, 17 tweets, 4 min read Read on Twitter
Trump's phone call to Zelensky shows that he believes it's ok to collude with a foreign government to help win an election. When one reads the Mueller Report in this context, it puts his campaign's 2016 openness to Russian assistance in a different, and not better, light. 1/
Also, Trump's own WH staff (including Pompeo?) responded AT THE TIME of the Zelensky call with actions showing they thought something untoward had happened. Why else hide the evidence in a top-secret location only reserved for national security secrets? 2/
The Republicans are trying to muddy the waters by investigating the investigators from 2016, the public servants who received and then acted upon many, independent, and in hindsight totally credible reports of fishy-looking contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians. 3/
As always, the Republicans are trying to have it both ways. They want to say a) it was wrong for the intelligence community to take seriously evidence suggesting a campaign was colluding with a foreign power, and b) it's ok for THE PRESIDENT to collude with a foreign power.
All of this rests upon the reigning Trumpian assumption that procedures are bullsh*t. There is only power, not procedure. Democracies and the rule of law depend upon societies honoring the integrity of procedures, even though they frequently fall short of perfection.
Remember that time Lindsey Graham said "y'all want power, and I sure hope you never get it." As is almost always the case these days with folks like him, it was 100% projection. After all, Graham had zero interest in actually investigating the credible claims against Kavanaugh.
As Lindsey himself rightly observed in May of 2016 (in a tweet that he still has not deleted), Trump poses an existential threat to the GOP, and presumably also the republic. How quickly the temptations of power distort one's judgment.
If the people who wrote the Constitution agreed on one thing, it was that power corrupts & that a republic must safeguard against such corruption. How ironic that a GOP that fetishizes "originalist" judges has forgotten the principle most dear to their beloved founders.
I'd also add that this power/procedure binary applies in the realm of the media as well. Conservative media has largely abandoned all respect for the procedures the journalistic profession has developed to ensure that their work is as accurate as possible.
Whether it be Uranium One, Seth Rich, Crowdstrike, Pizzagate, Benghazi or [fill in the blanks]; Fox and it's imitators regularly run stories that have been debunked innumerable times. They know better. But in the name of "both sides/just asking questions" they run w/ it anyway.
The GOP take on media is that it's 100% about power. The "liberal" media tells stories that support their will to power, and thus it's cool for the "conservative" media to do the same thing. "There is no truth, only power" these self-proclaimed defenders of "Western Civ" say.
Did some rando in their PJ's in a basement make up this story (or some teenager in Macedonia), or did a journalist spend months filing FOIA requests and interviewing hundreds of people? Meh, same diff say the people so concerned about "ideological brainwashing" by professors.
I understand why overworked and under-resourced rank and file Republicans who've never met a journalist or a professor buy this crap. I'm not excusing it, but I understand it. But the people in the media and politics who know what they're doing should feel shame, great shame.
Shame, it turns out, is a really useful emotion in a democracy. It prevents people in power from abusing that power for fear they will be found out. Once an entire party loses that ability to feel shame, it becomes an existential threat to constitutional democracy.
I'll let 2016 Lindsey have the last word here.
As I was saying about people in power who have no sense of shame...
Just so we're clear, Trump's very wealthy defenders would rather provoke a 2nd Civil War (that would result in bloodshed and massive civil and economic disruption) than have the president be held accountable through constitutionally mandated procedures.
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