The day after the Senate refuses to remove President Trump from office, the headlines could read “Extortionist president wins.” The subheads: Senator-jurors offer various excuses, justifications.” The sidebar: “Senate supporters learned crucial lessons at feet of the master.” Let’s consider the sidebar.
In his first year in office, 2017, Donald Trump made 1,999 false or misleading claims, the Washington Post has reported. In 2018, Trump lied 7,688 more times. In 2019, he added 8,155 more falsehoods to his total. By the third anniversary of his inauguration (you remember — the biggest inauguration crowds EVER!), the total had eclipsed the 16,000 mark.
Can we pause here for a moment, please, to consider that number: over 16,000 lies. No one expects this president to speak facts or tell the truth. What a moment in history.
Moving on.
Prior to Ukraine, the topic of immigration led the Trump pack of lies. Message to the president: Immigrants do not commit more crimes than born-in-America Americans. It’s the other way around. Your wall has not been built, and no, it’s not impenetrable. And yes, you have separated children from parents (and it’s a horrible thing). And no, illegal drugs are not carried by people fleeing torture, violence and despair in Central America seeking refuge here. Ninety percent of imported illegal drugs come through ports of entry.
He routinely lies about, well, almost everything. I gave you the biggest tax cut ever! That’s false but also is a great applause line at his raucous rallies, so why not keep repeating it? He does.
The president also claims at those rallies that “I was the person who saved Pre-existing Conditions in your Healthcare.” Again, he’s lying. None of his proposals require health insurance plans to cover preexisting conditions as the Affordable Care Act specifically does. And he is fighting hard to have Obamacare declared unconstitutional through a case now at the Supreme Court, which has decided to delay its decision until after the election.
As for Ukraine, Trump has lied repeatedly. The whistleblower complaint was wrong, he claims. That’s wrong. And the telephone call with the Ukrainian president, he repeatedly has claimed, was “perfect.” In truth, the phone call and the policy behind it was a shakedown.
Trump attempted to commit extortion, what John Bolton described as a “drug deal.” The president put a gun to the Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky’s head and said, Do what I want — announce an investigation of the Bidens — and if you don’t, well then good luck with the Russians who are invading your country. You won’t get the military aid authorized by Congress unless you do. (By the way, the General Accounting Office determined that withholding those funds violated the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.)
And then Trump tried to cover up his crime: a cover-up that would have succeeded but for the whistleblower.
All administrations lie. Nothing new there. But Trump’s incessant lies are different in kind and degree, made in service of autocracy and demagoguery. That’s dangerous.
In a politically-charged proceeding, such as the impeachment trial, you would expect hyperbole and histrionics. But Trump’s claims and arguments are beyond anything cognizable as political discourse. His normalizing of lying has perverted the political process.
Trump defenders assert that Trump could on his own give Alaska back to Putin, and that wouldn’t be impeachable. And that as long as a president conflates his own personal and political interests with the well-being of the country, he has the power, as Trump says, under Article II of the Constitution, to do whatever he wants. Really, anything he wants. A president can obstruct Congress from performing its most essential constitutional duty to exercise oversight over the Executive Branch — and that’s fine? None of this is impeachable? None of it?
About Bolton. Couldn’t Trump and his minions stop lying for just a moment, stop inventing excuses and just tell the truth? Just for once.
The real reason that Trump boosters have pulled every lever of power to prevent Bolton from testifying is that they have been terrified that he would tell the truth, testify as to what he knew, let the American people hear what Trump said and did. They justifiably have feared that he would name other individuals who could corroborate the facts that prove beyond any doubt his gross abuse of power.
The founders believed that impeachment should function as a ballast to keep the ship of state afloat when a president, as here, has abused the power of his office for personal gain or acted in concert with a foreign power, or both. The founders feared a despotic president but failed to envision a supplicant Senate.
But give Trump his due. He has transformed the Republican Party into a cult of personality. He has accomplished this because he is a master propagandist, a skill that dictators and would-be dictators have honed, including some of the most horrifying ones of the 20th and 21st century, many of whom initially came to power by being elected to office. After the election, the head of state would neuter the legislative branch (or the legislature would neuter itself) and install his own loyal judges who would not interfere with machinations of the executive branch.
Now, 2020 is a tipping point. We have an autocratic president, with enormous political and propaganda machines marching in lockstep with him. The American experiment in democracy that began with a president who could not tell a lie may well end with a president who cannot tell the truth.
Bill Newman is a Northampton-based lawyer and radio-show host. His column appears the first Saturday of the month.