1. Jonathan Bernstein: Does Trump Realize the Trouble He’s In?

Wednesday, the 1,000th day of Donald Trump’s presidency, went badly. That’s no surprise; most of the first 999 days went badly too. I have no idea if he’s going to wind up getting ousted from office, either as a result of the impeachment House Democrats are readying or the 2020 election. But things are getting worse for Trump — whether he realizes it or not.

Every once in a while, some event offers a clarifying reminder of the president’s poor judgment. On Wednesday, it was the release of a letter Trump wrote to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The letter itself was an embarrassment, in which Trump, soon after telling Erdogan on the phone that U.S. forces would move out of his way to enable Turkey’s invasion of Syria, tried to walk things back. Sort of. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman put it at the Monkey Cage, the president opted for “threatening rhetoric reminiscent of a Mafia boss” to “make loud threats that he may not be able to deliver on.” As soon as the letter was published, professional diplomats and historians said they had never seen something so amateurish from a U.S. president.

But what really underlined Trump’s problem for me wasn’t that he wrote an incompetent letter to follow up on what seems to have been an incompetent phone call. Or that his Syria policy, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Eli Lake notes, has resulted in chaos and death. Or that, on a crass political level, he’s managed to alienate his congressional allies just as he needs them most, with House Republicans voting overwhelmingly on Wednesday to condemn his decision. 

 Every president has policy fiascoes at some point. Every president slumps in the polls. Every president makes hiring decisions that go wrong. But normal presidents, most of the time, recognize their errors — even if they don’t admit them publicly — and work hard to improve things. Trump, to be blunt, doesn’t. It’s destroying his presidency, and damaging the nation. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-17/erdogan-letter-does-donald-trump-realize-the-trouble-he-s-in

2. Dana Milbank: The day that irony died

It is my sad duty to report that, after a long and painful illness, irony is dead.

Irony was already on life support last week when Trump brothers Don Jr. and Eric, who owe everything they have to family money and favoritism, spoke out against nepotism — in the Biden family.

Surrounded by loving admirers, irony finally succumbed at 6:22 p.m. Monday, when Republicans attempted to force a vote in the House censuring Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), and claiming the leader of the impeachment inquiry “misled the American people.”

So, after defending President Trump through 13,435 false or misleading statements as of last week (by The Post Fact Checker’s tally), Republicans are now thoroughly outraged because they think somebody misrepresented something Trump said.

And so Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), with the blessing of GOP leadership, the co-sponsorship of 172 Republicans and a sum total of zero self-awareness, read aloud on the House floor Monday evening a censure resolution saying Schiff “manufactured a false retelling of the conversation” between Trump and the Ukrainian president — an example of “conduct that misleads the American people in a way that is not befitting an elected member of the House.” (Schiff said at the time it was a “parody” and was “in not so many words” what Trump actually said.) https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/21/republicans-have-killed-irony/

3. William D. Cohan: "There Is Definite Hanky-Panky Going On”: The Fantastically Profitable Mystery Of The Trump Chaos Trades

Traders in the Chicago pits have been watching these kinds of wagers with an increasing mixture of shock and awe since the start of the Trump presidency. They are used to rapid fluctuations in the S&P 500 index; volatility is common, of course. But the precision and timing of these trades, and the vast amount of money being made as a result of them, make the traders wonder if all this is on the level.”

Are the people behind these trades incredibly lucky, or do they have access to information that other people don’t have about, say, Trump’s or Beijing’s latest thinking on the trade war or any other of a number of ways that Trump is able to move the markets through his tweeting or slips of the tongue? Essentially, do they have inside information?

There is no way for another trader, let alone an outsider such as me, to know who is making these trades. But regulators know or can find out. One longtime CME trader who has been watching with disgust says he’s never seen anything quite like these trades, not at least since al-Qaida cashed in before initiating the September 11 attacks. “There is definite hanky-panky going on, to the world’s financial markets’ detriment,” he says. “This is abysmal.”

Federal regulators might start here: In the last 10 minutes of trading on Friday, August 23, as the markets were roiling in the face of more bad trade news, someone bought 386,000 September e-minis. Three days later, Trump lied about getting a call from China to restart the trade talks, and the S&P 500 index shot up nearly 80 points. The potential profit on the trade was more than $1.5 billion. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10/the-mystery-of-the-trump-chaos-trades

4. Adam K. Raymond: World’s Least Self Aware Person, Donald Trump Jr., Attacks Bidens for Nepotism

President Trump’s two sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, who were born into wealth and work at a company their grandfather founded, have spent the last few weeks contending for the title of World’s Least Self-Aware Person.

