Too true, and more signs of the double standard we still hold women to.
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They fear our voices. Remember that.
A Powerful Statement of Resistance from a College Student on Trial in Moscow
Mass protests are sweeping through Latin America & Europe, highlighted by women coming together to sing âA Rapist in Your Pathâ, a song created in Chile arguing that sexual violence is very much political. The song has become a major feminist anthem. These videos are amazing to watch.
Chilean anti-rape anthem becomes international feminist phenomenon
A Rapist in Your Path performed by women at mass protests
Performances staged across Latin America and Europe
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William Webster - ex head of FBI/CIA speaks out on where he finds T is abusing his powers, and should be impeached.
The rule of law is the bedrock of American democracy, the principle that protects every American from the abuse of monarchs, despots and tyrants. Every American should demand that our leaders put the rule of law above politics.
I am deeply disturbed by the assertion of President Trump that our âcurrent directorâ â as he refers to the man he selected for the job of running the F.B.I. â cannot fix what the president calls a broken agency. The 10-year term given to all directors following J. Edgar Hooverâs 48-year tenure was created to provide independence for the director and for the bureau. The presidentâs thinly veiled suggestion that the director, Christopher Wray, like his banished predecessor, James Comey, could be on the chopping block, disturbs me greatly. The independence of both the F.B.I. and its director is critical and should be fiercely protected by each branch of government.
Over my nine-plus years as F.B.I. director, I reported to four honorable attorneys general. Each clearly understood the importance of the rule of law in our democracy and the critical role the F.B.I. plays in the enforcement of our laws. They fought to protect both, knowing how important it was that our F.B.I. remain independent of political influence of any kind.
As F.B.I. director, I served two presidents, one a Democrat, Jimmy Carter, who selected me in part because I was a Republican, and one a Republican, Ronald Reagan, whom I revered. Both of these presidents so respected the bureauâs independence that they went out of their way not to interfere with or sway our activities. I never once felt political pressure.
I know firsthand the professionalism of the men and women of the F.B.I. The aspersions cast upon them by the president and my longtime friend, Attorney General William P. Barr, are troubling in the extreme. Calling F.B.I. professionals âscum,â as the president did, is a slur against people who risk their lives to keep us safe. Mr. Barrâs charges of bias within the F.B.I., made without providing any evidence and in direct dispute of the findings of the nonpartisan inspector general, risk inflicting enduring damage on this critically important institution.
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Powerful Op-Ed piece from the NYT Editorial Board. Calling the Râs out on all the infantilizing of the issues, and the utter disruption of all Congressional/Presidential norms
It isnât supposed to be this way. Thereâs plenty of blame to go around for the intense â really, infantilizing â degree of polarization that has overwhelmed American politics across the past 40 years. But the nihilism of this moment â the trashing of constitutional safeguards, the scorn for facts, the embrace of corruption, the indifference to historical precedent and to foreign interference in American politics â is due principally to cowardice and opportunism on the part of Republican leaders who have chosen to reject their partyâs past standards and positions and instead follow Donald Trump, all the way down.
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Itâs a lot to ask of Republicans to insist on holding their own leader accountable, just as that was a lot to expect of Democrats during the Clinton impeachment inquiry. But while many Democrats then criticized President Bill Clinton and some voted to impeach him, Republican lawmakers would not breathe a word against Mr. Trump on Wednesday.
Instead, they competed with one another to invoke the most outlandish metaphor of evil â from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ â and >suggest that Mr. Trump is enduring even worse.
Senate Republicans are preparing to follow the example of their House colleagues, though many know better. Not so very long ago, several of them â including Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, even the majority leader, Mitch McConnell â warned that Donald Trump was wrong for the country. Lindsey Graham memorably called Mr. Trump âa race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigotâ who was âunfit for office.â Now these senators seem eager to endorse the very sort of behavior they feared.
It is not too much to wonder how much of this cynicism and betrayal of principle any democracy can handle.
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⊠But Congress has resorted to the ultimate remedy so rarely because of the unspoken agreement that it should be reserved for only the most egregious and inexcusable offenses against the national interest.
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@Windthin Thank you so much for this. I needed it! Iâve got to admit that despite the recent victory on the House floor, Iâve been feeling a bit down in the dumps, discouraged, and just plain worn out by the continuous stream of hate speech we are facing every day from our own President. BUT this lifted me up and reminded me that, yes, there is cause for hope and we should look forward to 2020 as a year when the healing can begin and we can start building a brighter future.
Iâve posted below the embedded video of President Obama delivering an inspiring message of hope and humanity for the holiday season because Iâm wishing everyone will watch it! I think Iâm going to start my day with it every morning over the holidays. Thanks again @Windthin
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Most welcome. Hope keeps us going. I also keep this thread tracking the many GOP retirements as a reminder that we ARE winning despite certain setbacks, and that the GOP is very much falling apart. The sheer number deciding to just not run again is stunning.
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This!
Our Year of Trumpschmerz
I thought Iâd unplug over the holiday week, in anticipation of a frenetic 2020 that will begin with a Senate impeachment trial and end with a Presidential election that may well be the most consequential of my lifetime. I thought Iâd take a break from Twitter and from endless, twenty-four-hour-a-day Trump. And I triedâI really did. I knew there was some issue with âHome Alone 2â but didnât bother to spend a few seconds clicking around to figure out what it was all about until I was writing this column. For a few days, Trumpâs Mar-a-Lago tweetstorms were like thunderclaps on a distant horizon; I knew the weather was bad on the Internet, and I happily stayed away. I realize this attitude is increasingly held by the American public, at least that segment of the public which doesnât follow the news for a living.
It turns out, however, that staying away from the daily distractions of Trump has not been restorative. You can turn off the Trump show, but the nagging, unfortunate reality is that the show goes on, with or without you. The President of the United States is still out there saying crazy, mean, inappropriate things at all hours of the day and night. This remains disturbing, even if one is divorced from the particulars. You can turn off your smartphone, delete the Twitter app, bake endless batches of cookies, and binge-watch Netflix: Trump is still there.
Tuning out also brings other, more consequential anxieties. The less time spent in the hair-trigger news cycle of Twitter, the more time left to contemplate the bigger, more long-lasting consequences that all of this is wreaking on our democratic institutions and our nerve-wracked souls. By choosing not to immerse myself in the details of which conspiracy theorist Trump was retweeting, I had more time to think about the increasingly real possibility of Trumpâs reĂ«lection in November. By skipping the mini outrages, I had the mental bandwidth for the macro ones: time, that is, to consider what the Trump Presidency will look like after Democrats have tried and failed to convict and remove him from office, and what the impact will be, over the next several decades, of a federal judiciary remade by a President who is hostile to any interpretation of the Constitution that does not give him essentially unconstrained authority. I had time to think about what a second-term Trump will feel empowered to do and time to consider, once again, whether the President may have been literally, and not just metaphorically, correct when he bragged that his followers would stay loyal to him even if he shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue.
-=-=-=-
There must be one of those long German words for all that soul-sickening worry, right? Some tortured mouthful of consonants that captures the ceaseless anxiety and absurdity of Washington in the age of Trump? I asked my friend, the German scholar and writer Constanze StelzenmĂŒller, an astute observer of Trumpism at the Brookings Institution and especially of its toxic effect on the troubled transatlantic relationship. She said that, even in Trump-skeptical Berlin, there was no single, widely accepted word that describes this phenomenon but gamely offered up her own stab at it. The word she came up with is â Trumpregierungsschlamasselschmerz .â
My German is nonexistent, but a quick Internet search suggests that Constanze nailed it. In thirty-three letters, she managed to capture the whole damn mess. Her word has pretty much everything that has come to characterize this uniquely dysfunctional moment in Americaâs troubled capital: Trump and his Administration (â regierung â means government); the mess of constant controversies (â schlamassel â); and the continuous pain or ache of the soul that results from excessive contemplation of it all (â schmerz â). Sure, itâs a mouthful, but thatâs the point: there should be one word that sums up the Trumpian disruption we are experiencing, not merely a jumble of different ones. Itâs the tweets and the other stuff, too: the endless attacks on enemies, real and imagined; the torrent of lies; the eroding of the basic functions of government; and the formerly unimaginable assault on our institutions. Itâs impeachment and the Mueller Report and migrant children in cages, the bullying of allies, and the lavish praise of adversaries. Itâs the uncertainty and worry that comes with all of the above.
On the brink of a new year, Trumpregierungsschlamasselschmerz has come to dominate our collective psyche. There is no taking a vacation from it. I confess that I have not yet figured out how to pronounce this unwieldy linguistic invention that so deftly captures our national Trump-soul-sickness. Luckily, I received a follow-up e-mail from Constanze, in which she proposed a shortened version that gets right to the angsty, anxious point: If â Trumpregierungsschlamasselschmerz â is too much, she said, you can just use â Trumpschmerz .â Either way, in German or in English, itâs my nominee for the word of the year in 2019. I suspect it will be in 2020 as well.
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A solid article showing that while Republicans & right-wing media have made white evangelicals fear having their rights stripped by the left, itâs actually more the other way around, though most Americans in general donât want to take rights from others.
White evangelicals fear atheists and Democrats would strip away their rights. Why?
Right-wing media is warning of a civil war â and urging evangelicals to stock up on guns
Following the NYTâs recent revelations, Senate Republicans must realize they will be taking a huge gamble if they stage a sham, witness-free trial and acquit Trump.
At the rate damning new evidence is surfacing, thereâs a strong chance that within a few months Trump will be resoundingly convicted in the court of public opinion and so will Senate Republicans for covering up his crimes.
