Donald Trump and his demented mind syndrome

Trump’s Brazen and Breathtaking Defense
The former President claims that if he just calls a document personal—whether it plausibly is or is not—no one can even question him about it, published in The New Yorker, by Amy Davidson Sorkin.

At the Heart of the Documents Case: Trump’s Attachment to His Boxes. The former president has long stowed papers and odds and ends in cartons that he liked to keep close. His aides called it the “beautiful mind” material*, reported in The New York Times. Secret government documents were found strewed on the floor in a room at Mar-A-Lago. (Maine Writer- In my opinion, tRump's hoarding of papers is more like trying to describe a demented and irrational mind syndrome.)

The former guy Donald Trump seems to collect people who push extreme legal theories, and in the days before January 6, 2021, a number of them were swarming around Vice-President Mike Pence.

Their big idea was that Pence could use his position presiding over a joint session of Congress to toss out the electoral votes of several states—and that to do so would be totally constitutional. 

To Pence, it didn’t add up. The American Revolution had been fought to get rid of a king, he wrote in his memoir: “The last thing the framers of the Constitution would have intended would be to confer unchecked authority on one individual.”

Trump has a different view. He made that clear, after appearing in federal court in Miami for his arraignment on thirty-one felony charges of unauthorized retention of documents “relating to the national defense,” in violation of the Espionage Act of 1917, and six additional felony charges alleging that he conspired to obstruct justice, and concealed and lied about the documents. (The Espionage Act, despite its name, is not confined to spying and is often used in cases involving government secrets.) 

In fact, the indictment was brought by the special counsel Jack Smith. Many of the documents were marked classified; many were kept in cardboard boxes that were moved around among a ballroom, a bathroom, and a closet at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. He pleaded not guilty, calling the indictment “the Boxes Hoax,” and blaming it on President Biden and “his closest thugs, misfits, and Marxists.” 

Unbelievably, the root cause of the hoax, to Trump’s delusional mind, is the prosecutors’ unwillingness to acknowledge the power of Trump.

“The President enjoys unconstrained authority to make decisions regarding disposal of documents,” he told supporters at his Bedminster golf club, hours after his arraignment. By way of explanation for this assertion of power, which would go well beyond a President’s ability to classify and declassify documents, he gave a garbled rendition of a 2010 lawsuit in which Judicial Watch, a conservative activist group, sued the National Archives and Records Administration (nara) in an attempt to force it to gain possession of audiocassettes of Bill Clinton speaking with a historian while he was President, which he had kept. (Trump calls this “the Clinton Socks Case,” because the cassettes were kept for a time in Clinton’s sock drawer; Socks was also the name of the Clintons’ cat, who was not involved.) The case wasn’t about classified materials but about the distinction between personal and Presidential records, and the extent to which the Presidential Records Act allows the President to draw that line. The judge ruled against Judicial Watch.

One would think that this decision—which involved very different circumstances, was limited in scope, and never reached the Supreme Court—would not be of much use to Trump. How could he assert that documents marked “Top Secret” which concerned the “military capabilities of a foreign country” (cited in count seventeen of the indictment) or “nuclear capabilities” (count five) are personal records❗❓😖 Those documents were generated by other executive agencies, according to the indictment, and not during a cozy conversation with a historian.

Trump’s answer is brazen and breathtaking: he claims that if he just calls a document personal—whether it plausibly is or is not—no one can even question him about it. “Whatever documents a President decides to take with him, he has the right,” Trump said. “It’s an absolute right. This is the law.” 

It is not the law, and it would be absurd to think that the P.R.A., (Presidential Records Act) which was enacted after Watergate precisely to limit a President’s ability to hold on to official records, is actually a license to loot. By his own reasoning, Trump could take the original parchment Constitution, stash it in one of his boxes, and walk away with it.

Trump seemed to expect that the Bedminster crowd would cheer his boasts about having the power to, in effect, lie to National Archives and Records Administration (NRA) and to the country, and many people did. In polls, he leads the field for the G.O.P. Presidential nomination by a margin that has only grown wider since his previous indictment, in April, in New York, on state charges related to an alleged hush-money payment. (Trump pleaded not guilty.) Primary season is looking to take the form of a legal demolition derby, with another indictment expected soon in Georgia, this one involving alleged efforts by Trump to overturn the 2020 election results; Smith may also be working on additional federal charges against Trump, related to January 6th. The cases may not be resolved by Election Day, 2024. A felony conviction would not preclude Trump’s becoming the president again.

