1. Garrett M. Graff: Mueller Makes It Clear: Trump Was Worse Than A 'Useful Idiot'

Mueller paints a detailed, consistent, and compelling portrait, compiled and amassed through both comprehensive documentary evidence and sworn testimony, of a man so immoral that while campaigning to be commander-in-chief he “expected” to benefit from an attack by America’s leading traditional adversary, even asking publicly for more help from Russia; a man who promised to “Make America Great Again” but who was so unpatriotic that his campaign fielded numerous inquiries and offers of help from Russia without ever once contacting law enforcement or US intelligence; a man who swore to uphold the Constitution at his inauguration, but was so insecure that despite evidently not even doing anything wrong, his first instinct was to obstruct the justice process repeatedly; a man so narcissistic that he swore to defend the nation from all enemies foreign and domestic, yet his first instinct was not anger at the authoritarian who attacked our democratic process but instead to magnify that attack by lambasting and undermining the professional, career intelligence and law enforcement officials who protect our country; a man so greedy that he lied repeatedly and openly to the American people about how he hoped Vladimir Putin would deliver hundreds of millions of dollars to his personal family business; and a manager so clueless and disrespected that his own senior campaign staff were carrying not one, not two, but three separate, unrelated criminal conspiracies even as they have purported to work on his behalf. 

The Mueller report outlines a portrait of a man completely unsuitable as the protector of the Constitution and arbiter of national security, a leader wholly unable to separate the good of our country from his own business interests, so lacking a moral compass that he would be unfit to lead a publicly traded company or possess a low-level government security clearance.

The bottom line of the Mueller Report is that if Donald Trump wasn’t guilty of conspiracy, he was simply conned by everyone around him. To a man as egotistical as Trump, the reality that everyone was in on the con but him might hurt more than Mueller’s handcuffs. https://www.wired.com/story/mueller-report-donald-trump-useful-idiot/

2. Abigail Tracy: The “Red Line” Investigations That Will Haunt Trump’s Presidency

For Donald Trump, perhaps the most chilling moment in the Mueller report occurs on page 446, where the special counsel reveals that he has referred a total of 14 potential cases to other prosecutors. Because while Robert Mueller was given a limited mandate to investigate the Trump-Russia affair, special counsel investigations have a habit of unearthing other, unrelated criminality in the process. Perhaps that is why, when Trump first learned that Mueller had been appointed, according to the report, he slumped back in his chair and exclaimed, “I’m fucked.”

What flashed through Trump’s mind in that moment—his sprawling business empire, his byzantine taxes, his hush-money payments to a porn star—is unknown. Indeed, 12 of the 14 referrals that Mueller outsourced were redacted and remain shrouded in secrecy. (The two public referred cases involve Michael Cohen, the president’s former fixer, and a false-statement case against Democratic attorney and lobbyist Gregory Craig.)

But, with investigations churning in Congress, in New York, and in Washington, D.C., it is clear that Trump’s nightmare is just beginning. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/donald-trump-mueller-report-referral-investigations

3. Susan Hennessey, Quinta Jurecic: The Mueller Report Demands an Impeachment Inquiry

Here is, as Bill Barr might call it, “the bottom line”: The Mueller Report describes, in excruciating detail and with relatively few redactions, a candidate and a campaign aware of the existence of a plot by a hostile foreign government to criminally interfere in the U.S. election for the purpose of supporting that candidate’s side. It describes a candidate and a campaign who welcomed the efforts and delighted in the assistance. It describes a candidate and a campaign who brazenly and serially lied to the American people about the existence of the foreign conspiracy and their contacts with it. And yet, it does not find evidence to support a charge of criminal conspiracy, which requires not just a shared purpose but a meeting of the minds.

Here is the other bottom line: The Mueller Report describes a president who, on numerous occasions, engaged in conduct calculated to hinder a federal investigation. It finds ample evidence that at least a portion of that conduct met all of the statutory elements of criminal obstruction of justice. In some of the instances in which all of the statutory elements of obstruction are met, the report finds no persuasive constitutional or factual defenses. And yet, it declines to render a judgment on whether the president has committed a crime.