The NYTâs explosive investigative report, Behind the Ukraine Aid Freeze: 84 Days of Conflict and Confusion, was released over the weekend. It contained so many new revelations that it has taken a few days for readers (and the media) to get a handle on the magnitude of the report â it is truly devastating to Trump and his enablers in the Senate. This editorial does an excellent job of explaining why.
If Mitch McConnell is going to pull off his scheme to turn President Trumpâs impeachment trial into a quick and painless sham with no witnesses, the Senate majority leader needs the story to be covered as a conventional Washington standoff â one that portrays both sides as maneuvering for advantage in an equivalently political manner.
But extraordinary new revelations in the New York Times about Trumpâs corrupt freezing of military aid to Ukraine will â or should â make this much harder to get away with.
McConnell badly needs the mediaâs both-sidesing instincts to hold firm against the brute facts of the situation. If Republicans bear the brunt of media pressure to explain why they donât want to hear from witnesses, that risks highlighting their true rationale: They adamantly fear new revelations precisely because they know Trump is guilty â and that this corrupt scheme is almost certainly much worse than we can currently surmise.
That possibility is underscored by the Times report, a chronology of Trumpâs decision to withhold aid to a vulnerable ally under assault while he and his henchmen extorted Ukraine into carrying out his corrupt designs.
The report demonstrates in striking detail that inside the administration, the consternation over the legality and propriety of the aid freeze â and confusion over Trumpâs true motives â ran much deeper than previously known, implicating top Cabinet officials more deeply than we thought.
Among the storyâs key points:
As early as June, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney worked to execute the freeze for Trump, and a top aide to Mulvaney â Robert Blair â worried it would fuel the narrative that Trump was tacitly aiding Russia.
Internal opposition was more forceful than previously known. The Pentagon pushed for the money for months. Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and then-national security adviser John Bolton privately urged Trump to understand that freezing the aid was not in our national interest .
Trump was unmoved, citing Ukraineâs âcorruption.â We now know Trump actually wanted Ukraine to announce sham investigations absolving Russia of 2016 electoral sabotage and smearing potential 2020 opponent Joe Biden. The Times report reveals that top Trump officials did not think that ostensibly combating Ukrainian âcorruptionâ (which wasnât even Trumpâs real aim) was in our interests.
Lawyers at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) worked to develop a far-fetched legal argument that Trump could exercise commander-in-chief authority to override Congressâ appropriation of the aid, to get around the law precluding Trump from freezing it.
Michael Duffey, a political appointee at OMB, tried to get the Pentagon to assume responsibility for getting the aid released, to deflect blame away from the White House for its own role in blocking it. This led a Pentagon official to pronounce herself âspeechless.â
Duffey froze the aid with highly unusual bureaucratic tactics, refused to tell Pentagon officials why Trump wanted it withheld and instructed them to keep this âclosely held.â (Some of this had already been reported, but in narrative context it becomes far more damning.) âŠ
Multiple officials worried that the hold violated the law or worked extensively to skirt it. Others saw Trumpâs actions as contrary to the national interest and never got a sufficient explanation for his motives. One top official executing the scheme tried to distance the White House from it and keep it quiet.
What makes all this new information really damning, however, is that many of these officials who were directly involved with Trumpâs freezing of aid are the same ones Trump blocked from appearing before the House impeachment inquiry.
This should make it inescapable that McConnell wants a trial with no testimony from these people â Democrats want to hear from Mulvaney, Bolton, Duffey and Blair â precisely because he, too, wants to prevent us from ever gaining a full accounting.
We now have a much clearer glimpse into the murky depths of just how much more these officials know about the scheme â and just how much McConnell and Trump are determined to make sure we donât ever learn. Thatâs so indefensible that it might even breach the levee of the mediaâs both-sidesing tendencies.
Trumpâs defenders are taking a huge risk
Hereâs another possibility. If McConnell does pull off a sham trial leading to a quick acquittal, more might surface later that, in retrospect, will get hung around Republicansâ necks and reverse-reveal just how corrupt their cover-up really was.
As George T. Conway III has noted, in such a scenario, Trumpâs defenders will suffer blowback from âthe very evidence they sought to suppress.â
This new report underscores the point. The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) is currently battling the administration over a tranche of OMB and Pentagon documents related to the aid freeze that CPI just obtained due to a court order. This is how Duffeyâs emails surfaced, but much of what CPI has obtained has been blacked out.
CPI is asking a judge to lift the blackouts, and a ruling is expected as early as March. So itâs plausible that CPI could obtain a great deal of new information â showing even more clearly how worried officials were that Trumpâs freeze was breaking the law â in only a few months.
That could come after Senate Republicans ran a sham trial and acquitted Trump. Do they really want to be on the hook for having suppressed such evidence, even in the face of a whole new round of deeply incriminating revelations?
Apparently they see that outcome as less risky than allowing witnesses to testify. Which again shows how worried they are about allowing the American people to gain a full accounting of Trumpâs corruption.
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A frightening look at just why Trump would gladly risk a war right now:
Trumpâs Faithful Will Follow Him to War
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Trump transformed a long-simmering proxy tit-for-tat to one of direct military confrontation.
Jan. 3, 2020, 3:14 PM PST
By Charles W. Dunne, adjunct professor at George Washington Universityâs Elliott School of International Affairs
Whether Americans realize it or not, the United States has just declared war on Iran. And, in part because the declaration was less than clear, that could be even more dangerous than it sounds.
When the U.S. on Sunday assassinated Qassem Soleimani, a top Iranian general who directed violent anti-U.S. campaigns for more than 15 years, it transformed a long-simmering proxy tit-for-tat between the two sworn enemies to one of direct military confrontation â one to which Iran will have almost no choice but to react to forcefully (and has indeed already promised ârevengeâ). This could easily mean targeting U.S. troops in the Middle East, as well as U.S. embassies and military facilities farther afield, and American cyber assets throughout the world. It could also lead to attacks on U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia and Israel, which carries with it the risk of a wider regional conflagration.
What all this gains us is unclear. Nothing suggests the killing of Soleimani, who commanded Iranâs powerful Revolutionary Guardsâ Quds Force and was on a trip to Iraq, is part of a well-planned strategy to bring Tehran to its knees, or to the negotiating table. The United States has toggled between both of these aims in its long, drawn-out struggle with Tehran, and thereâs no sign this contradiction has been resolved.
Until now, the Trump administrationâs strategy of âmaximum pressureâ on Iran â pulling out of the nuclear deal while ratcheting up sanctions and other forms of U.S. pressure â seemed driven by the goal of forcing some sort of peaceful accommodation with Tehran over its nuclear program and regional policies, but this abrupt escalation has cast all that into doubt and led both the U.S. and Iran into dangerous and uncharted waters. Cooler heads, on both sides, may prevail, with the immediate prospect of hot conflict cooling into a colder war. But the game seems to have been significantly changed.
Among other perils, the move suggests the U.S. hasnât yet thought out its endgame: Where does it want to be at the conclusion of all this? What does it want to accomplish? What U.S. contingency plans are in place for when things, inevitably, go off course? The fact that these questions are apparently unanswered means that all the regular risks of undertaking war, especially in the tinder box of the Middle East, are exponentially more dangerous because of the impulsive approach President Donald Trump has taken here. âŠ
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By
SiobhĂĄn OâGrady
Jan. 4, 2020 at 3:00 a.m. PST
In recent years, the United States has launched several risky military operations to kill individuals it viewed as posing a direct threat to U.S. national security, including raids against the leaders of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.
But analysts warned that Fridayâs airstrike on a two-vehicle convoy near the Baghdad airport that killed senior Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani and several other people differs greatly from earlier strikes on extremist operatives and puts the United States â and the Middle East â in dangerously uncharted territory.
âThis is a very different level of escalation,â said Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. After targeted killings of extremists, he said, the greatest cause for concern âmight be a brief intensification of fighting or some kind of limited reprisals against the U.S. military.â
After the killing of Soleimani, the United States could face direct Iranian reprisals, including potential cyberattacks, analysts said. Iranâs supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, threatened âsevere revengeâ but gave no indication of what could come.
Barbara Slavin, the director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council, said Trump is âtrying to do a victory lap here and beat his chest and somehow show this is like killing Baghdadi.â She was referring to the October raid on the hideout of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in northwestern Syria. âBut itâs not. Itâs much more serious,â she said.
Like Baghdadiâs, other targeted killings carried out by the United States have typically struck at extremist leaders without affiliations to a powerful state such as Iran.
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But in those cases, Cordesman said, âyou were killing a leader in a context of an ongoing operation against an extremist movement which did not have a major state sponsor.ââŠ
I canât recall a time when the U.S. assassinated a high-ranking military commander of another nation when we were not at war with that nation. I can recall us killing terrorists and extremists who were not officially within another nationâs military, but canât remember when we killed a general from a sovereign nation during peacetime. Seems like weâre leaping into uncharted waters here and setting a precedent that could return to haunt us later.
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Well, Unfortunately there actually is precedent.
The US hasnât done this since the 1953 Iranian coup dâĂ©tat also known as âOperation Ajaxâ. Which to be fair, was kept secret from the American people for years.
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I found this Article on Vox very insightful:
Letâs start this piece with two provocative claims. The first, which is hotly contested by legal experts, is that President Donald Trump broke the law when he ordered an airstrike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a powerful Iranian paramilitary leader.
The second claim is that it doesnât matter.
Part of the reason why the legal question is academic is that, even if we assume the strike on Soleimani was illegal, itâs hardly clear whether the courts can do anything to remedy an illegal assassination. Itâs not like a judge could issue a writ of resurrection that restores life to the people killed in this American airstrike. And federal courts canât hold a criminal trial of anyone involved in the Soleimani attack unless an increasingly partisan Justice Department agrees to prosecute. Nor is a judicial order likely to calm tensions between the United States and Iran.