First, one of them goes on TV or Twitter and attacks Hunter Biden for trading on his father’s name, brushing aside their own histories of doing the same. Then the other one goes on TV or Twitter and wags their finger at Joe Biden allowing his son to profit off his name, never mentioning that their sister and brother-in-law are senior White House officials whose companies are raking in cash as they help craft U.S. policy. With each appearance, the irony and sanctimony are ratcheted up.

The brotherly competition reached its apex Wednesday night when Don Jr., who became an executive vice-president at his father’s company at the age of 23, appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and said this: “When you’re the father and your son’s entire career is dependent on that, they own you.”

Don Jr. won. He is the World’s Least Self-Aware Person — a man who shares his name with the president and routinely profits off his father’s position in the White House is criticizing someone else for being “dependent” on his father. Where would Donald Trump Jr. be if his name was not Donald Trump Jr.? Probably not on TV. Not giving $50,000 speeches. And certainly not anywhere close to the White House. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/donald-trump-jr-attacks-hunter-and-joe-biden-for-nepotism.html

5. Tony Schwartz: Why Trump can’t change, no matter what the consequences are

In April 2016, on the verge of securing the Republican nomination for president, Donald Trump announced that his “campaign is evolving and transitioning, and so am I.” At a rally around the same time, he told supporters that “at some point, I’m going to be so presidential that you people will be so bored,” but “I just don’t know that I wanted to do it quite yet.” 

When Trump was elected, some critics held out hope that he would grow in office, as other presidents have. No one believes that’s possible anymore. After Mick Mulvaney took over as Trump’s third chief of staff last December, he let it be known that his approach would be to “let Trump be Trump.” Mulvaney was simply succumbing to reality. As Trump himself has said, he is essentially the same person today that he was at age 7. He has his story, and he’s sticking to it.

Growth and development are about seeing more. The wider, deeper and longer our perspective, the more variables we can consider — and the more capable we become. Likewise, the more responsibility we take for our behaviors, and the less we blame others for our shortcomings, the more power we have to influence our destiny. 

None of this is possible for Trump. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/why-trump-cant-change-no-matter-what-the-consequences-are/2019/10/18/cf502cf6-f117-11e9-89eb-ec56cd414732_story.html

7. Josh Kraushaar: Red Flags All Over for Senate Republicans

Buried in the Washington drama of impeachment, corruption, and foreign policy chaos this past week was a ground-shaking bit of news: New polling and fundraising figures show that Mitch McConnell’s hold on the Senate majority is looking awfully precarious. Indeed, the pathway for a narrow Democratic takeover of the upper chamber is looking clearer than ever.

Here’s the big picture: If Trump doesn’t win a second term, Democrats need to net only three seats to win back the majority. Assuming they can’t hang onto Sen. Doug Jones’ seat in ruby-red Alabama (but hold Sen. Gary Peters’ seat in traditionally blue Michigan), the magic number is four. And when you add Sen. Cory Gardner’s tough race in Colorado to the toss-up list, they’ve got five promising opportunities to defeat Republican senators.

In a normal political environment, Republicans would have good reason to be confident they could win some of these hotly contested races. But given the trajectory of Trump’s presidency and the trend lines in the battlegrounds, Republicans don’t have much room for error. Right now, control of the Senate past 2020 looks awfully close to a toss-up with over a year until the election. https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/682314

8. Robin Wright: Turkey, Syria, the Kurds, and Trump’s Abandonment of Foreign Policy

Much of the world watched aghast, last week, as President Donald Trump shattered any notion of an informed or sane U.S. foreign policy. He paved the way for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, of Turkey, to invade Syria, abandoning America’s Kurdish partners in the Syrian Democratic Forces, who had eliminated the Islamic State’s caliphate in March, after five years of gruelling warfare. (The S.D.F. lost eleven thousand soldiers; the U.S. lost six.) Erdoğan views Kurds—the world’s largest ethnic group without a state—as terrorists, because of a Kurdish separatist campaign in Turkey. After a phone call with Erdoğan, Trump ordered the withdrawal of a thousand U.S. Special Forces soldiers, who had been backing the S.D.F., even though isis sleeper cells are still waging an insurgency in Syria and Iraq. The retreat was so abrupt that the U.S. had to bomb a depot full of arms that it didn’t have time to remove.