The question of Presidential power does factor into the documents case. Smith may have turned to the Espionage Act in part because, perhaps surprisingly, a prosecutor does not need to show that national-defense information held without authorization was ever classified—thus avoiding a fight over which of the documents are still classified. (According to the indictment, there are recordings of Trump saying that a number of them were not declassified.) The statute itself is disturbingly vague as to what a prosecutor does need to show, beyond that a defendant should have been aware that such information “could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Also, according to current case law, it should be closely held by the government.

Trump’s retention of the documents and his careless storage of them—in a club that hosted thousands of guests—appear to easily clear the bar for an Espionage Act conviction. (The obstruction-related charges also look strong: Trump does not seem to have been subtle in his box-shuffling scheme.) But it is true that the Espionage Act bar is low, and, as a result, the law has been abused, before and after various amendments. It was the means of prosecuting pacifists during the First World War; Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, and died last week; and Reality Winner, a National Security Agency translator who leaked a single classified report about Russian election interference in 2018—during the Trump Administration. She was sentenced to more than five years in prison.

Trump’s trials thus may offer an opportunity to think about how we police secrecy. At the same time, Trump is already pushing his supporters to accept a dangerous interpretation of Presidential power—and of his personal power, which in his mind may be the same thing. We appear to be headed toward a period in American politics that is particularly unconstrained and unchecked, in ways that the Framers, as Pence would put it, might never have intended but would certainly have feared. 

Published in the print edition of the June 26, 2023, issue, with the headline “Unchecked Boxes.”

*A Beautiful Mind, is a reference to the title of a book and movie depicting the life of John F. Nash Jr., the mathematician with schizophrenia played in the film by Russell Crowe, who covered his office with newspaper clippings, believing they held a Russian code he needed to crack.

Saint Anselm College in Manchester New Hampshire was the back drop for Trump gun culture

Maine Writer:  As a Roman Catholic woman, the misuse of Saint Anselm College in Manchester New Hampshire, used as the venue for Donald Trump to spread his gun culture lies, is an example about how Catholicism continues erode the faith's responsibility to support moral leadership.

This essay is a salient exposure of the Saint Anselm's political misstep:

Guns, Trump, and Republicans: The GOP's right’s push to loosen restrictions is resulting in a judicial and legislative free-for-all that is intersecting, disastrously, with the 2024, U.S. presidential race. By Amy Davidson Sorkin published in The New Yorker.

Illustration in The New Yorker by João Fazenda

Some visions of how to live well in America are inextricably linked to owning a gun. Donald Trump certainly took that view recently, in a CNN town hall at Saint Anselm College, in New Hampshire, before an audience of Republicans and independents. 

Indeed, Trump presented guns as necessary for survival in a dark and violent landscape. “Remember, we have seven hundred million guns—seven hundred million. Many people, if they don’t have a gun, they’re not going to be very safe,” he said. “Many of them would not be alive today.” He condemned Chicago and New York for having tight gun restrictions, praised Brazil for loosening its laws, and called for arming teachers, many of whom, he claimed, are “soldiers, ex-soldiers, ex-policemen” who “really understand weapons.”

Trump’s presentation at Saint Anselm's was so riddled with falsehoods that it hardly registered that his seven-hundred-million figure was wrong. The actual number of guns in the United States is estimated to be close to four hundred million (more than ninety-five per cent of which are in civilian hands). Nevertheless, it’s still a huge number—the U.S. has both more guns and more gun deaths per capita than any other wealthy nation, according to the gun-safety advocacy group Giffords. 

One in every three firearm suicides on the planet occurs in this country.

Yet, in the town hall, when a member of the Saint Anselm College Republicans questioned Trump on the subject, the student asked not about stopping gun violence, but about his concern that, with all the gun violence and mass shootings in the news, politicians would act to “repress gun rights.” 