The killing of Soleimani is the latest in a series of escalations and retaliations that began with Trumpâs decision to pull out of the nuclear deal former President Barack Obama struck with Iran and includes Iranian attacks on American assets within the Middle East. Not long after the attack, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, Iranâs supreme leader, threatened revenge.
Americaâs legal system is not built for a president like Trump
One of the striking things about much of American national security law is that it vests extraordinary trust in the president. The 2001 authorization of military force, for example, provides that âthe president is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.â
Does this mean Trump could announce that he has determined Canada planned 9/11 and claim legal authorization to invade our northern neighbor? When I put this question to some of the experts I spoke with, they recoiled from the suggestion that Congress accidentally authorized a future war with Canada. But itâs hard to find language in the statute itself that prohibits such a war.
A similar issue arose in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), the travel ban case. One of the legal issues at question was whether Trump had the power to cut off travel from various nations under a statute that provides that:
Whenever the president finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or non-immigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.
As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the Hawaii ruling, this statute âexudes deference to the president in every clause.â He wasnât wrong.
So much of Americaâs national security law was drafted on the assumption that the president will be a person of honor and integrity â or, for that matter, a person of basic competence and judgment â who will act to protect national security, even when many of us might disagree with their decisions.
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How Lindsey Graham Lost His Way
The senator once enjoyed respect on both sides of the aisle. Why has he become a blind loyalist to Trump?
Lindsey Graham and Donald Trump were born nine years and one month apart. Trump came first, but when they appear side by side, as they often do these days, the men look about the same age. On November 6th, in the East Room of the White House, the president held an event to mark the record number of federal judges his administration has appointed, and Graham was there, having played a critical role in the achievement as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Trumpâs staff had scheduled the event in part to shift focus from the House impeachment investigation, to remind any wobbly Republicans of the reason theyâd held their noses and voted for the guy in the first place.
Over the course of his three terms representing South Carolina in the Senate, Graham had become predominantly known for two things: extreme hawkishness on foreign policy, following the lead of his close friend and mentor, the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, and a bipartisan streak that resulted in high-profile attempts to cut big deals on issues like immigration reform and climate change. A former senior staffer for a Democratic senator who has worked alongside Graham on bipartisan legislation tells me, âLike John McCain, he was a conservative Republican, but it was always worth asking where he was going to be on a particular issue, because he wasnât completely beholden to party orthodoxy. Heâd often be way out ahead of his staff, negotiating on the Senate floor unbeknownst to them, and they would be playing catch-up.â
Will Folks, a conservative political blogger in South Carolina, says, âThe joke here is Graham has a âcount to sixâ approach to governing: He spends the first four years of his term doing whatever he wants, veering off toward the left, and then the last two years, when the electorate is paying more attention, he comes right.â
Graham is ânever flustered, and just a natural at dealing with people who donât like him,â says David Woodard, a political-science professor at Clemson University who ran Grahamâs first two campaigns for the House of Representatives and recalls the first-term congressman as quickly becoming the unofficial social director for his freshman class, though he added, âYouâre going to find Lindsey knows a lot of people, but heâs not close to anybody.â
Like much of the GOP establishment, Graham had opposed Trump during the 2015 primary, but he spoke out more forcefully than most, and in the general election, he wrote in third-party candidate Evan McMullin. Which has made his subsequent capitulation all the more breathtaking, even in the context of a modern Republican Party completely transformed into the party of Trump. In the past few months alone, in advance of a likely Senate impeachment trial, Graham has doubled down on the presidentâs inflammatory characterization of the House inquiry, calling it a âlynching in every senseâ; preemptively announced he wouldnât be reading any of the transcripts of deposed House witnesses, though heâll be a juror in the trial, telling reporters heâd âwritten the whole process off . . . this is a bunch of B.S.â; and most recently, requested documents for a Judiciary Committee investigation into the entirely baseless claims that Trumpâs leading 2020 rival, Joe Biden, pressured the government of Ukraine to fire its lead prosecutor in an effort to help his son Hunter.
Shortly after Grahamâs office requested documents pertaining to the Biden investigation, a 2016 video surfaced in which Graham paid heartfelt tribute to the former vice president, calling him âas good a man as God ever createdâ and saying, âIf you canât admire Joe Biden as a person . . . you need to do some self-evaluation.â It felt like a taped confession to a future crime, as if the old Graham, the Graham who knew better, had put his soul in a time capsule in order to shame his craven Trump-era self. Here was video evidence of Grahamâs willingness to protect a man he knows to be corrupt by falsely accusing a friend of corruption. By that point, though, Grahamâs debasement had been so thoroughly realized, the hypocrisy on display barely made an impact.
Graham had first come to national prominence 20 years earlier, during the Senate impeachment trial of Bill Clinton. Graham had still been a member of the House of Representatives then, elected during the so-called Republican Revolution of 1994, the Newt Gingrich-led conservative backlash to Clinton. Graham, a former trial lawyer, became one of the House managers during Clintonâs Senate trial â essentially, a prosecutor tasked with making the case to the Senators as to why the president should be removed from office. A boyish 43-year-old in an ill-fitting suit, he deployed his mellifluous Southern accent as cannily as the man whose election he was trying to undo. âWhatâs a high crime?â he asked the chamber. âHow about if an important person hurts somebody of low means? Itâs not very scholarly, but I think itâs the truth. . . . It dudnât even have to be a crime!â Deploying that âdudnât,â especially, was pure Clinton, and watching the old clip now, Graham looks like heâs auditioning for a regional theater production of Matlock .
At the East Room event, Trump summoned Graham to the podium. The years had accentuated Grahamâs jowls and moistened his pale-blue eyes. Al Franken used to describe Graham as the second-funniest member of the Senate, and in his brief remarks, Graham leavened the embarrassing obsequiousness Trump demands of his subordinates. Referring to his own disastrous 2016 presidential run, Graham began, âAfter I got beat like a dog â which he likes hearing â he called me over to the White House and said, âIâd like you to help me.â
âI said, âIâd love to help you be a great president, because youâre now my president.â
âHe said, âI donât have your phone number.â
âI said, âThereâs a reason for that.â â
The crowd chuckled. Graham was referring to the moment during the Republican primary when Trump made a speech calling Graham an idiot â said he wasnât even as smart as Rick Perry â and then gave out his cellphone number, advising his supporters to âtry it.â
âThe highlight of my campaign was when you gave out my phone number,â Graham continued dryly, to more laughs from the room and a beaming nod from Trump. âIf I did as well as my phone number, it probably would have been a different story.â
Of course, the joke curdles a bit when you recall the context of the doxxing: Graham had provoked Trumpâs wrath by having the temerity to defend McCain, whom Trump had just mocked for being captured during Vietnam. Trump was a âjackass,â Graham said at the time, predicting âthe beginning of the endâ for his campaign.
Four years later, at the White House event, Graham concluded his remarks with a different prediction for Trump: âWhen you run and you get re-elected a year from now, one of the main reasons is that people in the conservative world believe that you fight for judges. God bless you.â
Steve Schmidt, who ran McCainâs 2008 presidential campaign, where Graham was a constant presence on the trail, tells me, âWe see more examples of this in film and literature, but there are instances of principled men and women laying down their careers in service of what is right. Clearly, that person will never be Lindsey Graham. With regard to the cruelty and abuse that was directed at John McCain by Trump, I think Lindseyâs flaccidity in defending him says a lot about his character. Nobody wants to be in a bar fight when they go out on Friday night. But when someone walks up and punches your best friend in the face, youâve got to do something. Lindsey has demonstrated heâs the guy who runs out the door.â
Grahamâs former law partner in South Carolina, Larry Brandt, spoke with comparable bluntness when I visit him at his office in Walhalla, a sleepy town near Clemson. Graham clerked for Brandt while attending law school at the University of South Carolina. Brandt had served in Vietnam as an Air Force JAG â heâs the type of Vietnam vet who will still, if Jane Fondaâs name comes up, feel compelled to add âthat bitch â â and the pair immediately hit it off. Graham had enlisted in the Air Force ROTC program when he started college and went on to serve as a JAG lawyer himself after graduation. In 1989, after leaving the service, Graham joined Brandtâs firm, and they remain friends. âLindsey always told me he wanted to be a politician,â Brandt says, describing his former protĂ©gĂ© as a tremendous trial lawyer. âLindsey comes from common people, and being the plaintiffâs lawyer, he was for the little guy.â
Brandt has voted for Republicans and Democrats, but he loathes Donald Trump, âthat 4-F sonofabitch.â Nodding toward the window of the conference room where weâre sitting, he says, âMy flagâs at half mast, and it ainât going up until Trumpâs gone.â Over the years, Brandt says heâs always stuck up for Graham back home, where his willingness to compromise has often left him unpopular with constituents, viewed with suspicion as a RINO (Republican in Name Only). But Brandtâs been dismayed by Grahamâs shifting stance on the president. âHeâs laughed with me and said Trumpâs just like a little boy,â Brandt says. âHe will agree with me when I say shit about Trump, when itâs me and him in here.â They last spoke over the summer, when Graham called to see if Brandt wanted to get dinner. Brandt was vacationing in Texas, but he told Graham, âI want to talk to you about some things, and Iâm gonna tell you now, Iâm not with you on a bunch of your issues.â They made plans to meet when Graham was back in August, but Brandt never heard from him.