Trump’s ignorance of the world has never been so blatant—or produced such bipartisan opposition. The House of Representatives voted 354–60 to condemn the pullout. On the Senate floor, Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, rebuked the President for leaving “a bloodstain on the annals of American history.” Yet Trump seemed delighted with his decision to let the Turks and the Kurds—both U.S. allies—fight it out. “It was unconventional, what I did,” he told the crowd at a campaign rally in Dallas, on Thursday. “Sometimes you have to let them fight like two kids. Then you pull them apart.”

Trump and Erdoğan share a crude egotism and a paranoia about deep states trying to undo them, but Erdoğan deftly gamed Trump. On October 9th, Trump sent a remarkably puerile letter to the Turkish leader, warning him not to go too far. History, he wrote, “will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen.” He added, “Don’t be a fool!” Erdoğan reportedly tossed the letter into the trash. The same day, he launched Operation Peace Spring, to destroy the S.D.F. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/28/turkey-syria-the-kurds-and-trumps-abandonment-of-foreign-policy

9. Jonathan Chait: Why Congress Might Impeach Trump and Actually Remove Him From Office

To be sure, throwing out Trump entails a lot of risk. To date, Republicans have taken the safer course of sticking with him despite all his counterproductively repellent behavior. To outsiders, their alliance with Trump appears immutable. But on the inside, the picture may be more fluid. The Republican Establishment took great comfort in the presence of John Kelly, James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and other staid figures who quietly assured official Washington they could restrain the president’s destructive impulses. Their departure has given Trump a freer hand to seize the powers of his office and act out in ways that evade any means of control.

The Syria debacle is genuinely alarming to the party, because it
shows Trump unleashing a strategic catastrophe, leading to thousands of escaped terrorists, through a simple phone call the implications of which he seems not to have understood. The up-front costs of ripping off the Band-Aid and removing Trump might seem less risky than allowing another year of a completely unconstrained toddler president.

In Casino, the bosses accepted a lot of erratic and risky behavior from Nicky Santoro because he was ultimately a useful ally. They didn’t care that he was a violent criminal — they were violent criminals, too. But they eventually decided that his flamboyant and uncontrollable behavior put their whole racket at risk. And when their calculation of his value tipped from acceptable risk to unacceptable risk, the end came swiftly and unexpectedly. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/congress-impeach-trump-actually-remove-him.html

10. Peter Nicholas: The Unraveling of Donald Trump

The country is entering a new and precarious phase, in which the central question about President Donald Trump is not whether he is coming unstrung, but rather just how unstrung he is going to get.

The boiling mind of Trump has spawned a cottage industry for cognitive experts who have questioned whether he is, well, all there. But as the impeachment inquiry barrels ahead on Capitol Hill, several associates of the president, including former White House aides, worry that his behavior is likely to get worse. Angered by the proceedings, unencumbered by aides willing to question his judgment, and more and more isolated in the West Wing, Trump is apt to lash out more at enemies imagined and real, these people told me. Conduct that has long been unsettling figures to deteriorate as Trump comes under mounting stress. What unfolded Wednesday inside the West Wing’s walls might be only a foretaste of what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described that day, after a meeting with Trump, as a presidential “meltdown.”

“He’s grown more comfortable in the job and less willing to assimilate new information and trust new advisers,” a former White House official told me. “He’s decided to throw caution to the wind and go it alone, especially when he’s stressed and feels under attack and threatened in various ways. Then his worst impulses and vices shine through.” https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/10/trump-impeachment-mental-health/600292/

11. Stephen Collinson: The guardrails are off the Trump presidency

That apt mission doctrine for a presidency blazing with abuses of power, conflicts of interest and unhinged behavior is the work of White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, whose barn burner of a briefing on a day of political train wrecks, staggering misdirection and reality bending sent a clear message.”

“Democrats can impeach President Donald Trump, Republicans can bemoan his betrayal of the Kurds and the media can fact-check him till the cows come home — but nothing is going to restrain or moderate him. In fact, he’s becoming ever more incorrigible.”