Moreover, the questioner also wanted to know how Trump would “restore rights that have been taken from us.” It was, oddly enough, one of the few moments when Trump appeared defensive, because the student seemed discontent with his decision, after a shooter killed fifty-eight people in Las Vegas, in 2017, to ban bump stocks, which can effectively allow semi-automatic firearms (which are readily available) to act like machine guns (the purchase of which is very highly restricted). 

Trump replied that he was aligned with the N.R.A. on bump stocks; in fact, the N.R.A. said that it was “disappointed” by the ban.

The exchange captured a number of factors that are converging to make this a particularly critical moment in the story of guns in America. One is judicial: New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc., et al. v. Bruen, the Supreme Court decision from last summer that struck down New York’s permit requirements for carrying a concealed handgun, has set off a stream of litigation. The majority opinion, written by Clarence Thomas, holds that courts, when looking at gun laws, should begin by presuming that “ordinary, law abiding citizens” basically have the right to own whatever guns they want and to carry them wherever they choose. The burden would then be on the government to show that any limits on that right comport with Thomas’s highly selective sense of the nation’s “historical tradition.” Stephen Breyer, in a dissent, suggested that even the Justices in the majority might not know what laws could survive under the new standard. It’s looking like he was right.

For example, the Saint Anselm student may not need to worry much longer about anyone being deprived of a bump stock. In January, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the ban was unlawful—a decision that the Biden Administration is appealing to the Supreme Court—and the Sixth Circuit did the same last month. And, a few weeks ago, a district-court judge in Virginia, citing Bruen, threw out a federal minimum-age requirement of twenty-one to buy handguns, which would make it legal for people as young as eighteen to do so; several similar cases are being heard.

Gun-rights advocates have also been pressing for new laws to make it easier to be armed. The result is a judicial and legislative free-for-all, that is intersecting, disastrously, with the 2024, Presidential race. Last month, Governor Ron DeSantis, of Florida, who announced his campaign for the Republican nomination, signed a bill allowing most adults to carry concealed guns without a state permit. (Twenty-six other states now have similar laws.) “You don’t need a permission slip from the government to be able to exercise your constitutional rights,” DeSantis said, according to Politico. He was speaking at Adventure Outdoors, in Smyrna, Georgia, an establishment that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution described as a “firearms superstore.” Georgia, of course, will be a battleground state in 2024. But even that reckless posturing wasn’t good enough for some gun advocates in Florida, who complained that DeSantis hadn’t done away with restrictions on openly brandishing a weapon.

The internal dynamics of the G.O.P. appear to be pushing Presidential contenders to increasingly extreme positions. Not that most of them need much prodding on guns: former Vice-President Mike Pence, who has indicated that he is considering running, has long been something of a Second Amendment fundamentalist. 

Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and a declared candidate, recently said that focusing on guns as a means to reduce gun violence was “lazy.” And, as the town hall demonstrated, even Trump is not exempt from the pressure. The Bruen decision is part of his legacy—he appointed three of the six Justices who signed the majority opinion. From the perspective of Republican activists, expanding on that victory is now his task, or that of whoever else wants to be President.

Yet there may be a parallel here to the right’s overreach on abortion since Roe v. Wade was overturned. There is widespread revulsion at mass violence and the toll that it takes, particularly on children. 

A Gallup poll a few months ago showed that, although most G.O.P. voters don’t want stricter gun laws, a majority don’t want looser ones, either. In a number of blue states, there are efforts under way to pass gun-safety laws that supporters hope will pass scrutiny under Bruen. On Tuesday, for instance, Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland, signed legislation restricting the places where people can bring guns—not to schools, hospitals, or polling stations. (The same day, the N.R.A. sued to block the law.)

In contrast, Jim Justice, the Republican governor of West Virginia, signed a “campus carry” bill in March that not only allows guns for those with permits on college and university grounds but directs administrators to provide gun-storage units in dorms. The gun-law terrain has rarely been more unsettled. What makes the impending fight over gun safety, amid an election, all the more hazardous is Trumpism itself, with its incessant invocation of the prospect of political violence, and its message for America: if you want to make your way in this country, make sure that you have a gun.

