1. Michael Gerson: Trump has finally met his match

A number of people whom the president has employed, defamed and then fired have slunk back to their master’s hand like beaten dogs. In John Bolton, President Trump has finally met his counterpunching match. Even as Trump’s defenders in the Senate trial were denying the factual basis for impeachment, leaks from the former national security adviser’s book have confirmed it. Senate Republicans can no longer deny Trump’s quid pro quo of military aid in exchange for slander without being deceptive or delusional.

Bolton’s bombshell comes on top of a comprehensive, well-argued case for conviction by House impeachment managers. Their presentation of the evidence, their version of constitutional interpretation and their appeal to senatorial self-respect were all compelling. The response of Republicans — putting fingers in their ears and loudly humming “Battle Hymn of the Republic” — has been less impressive.

If Republican senators refuse to call new witnesses (including Bolton) under these circumstances, there would be only one plausible explanation: They fear Trump’s retribution. Such fear, of course, is justified. In this case, going off the reservation is to enter a minefield. The first few GOP defectors on the issue of witnesses would come under enormous pressure. The first few GOP senators who support conviction would face a torrent of abuse from an unstable, thuggish narcissist, and from people convinced that disloyalty to Trump is treason or blasphemy. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-has-finally-met-his-match/2020/01/27/366776dc-413c-11ea-b5fc-eefa848cde99_story.html

2. Frank Bruni: John Bolton Gets the Last Laugh

President Trump’s reaction to the leak of incriminating details in John Bolton’s forthcoming book shocked me. Not the part where the president said that Bolton was making up a Ukraine quid pro quo in the service of the best-seller list — that he was lying for lucre. Trump sees that transaction everywhere he looks, because he sees it first and foremost in the mirror.

No, I was surprised that the president didn’t dispute knowing Bolton, or at least didn’t say that he was so slightly acquainted with his own former national security adviser that he couldn’t pick him — chinchilla-bushy mustache and all — out of a lineup. That’s Trump’s favorite ploy. Ask Michael Cohen, Anthony Scaramucci, Prince Andrew, Stormy Daniels, Gordon Sondland, Lev Parnas. Fall into disrepute, cross Trump or claim to have the goods on him and you’re wiped clean from his memory, no matter the existence of contradictory forensics. Ivanka, beware. You’re one bad manicure away from paternal amnesia.

Bolton is the impeachment star of the week, whether he winds up testifying or not, and I can’t shake the feeling that he plotted all of this out: keeping his head down during the hearings in the House; letting it be known only afterward that he’d be willing to testify in the Senate; the revelation this week — simultaneous with assertions by Trump’s defense team that there were no firsthand witnesses to the president’s wrongdoing — that his book indeed addresses Ukraine and fully backs up the charges in the articles of impeachment.

Bolton has always been vain, brilliant and ruthless, and this is the timeline that a vain, brilliant and ruthless operator would cinch. I’m not personally acquainted with the sound of his laughter, but I’m certain I hear it. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/28/opinion/john-bolton-book.html

3. Eli Merritt: Hamilton would have led the charge to oust President Trump

It’s not surprising that Rep. Adam B. Schiff’s opening statement in President Trump’s Senate impeachment trial began with an impassioned warning by Alexander Hamilton about the danger of demagogues subverting the Constitution and pursuing personal gain.

“When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents,” Schiff quoted Hamilton, “having the advantage of military habits — despotic in his ordinary demeanor — known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty — when such a man is seen to mount the hobbyhorse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government and bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day — it may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’ ”

Schiff went on to say that Trump “has acted precisely as Hamilton and his contemporaries had feared” — and that impeachment is one of the core constitutional mechanisms the founders devised to protect our free system of government from such harm.

Now as the Senate sits in judgment of Trump, the members of that body must weigh the prospect of removing him from office — in the face of mounting evidence and testimony — against their own policy preferences.