Now, the House must decide what to do with these facts. If it wants to actually confront the substance of the report, it will introduce a resolution to begin an impeachment inquiry. https://www.lawfareblog.com/mueller-report-demands-impeachment-inquiry

4. Jonathan Chait: Trump Beat the Rap, but Mueller Uncovered a Historic Scandal

It is famously difficult to prosecute the leaders of tight-knit criminal syndicates, which is why known mob bosses can walk the streets as celebrities for years or decades. This is the case even though there are specific laws designed to target the Mafia. Now imagine a mob boss who commands the loyalty of a national party and can hand out get-out-of-jail-free cards to his underlings when they get pinched, and you’re beginning to see the difficulty of establishing the kinds of criminal-conspiracy charges Mueller was after.

Trump’s defenders have muddled the distinction between the standard of proof required to convict a defendant in court — the standard Mueller was operating under — and the standard of proof in the court of public opinion. When you’re charged with a murder, you might beat the rap if the key witnesses recant or mysteriously die right before the trial. You would then be legally entitled to walk free, but your fellow citizens are not required to accept your boasts of exoneration. And they are certainly not required to disavow news reports that described you as a murderer.

Trump beat the rap. But Mueller’s report shows in excruciating detail the moral culpability that oozed out of the candidate and covered everybody beneath him. Pending the outcome of a couple of outstanding trials, the Russia investigation is no longer a question of law. It is a question of corruption, of ethics, of politics. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/mueller-report-russia-scandal-trump-putin-collusion-obstruction.html

5.  Eric Levitz: Mueller Report Confirms Trump Runs the White House Like It’s the Mafia

Donald Trump is running the American government like a business – or, if we’re being precise, like a criminal enterprise.

The president’s penchant for asking himself, “What would Roy Cohn advise John Gotti to do?” has been clear for some time. Last August, Trump said of the possibility that Michael Cohen would cooperate with Robert Mueller’s investigation, “I know all about flipping. It should almost be illegal.” Around that same time, the president insisted that his White House counsel, Don McGahn, was not a “a John Dean type ‘RAT’” — a reference to President Nixon’s lawyer, who testified (truthfully) about his boss’s attempts to obstruct justice. And Trump has repeatedly argued that the U.S. attorney general’s primary responsibility is to demonstrate unflinching loyalty to the president, as though the federal government was the Mafia and Trump its godfather.

Thus, Robert Mueller’s investigation was never going to reveal that the leader of the free world thinks like a mobster, as that was something we already knew. Nevertheless, the special counsel’s report does confirm that fact by detailing three previously unreported instances in which the president’s behavior was indistinguishable from that of a mafioso. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/mueller-report-excerpts-confirm-trump-runs-white-house-like-the-mob.html

6. Bess Levin: Mueller Confirms: Don Jr. Was Too Stupid To Collude

For the entirety of the special counsel’s investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, and obstruction of justice by the president, one question consistently on people’s minds was: will Donald Trump Jr. go down for this? It was Donald Trump’s namesake, after all, who received an e-mail from British publicist Rob Goldstone on behalf of Russian pop star Emin Agalarov promising dirt on Hillary Clinton—to which he responded “If it’s what you say . . . I love it, especially later in the summer”—and, after follow-up calls with Agalarov, set up the infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, attended by Jr., Jared Kushner, campaign manager Paul Manafort, an employee of Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, former Russian counter-intelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin, and a translator. He also apparently made a big show of telling everyone the Russians were coming, announcing in the regular morning meeting of senior campaign staff and Trump family members that he had “a lead on negative information about the Clinton Foundation” that he was taking a meeting to investigate, according to testimony from Manafort deputy Rick Gates, which makes an appearance on page 115 of the newly released Mueller report.