Preponderance of evidence against Trump guilty of conspiracy to defraud the US

What Donald Trump’s Trial Might Look Like- Echo essay published in The New Yorker by Amy Davidson Sorkin.

Presidents have been impeached, but none has ever been asked, after leaving office, to turn himself in for arraignment. The January 6th committee’s final actions could help to change that.

On October 14th, the day after the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol voted to subpoena Donald Trump, in response, released a long letter of “anger, disappointment, and complaint.” 

He said, the committee had “perpetuated a Show Trial the likes of which this Country has never seen before,” with “no Due Process, no Cross-Examination, no ‘real’ Republican members, and no legitimacy.” (And, he added, it got “very poor television ratings.”) The committee, of course, was not staging any sort of trial; it was conducting an inquiry into a series of events that culminated in Congress members fleeing a mob. But at its final public meeting, on December 19th, it voted to send criminal referrals to the Department of Justice regarding four felonies that Trump might have committed. If he wants a proper trial, the committee may have helped him to get one.

This photograph gets my vote for being the best in her career! House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rips a copy of President Donald Trump's State of the Union address at the Capitol on Feb. 4, 2020.

One of the referrals is for violating a statute in the U.S. criminal code that deals with inciting, assisting, or giving aid or comfort to an insurrection. The others are for obstruction of an official proceeding (namely, the counting of electoral votes), conspiracy to defraud the United States, and conspiracy to make a false statement. Referrals like these do not oblige the D.O.J. to begin a prosecution, or to pursue the exact charges that they specify. Initially, those choices lie with Jack Smith, who, in November, was named special counsel for the department’s investigation into January 6th, with a focus on Trump. (His remit also includes the question of whether Trump improperly kept classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.) If Smith recommends that Trump be charged, Attorney General Merrick Garland would have to sign off, and a grand jury would have to approve an indictment.

There is no exact model for what such a trial might look like. Presidents have been impeached, but none has ever been asked, after leaving office, to turn himself in for arraignment, with the prospect of arrest if he failed to comply. No judge has had to consider the question of cash bail for a billionaire who once lived in the White House, or asked the former head of state to turn over his passport. The voir dire of potential jurors would be an unprecedented spectacle; so would the mug shot.

Trump, however, would not be alone in facing trial as a result of January 6th. The D.O.J. has charged some nine hundred defendants, and has successfully prosecuted several members of the Oath Keepers on charges that match or parallel some of those in the committee’s referral. Trump, unlike the Oath Keepers, did not enter the Capitol on January 6th. 

From the White House, though, to take one example from an executive summary of the committee’s final report, he “repeatedly and unlawfully pressured” Vice-President Mike Pence to reject several states’ electoral votes in favor of fraudulent ones. (John Eastman, the former law professor who helped Trump devise what became known as the “fake electors” scheme, was the subject of committee referrals, too.)

The committee’s nine members—including the Republicans Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger—ran a tightly managed process. In televised hearings, they were able to play the snippets of videotaped testimony that they judged most effective. Prosecutors at trial, by contrast, have to deal with the live testimony of the witnesses before them. The rules of discovery mean that Trump’s lawyers would have access to full transcripts of depositions and to any exculpatory material the prosecutors possess. Evidentiary disputes, such as the one over whether Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony that a Secret Service agent told her about an altercation in a Presidential vehicle counted as inadmissible hearsay, would be addressed not by tweets but by litigation. Another point of contention would be whether Trump knew that he’d lost the election and was thus acting corruptly. Witnesses such as Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, and Greg Jacob, Pence’s counsel, could speak to that. But Trump could call witnesses, too—and prosecutors could cross-examine them. He would also get to decide whether to take the stand himself, a decision in which his vanity would surely be a factor.

Trump has made many frivolous claims of executive privilege, including one, involving a document request from the January 6th committee, that the Supreme Court rejected. A trial would no doubt bring new objections and appeals, some of which might be more substantive. All of this would take time, and the first Republican primaries for 2024 are fast approaching. An indictment and a trial would not legally bar Trump from running for President again. (Indeed, any attempt to block him from office if he’s convicted would face what are almost certainly insurmountable constitutional challenges.) And whoever is sworn in as President in January, 2025, would have the option of pardoning Trump.