The President’s brazen willingness to do exactly what he wants — key to his appeal to voters angry with the political establishment in 2016 — shone through a wild few hours that briefly stole the spotlight from the Democratic impeachment inquiry.” https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/10/trump-impeachment-mental-health/600292/

12. John Bowden: Ex-special ops commander: 'Our republic is under attack from the president'

Retired Adm. William McRaven argued in an op-ed Thursday that President Trump is "destroying" the United States, warning that the future of the country is "in peril" if Trump is not removed from office.

McRaven, former commander of U.S. Special Operations, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times, "Our Republic Is Under Attack From the President." In it, he argues that Trump is launching "assaults" on various U.S. institutions: "on the intelligence and law enforcement community, the State Department and the press."

"They have seen our leaders stand beside despots and strongmen, preferring their government narrative to our own. They have seen us abandon our allies and have heard the shouts of betrayal from the battlefield," McRaven said of veterans who attended an Office of

"If our promises are meaningless, how will our allies ever trust us? If we can’t have faith in our nation’s principles, why would the men and women of this nation join the military? And if they don’t join, who will protect us?" he wrote. https://thehill.com/policy/defense/466369-former-special-ops-commander-our-republic-is-under-attack-from-the-president

13. Jonathan Chait: Trump Writes Unhinged ‘Legal’ Letter Demanding That CNN Pay Him Money

This week, right-wing hoaxster James O’Keefe launched the latest of his series of secretly recorded videos, which purport to prove various conservative conspiracy theories but fail. The new version involves a CNN contractor recording employees grumbling about various complaints about the network, none of which establish the plot O’Keefe set out to prove, and some of which suggest the opposite (an employee complains that CNN covers Trump rallies but not Biden ones, which are too boring).

Even some of the conservative movement’s dimmest stars came away unimpressed. The project nonetheless seems to have left an impression on Donald Trump, a devoted follower and purveyor of nearly all the right’s conspiracy theories, a fanatical devotee of cable news, and, incidentally, the president of the United States. Trump has directed his lawyer to threaten a lawsuit against CNN on the basis of O’Keefe’s flimsy video.

The letter claims that O’Keefe has personally disproven CNN’s claim to be a news network dedicated to reporting facts. “In the Footage, your employees appear to state that CNN attempts to make its reporting appear neutral and unbiased, when in fact its reporting is far from neutral and highly biased against the President.” The letter then moves on to its true complaint, stating (without any evidence whatsoever), “Never in the history of this country has a President been the subject of such a sustained barrage of unfair, unfounded, unethical and unlawful attacks by so-called ‘mainstream’ news, as the current situation.”

Continuing from this extremely shaky factual foundation, Trump’s letter proceeds to a ludicrous legal argument: CNN has violated the Lanham Act, which controls truth in advertising. Therefore, by claiming to be a real news network while subjecting Trump to hours of critical coverage, it has misrepresented itself. For some reason Trump claims he is personally entitled to financial compensation from CNN as a result. Trump plans to “seek compensatory damages, treble damages, punitive damages, injunctive relief, reimbursement of legal costs, and all other available legal and equitable remedies.”

Trump’s business career shows a long history of threatening absurd lawsuits for the purpose of intimidation. At times he has succeeded in bullying his targets into backing down. Usually, he fails to follow through on his threats. Even if Trump does follow through and file a lawsuit, it would be laughed out of any court — even one stocked entirely with Trump appointees.

However, Trump’s impulse here should not be merely dismissed as another ineffectual tantrum from the toddler president. The effort to intimidate news organizations he cannot control directly is a persistent theme of his presidency. Trump has used his powers as president to punish independent media when the opportunity has presented itself. And as the cordon of professionals working to restrain him has disintegrated, the space between Trump’s impulses and his official acts has collapsed. Just last week, the president formally endorsed, via a quasi-legal letter, his even more absurd position that Congress cannot legally impeach him.
Trump’s authoritarian impulses frequently appear cartoonish because they are executed so clumsily, and based not in any fascist theory of government but in his literal failure to grasp separation of powers, popular sovereignty, and the rule of law as concepts. But to be an authoritarian clown is still to be an authoritarian. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/trump-letter-cnn-project-veritas-first-amendment.html

14. Ron Chernow: Hamilton pushed for impeachment powers. Trump is what he had in mind.

Trump has described the impeachment proceedings as a “coup,” and his White House counsel has termed them “unconstitutional.” This would come as a surprise to Alexander Hamilton, who wrote not only the 11 essays in “The Federalist” outlining and defending the powers of the presidency, but also the two essays devoted to impeachment.