Obviously, all this only added to the question of Donny’s legal liability. In fact, as the redacted report states, the special counsel’s office “considered whether to charge Trump Campaign officials with crimes in connection with the June 9 meeting.” But luckily for the president’s eldest son, he ended up getting off scot-free—not because he hadn’t done anything sketchy, but because Robert Mueller concluded he was too stupid to know what he was doing. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/mueller-report-confirms-don-jr-too-stupid-to-collude-with-russia

7. Tom Nichols: Mueller report: Donald Trump failed us as commander-in-chief

The President of the United States, like all elected officials and public servants, swears to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies. But there is one responsibility the president must bear alone, and that is the obligation to act as the commander in chief, the guardian of our national security and the defender of our nation from malevolent foreign powers. The Mueller report makes clear that Donald Trump has failed miserably in this sacred obligation, and instead has traded his constitutional duty for his own safety.

Mueller’s conclusions lay to rest some — but not all — of the legal issues surrounding the Russian attempts to subvert our democratic processes. As the report notes, Mueller’s team could not find a specific agreement between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to cooperate in an operation against American institutions.

For this, we should be grateful, but that’s about as far as the good news goes.

As a team of writers at Lawfare put it, Trump’s people “were aware the Russians sought to help them win. They welcomed that assistance. Instead of warning the American public, they instead devised a public relations and campaign strategy that sought to capitalize on Russia’s illicit assistance. In other words, the Russians and the Trump campaign shared a common goal, and each side worked to achieve that goal with basic knowledge of the other side’s intention. They just didn’t agree to work toward that goal together.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/04/19/mueller-report-trump-commander-in-chief-russia-oath-column/3506216002/

8. Julia Davis: Russia’s Mueller Report: If Putin Did It, He Did It for You

Russian state-TV viewers on Thursday were delivered a different conclusion from Robert Mueller’s report: Putin always wins. And now everyday Russians are going to win, too.

In the rest of the world, the Justice Department’s redacted version of the special counsel’s report concluded Moscow interfered in the 2016 presidential election “in sweeping and systematic fashion.” He identified numerous links between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign, establishing that “the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”

On Friday, the Kremlin issued a scathing response, feigning disappointment with the investigation’s quality, questioning whether it was a waste of taxpayers’ money, and falsely claiming the report doesn’t contain “a single piece of evidence”of Russian intervention in 2016.

Willfully ignoring Mueller’s conclusions, Russian government officials appeared greatly encouraged by the lack of further indictments stemming from the investigation. Parroting President Trump’s narrative, state-media outlet RT on Thursday posted the link to Mueller’s report, prefaced by: “SPOILER ALERT: No ‘collusion’” “Collusion” has no legal definition and is not a federal crime—therefore, the Mueller report did not make a determination on “collusion.”

Unburdened by the facts, Russian state-TV hosts and experts were happy to repeat Trump’s mantra—“No collusion, no obstruction”—throughout the investigation. https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-state-tv-spins-mueller-report-if-putin-did-it-he-did-it-for-you

9. Andrew Sullivan: There Was No Russia Conspiracy. But Trump Is More Dangerous Than Ever.

We know that the president will put his personal ego above even an investigation of an assault by a foreign power against our democracy — a threat far graver than lying under oath about an affair or passively covering up a two-bit robbery (the cause of the last two impeachments). It is a declaration that this president will not stop that foreign meddling from happening again, and will be happy if it helps reelect him. This is, quite simply, intolerable. We have a president who is an instinctual criminal and liar, who threatens the integrity of our justice system and of our democratic elections, who is incapable of understanding the rule of law, backed by an attorney general who just outright distorted the findings of the special counsel.

What more do we need to know? To refuse to use the one weapon the Founders gave us to remove such a character from office is more than cowardice. It is complicity. It is a surrender to forces which aim to make the world safe for authoritarianism. It may not work. But if we acquiesce, pretend it isn’t happening, or look away, it cannot work. This disgusting man is not just a cancer in the presidency. His presidency is a cancer in our Constitution and way of life. How long do we let this metastasize even further? How long before we take a stand? Mueller has given us the road map. He has done his duty. Now it’s our turn to do ours: “to support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

There is no qualification in that oath of citizenship.

