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12 tweets,
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FWIW: My take on Trump-Ukraine is more or less the same as my take on Trump-Russia. Rather than signaling a nefarious subterfuge of global proportions, it is symptomatic of the president’s view that the entirety of his office is an opportunity to transact.
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Trump has things he wants - money, power, leverage. Others, whether Putin or Zelensky or MBS or Xi - have things they want. So do the NRA, the carbon industry, etc etc. In DJT’s worldview, only an idiot would pass up the chance to do deals.
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Like Putin (though for different reasons), DJT sees no distinction between the national interest and his own. For Putin, that’s because he’s drunk the kool-aid. For Trump, it’s because he’s never heard of the national interest. But the outcome is the same: state capture.
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In that respect, Trump-Ukraine and Trump-Russia are indistinguishable from the fact that Pence stayed at Trump’s resort in Ireland, or the military in Scotland, or all the other interests queuing up for a room in a DJT property. I’m sure there’s plenty we don’t know about.
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Apart from being abjectly corrupt and subverting the public interest, this approach makes the entire administration exceedingly vulnerable to manipulation.
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It inserts a logic of personal profit-making that should be entirely foreign to public policy, and it empowers those who can pay.
And it is certainly grounds for impeachment.
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And it is certainly grounds for impeachment.
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But while Trump is at the core of this, we should not kid ourselves that this begins and ends with him and his administration.
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Trumpian transactionalism is the logical outcome of the right’s crusade against government as the provider of public goods.
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Driven by the insistence that government is always a problem and never a solution, privatization and austerity have driven a wedge between the state and the public interest. But they don’t make the state go away.
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Absent a connection with the public interest, the state remains a powerful arbiter of private interests. Unchecked by politicians’ fear of a popular backlash, corruption thrives as never before.
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Fixing this involves more than impeaching DJT, defeating Pence in 2024 and booting the McConnels of the world out of office.
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Fixing this requires both parties to rediscover a positive mission for government, one that makes the state relevant again, worth fighting for an worth defending against enemies - foreign and domestic.
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