But a Presidential pardon would be limited to federal crimes. The first indictment of Trump related to January 6th may come at the state level, in Fulton County, Georgia, where District Attorney Fani Willis appears to be in the late stages of her own investigation. Willis has a repertoire of Georgia laws to draw on, including a statute on criminal solicitation of election fraud, which would seem to describe the phone call in which Trump demanded that Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find” him more than eleven thousand votes. A special grand jury has been sitting for months, and has heard testimony from a range of witnesses, including Governor Brian Kemp. Georgia would likely be the focus of any federal trial as well, because the Trump team’s attempts to overturn the election there were especially blatant. In addition to the Raffensperger call, which was recorded, the effort to advance the fake-elector scheme in Georgia left a rich paper trail. Incidentally, Georgia trials, unlike federal ones, can be televised.

Trials inevitably have uncontrollable aspects, even when the defendants are more predictable than Trump. They are rightly harder and riskier for prosecutors than hearings are for members of Congress. What’s at stake for Trump is his freedom, not just his television ratings: the charges that the January 6th committee referred carry sentences of up to twenty years in prison. But the adversarial nature of the process can be highly productive. The committee came up with a good deal of evidence; a trial is where it can be tested. ♦

Published in the print edition of the January 2 & 9, 2023, issue, with the headline “Trump on Trial?.”

Paasleeeze! Vote Blue in 2022: Prevent the contagious Trumpitis danger

The G.O.P.’s Race to the cult leader's "Grumpy Old Party".

Echo essay by Amy Davidson Sorkin published in The New Yorker.

Out-Trump the Trumpists - The midterm elections are approaching, and the Republican Party is heading into them with the former president as its Trumposity cult leader.

Anyone in need of a warning about what the 2022, midterm elections could bring might consider what took place last month at a candidates’ forum sponsored by the Republican Women of Coffee County, Alabama. Katie Britt, a contender for the Republican nomination to replace Senator Richard Shelby, who is retiring, was asked if she had supported Roy Moore in the 2017, special Senate election. 

Moore is the (stupid!) Constitution-defying judge who was accused of sexually pursuing teen-age girls; he denied the allegations, but lost to the Democratic candidate, Doug Jones. “I have never supported or voted for a Democrat in my life,” Britt said, but added, “I also think it’s important to stand with women.” That hedged response appeared to provoke the next candidate to speak, Representative Mo Brooks, who accused her of lacking party loyalty. “We are a team,” he said. “We have a belief system.”

What was most notable in this exchange was Britt’s reply: she accused Brooks of being the disloyal one. “Every single time, I voted for Donald Trump, and stood with him,” she said. “That wasn’t the step you took.” During the 2016, Presidential primaries, Brooks initially supported Senator Ted Cruz. (hypocrisy 101 encore!)

But, the congressman is now best known for the speech he gave at Trump’s January 6th Save America rally, in which he told the crowd that the time had come for “kicking ass.” At a more recent Trump rally, he warned of “godless, evil, amoral socialist Democrats.” Trump has enthusiastically endorsed Brooks, and has derided Britt, who once served as Shelby’s chief of staff, as an unqualified “assistant” to a “rino.” Britt has the backing of Alabama’s business establishment, yet she apparently thought that her best move was to try to out-Trump an unapologetic insurrectionist.

She’s not the only one. Earlier this month, Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, a purported establishment figure who, at eighty-eight, is running for an eighth term, came onstage at a Trump rally in Des Moines. “If I didn’t accept the endorsement of a person that’s got ninety-one per cent of the Republican voters in Iowa, I wouldn’t be too smart,” Grassley said, grinning. The number he cited came from a Des Moines Register poll, which also found that Trump’s favorability rating was forty-eight per cent among Iowa independents. 

A CNN poll last month indicated that, nationally, seventy-eight per cent of Republicans believe that Joe Biden was not legitimately elected President. Increasingly, they seem to expect their party’s candidates to agree.

