges coming at him and members of his family, he may feel trapped. This would leave him the choice of resigning or trying to fight congressional removal. But the latter is highly risky.

I don’t share the conventional view that if Mr. Trump is impeached by the House, the Republican-dominated Senate would never muster the necessary 67 votes to convict him. Stasis would decree that would be the case, but the current situation, already shifting, will have been left far behind by the time the senators face that question. Republicans who were once Mr. Trump’s firm allies have already openly criticized some of his recent actions, including his support of Saudi Arabia despite the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and his decision on Syria. They also openly deplored Mr. Mattis’s departure.

In the end the Republicans will opt for their own political survival. Almost from the outset some Senate Republicans have speculated on how long his presidency would last. Some surely noticed that his base didn’t prevail in the midterms.

But it may well not come to a vote in the Senate. Facing an assortment of unpalatable possibilities, including being indicted after he leaves office, Mr. Trump will be looking for a way out. It’s to be recalled that Mr. Nixon resigned without having been impeached or convicted. The House was clearly going to approve articles of impeachment against him, and he’d been warned by senior Republicans that his support in the Senate had collapsed. Mr. Trump could well exhibit a similar instinct for self-preservation. But like Mr. Nixon, Mr. Trump will want future legal protection.

While Mr. Trump’s case is more complex than Mr. Nixon’s, the evident dangers of keeping an out-of-control president in office might well impel politicians in both parties, not without controversy, to want to make a deal to get him out of there.