There seems little doubt, given his writings on the presidency, that Hamilton would have been aghast at Trump’s behavior and appalled by his invitation to foreign actors to meddle in our elections. As a result, he would most certainly have endorsed the current impeachment inquiry. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Trump embodies Hamilton’s worst fears about the kind of person who might someday head the government.

Among our founders, Hamilton’s views count heavily because he was the foremost proponent of a robust presidency, yet he also harbored an abiding fear that a brazen demagogue could seize the office. That worry helps to explain why he analyzed impeachment in such detail: He viewed it as a crucial instrument to curb possible abuses arising from the enlarged powers he otherwise championed. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/10/18/hamilton-pushed-impeachment-powers-trump-is-what-he-had-mind/

15. Robin Wright: Turkey, Syria, the Kurds, and Trump’s Abandonment of Foreign Policy

Much of the world watched aghast, last week, as President Donald Trump shattered any notion of an informed or sane U.S. foreign policy. He paved the way for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, of Turkey, to invade Syria, abandoning America’s Kurdish partners in the Syrian Democratic Forces, who had eliminated the Islamic State’s caliphate in March, after five years of gruelling warfare. (The S.D.F. lost eleven thousand soldiers; the U.S. lost six.) Erdoğan views Kurds—the world’s largest ethnic group without a state—as terrorists, because of a Kurdish separatist campaign in Turkey. After a phone call with Erdoğan, Trump ordered the withdrawal of a thousand U.S. Special Forces soldiers, who had been backing the S.D.F., even though isis sleeper cells are still waging an insurgency in Syria and Iraq. The retreat was so abrupt that the U.S. had to bomb a depot full of arms that it didn’t have time to remove.

Trump’s ignorance of the world has never been so blatant—or produced such bipartisan opposition. The House of Representatives voted 354–60 to condemn the pullout. On the Senate floor, Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, rebuked the President for leaving “a bloodstain on the annals of American history.” Yet Trump seemed delighted with his decision to let the Turks and the Kurds—both U.S. allies—fight it out. “It was unconventional, what I did,” he told the crowd at a campaign rally in Dallas, on Thursday. “Sometimes you have to let them fight like two kids. Then you pull them apart.”

Trump and Erdoğan share a crude egotism and a paranoia about deep states trying to undo them, but Erdoğan deftly gamed Trump. On October 9th, Trump sent a remarkably puerile letter to the Turkish leader, warning him not to go too far. History, he wrote, “will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen.” He added, “Don’t be a fool!” Erdoğan reportedly tossed the letter into the trash. The same day, he launched Operation Peace Spring, to destroy the S.D.F. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/28/turkey-syria-the-kurds-and-trumps-abandonment-of-foreign-policy

16. Chris Cillizza: How much more of Donald Trump can Republicans possibly take?

It's worth remembering that fact at this moment as congressional Republicans find themselves confronted with a cavalcade of troubling news stories about President Donald Trump and his conduct in office. Because while elected GOP officials have almost totally capitulated to Trump's hostile takeover of their party, there is always a point at which you simply cannot look even quasi-objectively at the actions of this president and conclude that standing behind him remains the right (or even defensible) thing to do.

The most damning development is, obviously, the Tuesday testimony of Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine. Taylor's opening statement to Congress makes clear -- beyond any reasonable doubt -- that there was a quid pro quo organized by the White House: Announce investigations into Trump's preferred subjects (Crowdstrike, the Bidens) and get the military aid money being withheld. https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/23/politics/donald-trump-taylor-ukraine-republicans/index.html

17. McKay Coppins: The Liberation of Mitt Romney

Romney understands, of course, that many of his Republican colleagues live in fear of being subjected to a presidential Twitter tirade. In fact, some believe that Trump’s targeting of Romney is intended as a warning to other GOP lawmakers lest they step out of line. That fear is one of the reasons his caucus has attempted such elaborate rhetorical contortions to defend Trump as the House impeachment inquiry turns up damning evidence. “I think it’s very natural for people to look at circumstances and see them in the light that’s most amenable to their maintaining power,” he told me in an interview last month at The Atlantic Festival.