In this respect, there’s a parallel to Hamilton and the Federalists who were tested by the irregular outcome of the presidential election of 1800. In a critical vote in a single chamber of the Congress, they, too, had to choose between preserving the United States’ constitutional government and supporting a man who might deliver policies they liked better. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-01-25/alexander-hamilton-donald-trump-impeachment-senate

4. Dana Milbank:Trump’s lawyers are absolutely entitled to their own facts

For three days, impeachment managers presented the facts to the Senate. On Saturday, the president’s lawyers presented the alternative facts.

There was familiar invective from Trump’s lawyers (“fake,” “blind drive to impeach,” “staged public hearings,” “secret hearings in the basement bunker,” “shell game,” “they are here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history"). But their arguments were surprisingly lawyerly, and they at least attempted to mount a serious defense of the president — a feat that filled White House Counsel Pat Cipollone with pride as he completed the second of Trump’s allotted 24 hours of defense. “You’ve heard you’re not going to hear facts from the president’s lawyers,” he said. “That’s all we’ve done.”

This was true — if you subscribe to Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” theory of epistemology.

Alternative Fact: “President [Volodymyr] Zelensky and high-ranking Ukrainian officials did not even know — did not even know — the security assistance was paused until the end of August, over a month after the July 25 call.”
Actual Fact: Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Laura Cooper testified that the Ukrainians were inquiring about the status of the security assistance on July 25.

Alternative Fact: “They kept telling you it was Russia alone that interfered in the 2016 election, but there is evidence that Ukraine also interfered.”
Actual Fact: “We have no information that indicates that Ukraine interfered,” said Trump’s FBI director, Christopher Wray.

Alternative Fact: The administration fought subpoenas because “the subpoenas were not authorized because there were no votes” to start an impeachment inquiry.
Actual Fact: The administration fought the subpoenas even after the formal vote to open the impeachment inquiry.

Alternative Fact: “The transcript shows that the president did not condition either security assistance or a meeting on anything.”
Actual Fact: The “transcript” is not an actual transcript but a partial reconstruction of the call by the White House. It includes the Trump phrase “do us a favor though” immediately following the Ukrainian president’s mention of military help and immediately before Trump’s request for investigations.

Alternative Fact: “They design[ed] a mechanism here where the president was locked out and denied the ability to cross-examine witnesses” in the House impeachment.
Actual Fact: Cipollone declined an invitation to participate in the House impeachment hearings before the Judiciary Committee.

Alternative Fact: “The Democrats’ allegation that the president engaged in a quid pro quo is unfounded.”
Actual Fact: Told that what he was describing was a quid pro quo, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said at a news conference: “We do that all the time.”

Alternative Fact: “The Mueller Report … after $32 million and roughly 500 search warrants, determined that there was no collusion.”
Actual Fact: “We did not address ‘collusion,’ which is not a legal term,” Mueller testified.

Other, innuendo-based arguments Saturday that will likely reappear in Trump’s lawyers’ arguments over the next two days: Trump had good reason not to trust the intelligence community, Ukraine is a mess, Adam Schiff is an incorrigible liar, and the whistleblower is in cahoots with Joe Biden. But Saturday was the factual portion — or what passes for it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/25/trumps-lawyers-are-absolutely-entitled-their-own-facts/

5. A partisan Supreme Court ruling on the ACA just gave President Trump a boost

The Supreme Court gave the Trump administration a gift Tuesday — one that could greatly help the president in the 2020 election. In an order that received less attention than it deserved, the court declined to speed up its consideration of a challenge to the Affordable Care Act.

In that case, Texas v. United States, the Trump administration has argued that the court should invalidate all of the ACA, including its legal protections for people with preexisting conditions. The administration is pursuing this course even though President Trump has made bizarre assertions that imply quite a different stance.
“I was the person who saved Pre-Existing Conditions in your Healthcare,” he tweeted, falsely, on Jan. 13. By putting off a decision in the case until after the election, the court avoided making the administration’s deeply unpopular campaign to demolish the ACA a centerpiece of the presidential race. Given that the court has frequently expedited or taken other extraordinary steps in cases of similar import, its refusal to do so in this instance looks an awful lot like an effort to help the Republican Party.