One day, before Trump was elected, Graham visited Brandt at his office. âWe were talking about politics, and he looked at me and said, âLarry, youâre too honest to be in politics,â â Brandt recalls. âHe said, âEighty-five percent of the people in Washington, elected officials and bureaucrats, would sell their mothers to keep their jobs.â Thatâs a direct quote.â Two Christmases ago, Brandt ran into Graham at a restaurant in Seneca and reminded him of what heâd said. âHe, of course, made a joke out of it,â Brandt says. âBut Lindsey, in my opinion, has sold his mother to keep his job.â
The building where Graham grew up still stands at 217 Main St. in Central, South Carolina, a flyspeck of a town in the northwest corner of the state. I say âbuildingâ and not âhouseâ because itâs not a house, but the last in a row of low brick storefronts, mostly empty today, running alongside a set of train tracks. Central got its name because of its location on the rail line, halfway between Atlanta and Charlotte. Grahamâs father, F.J., owned a bar called the Sanitary Cafe. The family lived in back, crowded into a single room, using the same restroom as the customers and a metal wash basin, with water heated on the stove, for bathing. Woodard, Grahamâs former campaign consultant, who also worked on races for Trey Gowdy and Jim DeMint, tells me that when Grahamâs relatives stopped by campaign headquarters, âIt was like, have you seen the movie Deliverance ?â
Graham helped run the family liquor store (the Sanitary Cafe having been sold) after both of his parents died in quick succession while he was still in college in the 1970s. One of the more revealing passages in Grahamâs anodyne 2015 campaign autobiography, My Story , comes when he discovers his aptitude for trials in law school. âConducting a trial,â he writes, âis like staging a play, and youâre the writer, director, and principal actor. I was born to do it.â Graham loved âinjecting a little drama into the simplest thingsâ â when introducing evidence, for example, he would rummage through his files before retrieving the correct page with a flourish, âin a voice that suggests an important discovery.â Filtered through this lens, Grahamâs talent for sophistry in the defense of Trump makes a kind of sense, purely on the level of craft. Politics, like commanding attention in a courtroom, is performance. (Graham declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Thereâs little disagreement about what has been Grahamâs pivotal performance of the Trump era: the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh, when Graham startled spectators with an uncharacteristic, snarling eruption at his Democratic colleagues (complete with the sort of dramatic business described by Graham in his book, including literal finger-wagging and a climactic shuffling of papers). âI will tell you none of that was scripted, nor did any of his staff know it was coming,â a former senior member of Grahamâs Senate staff insists. âHeâs always had the view that as long as a Supreme Court nominee was qualified, the president gets his pick. He voted for Kagan and Sotomayor under Obama, which wasnât easy. And I think he looked at how the Democrats handled the Kavanaugh nomination and was deeply furious.â
A lawmaker who knows Graham well watched the hearing with a more jaundiced eye. âTo me, that was very, very ginned up,â the ex-member said. âI watched that and went, âJesus Christ, come on!â It was theatrics. The right response would have been sarcastic clapping. Really, when he finished, someone should have gone, â Nice speech , Lindsey!â â
Sincere or not, the moment had its desired effect. Trump loved the show, and Graham received credit for turning the tide of the hearing in Republicansâ favor. More important, GOP voters in South Carolina, along with potential primary rivals â Graham is up for re-election in 2020 â took notice. Will Folks, the political blogger in South Carolina, describes Grahamâs Kavanaugh defense as both âall playactingâ and âthe crowning moment of his latest ideological reorientation.â Prior to the hearing, Folks tells me, ânot only do I think Graham would have had a serious primary challenger, but he would have lost. I wrote an article in 2017 called âDead Senator Walking.â The polling was that bad. They would not piss on him if he was on fire, as the expression goes down here. There was a visceral hatred for the man.â
John Warren, a Greenville businessman and Iraq War veteran, had been publicly talking about challenging Graham in 2020, telling Eric Bolling of the Blaze last year that South Carolina was âa great conservative state, and we deserve two conservative senators.â But with Grahamâs popularity and fundraising prowess surging post-Kavanaugh defense â his poll numbers in South Carolina jumped 21 points after the hearing, from 51 percent in April 2018 to 72 percent in October 2018 â Warren quietly announced this fall that he wouldnât be running for any office in 2020. And Graham understood, more than ever, what his political survival depended upon. Though he ultimately answered to the voters back home, he served at the pleasure of the president.
After Grahamâs parents died, his sister, Darline, only 13 at the time, went to live with an aunt and uncle, but Graham became her guardian, coming home from college most weekends and eventually legally adopting her. As an Air Force lawyer in the 1980s, Graham defended clients who were going to be discharged after testing positive for marijuana by putting the sloppy lab protocol on trial, Barry Scheck-style, eventually making his national television debut when he was interviewed for a Diane Sawyer-anchored 60 Minutes segment on the cases. Heâd never been âpolitical,â he writes in My Story , until the election of Ronald Reagan, and being stationed in Germany during the final years of the Cold War cemented his hawkish foreign-policy views. Back in South Carolina, he won a state House of Representatives seat in 1992, and in 1994, riding a wave of conservative anger at Bill Clinton, he became the first Republican to represent South Carolinaâs 3rd Congressional District since before Reconstruction. âIâd like to think I was a genius, but I was just in the right place at the right time,â says Woodard, Grahamâs campaign manager. âThe main difference between Lindsey and his Democratic opponent was Lindsey had an âRâ next to his name, and people who couldnât stand Clinton wanted to send a message.â
As a freshman member of Congress, Graham quickly cooled on Newt Gingrich. The frustrated group of Republicans who launched an unsuccessful coup against Gingrich in 1997 met in Grahamâs office to plot. (Gingrich resigned as speaker the following year.) âLindsey is a good barometer,â says Woodard. âHe figured out his first week in office that Gingrich had a short shelf life. He was willing to say things against him as a freshman congressman! Heâs not an intellectual or an ideologue, heâs not going to write a book on the conservative mantle. But he will have a sense of when the tide is changing before anyone else in the room. He can read people â voters, but also colleagues â better than almost anyone Iâve seen.â
One of the first examples of a particular genre of Graham profile, all painting him as a folksy voice of reason in an increasingly hardline GOP, appeared in The Washington Post in 1998. Headlined âLindsey Graham, a Twang of Moderation,â the piece portrayed him as a droll, highly quotable country lawyer whose views on impeachment âare surprisingly compatible with President Clintonâs.â On the House floor, Graham had said that if the Clinton impeachment ended up being âabout an extramarital affair with an intern, and thatâs it, I will not vote to impeach this president no matter if 82 percent of the people back home want me to, because we will destroy this country.â
Substantively, though, the Graham of the Nineties was a fairly doctrinaire conservative, and in the end, he did vote to impeach Clinton. But his skill at being all things to all people, and his budding love of the media spotlight, was on full display in the Post story. When I speak with Bill McCollum, a former Republican House member from Florida who served alongside Graham as an impeachment manager, he praises the âquick mindâ and âgentlemanlyâ manner of his colleague, but adds, âEven though I thought he was generally right, I would be remiss in not telling you people thought he could be too aggressive, out grabbing the mic.â
The Post article also described Grahamâs Air Force tour as âterrific fun for a young bachelor swinging his way through Paris and Rome.â Graham himself, jokingly declining to discuss his âexploits,â added, âI was very heterosexual, thatâs all you need to know.â Grahamâs lifelong bachelorhood has been a subject of unsubstantiated speculation, and homophobic baiting, for years. During the Clinton impeachment, anonymous callers left messages at his office threatening to out him. On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart did an impression of Graham as a mincing Scarlett OâHara. In 2002, when Graham decided to run for Senate â the arch segregationist Strom Thurmond finally announced his retirement at age 99 â Dick Harpootlian, the chair of the state Democratic Party, said Graham was a little too âlight in the loafersâ to fill Thurmondâs shoes. âI know itâs really gonna upset a lot of gay men . . . but I ainât available. I ainât gay. Sorry,â Graham told The New York Times Magazine in 2010.
The rumors are only relevant insofar as Grahamâs record on gay rights, which, according to the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ civil-rights organization, has been largely atrocious. The group describes Graham as âa consistent opponent of everything from marriage equality to protecting LGBTQ workers from employment discriminationâ (though in 2015, he called for the GOP to drop its demand for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a woman and a man).