Romney told me that he does not have an abstract definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and that when it comes to identifying impeachable acts, he follows Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous standard for defining hard-core porn: “I’ll know it when I see it.” Asked if he’s seen it yet, Romney told me that he’ll make up his mind once he hears all the evidence at the trial: “At this stage, I am strenuously avoiding trying to make any judgment.”

In the meantime, Romney is leading the Republican revolt over the president’s recent decision to pull troops out of northern Syria, leaving America’s Kurdish allies behind. In a withering speech on the Senate floor last week, he condemned the administration’s betrayal of the Kurds, and called for hearings on the matter. He told me that he wants to see a transcript of the phone call between Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that preceded the troop withdrawal. “This is not just a disagreement on foreign policy,” he said. “This is a violation of fundamental American honor.”

Amid all the tumult, Romney has come to terms with the fact that there will be little progress on his legislative to-do list for the foreseeable future. (Between impeachment proceedings and next year’s elections, who has time to pass laws?) Nor is Romney especially well positioned to launch a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, despite endless fantasizing by pundits. (He has said he’s not planning to run again.) While his battles with the president have earned him plaudits from some in Utah—where support for Trump is uncommonly weak for a red state—he is widely viewed as a villain in MAGA world.

But Romney is looking beyond the next year, and beyond the president’s base, as he tries to lay the groundwork for a post-Trump Republican Party. While he acknowledges the failures of his own presidential campaign, he told me that he doubts Trump’s electoral coalition will be replicable in the long run. “We have to get young people and Hispanics and African Americans to vote Republican,” he said, adding that he hopes these voters will see his resistance to Trump as a sign that one day they could find a home in the GOP. If that seems naive, the senator is probably okay with it. In cynical times like these, someone has to serve as the guardian of lost causes.

After all, Romney said, “the president will not be the president forever.” https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/10/mitt-romney-middle-impeachment-fight/600373/

18. Jacob Bacharach:Trump’s G7 scandal points to a better path for impeachment

The Democrats and much of the so-called National Security community have so far preferred to hang their impeachment efforts on this amateurish espionage by Trump’s hilariously corrupt and inept circle of fund-bundlers, lawyers, and half-wit foreign operatives. But while I have no doubt that whatever it is he and his buddies were trying to do in Ukraine — if they even knew themselves — was just as criminal, unethical, immoral, and dumb as its expanding cast of hacks and hangers-on, I am not convinced it makes the best public case.
 
I do believe that he wanted in some inchoate way to use Doral to enrich himself, but I also think it was a secondary consideration to the fact that he really did believe it was the “best” place, that collection of over-fertilized lawns and bad restaurants under the rumbling skies of a nearby airport.

The plainness of the attempted crime, the gleeful “I-did-it” quality of Trump’s original announcement via Twitter that he would award the giant G7 conference to himself, followed by the petulant incredulity that he would have to reverse himself, suggests that both he and the embarrassed sycophants who rushed to defend him before he threw them under the bus by abruptly reversing himself, had not considered — could not even imagine — that it would hurt him.

It is almost dismayingly ordinary, and it has been going on for his entire term now, the petty thievery of his Washington hotel, his daughter’s chintzy brands, his sons’, well, whatever it is that those boys do precisely. The brief flirtation with Doral seemed to hold the potential to refocus some of the impeachment inquiry’s energy on this open, American criminality and away from the world’s worst Graham Greene novel.

For once, enough of political Washington seemed to at least agree that it looked bad. Why it looked worse than, say, renting 500 Trump hotel rooms to the Saudis is a point of D.C. protocol and politesse that I’ll never be able to parse. But if we are to hope for a true Nixonian reckoning for this terrible administration, I still think, despite some misgivings, that it is less likely to come from a spy store, more likely to come from forcing him to declare, over and over again, “I am not a crook.” https://theoutline.com/post/8129/trump-g7-doral-scandal-impeachment

19. Kurt Bardella: Mike Pompeo and Jim Jordan’s Astounding Hypocrisy

For eight years, House Republicans searched for a “smoking gun” that could unravel the presidency of Barack Obama. They presided over hundreds of oversight hearings, issued more than 100 subpoenas, held the attorney general in contempt of Congress, and even formed a special select committee devoted exclusively to one investigation, on Benghazi. As someone who spent five years working alongside Republicans on the Oversight Committee, I can tell you that we never found a “smoking gun” like the testimony that was provided yesterday from the senior U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, William B. Taylor.