With the Senate divided fifty-fifty, just to maintain a status quo in which Biden’s agenda depends on the whims of Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, and Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, Democrats need to concentrate on holding on to Mark Kelly’s seat, in Arizona, and to Raphael Warnock’s, in Georgia. (Both men won in special elections, and are seen as vulnerable.) Or they need to pick up seats, perhaps in North Carolina or Pennsylvania, where the incumbents are retiring, or in Florida, where Representative Val Demings is challenging Marco Rubio. In the House, the Democrats’ margin is just eight seats, and midterm voters tend to turn against the party of the incumbent President. At the moment, Biden’s approval rating has dropped to forty-three per cent. The task for Democrats could hardly be more crucial: so much depends on so few seats—including, possibly, another Supreme Court appointment.

Yet, the numbers aren’t all that matters. Even if the Democrats hold the Senate, the dynamic there will change for the worse if their Republican counterparts are more Trumpist—more conspiracy-minded, more jingoistic, more convinced that the people on the other side of the aisle are godless, evil, amoral socialists. Such a caucus would be even more likely to engage in reckless acts of obstruction and conflict. The effect would almost certainly be more exaggerated in the House, where the Marjorie Taylor Greene contingent will likely grow.  As the average level of extremism in Congress rises, it becomes harder to tell true believers from opportunists. The former President, banished from Twitter, can appear marginalized, yet the G.O.P. is heading into the midterms with Trump as its leader.

Earlier this year, when Trump began talking about handing out endorsements, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, said that he would push back if he thought that Trump’s choices would cost the G.O.P. seats. Last month though, McConnell told Politico, “I don’t believe they’re troubling.” (The exception appears to be in Alaska, where Trump’s effort to bring down Lisa Murkowski hasn’t gained traction.) McConnell was seemingly content with Brooks, and with Trump’s endorsement of Herschel Walker, the former football player with a tumultuous business and personal life who has promoted election-fraud conspiracy theories and will challenge Warnock, in Georgia. “There’s every indication he’s going to be a good candidate,” McConnell said. Whether he would be a good senator didn’t seem to matter.

In Pennsylvania, Trump has endorsed Sean Parnell, a retired Army captain who has written several military-themed books (“Outlaw Platoon,” “Left for Dead”), joined a lawsuit in his state to get mail-in ballots thrown out, and is in the middle of a contentious divorce. 

Parnell's main primary opponent, Carla Sands, was a Trump donor and his Ambassador to Denmark; she got into trouble for posting pro-Trump tweets on her government account, a Hatch Act violation.

There are similar stories in other states. This past spring, Trump pressured Mark Brnovich, the Arizona attorney general, who is challenging Kelly, to “get on the ball” in backing an audit of the 2020, vote in Maricopa County, and he did. (The results, released last month, actually increased Biden’s margin of victory.) 

Nevertheless, one of his rivals, Blake Masters, who is backed by Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire, is attacking him for not doing more for Trump.

Trump, meanwhile, has endorsed Mark Finchem, a state legislator at times associated with QAnon, in the race for Arizona’s secretary of state. (He pointed out Finchem in the audience at the rally in Des Moines.) Trump’s attentiveness to a race for a state election official is unsettling, given the pressure he exerted on such officials to shift results in his favor in 2020. The (cultist!) Republican leaders who defer to his preferences and echo his delusions now are building the scaffolding for his own next campaign. The nomination, at least, appears to be his for the taking. Ahead of 2022, G.O.P. candidates are scrambling for Trump’s endorsement. 

In 2024, the evil Trumposity cult leader could be demanding theirs.

Published in the print edition of the October 25, 2021, The New Yorker issue, with the headline “Who’s the Trumpiest?.”

Maine Writer P.S.- After all, "trumpitis" is dangerous and highly contagious!

Republicans have no right to ignore a Donald Trump driven Constitutional crisis.

Donald Trump has a peculiar view about what he calls “rights,” which he seems to conflate with any power, mechanism, or maneuver that will allow him to avoid legal jeopardy. 

Will Republicans Challenge Trump on Impeachment?

A crucial question in the mounting drama is how Republicans in the House and the Senate will shape the process.
By Amy Davidson Sorkin published in The New Yorker

In (another chaotic) letter sent last Tuesday to Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, and to several committee chairs, Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, said that Trump would not comply with requests from the House’s impeachment inquiry, owing to his duty to “preserve the rights” of future Presidents.