Impeach Trump now. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/andrew-sullivan-impeach-trump-now.html

10. Charles M. Blow: Demonizing Minority Women

Last month at an event hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, delivered a speech in which she correctly derided Islamophobia, a real and persistent problem in this country and others.

In that speech, Representative Omar invoked the attacks of Sept. 11, saying the council was created “because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”

Maybe we could judge her use of language as inartful, but we all succumb to that occasionally, me included. Error is inevitable among the loquacious. But the Omar of the speech stands. I saw nowhere in it a thread of terror apologia.

And yet, conservative media has pounced on four of Omar’s words — “some people did something” — as just that. Brian Kilmeade, one of the dull and delusional on “Fox & Friends,” questioned her patriotism, saying, “You have to wonder if she’s an American first.”

Donald Trump upped the ante, retweeting a video of Omar saying, “Some people did something,” interspersed with the still-chilling video of the 9/11 attacks. Some things should be too sacred to exploit for political gain, but Trump is an amoralist. Nothing is beyond the pale.

While the unrelenting attacks on Omar are newsworthy unto themselves as a conservative peculiarity, I believe that the attacks should be viewed through a wider and longer lens. Omar is only the most recent minority woman onto whom conservatives have trained their fire.

While white supremacy has historically tried to paint minority men as physically dangerous, it has routinely painted minority women, particularly those strong and vocal, as pathological and reprobate.

There is a pattern here. It is expressed not only in the attacks on, and in elevation of, Omar, but also on Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

Before them, Trump and his cohorts demonized Representative Maxine Waters, who Trump dubbed “Low I.Q.,” and Representative Frederica Wilson of Florida.

The strategy is simple: While sexism and racism are potent individually, they are devastating in combination, particularly when appealing to a party dominated by white men and which exalts white supremacy and white patriarchy.

The only women they truly honor are white women who obsequiously condone or actively participate in the oppression.

All manner of inhumanity and barbarism have been conducted under the guise of protecting the honor and purity of these white women. There are untold rope-burned necks and fully burned bodies in American history to attest to this.

There is a reason that Trump launching his campaign by calling Mexicans murderers and rapists had such resonance among the people who came to support him. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/opinion/ilhan-omar-minority-women.html

11. Tina Nguyen: Post-Mueller, Are The Conways Sleeping In Separate Rooms?

The Conway household, for better or for worse, has become a metaphor for a nation divided. Though everyone is literally reading the exact same report, people’s conclusions heavily depend on where they sit politically. Mainstream media and liberal analyses have focused heavily on the potential obstruction case laid out by Mueller, calling for further investigations, and generally consider the report, as Rachel Maddow put it, a “road map for how to charge this president with multiple felony counts of obstruction of justice.” Conservative media, meanwhile, are satisfied with Mueller’s finding that the Trump campaign never actively conspired with Russia, or at least that he could not prove anyone did. Any further investigations, the president’s allies contend, will just be more witch hunts on steroids, run by Democrats and egged on by journalists whose Russia-gate narrative has broken down. “This is a political document that he should never have written—a political document that’s 200 pages long that the press keeps focusing on,” commentator Mark Levin bellowed on Fox & Friends Friday morning, later adding: “I’m using plain English, so even Joe Scarborough and Jake Tapper can understand this. Volume II is crap. Volume II was written for slip-and-fall lawyer Nadler, slip-and-fall lawyer Schiff. That’s why he wrote it. He knew the media would run with it.”