As I read through Taylor’s statement, which was given under oath, I couldn’t help but think to myself how my former Republican colleagues would have reacted if similar testimony had been given by a career diplomat during the Obama administration, especially during the Benghazi investigation, which produced 33 hearings in two years.

The reality is that if Pompeo, Jordan, and House Republicans had received the kind of bombshell testimony we heard from Taylor yesterday, they would have immediately moved to impeach the president. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/how-trumps-defenders-now-approached-benghazi-back-then/600556/

20. Michael Gerson: The smoking gun has already been revealed

No one disputes that Trump froze hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine shortly before his call to Zelensky. No one can dispute that this created massive leverage with a beleaguered client country. No one disputes that Trump reminded Zelensky of U.S. largesse three times in the released rough transcript of the call. No one disputes that Zelensky assured Trump of Ukrainian reciprocity. No one denies that Trump found this insufficient and asked for further favors: the investigation of a political opponent and his son, as well as of a crackpot theory that Ukraine was behind the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails. No one can dispute that the fulfillment of those favors would have been regarded as politically advantageous by the president.

Whatever strategy Republicans adopt, the smoking gun has already been revealed. It is the rough transcript of the Ukraine conversation that the White House initially parked in a classified computer system but released after the call was exposed by a whistleblower. A common-sense reading of that text reveals a president of the United States involved in a politically motivated shakedown of a foreign leader.

This is a quid pro quo. It is a corrupt quid pro quo. It is a proven quid pro quo. In the end, there is only one question: Does it rise to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors”?

Here is where well-intentioned Republican legislators will struggle. They know that foreign powers such as Russia have influenced U.S. elections by subterfuge. They will determine whether an American president can encourage foreign influence on U.S. elections without consequence. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-smoking-gun-has-already-been-revealed/2019/10/21/681d3882-f426-11e9-ad8b-85e2aa00b5ce_story.html

21. Dan Balz: New testimony undercuts Trump’s claim of no quid pro quo on Ukraine. How will Washington respond?

The closed-door testimony by the United States’ senior diplomat in Ukraine significantly changes the discussion about whether President Trump withheld military assistance to compel a foreign government to investigate one of his political rivals.

It is no longer a question of whether this happened. It is now a question of how the president explains it and how lawmakers — especially Republicans — choose to respond to it.

The lengthy prepared testimony by William B. Taylor Jr. to the House Intelligence Committee is painstakingly clear in its rendition of events. His account directly contradicts the president and asserts that military assistance was withheld for months as Trump was demanding an explicit statement from Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky confirming that he would launch investigations the president wanted.

Trump’s long-standing characterization that there was no quid pro quo runs smack into evidence to the contrary. Characterizations now count for less than explanations. How does he explain what Taylor outlines, which is that Trump was directly linking military assistance to demands that the Ukraine president announce publicly his intention to start investigations into the 2016 campaign and former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden? https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/new-testimony-undercuts-trumps-claim-of-no-quid-pro-quo-on-ukraine-how-will-washington-respond/2019/10/22/4d611646-f50a-11e9-a285-882a8e386a96_story.html

22. Margaret Carlson: With Trump, It’s Not the Cover-Up. It’s the Crime

It’s an article of faith since Watergate that it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up that fells a president. Members of Congress are organized to hold hearings to explore the cancer on the presidency. Reporters, like dobermans, are bred to sniff it out.

What if there is no cover-up, no need to meet with Deep Throat in an underground garage to get to the bottom of a break-in of Democratic headquarters? What if shame has gone the way of the landline, an artifact of White Houses past? 

These aren’t hypothetical questions. It upends the moral universe to have a president who brags about a call to the point of releasing the transcript in which he shakes down the Ukrainian president in a weapons-for-dirt-on-Biden deal as if it were perfectly normal. True enough, it didn’t contain the words “quid pro quo,” as if the absence of a Latin phrase no one uses in conversation supports Trump’s assertion that he wasn’t withholding money to fight Vladimir Putin’s invading army until he got what he wanted. https://www.thedailybeast.com/with-trump-its-not-the-cover-up-its-the-crime