Indeed, delaying a decision is significantly more helpful to the president than an expedited ruling in his favor would be; a decision endorsing the administration’s arguments, and invalidating the ACA, would expose the president’s false statements about health care and his own lack of a health-care plan. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/23/partisan-supreme-court-ruling-aca-just-gave-president-trump-boost/

6. Michael Gerson: Republicans aren’t serving the country, or even the president. Just themselves.

It is another of President Trump’s dubious achievements to turn the ultimate constitutional check on presidential abuses of power into an utter farce. Watching Republican senators complain that there is “nothing new” in the case made by House impeachment managers, while they are actively opposing the introduction of new evidence and new testimony, is confirmation of barefaced bad faith. In this matter, elected Republicans are mainly serving, not the president, and certainly not the republic, but themselves. Having decided that no amount of evidence would be sufficient for conviction, they realize that the presentation of a full and compelling case would convict them of servility and institutional surrender. So a quick and dirty Senate trial is the best way to limit the exposure of their malpractice.

This crime against democracy is compounded by the eagerness of Republicans to use impeachment as a fundraising opportunity and method to energize base voters. The theory seems to be: If you are going to betray the constitutional order, you might as well profit from it.

In the impeachment trial, all the dismal signs point to acquittal at any cost. And it is not the first time the president has skated. Despite compelling evidence of wrongdoing and obstruction of justice in the Mueller report, Trump largely escaped accountability (even as many of his smarmy advisers did not escape jail). The appearance of vindication in this case immediately preceded the president’s decision to squeeze an embattled foreign power for his political benefit. Give Trump an inch and he’ll take Ukraine. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-arent-serving-the-country-or-even-the-president-just-themselves/2020/01/23/6d820a78-3e0e-11ea-baca-eb7ace0a3455_story.html

7. Max Boot: Trump wants you to think ‘everyone does it.’ No, they don’t.

Strip away the name-calling, lies, procedural complaints and conspiracy theories, and you are left with the core of President Trump’s impeachment defense: Everyone does it.

As acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said on Oct. 17: “I have news for everybody: Get over it. There is going to be political influence in foreign policy.” That argument is now echoed by Trump’s lawyers, who write in their trial memorandum: “In a representative democracy … elected officials almost always consider the effect that their conduct might have on the next election. And there is nothing wrong with that.” It is further amplified in a letter signed by 21 of 26 Republican state attorneys general that was shared on Twitter by Trump: “It cannot be a legitimate basis to impeach a President for acting in a legal manner that may also be politically advantageous. Such a standard would be cause for the impeachment of virtually every President, past, present, and future.”

This premise may be alluring to cynical Trump supporters who are convinced that all politicians are crooks. But it’s simply false. There is no evidence that any president in U.S. history has done what Trump is accused of doing.

Trump defenders may eventually be proved correct: While his behavior is outrageously abnormal today, in a few decades’ time it may come to be seen as the norm. And then, to quote Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif), "we are lost.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/24/trump-wants-you-think-everyone-does-it-no-they-dont/

8. Colbert I. King: Vandalizing America has been a group act starring Trump and Republicans

President Trump’s impeachment trial underscores the overriding importance of maintaining the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives and changing the Senate from red to blue on Election Day 2020. Today, Trump is poised to get away with betraying his oath of office and raining havoc on government policies because House and Senate Republicans have chosen to go along and look the other way. For the sake of the nation, they, like Trump, need to be replaced.