Bifurcated as the media landscape is, it is tempting to see in the continued union of the Conways a sign that perhaps American, too, might survive this moment of political rancor. (If George Conway can brush off his wife’s boss calling him a “stone-cold loser”, “husband from hell”, and a “whack job”, and still go home to his family at night, then perhaps there is hope for the rest of us, too. And yet, there is no doubt the country’s political marriage is on the rocks as we enter a post-Mueller era that is, perhaps unsurprisingly, just as resistant to reconciliation as before. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/kellyanne-george-conways-reactions-mueller-report

12. Paul Waldman: No bottom: Republicans show they’ll defend just about anything Trump does

There’s a pattern that President Trump has followed many times when accused of wrongdoing. First, deny it. Then, when irrefutable proof emerges that you did it and your denials were lies, insist that there was nothing wrong with it in the first place. That’s how he handled the story of his hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, the fact that he was pursuing a deal to build a tower in Moscow while running for president (“There would have been nothing wrong if I did do it”), and his campaign’s attempt to get damaging information on Hillary Clinton from a Russian lawyer (“totally legal and done all the time in politics”).

We’re seeing it anew. On Sunday, Rudolph W.  went on television and insisted: “There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians." This was in a context where that “information” was the result of an organized attack allegedly by Russian intelligence agents that included hacking into Democratic email systems.

That’s right: The president’s lawyer just issued an invitation to any foreign adversary — Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, the Islamic State, anyone — that if they decide that one American presidential candidate would be more favorable to their interests, they should go ahead and hack, spy or use whatever other kind of means they want to employ to sway the election, and their efforts will be welcomed.

That alone is shocking and despicable. But it’s just one part of a larger Republican argument, one that says not that Trump did some unfortunate things but nothing that would justify prosecution or impeachment, but instead that he is completely blameless because there is no such thing as unethical conduct if committed by Trump.

As we grapple with the fallout from the Mueller report, this is not only the position Trump and his aides are taking. It’s the position of the entire Republican Party, not just for the specific misconduct detailed in the report but for the whole of the Trump presidency. The GOP has embraced utter and complete moral nihilism.

Republicans chose as their leader the single most loathsome figure in American public life, a man possessed of not a single human virtue. He would inevitably call them to descend to the moral void where he resides. And when they did — enthusiastically — they showed us not just who he is, but who they are as well.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/22/no-bottom-republicans-show-theyll-defend-just-about-everything-trump-does/

13.  Max Boot: My former party’s reaction to the Mueller report fills me with disgust

Having declared the Republican Party to be morally bankrupt last month — after 90 percent of GOP lawmakers voted to approve President Trump’s unconstitutional state of emergency — I am not remotely surprised by the party’s dishonorable and dishonest reaction to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report. But I am nevertheless dismayed and disgusted that a once-great party — to which I belonged for most of my life — could become a handmaiden to foreign attacks on the United States and blatant lawbreaking by the president.

The pattern was set by Attorney General William P. Barr, an establishment Republican who turned out to be a more unprincipled sycophant than his immediate predecessor, the erstwhile purveyor of toilets for “well-endowed” men. Barr released his own summary of the Mueller report, which was highly favorable to the president — and highly misleading. He then held a news conference to claim that Trump had been cleared on both obstruction of justice and collusion with Russia.

Anyone who has actually read the 448-page report knows that neither of those things is true. Mueller uncovered not only extensive connections between the Trump campaign and Russia but also extensive evidence of lying and obstruction of justice by the president. As former attorney general Eric Holder noted, “ANY competent public corruption prosecutor would bring obstruction charges against Trump and win.” Only the Justice Department position that a president can’t be indicted saved Trump — for now.
Yet the president’s cultists reacted as if the special counsel had anointed him as the second coming of “Honest Abe” Lincoln. “TRUMP CLEAN,” blared the front page of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. “No crimes committed. Dem hoax destroyed.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/22/my-former-partys-reaction-mueller-report-fills-me-with-disgust/

14.  Barbara McQuade: Mueller Exposed Trump’s Biggest Betrayal

The most important line in the Mueller report appears in the introduction to Volume I: “The Russian government interfered with the 2016 election in sweeping and systematic fashion.” Our president’s response has fallen woefully short. And now we know why.