Trump wrongly claimed that the inquiry itself is unconstitutional, (the letter charged)—although the Constitution expressly gives the House the right to conduct it. Moreover, Trump said that he would consider coöperating only “if they give us our rights,” echoing a previous Tweet, in which he said that he couldn’t let a key witness, Gordon Sondland, the U. S. Ambassador to the European Union, be deposed by congressional investigators because he “would be testifying before a totally compromised kangaroo court, where Republican’s rights have been taken away.”

By “Republican’s rights,” the Trump may just be referring to himself and to his grand delusion that he has unmatched prerogatives. If he thinks that his party can simply halt all investigations into his behavior, that’s wrong, too—wrong even if the Republicans had a majority in the House, and even though they do have a majority in the Senate. Republicans in both chambers are entitled to shape the process. They can, of course, defend Trump, but they can also question and confront him. One of the crucial issues in the impeachment drama is whether they will do so.

They might start by objecting to Donald Trump (acting like a president) asking a foreign leader to investigate the family of one of his opponents. Trump has more or less bragged about doing that in a phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky, of Ukraine, regarding Joe Biden and the business dealings of his son Hunter.

Instead, congressional Republicans have either remained silent or tried to show that it’s the Democrats who are at fault. Kevin McCarthy, (IMO- he must be related to the notorious Joseph McCarthy, founder of McCarthyism) the House Minority Leader, said on “Fox and Friends” that “more people in America want to investigate what Biden has done with his son than want to impeach this President.” Actually, a Fox News survey last week showed that fifty-one per cent of voters think that Trump should be “impeached and removed” from office.

(Trump tweeted, in response, “Whoever their Pollster is, they suck.”) 

If articles of impeachment are passed, which seems increasingly likely, it will take sixty-seven votes in the Senate to convict Trump, which means that at least twenty of the fifty-three Republicans will have to walk away from him. That number still seems distant. The Washington Post keeps a tally: as of last week, no Republican senators publicly supported impeachment, thirty-nine were unequivocally behind Trump (for example, calling the investigation a “witch hunt”), and only fourteen expressed some concern about the allegations. Mitt Romney, of Utah, has been the most critical; Ben Sasse, of Nebraska, who has broken with the President before, said that some aspects of Trump’s call with Zelensky are “terrible,” but also that the House investigation is a “partisan clown show.”

Yet, in the same week, Republicans were as openly angry with Trump as they have ever been when he announced, after a phone call with the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, that the United States would step aside as Turkey launched a military offensive in northern Syria. The move was seen by many in both parties as a betrayal of Kurdish militias that have been a valuable partner in the fight against isis, but have long been targeted by Turkey. Air strikes began within days of the announcement. Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, ping-ponged between saying that the Administration had “shamelessly abandoned” the Kurds and pledging to hold a hearing to allow Rudy Giuliani, the President’s volatile lawyer, to lay out his conspiracy theories related to Ukraine. Two days later, two of Giuliani’s associates were arrested on criminal charges alleging that they had tried to funnel foreign money into American election campaigns.

It’s as though any dissent on matters of policy requires a greater show of loyalty on impeachment. In this, the Republicans’ intended audience is not only Trump, but his electoral base. Senator Mitch McConnell, who is up for reëlection next year, sharply criticized Trump’s decision on Syria, but also ran an online campaign ad in which he claimed that impeachment is proceeding because “a left-wing mob” has Pelosi in its clutches. 

This campaign is horrible, McConnell has already made a wrong minded judgement: “The way that impeachment stops” is with “a Senate majority, with me as majority leader,” McConnell said. “But I need your help: please contribute before the deadline!”

Trump relies on the appearance of a united party to validate his ever more corrosive policies—and his tirades—with voters. If that unity falters, things could move quickly. Yet what’s remarkable is that more Republican senators who are not facing reëlection, or are secure in their seats, have not spoken out as a matter of principle. Some may be boxed in by positions they staked out earlier in Trump’s Presidency. In the course of the Mueller investigation, many congressional Republicans demanded that the Justice Department aggressively investigate the investigation’s origins, which, they suggested, would show that Trump had been wronged. Did they know that this pursuit might take the form of Trump’s asking Zelensky for “a favor” regarding a phantom Democratic Party server, or Attorney General William Barr’s playing detective in Rome and London? Probably not, but, with Trump, they had good reason to fear something extreme.