Woodard points out that Thurmond had an illegitimate black daughter heâd kept secret until his death. âThereâs always this feeling that what you see in a South Carolina politician is not what you get, that thereâs something in the closet,â he says. But Woodard doesnât believe Graham is gay. âI kept his daily schedule, and if I wasnât with him, I knew who was,â Woodard says. âIn 1994, in fact, we had all these women after him. Theyâd hold these fundraisers and invite him over. Lindsey would tell me later, âIt was a trap, Dave! Donât ever send me back over there.â But I never suspected he was anything other than an affable bachelor.â
As a senator, Graham quickly allied himself with McCain, whom heâd supported over George W. Bush in the ugly South Carolina Republican primary in 2000. âHis foreign policy and immigration positions were soon indistinguishable from those of his mentor,â according to The New York Times , which effectively meant there wasnât a war Graham didnât support, but also that he would become a member of the Gang of Eight, a bipartisan group of senators that passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2013, only to see it killed by conservatives in the House. The former Democratic staffer tells me, âHe got the immigration issue, and it was clearly for the right reasons. There wasnât a great deal of political upside in South Carolina for him to go whole hog on it.â
During the Obama years, in fact, Graham found himself assailed by conservatives as he became one of the only Republicans willing to work with the administration. An article in Politico called Graham and Rahm Emanuel, Obamaâs chief of staff, âD.C.âs odd couple,â noting that, by 2010, Graham had âhad more in-person meetings with Emanuel than any other Republican.â The former Graham staffer told me that if an issue was big and complicated and seemed unsolvable, Graham was drawn to it. âHe liked to try to put the puzzle together in a way that would bring Republicans and Democrats together, which often meant swallowing policies that werenât his preference, as long as he believed he got something in return.â
Part of Grahamâs skill at consensus building came down to his personal charm. âEveryone likes having him around,â Schmidt acknowledges. âHeâs a genuinely funny guy.â After Trumpâs election, according to Bob Woodwardâs Fear , then-White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus urged Graham to broach a rapport with the new president, telling him, âYouâre a lot of fun. He needs fun people around him.â In Woodwardâs account of their first Oval Office meeting, in March 2017, an anecdote for which Graham seems the likely source, the senator entered with a prepared speech. Trump jumped up to hug him, declaring, âWeâve got to be friends.â Graham said he wanted that, and told Trump, âI want to apologize to you for a very fucked-up Republican majority. Congress is going to fuck up your presidency. We have no idea what weâre doing. We have no plan for health care. Weâre on different planets when it comes to cutting taxes. And youâre the biggest loser in this.â And then the silver-tongued country lawyer appealed to Trumpâs ego, telling him, âYouâre a dealmaker. These leaders in Congress donât know how to do something as simple as buying a house. . . . There are not five people on Capitol Hill Iâd let buy me a car. Iâd let you buy me a car.â
Perhaps early on, Graham thought he could work Trump with flattery. The new president must have certainly made a tempting target for anyone skilled at manipulation. If you could stomach sucking up to the guy, ignore all but the very worst of his racism, bullying, and vulgarity, and then whisper your own policy preferences in his ear, details of which he would have zero interest in, other than how they might represent a âwinâ for him â well, maybe his cult of personality could be used to advance sensible conservative goals. That would be the charitable reading of what Iâll call the Paul Ryan Approach, an approach Graham, whoâd never stopped hammering Trump during the campaign, quickly adopted. In the Woodward book, Steve Bannon describes Graham as âthe best salesman around,â saying that Trump âloves Graham. Graham can sell him anything.â (Graham also told Bannon âthat America First is bullshit. This is all bullshit.â)
The big test of Grahamâs salesmanship came on immigration, the issue that Trump has so successfully demagogued upon. Graham was trying to help broker a new deal, one in which Trump would agree to extend the Dream Act, the program protecting undocumented immigrants whoâd been brought to the United States as children, in exchange for more money on border security from Democrats. Then came the infamous meeting in which Trump referred to poor, non-white countries as âshitholes.â âSenator Graham was incensed,â the Democratic Senate staffer tells me. âHe said directly to the president, âMy forefathers came from a shithole country, too, and look at me now.â â
As Ryan also quickly learned, hopes that Trump might begin to curb his worse impulses proved fanciful. âAnybody who thinks heâs going to have a moderating influence on Trump pretty much always ends up going, âWell, that idea didnât work,â â says Al Franken, who served alongside Graham on the Senate Judiciary Committee. âFor Lindsey, âI can see every angle, and I have influence with Trump so he doesnât go off the deep endâ is a good talking point. But I donât think itâs shown any benefits.â
With his House majority doomed, Ryan announced his retirement. Graham, though, persisted, to the bewilderment of even those whoâd worked closely with him. âWhen Senator Graham really began courting the president â golfing all the time with him, saying flattering things on cable news â it felt like he wanted to be the attorney general, or there was some other play there,â the Democratic Senate staffer says. âInitially we thought, âWell, if he ingratiates himself to the president, it helps us on immigration.â Then there was a turn. He got much Trumpier. He became a blind defender of the presidentâs policies, no matter what, his fingers in his ears, âIâm not interested in the facts, just here to support the president.â Which is where he is today. Iâm sure Iâm not alone wondering what Senator McCain would think.â
When I ask Schmidt, McCainâs former senior campaign adviser, about the âmoderating influence on Trumpâ defense of Grahamâs behavior, he snorts. âItâs ludicrous,â he says, âbut despite its ludicrousness, this will be one of the fundamental arguments in American politics for the next 25 years. âNo, no, you donât understand: I was secretly against him while he was debasing his office, dividing the American people, engaged in all manner of abuses of power. I was on the front lines of Mar-a-Lago preventing this!â Itâs an absurdity. For most Republicans, the simple fact is, what they now claim to believe is at odds with what they claimed to believe three years ago. Look at what Lindsey said in 2015 and what he says today. What intervening event occurred that would lend oneself to have such a strong turn?â
A senior staffer at a nonprofit Washington-based advocacy group who has worked with Graham for more than a decade tells me, âGraham is the most nervous primary politician Iâve ever seen. Even if he doesnât have a credible challenger on the right, he goes into overdrive, and I mean overdrive.â As 2020 approached, Graham was certainly paying attention to his right-leaning primary electorate back home. South Carolina is an aging state, popular with retirees â the fastest-growing age demographic is residents 85 or older. âTen years from now, I think South Carolina is going to be the most conservative state in the country,â the staffer predicted.
Franken sees Grahamâs rightward tack as evidence of a fundamental cynicism. Once, shortly before the Christmas recess, Graham bumped into Franken in the hallway and asked if he planned on taking his family somewhere warm. Franken said yes, in fact, theyâd be vacationing in Puerto Rico. Without missing a beat, Graham said, âDo two fundraisers while youâre there: one for the pro-statehood people and one for the anti-statehood people. They never talk to each other!â
âHe was loaded for that,â Franken says. âHe jokes about being cynical with his colleagues â thatâs a big part of his humor â but I think that actually reflects a reality. He does what he has to do.â
In October, Grahamâs re-election campaign announced heâd broken fundraising records for the third quarter of 2019 with a staggering $3.3 million haul, more than any other Republican Senate candidate raised during the same period and the most any candidate in South Carolina had ever raised in a three-month period ($1.2 million came from small donors, who in GOP fundraising circles tend to be Trump supporters, and 87 percent of the money came from out of state).
His likely general-election opponent next year, Jaime Harrison, is a charismatic former chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party. I met Harrison as he was making a campaign appearance in Rock Hill, handing out meals at a mobile food bank. Graham, Harrison tells me, âhas not had a town hall in South Carolina in well over two years. But you can find him on Fox News or golfing with the president every other day. Thatâs not helping the people here.â Pointing to a Graham quote about wanting to be ârelevant,â Harrison says, âRelevance for him is that news reporters gaggle around him when heâs walking down the corridors; itâs going on Sean Hannity or flying on Air Force One. Relevance for the people of South Carolina is none of that.â
Most of the local political observers I spoke with expressed skepticism that Harrison, who is black, can replicate the base-energizing strategy of Stacey Abrams in Georgia and come as close to winning in a state as conservative as South Carolina. Still, Harrison has broken fundraising records for any Democratic Senate candidate in the state, raising $2.2 million in the third quarter. Their race will likely be the most expensive Senate campaign in state history.
Gibbs Knotts, a professor of political science at the College of Charleston, considers Harrison a long shot, but adds, âWhat I would say is, look at South Carolinaâs 1st District. Trump won that by 13 percentage points, and then you had a guy like Joe Cunningham,â the Democrat who won an upset victory for a vacant House seat in 2018. âA lot of folks in South Carolina look at Cunningham and wonder, âIs that the magic formula?â â Knotts went on. âItâs an upscale Charleston suburb. If thereâs a Democratic candidate who can do well in those kinds of suburbs, along with urban areas and rural parts of the state that are heavily African American, thatâs a coalition that could work against Lindsey Graham.â
But probably not next year. Itâs ironic that Graham has adopted Trumpâs strategy of appealing to the base and only the base, and it will likely ensure that the onetime highly endangered RINO will coast to reelection, whereas the same strategy could doom the deeply unpopular Trump nationwide. Meanwhile, impeachment looms, with the action turning to the Senate. During an impeachment trial, senators, acting as jurors, must sit in silence as House managers and the presidentâs lawyers argue the case. But Graham, as one of Trumpâs most tireless apologists, will certainly play a role on the defense team, spinning for gaggles of reporters inside the Senate and running interference with his own Judiciary investigation into the Bidens. âAfter McCainâs passing, I got the sense that Graham was isolated within his own caucus, and that having allies at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue behooved him,â the Democratic Senate staffer says. Now Graham has emerged, unlikely as it would have seemed just a few years ago, as one of the most powerful voices in his party.
âPeople try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what heâs doing now,â Schmidt says. âThe way to understand him is to look at whatâs consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. Thatâs Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trumpâs the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power â but heâs found it unattainable on his own merits.â
Speaking to CBSâ John Dickerson after McCainâs death, Graham recalled one of the final afternoons he spent with his friend at his Arizona ranch. They watched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , a classic Western in which Jimmy Stewart plays a U.S. senator who is elected after heâs given credit for gunning down the titular villain â though in fact (spoiler!) John Wayneâs character actually did it. The movie is where the line âWhen legend becomes fact, print the legendâ comes from. When Dickerson pushed Graham about his cozying up to McCainâs nemesis in the White House, Graham attempted to burnish his own legend, making his willingness to bend the knee sound patriotic. âI donât have the luxury of playing like heâs not president,â he said. âIâm not going to give up on the idea of working with this president.â
It sounded good, but which, exactly, of the urgent issues of the day was Trump âworking withâ the senior senator from South Carolina on? Not immigration, nor climate change. (The old Graham fought hard with John Kerry and Joe Lieberman to try to pass a bipartisan cap-and-trade bill.) And certainly few of Trumpâs actions in the realm of foreign policy â most recently, Trumpâs betrayal of the Kurds in Syria â would have reassured the hawkish neocon. Wasnât it actually more of a luxury to âworkâ with the president, which in effect means kowtowing to the president, and still remain in your cozy position in the Senate, rather than risk being the character in the movie who takes a shot at the bad guy and misses?