As with all things, Donald Trump made the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller all about him. But it is about so much more: our national security and the future of our democracy. Trump’s failure to protect our country from future attacks is his biggest betrayal.

Mueller has published a detailed accounting of Russia’s attack on our presidential election. His report describes how Russia conducted a social-media disinformation campaign and weaponized email messages to sabotage the election. Mueller’s description of the Russia attack makes it clear that information warfare is the new battleground.

And yet Trump continues to minimize the threat to our national security. Concerned more about the legitimacy of his presidency than the integrity of future elections, Trump still downplays the Russian attack.

In other words, Trump was more concerned about appearing to have won a decisive victory in the election than about acknowledging and addressing an attack on our country by a foreign adversary.

Trump’s reaction to Russia interference will only embolden our adversary for future attacks. His self-absorption prevents him from fulfilling his duty that the laws be faithfully executed. Now that the Mueller investigation is over, and Trump’s motives have been exposed, staffers and Congress must play a stronger role in pushing Trump to the side and hardening our election system against attacks.http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/mueller-exposed-trumps-biggest-betrayal.html

15. Eugene Robinson: Democrats must seize and define this moment. Otherwise, Trump will.

The political case for moving deliberately but fearlessly toward impeachment is even clearer: If timorous Democrats do not seize and define this moment, Trump surely will.

What just happened is that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III delivered a searing indictment of a president who has no idea what “honor” and “integrity” even mean — a president who lies almost pathologically, who orders subordinates to lie, who has no respect for the rule of law, who welcomed Russian interference in the 2016 election, who clumsily tried to orchestrate a coverup , who tried his best to impede a lawful Justice Department investigation and failed only to the extent that aides ignored his outrageous and improper orders.

What Trump claims just happened is a “witch hunt.”

Anyone who thinks there is a chance that Trump will lick his wounds and move on has not been paying attention. Having escaped criminal charges — because he is a sitting president — Trump will go on the offensive. With the help of Attorney General William P. Barr, whose title really should be Minister of Spin, the president will push to investigate the investigators and sell the bogus counternarrative of an attempted “coup” by politically motivated elements of the “deep state.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/democrats-must-seize-and-define-this-moment-otherwise-trump-will/2019/04/22/0856c736-652b-11e9-8985-4cf30147bdca_story.html

 

16. Joe Lockhart: There’s a Bigger Prize Than Impeachment. Keeping Trump in office will destroy the Republican Party.

For Democrats, leaving Donald Trump in office until the 2020 election is not only good politics — it is the best chance for fundamental realignment of American politics in more than a generation. Mr. Trump is three years into destroying what we know as the Republican Party. Another two years just might finish it off. Trumpism has become Republicanism, and that spells electoral doom for the party.

Mr. Trump has abandoned most of the core principles that have defined Republicans for the past century. Free trade abandoned for protectionism. Challenging our adversaries and promoting democracy replaced by coddling Russia and cozying up to dictators near and far. Fiscal conservatism replaced by reckless spending and exploding deficits.

What’s left of the party is a rigid adherence to tax cuts, a social agenda that repels most younger Americans and rampant xenophobia and race-based politics that regularly interfere with the basic functioning of the federal government. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/opinion/theres-a-bigger-prize-than-impeachment.html

17. Barbara McQuade: Mueller Exposed Trump’s Biggest Betrayal

The Mueller report offers insights into Trump’s thinking: “Several advisors recalled that the President-Elect viewed stories about his Russian connections, the Russia investigations, and the intelligence community assessment of Russian interference as a threat to the legitimacy of his electoral victory.” Former communications director Hope Hicks said that Trump “viewed the intelligence community assessment as his ‘Achilles heel’ because, even if Russia had no impact on the election, people would think Russia helped him win, taking away from what he had accomplished.” Her predecessor, Sean Spicer, “recalled that the President thought the Russia story was developed to undermine the legitimacy of his election.” Former deputy campaign chairman Richard Gates “said the President viewed the Russia investigation as an attack on the legitimacy of his win.” White House chief of staff Reince Priebus “recalled that when the intelligence assessment came out, the President-Elect was concerned people would question the legitimacy of his win.”

