Donald Trump in The Atlantic
On Foreign Policy:
U.S. has become dumping ground for everybody else's problems
While the Trump and Sanders campaigns both represent insurgencies against party elites, they represent insurgencies aimed at taking America in radically different directions. One way of understanding those different directions is through American
exceptionalism. Sanders voters want to make America more like the rest of the world. Trump voters want to keep America a nation apart.American exceptionalism today generally denotes Americans' peculiar faith in God, flag, and free market--the
Sanders campaign represents an assault on all three [while Trump supports all three].
Trump's entire campaign is built around the idea that foreign influences are infecting the United States. "The U.S.," he declared upon announcing his presidential
campaign, "has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems."
Trump's supporters like the fact that he's rich, blunt, and hasn't spent his life in politics. But his pledges to keep the rest of the world at bay are core to his appeal.
Source: The Atlantic magazine, "War Over American Exceptionalism"
Feb 11, 2016
On Principles & Values:
OpEd: criminal act to try to get A.G. to unrecuse
The president committed crimes. Mueller does not accuse the president of crimes. He doesn't have to. But the facts he recounts describe criminal behavior. They describe criminal behavior even if we allow the president's--and the attorney general's--
argument that facially valid exercises of presidential authority cannot be obstructions of justice. They do this because they describe obstructive activity that does not involve facially valid exercises of presidential power at all.
Consider only two examples. The first is the particularly ugly section concerning Trump's efforts to get then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to "unrecuse." Another example: Mueller reports that after the news broke that Trump had sought to get
then-White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire the special counsel, Trump sought to get McGahn to deny the story. He also sought to get him to create an internal record denying the story. McGahn refused.
Source: The Atlantic magazine on Mueller Report
Apr 29, 2019
On Principles & Values:
OpEd: impeachable act to fire FBI's Comey
[Besides criminal obstruction described in the Mueller Report], the president also committed impeachable offenses. Crimes and impeachable offenses are not the same thing. Some of the most obviously impeachable offenses are the most unacceptable abuses
of power [regarding] the firing of former FBI Director James Comey. While this fact pattern is complicated for criminal purposes, as a matter of impeachment, it's very simple indeed. The president of the United States isolated Comey in order to ask that
he drop a sensitive FBI investigation in which Trump had a personal interest. The president then leaned on Comey to make public statements about his own status in the investigation. And when he couldn't get Comey to do so, he recruited the deputy
attorney general to create a pretext for Comey's removal.While there may be viable technical defenses against a criminal charge here, there simply is no plausible way to understand this fact pattern as a good-faith exercise of presidential power.
Source: The Atlantic magazine on Mueller Report
Apr 29, 2019
On Principles & Values:
OpEd: impeachable act to investigate Hillary Clinton
[One of the most obviously impeachable offenses was] the effort to get A.G. Jeff Sessions to investigate Hillary Clinton. Mueller does not disentangle this effort from the attempt to get Sessions to reassert control of the Russia investigation.
Let's do so here: Even as he was trying to get Sessions to protect him from the FBI, Trump was also trying to induce Sessions to investigate his political opponents.This is not obstruction of justice in any criminal sense.
It's rather the opposite of obstruction of justice; it's the initiation of injustice. So I don't think it's plausibly sound in terms of criminal law. But it is molten-core impeachment territory. Consider: The president of the
United States was trying to induce the attorney general of the United States to initiate a criminal investigation based on no known criminal predicate against a private citizen whom he happened to dislike.
Source: The Atlantic magazine on Mueller Report
Apr 29, 2019
On Principles & Values:
OpEd: Trump's crew tried to collude, like Keystone Kollusion
Trump was not complicit in the Russian social-media conspiracy. Separating the wheat from the chaff is important, so let's do so. While Trump has a great deal to answer for, Mueller unambiguously clears him--clears in the true sense of the word--of
involvement in Russian efforts to interfere in the U.S. election by means of the Internet Research Agency's social-media campaign.Here's the key point: If there wasn't collusion on the hacking, it sure wasn't for lack of trying.
Indeed, the Mueller report makes clear that Trump personally ordered an attempt to obtain Hillary Clinton's emails; and people associated with the campaign pursued this believing they were dealing with Russian hackers. And Donald Trump Jr. was
directly in touch with WikiLeaks--from whom he obtained a password to a hacked database. None of these incidents amount to crimes. But the picture it all paints of the president's conduct is anything but exonerating. Call it Keystone Kollusion.
Source: The Atlantic magazine on Mueller Report
Apr 29, 2019
Page last updated: Jul 21, 2024