And it was Trump who has:

● caused children to be separated from their families and placed in inhumane conditions;

● cozied up to right-wing cutthroats who, through their words and deeds, damn democracy;

● thumbed his nose at climate change and assaulted school lunch programs;

● reveled in the use of foul language;

● taken delight in disparaging brown- and black-skinned immigrants and the places they come from (“shithole countries”);

● shown preference for those sharing his racial heritage (look at his administration, his playgrounds and his playmates);

● paid lip service to unity while promoting division.

Trump has single-handedly demeaned his office.

That said, vandalizing America has been a GOP group act. Both Trump and Republicans must be pulled offstage.

The transformation of the federal judiciary, with extremely conservative ideologues holding life-term appointments, could not have happened without a Trump-McConnell alliance.

A solid stone wall of Republicans has converted the Senate into a legislative graveyard for bills passed by the House but opposed by Trump. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/impeachment-results-from-republican-failures-we-can-remedy-that-in-november/2020/01/24/7abb7c34-3e12-11ea-8872-5df698785a4e_story.html

9. Michael Hiltzik: Trump opens door to Social Security cuts

With his penchant for saying the quiet parts out loud and assuming no one is paying attention, President Trump on Wednesday opened the door to cutting Social Security and Medicare later this year.

The word came at the very end of an interview conducted by Joe Kernen of CNBC, in connection with Trump’s appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Here’s how it unfolded, according to the tape and transcript from CNBC:

“JOE KERNEN: Entitlements ever be on your plate?

“PRESIDENT TRUMP: At some point they will be. We have tremendous growth. We’re going to have tremendous growth. This next year I — it’ll be toward the end of the year. The growth is going to be incredible. And at the right time, we will take a look at that. You know, that’s actually the easiest of all things, if you look, cause it’s such a—"

Trump then wandered off into a string of false and incoherent claims about the economy. “We’ve never had growth like this,” he said, even though economic growth during Trump’s term is nowhere near a record pace.

What’s important is that Trump appears to be falling into lockstep with the more general Republican position that closing the federal deficit requires cutting back on Social Security, Medicare and other social safety net programs. Never mind that the deficit was opened into a gaping maw by the tax cut Trump signed in December 2017, which went mostly to corporations and the wealthy, the effect of which goosed economic growth for a short period but has faded. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-01-23/trump-social-security

10. Eric Levitz: Donald Trump Is Already Trying to Cut Medicaid

Just this week, while Breitbart was scolding the corporate media for absurdly suggesting that Trump is trying to cut entitlements, the Trump administration was finalizing a plan to cut entitlement spending in red states without congressional authorization. As Politico reports:

The Trump administration is finalizing a plan to let states convert a chunk of Medicaid funding to block grants, even as officials remain divided over how to sell the controversial change to the safety net health program.

At present, federal spending on Medicaid rises in tandem with need for the program: All Americans who fall below a certain income or asset level are entitled to Medicaid’s services, even if this means that overall Medicaid spending comes in higher than Congress expected. This is what makes Medicaid an entitlement program. Thus, the Trump administration is trying to help Republican-controlled states cut entitlements in the most literal sense: It is encouraging them to end their residents’ entitlement to the benefits of the Medicaid expansion.

This point isn’t a technical one. When the president and his congressional allies pushed a similar block-granting scheme in 2017, the Congressional Budget Office found the Republican proposal would constitute a “35 percent reduction” in Medicaid spending by 2036. The reason for this was simple: Medicaid’s per-beneficiary spending is rising at a faster rate than consumer price inflation, and the GOP’s proposal would eventually tie growth in overall Medicaid spending to the latter. The administration’s current initiative aims to advance the same type of covert benefit cut at a smaller scale.

