[Meteor Blades will return next week]
Richard North Patterson/Bulwark:
A Betrayal Too Far
Trump’s abrupt and stunning act of dereliction startled everyone he should have consulted beforehand: our State Department, Pentagon, intelligence community, allies, key members of Congress—and the Kurds themselves. He discussed this only with the Turkey’s authoritarian, who is determined to quash a fighting force tied to Kurdish insurgents inside Turkey. In acceding to Turkish aggression on the basis of a single phone call from a crafty autocrat, Trump contemptuously ignored all advice, and abandoned a painstaking American diplomatic effort to work out an accommodation which would satisfy Turkey’s demands for border security.
Two new impeachment polls yesterday…
Politico:
Poll: Half of voters support impeaching and removing Trump
A new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll is the latest survey to show public backing for Congress' intensifying impeachment inquiry.
The 50 percent who support Trump’s removal is identical to the percentage who approve of the intensifying impeachment inquiry into the president, and who would support the House’s voting to impeach Trump. Similarly, 44 percent of voters oppose the inquiry, and 43 percent would oppose the House’s impeaching the president.
The new poll is the latest public survey to show plurality or majority support for House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, which began in earnest last month amid evidence that Trump used his power as president to press foreign governments to investigate his political rivals. But other polls show Americans are more divided on whether Trump should be removed from office.
Sahil Kapur/Bloomberg covers the earlier this week polls:
Most Favor Trump Impeachment Inquiry But Wary of His Removal, Polls Show
A majority of Americans support the House Democratic impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump, a sharp pivot in opinion from the first two and a half years of his presidency, but are also wary about removing him from office, according to three recent polls.
The surveys were published Tuesday by the Washington Post-Schar, Quinnipiac and NBC/Wall Street Journal. Over Trump’s time in office, survey after survey had showed the American public opposed to impeachment proceedings, even as he remained deeply unpopular.
The Fox and Morning Consult polls are more aggressive about removal.
And for some history:
Amelia Thompson-DeVeux/FiveThirtyEight:
It Took A Long Time For Republicans To Abandon Nixon
After winning a sweeping victory in the 1972 election, the president began his second term with an approval rating around 60 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s tracker of presidential approval. Then that spring saw a stunning 30-point drop in Nixon’s support starting around when one of the people charged with breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters confessed to a judge that he and the other conspirators had been pressured to stay silent.
Support for Nixon continued to plunge throughout the long summer of 1973, while former White House lawyer John Dean testified in Senate hearings that the president had been involved in a cover-up of the burglary and a White House aide confirmed in closed-door testimony that Nixon had set up a secret White House taping system. And by the time of October’s Saturday Night Massacre — where Nixon ordered the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had been demanding those tapes, and the closing of the special prosecutor’s investigation — his approval rating had plunged to 27 percent, which is about where it stayed until Nixon resigned.
Note that it’s less that Biden is falling, more that Warren is rising.
First Read:
Trump starts the impeachment battle with a majority against him
So two things can be true.
One, Americans have been pretty much locked in their partisan corners since November 2016.
“What’s powerful about this poll is what has not changed,” said Bill McInturff, the Republican pollster who co-conducts the NBC/WSJ survey.
And two, Trump starts this impeachment battle — and looks ahead to re-election next year — with 53 percent of the country already against him.
“This is one poll at the beginning,” said Peter Hart, the Democratic half of the NBC/WSJ poll. “And it’s a different starting point than either [Richard] Nixon or [Bill] Clinton had” during their own impeachments.
David Leonhardt/NY Times:
‘Wow. This Letter Is Bananas.’
When reality is inconvenient, reinvent it.
There is no legal or logical basis to President Trump’s claim that the impeachment inquiry is illegitimate.
“Wow. This letter is bananas,” Gregg Nunziata, a lawyer and former Republican staff member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote yesterday, referring to the White House letter announcing it would not cooperate with the inquiry. “A barely-lawyered temper tantrum. A middle finger to Congress and its oversight responsibilities. No Member of Congress should accept it, no matter his or her view on the behavior of Pelosi, Schiff, or Trump.”
The Constitution gives Congress the right to pursue impeachment. And a president inviting foreign interference in American affairs — for personal gain — clearly qualifies as a potential “high crime.”
Bloomberg:
Trump Urged Top Aide to Help Giuliani Client Facing DOJ Charges
President Donald Trump pressed then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to help persuade the Justice Department to drop a criminal case against an Iranian-Turkish gold trader who was a client of Rudy Giuliani, according to three people familiar with the 2017 meeting in the Oval Office.
Tillerson refused, arguing it would constitute interference in an ongoing investigation of the trader, Reza Zarrab, according to the people. They said other participants in the Oval Office were shocked by the request.
More obstruction of justice.