When I ask Woodard what motivates Graham to stay in politics after all these years, he says, âIâve thought about that,â and pauses before continuing. âHeâs alone. Itâs not like he has a family, a child. His time, when heâs away from the spotlight, I think is a lonely time. Heâs more comfortable in the spotlight where heâs Senator Lindsey Graham, talking about things he knows a lot about. I thought he wouldnât run in 2020. And then he did the Kavanaugh thing, and heâs the Trump buddy. If Trump wins a second term, he might wind up in the Cabinet, maybe Secretary of Defense? The South, and South Carolina in particular, has a history of sending âem back. Heâs got Thurmondâs seat, and Thurmond had that seat until he was 100. So he could have a long way to go.â
What Will Happen to The Trump Toadies?
Look to Nixonâs defenders, and the Vichy collaborators, for clues.
Irony, declared dead after 9/11, is alive and kicking in Trumpâs America. Itâs the concepts of truth and shame that are on life support. The definition of âfactsâ has been so thoroughly vandalized that Americans can no longer agree on what one is, and our president has barreled through so many crimes and misdemeanors with so few consequences that itâs impossible to gainsay his claim that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. Donald Trump proves daily that there is no longer any penalty for doing wrong as long as you deny everything, never say youâre sorry, and have co-conspirators stashed in powerful places to put the fix in.
No wonder so many fear that Trump will escape his current predicament scot-free, with a foregone acquittal at his impeachment trial in the GOP-controlled Senate and a pull-from-behind victory in November, buoyed by a booming economy, fractious Democrats, and a stacked Electoral College. The enablers and apologists who have facilitated his triumph over the rule of law happily agree. John Kennedy, the Louisiana senator who parrots Vladimir Putinâs talking points in his supine defense of Trump, acts as if there will never be a reckoning. While he has no relation to the president whose name he incongruously bears, his every craven statement bespeaks a confidence that history will count him among the knights of the buffet table in the gilded Mar-a-Lago renovation of Camelot. He is far from alone.
If we can extricate ourselves even briefly from our fatalistic fog, however, we might give some credence to a wider view. For all the damage inflicted since Inauguration Day 2017, America is still standing, a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump, and the laws of gravity, if not those of the nation, remain in full force. Moral gravity may well reassert its pull, too, with time. Rather than being the end of American history as we know it, the Trump presidency may prove merely a notorious chapter in that history. Heedless lapdogs like Kennedy, Devin Nunes, and Lindsey Graham are acting now as if there is no tomorrow, but tomorrow will come eventually, whatever happens in the near future, and Judgment Day could arrive sooner than they think. That judgment will be rendered by an ever-more demographically diverse America unlikely to be magnanimous toward cynical politicians who prioritized pandering to Trumpâs dwindling all-white base over the common good.
All cults come to an end, often abruptly, and Trumpâs Republican Party is nothing if not a cult. While cult leaders are generally incapable of remorse â whether they be totalitarian rulers, sexual Svengalis, or the self-declared messiahs of crackpot religions â their followers almost always pay a human and reputational price once the leader is toppled. We donât know how and when Donald Trump will exit, but under any scenario it wonât be later than January 20, 2025. Even were he to be gone tomorrow, the legacy of his most powerful and servile collaborators is already indelibly bound to his.
Whether these enablers joined his administration in earnest, or aided and abetted it from elite perches in politics, Congress, the media, or the private sector, they will be remembered for cheering on a leader whose record in government (thus far) includes splitting up immigrant families and incarcerating their children in cages; encouraging a spike in racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic vigilantes; leveraging American power to promote ethnic cleansing abroad and punish political opponents at home; actively inciting climate change and environmental wreckage; and surrendering Americaâs national security to an international rogueâs gallery of despots.
That selective short list doesnât take into account any new White House felonies still to come, any future repercussions here and abroad of Trumpâs actions to date, or any previous foul deeds that have so far eluded public exposure. For all the technological quickening of the media pulse in this century, Trumpâs collaborators will one day be viewed through the long lens of history like Nixonâs collaborators before them and the various fools, opportunists, and cowards who tried to appease Hitler in America, England, and France before that. Once Trump has vacated the Oval Office, and possibly for decades thereafter, his government, like any other deposed strongmanâs, will be subjected to a forensic colonoscopy to root out buried crimes, whether against humanity or the rule of law or both. With time, everything will come out â it always does. With time, the ultimate fates of those brutalized immigrant and refugee families will emerge in full. And Trumpâs collaborators, our Vichy Republicans, will own all of it â whether they were active participants in the wrongdoing like Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, Kirstjen Nielsen, Mike Pompeo, and William Barr, or the so-called adults in the room who stood idly by rather than sound public alarms for the good of the Republic (e.g., Gary Cohn, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson), or those elite allies beyond the White House gates who pretended not to notice administration criminality and moral atrocities in exchange for favors like tax cuts and judicial appointments (from Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan to Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr.).
Such Trump collaborators are kidding themselves if they think that post-Trump image-laundering through âgood worksâ or sheer historical amnesia will cleanse their names of the Trump taint as easily as his residential complexes in Manhattan have shed their Trump signage. A century of history â and not just American history â says otherwise.
To take two examples from the Nixon era, the White House criminals Charles Colson and Jeb Stuart Magruder both found God and dedicated themselves to ministries after doing time for Watergate-related crimes. (They were among 69 charged and 25 imprisoned.) But you wonât find their ostentatious efforts at spiritual redemption at the top of their Wikipedia entries or referenced more than fleetingly in the vast Nixon-Watergate literature. Nixon lackeys who did nothing illegal generally fared no better: The New Jersey congressman Charles Sandman, a House Judiciary Committee impeachment holdout until a few days before Nixonâs resignation, lost a seat he had held since 1966 in the subsequent 1974 midterms (48 other GOP members of Congress were wiped out as well) and would wind up the decade dishing out steamed crabs at a joint on the Jersey shore and losing a jury trial on the charge of slandering a police officer. When a Senate counterpart, Ed Gurney of Florida, a vocal Nixon defender on Sam Ervinâs Watergate Committee, died in 1996, his family tried to keep his death a secret, presumably to avoid renewed attention to his past.
Some Nixon loyalists on Capitol Hill escaped oblivion â most notably the Mississippi congressman Trent Lott, from a district that had voted 87 percent for Nixon in 1972 (Nixonâs strongest in the nation). So did some White House flacks well removed from Watergate like Pat Buchanan and Diane Sawyer. Others, prefiguring Sean Spicerâs debasement on Dancing With the Stars , landed B-list (and lower) media gigs: The Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy appeared on televisionâs Miami Vice and MacGyver, and a ditzy Jesuit speechwriter prominent in the White House spin offensive, John McLaughlin, found a secular throne for himself at an odious Beltway chatfest, The McLaughlin Group, after abandoning the priesthood. Like their Trump counterparts, countless Watergate principals wrote tell-all books, many of them best sellers, running the gamut from H. R. Haldemanâs The Ends of Power to John Ehrlichmanâs Witness to Power .
But there arenât any die-hard Nixon supporters in either chamber of Congress who are now remembered as patriots, no matter what else they did with their careers before, during, or after his presidency. The figures who live on are those like Ervin and Judge Sirica, who brought Nixon to justice, and, as the historian David Greenberg has noted, âthose loyalists who abandoned Nixon early, when it mattered.â
HuffPost reported in 2017 that the Trump Justice Department took down the portrait of one of the few heroes who stood up to Nixonâs abuses of power from within his administration, Attorney General Elliot Richardson. Whether Richardsonâs deaccession was an act of denial, gallows humor, or a conscious or subconscious admission of guilt, it was an impotent gesture â not least because Watergate has with time proved an inadequate analogy for Trumpâs metastasizing scandals. The stench of disrepute that will cling to Trumpâs collaborators is likely to exceed the posthumous punishment of Nixonâs dead-enders for the simple reason that Nixonâs White House horrors werenât in the same league.
In both cases, impeachment was driven by the revelations of illegal efforts to sabotage a rival presidential candidate and the ensuing cover-ups. But the gravity of the specifics differ by several orders of magnitude. The cash that Nixon & Co.
tapped to fund the break-in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters (and the subsequent hush money to the burglars) came from his own donors; Trump, by contrast, sought to bankroll his effort to dig up dirt on the Bidens by appropriating nearly $400 million in Congress-mandated foreign aid paid for by taxpayers. And while the Nixon White House hired freelance bumblers to spy on the Democrats, Trump commandeered a cabal of Cabinet officers, diplomats, and Rudy Giulianiârecruited thugs to try to muscle the head of state of a foreign ally into doing his bidding.The disproportionality between Trumpâs history and Nixonâs hardly ends there. Trump is not Hitler, but some of his actions, starting with his repeated, barely coded endorsements of white supremacists, suggest itâs not for want of trying. Nixon and his vice-president, Spiro Agnew, exploited racial resentments and backlash to the civil-rights movement to attract bigots to the GOP through a new âsouthern strategy.â Ugly as that was (and is), it pales next to Trump and his campaignâs explicit alignment with those âfine peopleâ who stir hate, bullying, and incendiary alt-right conspiracy theories into an inflammatory dark-web brew. However much Trumpâs courtiers try to compartmentalize, they canât separate themselves from his flirtations with neo-Nazis.
Nor can Trumpâs enablers escape the stain of his alliances with murderous neo-Hitlers and neo-Stalins in Russia, Syria, Turkey, Hungary, Brazil, and North Korea. Whatever else is to be said about Nixon, not for a second would he have favored the worldview and national interests of a strongman like Putin over that of America and its allies, or taken Putinâs word as a former KGB agent over that of Americaâs own intelligence agencies. Itâs this aspect of Trumpian rule that sinks to depths previously unfathomable for an American president and makes Trumpâs collaborators look less like the corrupt government bureaucrats and hacks of All the Presidentâs Men and more like the traitorous elites who wittingly or idiotically enabled Hitler in the 1930s.
