More and more thinkers and writers are seeing the threat that is Donald Trump, and many are starting to pick up the idea that dishonest support for this wacko is not in the longer term best interest of the Rethug party. And, of course, blind support of this nutjob in the face of evidence of his corruption and nuttiness will damage Rethugs at all levels in the 2020 election.
And now, we aren’t talking about criticisms from the left, any more. Or even never Trumpers.
There is the American Conservative on anther Diary, calling for impeachment
www.dailykos.com/…
There is a senior editor at Reason Magazine discussing the Rethug gaslighting of the impeachment evidence
IMPEACHMENT
Trump's Congressional Defenders Deny Reality
While the president’s motives in seeking Ukrainian investigations are a matter of dispute, his actions are clear from the public record.
During Monday's impeachment hearing, Republican lawyer Stephen Castor denied that Donald Trump had asked his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading contender to oppose Trump in next year's election. "I don't think the record supports that," Castor said.
That jaw-dropping moment starkly illustrated the lengths to which Republicans have gone in rebutting the charge that Trump abused his powers for personal gain. The president's defenders have repeatedly contested well-established facts in a way that makes fair-minded nonpartisans despair of having an impeachment debate based on a shared understanding of reality.
Meanwhile from a more liberal viewpoint, but still pretty jaw-dropping, a Vox piece on the sheer nuttiness of Trump’s most recent campaign rally, in Hershey.
www.vox.com/…
Trump’s speech in Hershey revealed a presidency off the rails
It was one of his ugliest rallies yet — and put the stakes of 2020 in sharp relief.
As House Democrats prepare to vote on articles of impeachment related to his alleged abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, President Donald Trump gave a speech at a campaign rally on Tuesday night in Hershey, Pennsylvania, that highlighted many of the reasons people feel that the country will struggle to withstand another year of this — even in the likely event that the Senate doesn’t end up removing him from office.
Over the course of a more than 90-minute delivery, Trump pushed conspiracy theories and blatant lies, trashed law enforcement officials that aren’t blindly loyal to him, exhibited thuggish tendencies toward protesters, made misogynistic remarks, and demonstrated that he fundamentally misunderstands the Constitution.
It was one of his most troubling performances in recent memory and served as a stark illustration of just how ugly Trump’s reelection campaign will be. As the president, Trump has access to information and briefings from some of the world’s top intelligence professionals. And yet he can’t seem to stop himself from spreading rumor and innuendo in an effort to demean his political foes.
During a portion of his speech on Tuesday in which he demeaned both the FBI rank-and-file and bureau leadership..
Trump described the whistleblower complaint that initially sounded the alarm about his dealings with Ukraine as incorrect, despite the fact that every key allegation in it has been corroborated. As his speech wound down, Trump proclaimed “we support, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” But earlier in the speech he described Democrats’ efforts to follow the impeachment process as specified in that very same Constitution as an attempt to “overthrow our democracy.”
Many more examples of ugliness from just Trump’s speech in Hershey could be cited. He sensationalized crimes committed by undocumented immigrants in gory detail — “last summer at least 19 illegal aliens were charged in connection with grisly homicides, including hacking victims to death and ripping out, in two cases, their hearts,” he said — and made a variety of false accusations against Democrats, including that they want “to get rid of religion” and support infanticide. He also expressed his usual tragicomical level of ignorance about how wind energy works.
In a sense, there is good news in Trump’s behavior in Hershey:
-- A stock Trump rally filled with hate and lies may play to his narrowest base, but will throw off independents and non-base Republicans who want an actual America back.
--I go back to my concept of a Trumpian feedback loop. Will a Trump with no effective advisers who can rein him in, and subject to expanding criticism + impeachment, do anything but get worse? Will he understand, at all, how he needs to behave in order to attract anyone who isn’t already in his base? Will he be able to adequately handle normal aspects of a presidential campaign, like debates and interviews? I cannot see how. Very simply, Trump getting worse and worse is going to scare a lot of people away from him.
--Based upon the same idea, I expect that we will see many more behaviors from Trump that are simply based upon rage, irrationality, revenge, and ideas of how to behave that would be immature in a six-year-old.
And, on the Dem side, he is generating scripts for the left that will display dazzlingly in ads, campaigns, town halls and debates.
And from Dana Milbank at WaPo:
www.washingtonpost.com/...
The truth finally gains ground on a lie
It’s often said that a lie can travel halfway across the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. But the truth gained ground this week. For two years, Trump and his defenders howled about a politically motivated FBI spying on his campaign. This week, the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded no such thing occurred. And while Attorney General Bill Barr continued to assert the fiction, FBI Director Christopher Wray bravely spoke out, calling Trump’s “deep state” conspiracy theory an “affront” and saying the FBI has “no information” implicating Ukraine in election interference — a key element of Republicans’ impeachment defense. (Wray’s truth-telling earned a presidential attack on Twitter.)
Now Trump is launching similar smears against impeachment investigators. He threatened the “totally corrupt” Schiff on Tuesday, saying Schiff will “have to answer” for “committing this fraud.”
The best response to a big lie is to repeat the simple truth — and that’s what Pelosi and her chairmen did Tuesday. The rollout was a bit clumsy: Pelosi seemed momentarily to forget the name of Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.), and Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) wandered in 10 minutes late.
But Democrats were disciplined — the articles didn’t leak — and succinct as they summarized “Trump’s efforts to solicit foreign interference in the 2020 elections,” which “compromised our national security and threatened the integrity of our elections.” Both articles mention that Trump’s offenses are “consistent with” previous behavior, without mentioning the Mueller findings.
That’s as it should be, for the evidence in the Ukraine case is stark. As Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) summarized Monday, investigators learned that Trump: sent Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine for dirt on Joe Biden; directed two ambassadors to work with Giuliani; fired an anticorruption ambassador to Ukraine; told Vice President Pence not to go to the Ukrainian inauguration; had his staff chief withhold Ukraine’s military assistance; refused a White House meeting with Ukraine’s president; ignored his advisers’ anti-corruption talking points; asked the Ukrainian president for “a favor” and for an investigation into opponent Biden; confirmed it publicly; asked China to do the same; and blocked investigators from learning more.
How do Trump and the Rethugs rebound from all of this? It seems pretty clear that they can’t.