Trump’s support for entitlement cuts is a matter of fact, not “perception.” To the extent that the “corporate media” failed to accurately convey Trump’s position on entitlements this week, it did not do so by unfairly interpreting his remarks on the subject, but by obscuring his administration’s past and present actions on the issue. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/donald-trump-social-security-cuts-medicaid-entitlements-davos-cnbc.html

11. Susan B. Glasser: The Closing Of The Senatorial Mind

If the goal of the House managers was to sway any votes, then it is hard not to see their presentation of the case as a failure. On Thursday night, the Republican Rob Portman, of Ohio, spoke to CNN’s Manu Raju outside the chamber and made what counts these days as a concession of sorts to the Democrats. Portman acknowledged that Trump’s withholding of millions in military aid and a White House meeting from Ukraine, as he sought politically motivated investigations, was problematic behavior. “Some of the things that were done were not appropriate,” Portman said. “I’ve used the word ‘wrong’ and ‘inappropriate.’ That’s a very different question than removing someone from office who was duly elected, in the middle of a Presidential election.”

On Friday afternoon, Judy Woodruff, of PBS, asked Portman’s colleague Deb Fischer, of Nebraska, whether she at least accepted “their premise” that Trump had asked Ukraine to investigate his 2020 political rival, former Vice-President Joe Biden. “I don’t,” Fischer said. This is remarkable stuff. What must the Senate chaplain make of such willful defiance of the facts? The demand from Trump to investigate Biden—by name, no less!—is right in the summary of his July 25th call with the Ukrainian President—the “perfect” phone call, as Trump calls it. The President has tweeted dozens of times since September urging Americans to “READ THE TRANSCRIPT!” How is it possible that one of the hundred senators is so disdainful of her duty that she has not bothered to do so or, if she has, is so willing to ignore what it so plainly says?

This is not a serious defense of Trump, of course, but it is amazingly revealing. The Senate trial of twenty-one years ago was for the Rob Portmans; the Senate trial of today is for the Deb Fischers. There is no audience for Adam Schiff, or if there is it has shrunk to a small handful of Republicans who may or may not vote next week to keep the trial going with witnesses and further evidence. For the rest of the Republicans and the forty per cent or so of America that has unflinchingly supported Trump through his Presidency, there will be another show, produced personally by the showman-in-chief. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-closing-of-the-senatorial-mind

12.  Ezra Klein: Why Democrats Still Have to Appeal to the Center, but Republicans Don’t

American politics has been dominated by the Democratic and Republican Parties since the Civil War. That gives us the illusion of stability — that today’s political divisions cut roughly the same lines as yesteryear.

But in recent decades, the two parties have been changing, and fast. Those changes are ideological — the Democratic Party has moved left, and the Republican Party has moved right. But more fundamentally, those changes are compositional: Democrats have become more diverse, urban, young and secular, and the Republican Party has turned itself into a vehicle for whiter, older, more Christian and more rural voters.

This is the root cause of intensifying polarization: Our differences, both ideological and demographic, map onto our party divisions today in ways they didn’t in the past. But the changes have not affected the parties symmetrically.

Put simply, Democrats can’t win running the kinds of campaigns and deploying the kinds of tactics that succeed for Republicans. They can move to the left — and they are — but they can’t abandon the center or, given the geography of American politics, the center-right, and still hold power. Democrats are modestly, but importantly, restrained by diversity and democracy. Republicans are not. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/opinion/sunday/democrats-republicans-polarization.html

13. First Read: For the GOP on impeachment, it's Trump's way or the highway

President Trump’s lawyers on Monday were throwing so much spaghetti against the wall — to see what would stick — the Senate chamber might have been the kitchen in an Olive Garden. You had:

• Ken Starr — yes, that Ken Starr — criticizing the use of impeachment as a tool: “Like war, impeachment is hell.”
• Jay Sekulow maintaining that no witness has testified that Trump himself said there was any connection between Ukraine’s security assistance and an investigation into the Bidens (even though John is now claiming the president told him this).
• Alan Dershowitz saying that, even if Bolton’s claims are true, they’re not an impeachable offense: “Let me repeat: nothing in the Bolton revelations, even if true, would rise to the level of an abuse of power or an impeachable offense.”
• Jane Raskin contending that Rudy Giuliani’s activities with Ukraine had nothing to do with 2020 politics.
• And Pam Bondi and Eric Herschmann arguing that the Bidens needed to be investigated.