The notion of Vichy Republicans is hardly hyperbole. Christopher R. Browning, an American historian of the Holocaust and World War IIâera Europe, wrote in the New York Review of Books in 2018 that those who rationalized their original support for Trump on the grounds of âBetter Trump than Hillaryâ â and are now reupping for 2020 â are channeling those on the right who proclaimed âBetter Hitler than Blumâ in France in the 1930s. Such Frenchmen, Browning writes, went so far as to empower their countryâs âtraditional national enemy across the Rhineâ and its Nazi dictator rather than reelect the sitting prime minister, LĂ©on Blum, a Jewish socialist who would have preserved French democracy. (In defeat, Blum would become an opponent of Vichy and end up in Buchenwald.)
Make no mistake: The current âBetter Trump than Warrenâ (or Sanders) crowd is repeating this history. Their credo might as well be âBetter Putin, Erdogan, and Assad than Warren,â for Trump is serving as an unabashed proxy for our present-day mini-Hitlers while simultaneously trying to transform American democracy into an Ultimate Fighting Championship ring of chaos, corruption, and dysfunction. Prominent Trump supporters like Kennedy, of course, fiercely deny that they are pro-Putin (even though the president himself never has), but that doesnât vitiate the real-world consequence that by standing with Trump, they are advancing the interests of Russia even as it conducts cyberwar against their own country and threatens some of the same American allies Hitler did.
You donât have to be a card-carrying fascist to collaborate with fascists and help them seize power; you just have to be morally bankrupt and self-serving. As the authoritative American historian of Vichy France, Robert O. Paxton, has pointed out, it was only âa rather small minorityâ of Franceâs wartime collaborators who were motivated by an actual âideological sympathy with Nazism and Fascismâ to go along with the Nazi puppet regime fronted by Marshal Philippe PĂ©tain in Vichy. A more widespread incentive was âpersonal gain.â Others rationalized their complicity by persuading themselves they were acting in the ânational interest.â It would be no surprise if that distribution of motivations persists among Trump collaborators today. Such backers as the financier Stephen Schwarzman and New York real-estate titans like Stephen Ross of Hudson Yards no doubt congratulate themselves on acting in the ânational interestâ while pocketing personal gains measured in either political influence or on a profit-and-loss statement.
In France, such ostensible moral distinctions among collaborators were rendered moot in the long-delayed and gruesome postwar reckoning. All roads led to the same destination: Starting in 1942, Vichy shipped some 76,000 Jews in mass deportations to their doom. The exiled were mostly foreign refugees, Paxton writes, who had previously ârelied upon traditional French hospitality.â Their blood was on every collaboratorâs hands. The collaboratorsâ common postwar defense â that things would have been far worse if they had not been working on the inside â was repurposed by the Trump official responsible for the brutal treatment of immigrants who had relied upon traditional American humanity. âJohn F. Kelly Says His Tenure As Trumpâs Chief of Staff Is Best Measured by What the President Did Not Doâ read the headline of the exit interview he gave the Los Angeles Times . Good luck with that in the long-term court of public opinion. France wrestled with Vichyâs legacy for decades before 1995, when the French president Jacques Chirac abjured denial and officially confirmed his nationâs complicity in the wholesale deportation of Jews.
If you look back at the elite figures who lent their clout and prestige to clearing Hitlerâs path before or during World War II, itâs striking how such folly and inhumanity remains immutable across national boundaries and centuries. The amalgam of nationalism, isolationism, and nativism embraced by Trump shares its DNA not just with the PĂ©tainists of France but Neville Chamberlainâs appeasement cohort in England and America First, the movement whose name Trump appropriated without (of course) knowing what it was. America First, though originating as a campus-centric peace campaign, was hijacked by a rancid mob of Hitler acolytes and peace-at-any-price dupes that included, most famously, Charles Lindbergh. Many of these Hitler enablers had elaborate rationalizations for their actions that mirror those of Trumpâs highest-profile shills today. Robert Taft, the hard-right isolationist senator from Ohio, wrote the script for Better Trump than Hillaryâism nearly a century ago: America should not go to war with Germany, he argued, because âthere is a good deal more danger of the infiltration of totalitarian ideas from the New Deal circles in Washington than there will ever be from the activities of the ⊠Nazis.â
Another parallel is exemplified by the Trump collaborator and donor Gordon Sondland, even now, somehow, still the ambassador to the European Union. Heâs a zhlubby discount-rack answer to Joseph Kennedy, a far more successful and clever mogul who served as Franklin Rooseveltâs ambassador to the U.K. from 1937 to 1940. Until FDR shut him down, Kennedy tried to conduct a rogue foreign policy to advance Chamberlainâs appeasement efforts to the point of counseling the Nazis that they could get away with brutalizing Jews if they would just do so with less âloud clamor.â Much as Sondland, Trump, and Giuliani thought nothing of leaving Ukraine vulnerable to Putinâs aggression by holding back military aid, so Kennedy thought that Hitler should be free to conquer expendable smaller countries in Eastern Europe. âI canât for the life of me understand why anybody would want to go to war to save the Czechs,â he wrote in a draft of a speech before the White House nixed it. As went the Czechs then, so have gone the Ukrainians and Kurds today.
The antecedents for Trumpist enablers from the tycoon sector both within and outside the White House â Cohn, Schwarzman, Steven Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, et al. â can be found in those now-vilified captains of 1930s American industry who were prime movers in various back-channel schemes to appease Hitler. The America First Committeeâs members included Henry Ford, an unabashed anti-Semite who was name-checked admiringly in Mein Kampf, and Avery Brundage, an Illinois construction magnate and president of the U.S. Olympic Committee who bent to Hitlerâs will by yanking the only two Jewish competitors on an American team in the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin. James Mooney, the General Motors overseas president in charge of its European operations and another America First committeeman, took it upon himself to do his own Giuliani-Sondland-like shadow diplomacy by securing face-to-face meetings with Hermann Göring as well as Hitler. He claimed to be seeking peace, but had he succeeded, he would have facilitated Germanyâs conquest of Europe much as Trump and his supplicants have been green-lighting the imperial designs of Russia and Turkey.
These businessmenâs machinations did not bring about peace in their time but did bring financial quid pro quos that fattened their bottom lines. Hitlerâs regime gave Brundageâs company the commission to build its new embassy in Washington. More than a half-century after V-E Day, researchers confirmed that Ford and GMâs German operations had manufactured armaments for the Nazi war machine, sometimes with slave labor. Alfred P. Sloan, the longtime GM chairman, explained his philosophy: âAn international business operating throughout the world should conduct its operations in strictly business terms, without regard to the political beliefs of its management, or the political beliefs of the countries in which it is operating.â Surely Jared Kushner, Mnuchin, and Schwarzman couldnât have put it any better as they cavorted with Mohammed bin Salman at his investment conference in Riyadh in October, a year after the murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi. As with Ford, Brundage, Mooney, and the rest, any loot they accrued in exchange for their pact with the Devil will be unearthed in good time.
While some Hitler appeasers faced swift retribution â FDR shut down Joseph Kennedyâs personal political ambitions for good â others would get their due later. In 1998, nearly four decades after his death, Mooney would at last face an accounting: Newly discovered documents, triggered in part by litigation on behalf of Holocaust survivors, would show, as the Washington Post put it, that in consultation with Göring, âhe was involved in the partial conversion of the principal GM automobile plant at RĂŒsselsheim to production of engines and other parts for the Junker âWunderbomber,â a key weapon in the German air force.â
One imagines that high-toned Trump collaborators deplore Khashoggiâs murder (though not when in Saudi Arabia). And they may (privately) roll their eyes at Trumpâs palling around with bigots. For heavenâs sake, some of them are Jewish themselves, and so is the First Daughter! But America First also claimed to be foursquare against anti-Semitism, despite the fact that Lindbergh, Ford, and Mooney all received medals of appreciation from the Third Reich before the war. Like the Trump White House, the America First Committee deployed token Jews to try to deflect critics, including Florence Kahn, a former Republican congresswoman from California; it even hired a Jew as the first publicity director of its New York chapter. But such disingenuous stunts, like Trumpâs soporific teleprompter-scripted condemnation of âracism, bigotry and white supremacyâ after mass shootings, didnât deter American Nazi wannabes from flocking to the organizationâs ranks, among them the followers of the unabashedly anti-Semitic radio priest Father Coughlin. Ivanka Trumpâs observance of the Sabbath has not stopped her father from retweeting anti-Semitic memes or prevented âJews Will Not Replace Usâ thugs from rallying around #MAGA.
In Hitler in Los Angeles , his groundbreaking recent history of wartime Nazism in California, Steven J. Ross might as well have been writing about Charlottesville when he observes that âAmerica First enabled previously disreputable hate groups to move from the margins to the mainstream of American life and politics.â The anti-Semitic dog whistles of Lindbergh and his prominent peers gave a pass to violent extremist groups of that time like the American Rangers and the Royal Order of American Defenders. The Trump GOP has revived the tradition: Not only did House members meet with Chuck Johnson, a Holocaust denier who raises money for the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, but Floridaâs irrepressible freshman congressman Matt Gaetz invited him to cheer Trump at the 2018 State of the Union.