In other words, Trump was more concerned about appearing to have won a decisive victory in the election than about acknowledging and addressing an attack on our country by a foreign adversary. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/mueller-exposed-trumps-biggest-betrayal.html

18. Paul Krugman: The Great Republican Abdication

So all the “fake news” was true. A hostile foreign power intervened in the presidential election, hoping to install Donald Trump in the White House. The Trump campaign was aware of this intervention and welcomed it. And once in power, Trump tried to block any inquiry into what happened.

Never mind attempts to spin this story as somehow not meeting some definitions of collusion or obstruction of justice. The fact is that the occupant of the White House betrayed his country. And the question everyone is asking is, what will Democrats do about it?

But notice that the question is only about Democrats. Everyone (correctly) takes it as a given that Republicans will do nothing. Why?

Because the modern G.O.P. is perfectly willing to sell out America if that’s what it takes to get tax cuts for the wealthy. Republicans may not think of it in those terms, but that’s what their behavior amounts to.

The truth is that the G.O.P. faced its decisive test in 2016, when almost everyone in the Republican establishment lined up behind a man fully known to be a would-be authoritarian who was unfit morally, temperamentally and intellectually for high office. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/opinion/trump-republican-party.html

19. Eric Levitz: The Biggest Threat to American Democracy in 2020 Will Be Trump, Not Russia

Our president has publicly disputed the integrity of the 2016 and 2018 elections, accusing the Democratic Party of manufacturing millions of fraudulent votes for itself in both those contests. Last fall, he specifically accused his political opponents of trying to orchestrate an “invasion” of the United States by Central American migrants, in a bid to steal the midterm elections with illegal votes.

In other words: A man who boasts the imprimatur of the presidency, and commands the loyalty of 40 percent of the electorate, is routinely telling his followers that they cannot trust the veracity of American election results, because his political opponents are treasonous cheaters who are trying to rob Americans of national sovereignty through undemocratic means.

And we’re supposed to be terrified at the specter of anonymous Russian trolls working “to divide Americans using social media?”

Much of the Times report reads like a savage parody of the American tendency to project its internal tensions outward; to insist that all would be well in this shining city on a hill, were it not for those outside agitators. But anyone with a clear set of eyes and a working memory knows that the most pressing threat to our democracy is coming from inside the White House. Our political Establishment’s refusal to acknowledge this fact is more dangerous than the president’s failure to acknowledge the threat posed by Russian interference — not least because, were it not for the former, Donald Trump would no longer be president. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/trump-russia-interference-2020-election-security.html

20. Max Boot: The GOP doesn’t have to impeach Trump. But it also doesn’t have to nominate him.

I get that Republicans are too cowardly to impeach President Trump — or even criticize him. But are they really proud to have him represent their party in 2020? And, if not, why don’t they nominate someone else who is not an ethical and intellectual abomination?

Those questions were salient before special counsel Robert S. Mueller III submitted his report. They are even more urgent now, because, contrary to the propagandistic White House narrative, Mueller did not “clear” Trump. He found unseemly contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia, and he found that Trump attempted to obstruct justice.

But leave aside the important question of whether the president broke the law. (Spoiler alert: he did.) The republic must have a higher standard for its president — and the Republican Party for its nominee — than merely whether it can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he has committed any felonies. As now-Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said in 1999 when he was a member of the House, “You don’t even have to be convicted of a crime to lose your job in this constitutional republic.”

Obvious illegality aside, the Mueller report makes a strong case for why Trump should lose his job. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gop-doesnt-have-to-impeach-trump-but-it-also-doesnt-have-to-nominate-him/2019/04/24/902c267a-65fc-11e9-8985-4cf30147bdca_story.html