Got all of that?

If you’re a regular watcher of Sean Hannity, it might have made sense. But if not, it was all over the place. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/gop-impeachment-it-s-trump-s-way-or-highway-n1124516

14. Susan B. Glasser: The Bolton Bombshell And The Unwaveringly Pro-Trump G.O.P.

At any other moment in Washington in my lifetime, I would have predicted with absolute confidence that the Bolton revelation would force Republican senators to switch their position and support witnesses. And not just a few, but almost all of them. But this is now, and the unthinkable and inconceivable have become increasingly routine. Here it was, the proverbial smoking gun, right in the middle of the trial, crucial evidence that Trump, his advisers, his lawyers, and his enablers on Capitol Hill knew about and were trying to suppress. Just last week, Trump’s legal team told senators that “not a single witness with actual knowledge ever testified that the President suggested any connection between announcing investigations and security assistance.”

In fact, the President and his aides knew that Bolton had done more than suggest it. He had put it in writing, sent his account to the White House on December 30th, and was prepared to raise his right hand and swear to it under oath. But we have had so many smoking-gun moments in the last few years. This is the post–“Access Hollywood” tape G.O.P., which elected as President of the United States a man who bragged of grabbing women by their genitals on tape, just a few weeks after the recording came to light. In the Ukraine scandal, we have seen this process repeat itself. Facts emerge that show the President’s actions to be inappropriate, outrageous, and clearly, straightforwardly wrong. At first, even Republicans on the Hill seem to waver. But again and again and again they find a way to accommodate themselves to the unpleasant new information, to rationalize and to justify.

On Monday, after watching all this play out, Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat who has been forced to forego Presidential campaigning in Iowa in order to attend the Senate trial, said that listening to the Trump defense was like a visit to an “alternative universe.” But Monday proved once again that this alternative universe has become the new normal in Trump’s G.O.P. It is not the exception but the rule. The post-Bolton-bombshell Republican Party will be largely the same as the pre-Bolton-bombshell Republican Party. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-bolton-bombshell-and-the-unwaveringly-pro-trump-gop

15. Michael Bloomberg: A new future for Puerto Rico includes making it our 51st state

The citizens of Puerto Rico deserve to have their voices heard — not only in the presidential primary election, but in the general election, too. They deserve real representation in Washington that reflects their interests. And they deserve the same federal funding for disaster relief and reconstruction that all other Americans would expect.

The best way to make that happen is through statehood. And it’s the only way for Washington to stop ignoring the island and applying Band-Aids — and start forming a true partnership with elected leaders there who are on the same footing as other representatives around the country.

The time has come to sew Puerto Rico’s star into our national flag. As president, when voters there are ready to begin the stitching, I’ll bring Congress and the whole country together to get it done. https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/guest-commentary/os-op-michael-bloomberg-grant-puerto-rico-statehood-20200127-hxzgiutzincopdzqidkovxok7q-story.html

16. Heather Hurlburt: Trump’s Middle East Plan Is About Exerting Power, Not Achieving Peace

“They can come up with things normal humans don’t think about.”

That’s how Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the “real-estate people,” as he characterized President Trump and his family/advisers, for coming up with a new proposal to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s a description that even many analysts who panned Trump’s peace plan would agree with.