No one can predict posterityâs judgments, but if the past is any guide at all, this is not going to end well for Trumpâs collaborators. The Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the Unification Church cult leader who was welcomed into the Oval Office by Nixon and whose brainwashed âMooniesâ gathered en masse on the Capitol steps to pray and fast for three days during impeachment, may have found his farcical descendants in Trumpâs Christian stooges. Witness the offspring of Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell â the Donald Trump Jr.âs, if you will, of Americaâs pagan Evangelical racket. Franklin Graham has preached an Old Testament parallel between Trump and David, while Jerry Jr. is now fending off inquiries into his and his wifeâs antics, business or otherwise, with a pool boy they befriended at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. (For his part, Moon was eventually engulfed by repeated post-Watergate scandals, including a conviction for tax fraud and obstruction of justice that sent him to prison in 1982.) The rhetoric of Nixonâs and Trumpâs mad-dog defenders can be interchangeable, too. Thereâs more than a little of the degraded Lindsey Graham in the legendary Today show appearance by Earl Landgrebe, a die-hard anti-impeachment vote on the House Judiciary Committee, the day before Nixon resigned in August 1974. âDonât confuse me with the facts. Iâve got a closed mind,â he said. âI will not vote for impeachment. Iâm going to stick with my president even if he and I have to be taken out of this building and shot.â (The voters shot him soon enough; he received only 39 percent of the vote in his safe Indiana district three months later.)
But such similarities understate the case. The stakes are much higher when an American president is putting the nation, and its Constitution, in jeopardy by abusing his power to aid Americaâs foreign foes. Someone like Graham is less likely to be remembered as another Landgrebe than as another Burton Wheeler, a senator from Montana who began his career as a conventional New Deal Democrat and morphed into an America First Nazi appeaser. As Graham countenanced Trumpâs empowering of Putin and his assault on Ukraine, so Wheeler opposed aid to England and other American allies when war broke out in Europe. He is best known now â and may be in perpetuity â as the fascist vice-president to Lindberghâs president in Philip Rothâs World War II counter-history, The Plot Against America . (David Simon is soon to bring out a television version.)
Mitch McConnell has led another, even graver reenactment of the Hitler-appeasersâ playbook by slow-walking or ignoring intelligence-agency alarms about Russian interference in our elections past, present, and future. His congressional antecedents did the same when Germany tried to sabotage the election of 1940. As the story is told by Susan Dunn, a historian at Williams College, in her 2013 book 1940 , the chargĂ© dâaffaires at the German Embassy in Washington, Hans Thomsen, wielded âmoney, a cohort of isolationist congressmen, senators, and authors, and a bag of dirty tricks,â hoping to realize goals tantamount to Putinâs ambitions: âto convince Americans that fascist aggression posed no danger to them, to discourage them from pouring billions of dollars into national defense and military aid for the Allies, and, finally, to engineer Rooseveltâs defeat in 1940.â
Even without social media in his arsenal, Thomsenâs dirty tricks uncannily anticipated Russiaâs 21st-century disinformation tactics. He funneled financial aid to an isolationist âMake Europe Pay War Debtsâ Committee to rile up Americans against European allies, lent aid to ostensibly grassroots organizations with names like âPaul Revereâs Sentinelsâ rallying against American entry into war with Germany, and clandestinely underwrote newspaper ads lobbying for the same. With a secret subsidy, he paid an isolationist congressman, Hamilton Fish of New York, to corral anti-interventionist colleagues before a GOP convention platform committee to push a resolution âunequivocally opposing any American involvement in the war in Europe.â Thomsen even helped engineer a fake news stunt worthy of Russiaâs propaganda schemes on Facebook by using the isolationist Montana representative Jacob Thorkelson to slip a counterfeit Hitler interview into the Congressional Record. It had âHitler telling a reporter that American fears of him were âflattering but grotesqueâ and calling the idea of a German invasion of the United States âstupid and fantastic.â â
Any historical parallels, alas, end there. Germanyâs attempted election sabotage failed in 1940. The Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie, an interventionist, as their presidential candidate, rather than an isolationist favored by the Nazis, and the reelected FDR led America to war. By contrast, Russia may have succeeded in moving the electoral needle in 2016, and may again in 2020, with the blessings of the Putin-admiring American president and his quisling of a secretary of State Pompeo, not to mention the pliant Moscow Mitch, the double-dealing Barr, and the rest of their collaborators in the executive branch and Congress.
Those who continue with Trump on this path, if they have any shred of conscience or patriotism left, would be advised to look at their historical predecessors of the appeasement era, not the more forgiving template of Watergate, if they wish to game out their future and that of family members who bear their names. They might recall that Lindbergh was among the most popular figures, if not the most popular, in the nation before lending his voice to America First. He had won the cheers of the world after piloting the first nonstop solo flight over the Atlantic and then its sympathy after his 20-month-old son was murdered in a sensational kidnapping case. More than a decade after V-E Day, when Hollywood decided it was at last safe to profitably resurrect that heroic young Lindbergh in an adulatory 1957 biopic, The Spirit of St. Louis, some theaters refused to book it despite the added halo of the most unimpeachable all-American star, Jimmy Stewart of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Jack Warner reputedly called it âthe most disastrous failureâ in the history of Warner Bros. In the following decade, Lindbergh inched back into the spotlight as a philanthropist campaigning for the World Wildlife Fund. âI donât want history to record my generation as being responsible for the extermination of any form of life,â he declared, prompting the popular syndicated columnist Max Lerner to respond, âWhere the hell was he when Hitler was trying to exterminate an entire race of human beings?â
Some of Lindberghâs fellow isolationists sought to reclaim their reputations after the war, too, but as the historian Geoffrey Perret wrote, they âwould generally be regarded for years to come as stupid, vicious, pro-Nazi reactionaries, or at least as people blind to the realities of a new day and a menace to their countryâs safety.â Taft, the rigidly isolationist senator who bore a White House lineage (William Howard Taft was his father), failed in two subsequent presidential runs after his first attempt imploded as France fell to the Germans in 1940. Once known as the towering âMr. Republican,â he now is barely remembered even by Republicans.
A comparable figure in England was Lord Londonderry, nĂ© Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, a former Tory British air minister whose entanglement with Nazi leaders and push for Anglo-German friendship in the 1930s mirrors Trump, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and their posseâs infatuated courtship of Putinâs Russia. As the English Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw writes in Making Friends With Hitler , Londonderry âspent his later years in a relentless, but fruitless, campaignâ for vindication. âWas he, as his detractors claimed, a genuine Nazi sympathizer â âa Nazi Englishmanâ as he was dubbed? Or was he merely a gullible, naĂŻve and misguided âfellow-traveler of the Rightâ?â Though Londonderry âhad no truck with the fanatical fascists, or the wide-eyed cranks and mystics who fell for Hitler lock, stock and barrel,â Kershaw concludes, in the end it didnât matter.
His actions worked to Hitlerâs advantage, and his âreputation was ruined.â His fitting permanent memorial is Lord Darlington, the fictional English aristocrat whose outreach to the Nazis and ensuing downfall are observed with a certain sorrow and pity by his butler, Stevens, in Kazuo Ishiguroâs classic novel The Remains of the Day .No less a sage than Ted Cruz told friends while preparing his 2016 convention speech that âhistory isnât kind to the man who holds Mussoliniâs jacket,â according to the Politico journalist Tim Albertaâs account in American Carnage . But so harsh was the baseâs blowback after he refused to endorse Trump in that address that he has been holding Mussoliniâs jacket ever since.
What are Cruz and all his peers afraid of? âEvery member of the French Resistance faced the strong possibility of torture, deportation, and death,â wrote Charles Kaiser, whose book The Cost of Courage tells of one Resistance family during Vichy. âThe most a Republican senator risks from opposing a corrupt and racist president is a loss at the polls.â And even at that, there can be rewards down the road. Larry Hogan, the current Republican governor of Maryland, recently reminisced to the New York Times about his father, Lawrence Hogan, who was the first Republican on the House Judiciary Committee to come out in favor of impeaching Nixon in 1974. âHe lost friends in Congress,â the younger Hogan recalled. âHe lost the support of his constituents and he angered the White House. But history was kind to him. He was known as a courageous guy. I think itâs the thing he is most remembered for and the thing Iâm most proud of him for.â
Trumpâs enablers and collaborators are more Londonderry than Hogan. It is too late for them to save their reputations. We must hope that it is not too late to save the country they have betrayed.
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George Conway and Neal Katyal: How Pelosi should play her impeachment cards
These guys are creative, nothing in the constitution or the House rules that says you canât split the Articles of Impeachment and send them independently. 2020 is already so bonkers.
Separating the two articles â our preferred approach â would make perfect sense. When it comes to the second article, all the evidence about Trumpâs obstruction is a matter of public record. Thereâs nothing more to add, so the second article is ripe for trial. But as to the first, although there is plenty of evidence demonstrating Trumpâs guilt, his obstruction has prevented all of the evidence from coming to light.
Since the House voted to approve the articles of impeachment last month, new revelations of Trumpâs involvement have emerged, including emails showing that aid was ordered withheld from Ukraine 91 minutes after Trumpâs supposedly âperfectâ phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trumpâs former national security adviser, John Bolton, has said he is willing to testify before the Senate if subpoenaed, and Boltonâs lawyer has said he has new information, yet McConnell has balked at assurances that Bolton would be called.
How can one conduct a âtrialâ without knowing this evidence? As lawyers, we have never heard of a trial without witnesses. Both past impeachment trials of presidents featured witnesses â including 41 in the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. And the lack of witnesses is particularly striking given the shell game Trump and his Republican colleagues have played. In the House, Trump prevented executive branch employees from testifying, but said some of them would be able to testify in the Senate. Now that we are in the Senate, Republicans say these folks should have testified in the House. Lewis Carroll would be pleased.
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Involuntary Celibates are an âemerging domestic terrorism threatâ: Texas warns of an âIncel Rebellionâ
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