The proposals Trump unveiled alongside Netanyahu at the White House on Tuesday are an important attempt to shift the parameters of politics in Israel, the Arab world, and here in the U.S. Despite the way they’re being advertised, none of them have anything to do with achieving peace between Israelis and Palestinians; in fact, they are more mortal blows to the fading prospects of a two-state solution to the conflict. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/trumps-mideast-plan-is-about-power-not-achieving-peace.html

17. Steve Benen: Reversing course, many in GOP say Trump’s guilt is now irrelevant

Several prominent Republicans seemed to collectively breathe a sigh of relief yesterday. After spending months kicking around a series of talking points intended to defend Donald Trump in his Ukraine scandal – some of which were contradictory, some of which were laughable, each of which was woeful – many in the party finally started to settle on the one assertion that can’t be discredited or debunked:

Republicans no longer think it matters whether the president is guilty.

For months, the president’s GOP allies fought a losing battle, challenging the available facts, insisting Trump did not do what the evidence said he did. But on Monday night, during the impeachment trial, Alan Dershowitz stood on the Senate floor and argued, in reference to the reported revelations from John Bolton’s book, “[N]othing in the Bolton revelations, even if true, would rise to the level of an abuse of power or an impeachable offense.”

Even if every allegation is true, even if the president did exactly what he’s accused of doing, even if he abused the powers of his office in the precise way Democrats claim, much of the Republican Party has convinced itself, quite suddenly, that the presidential misdeeds simply don’t meet the arbitrary threshold for importance.

And if the allegations are no longer relevant, then the trial is no longer relevant, and the need for witness testimony is no longer relevant. Dershowitz effectively handed the GOP a key to get his client out of this mess, and several Senate Republicans rushed to use it.

As a substantive matter, the party’s new posture is indefensible. Trump’s abuse of power was staggering on a historic scale and, according to Congress’ independent watchdog, blatantly illegal. For lawmakers to say it’s perfectly permissible for a president to ignore the law, withhold congressionally approved aid to a vulnerable ally, as part of an extortion scheme the president hoped to use to cheat in an election, is madness.

But as of this morning, much of the Senate Republican conference has decided the smart move is to simply not care. The more Democrats point to evidence of Trump’s misconduct, the more GOP senators will reply, “So what?” http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/reversing-course-many-gop-say-trumps-guilt-now-irrelevant

18. Stephanie Mencimer: Evangelicals Love Donald Trump for Many Reasons, But One of Them Is Especially Terrifying

On many levels, President Donald Trump’s self-created crisis in Iran seems to have no relationship to any sort of coherent foreign policy or geopolitical plan for the future. The assassination has yielded few if any tangible rewards for the US. But there is an eager constituency for Trump’s improvised policy toward the Middle East and Iran in particular: the evangelical Christians who see it as a means of ushering in the return of Christ. Lured by the promise of conservative Supreme Court justices, anti-abortion measures, and a commitment to Christian supremacy under the guise of religious freedom, white evangelicals voted for Trump in higher numbers than any other group—more than 80 percent.

He desperately needs them if he’s going to be reelected. And while some have expressed concern about the administration’s inching toward war with Iran, many of those with what were once fringe beliefs have cheered the killing of Soleimani. “Iran has this big part to play in biblical history,” says religious historian Diana Butler Bass, who grew up in the evangelical church, attended an evangelical college and seminary, and wrote her Ph.D. thesis at Duke University on American fundamentalism. “There are these particular prophecies from Ezekiel, where there is talk of a war that will happen at a very important moment in Israel’s history. And that war is going to kick off the End Times. People in this prophetic community believe Iran is going to be one of these aggressors.” 

On many levels, President Donald Trump’s self-created crisis in Iran seems to have no relationship to any sort of coherent foreign policy or geopolitical plan for the future. The assassination of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force, has yielded few if any tangible rewards for the US. But there is an eager constituency for Trump’s improvised policy toward the Middle East and Iran in particular: the evangelical Christians who see it as a means of ushering in the return of Christ. Lured by the promise of conservative Supreme Court justices, anti-abortion measures, and a commitment to Christian supremacy under the guise of religious freedom, white evangelicals voted for Trump in higher numbers than any other group—more than 80 percent. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/01/evangelicals-are-anticipating-the-end-of-the-world-and-trump-is-listening/