That experience should be a warning to Republicans defending Trump at a time when the full extent of his recklessness is only just being revealed. His refusal to participate won’t put an end to the impeachment inquiry; it will only initiate more fights about subpoenas and witnesses, defiance of court orders, and obstruction of justice. This will all go to the heart of Congress’s right to conduct oversight, and may provide separate grounds for impeachment. (One of the draft articles of impeachment in Watergate concerned Richard Nixon’s failure to honor subpoenas.) Trump has already referred to the impeachment inquiry as a coup. This is not a moment for Republican legislators to stand by and watch as a constitutional crisis unfolds. That is something they have no right to do. 

♦This article appears in the print edition of the October 21, 2019, issue, with the headline “Party on the Line.”

Asylum seekers are in compliance with the law

Countering Trump at the Border: Echo opinion by Amy Davidson Sorkin* published in The New Yorker 

A fair approach to the migrants’ situation would begin with recognizing that a person seeking asylum has a right to be heard

Donald Trump has always had an odd idea of what constitutes strength. 

Illustration by João Fazenda

This was evident again last week, when, a day after U.S. Border Patrol agents fired tear gas at a crowd of Central American migrants, as some tried to rush across the border from Tijuana, he boasted about the incident at a rally. “Frankly, if we didn’t show them strength and a strong border,” he said, “you would have hundreds of thousands of people pouring into our country.” Strength is a display, in other words, meant to demoralize the vulnerable. “We are doing a job,” Trump added. “We’re doing what’s right.”

He was wrong on both counts. 

It is not a President’s job to try to renounce a law that promises even undocumented people already in this country an opportunity to apply for asylum, as Trump did, until a federal district court temporarily stopped him. And it is not right to approach the issue of immigration, as Trump has done, with an indifference to human tragedy, cavalier threats to use lethal force and to close the border, and a zeal to divide. There are now more than six thousand migrants in encampments in Tijuana—many of them part of a caravan that has travelled from Honduras, and more than a thousand of whom are children—and conditions there are worsening by nearly every measure: sanitation, illness, grief, frustration, and anger. At the San Ysidro crossing, where many of the migrants are hoping to claim asylum, officials are processing fewer than a hundred cases a day.

In the run-up to the midterm elections, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate, said in a statement that the President’s railing about the caravan was just a sign that he was “desperate to change the subject from health care.” 

Trump is, demonstrably, a showman whose act relies on bigotry. The migrants are not an invasion, as he would have it. But neither should they be treated simply as a distraction, or an abstraction. The midterms are over, and the issues raised by the presence of the migrants deserve to be addressed seriously and directly.

A fair approach would begin with recognizing that a person seeking asylum has a right to be heard, as an individual, by immigration authorities. Trump seems to think that if he orders authorities to stop listening to the migrants’ stories they’ll just go away. Or perhaps he thinks that if they try to enter the country anyway he can use the pictures as fodder for his drive to build a wall. Last week, he told Politico that border security was, politically, “a total winner,” adding that he will veto funding bills, shutting down much of the government, unless he gets the money for his wall. He wants five billion dollars; Schumer has counter-offered an earlier figure of $1.6 billion for non-wall security, and some fencing. A key deadline falls on December 7th.

Traditionally, the basis for a successful asylum claim has been a well-grounded fear of persecution, based on one’s race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a social group. That last term has had a shifting meaning in immigration law. Under the Obama Administration, it came to include many survivors of domestic violence. Trump’s former Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, reversed course, instructing immigration judges to turn down claims citing domestic or gang violence, which is rife in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Conditions in those countries, combined with a growing awareness of the legal possibilities, have contributed to an increase in the number of migrants, particularly families, who seek asylum. 

There is now a backlog of about a million immigration cases.

It would make sense, and would build faith in the system, to hear migrants’ claims far more expeditiously, as long as each gets careful consideration, and the courts aren’t turned into the deportation conveyor belts that Trump wants them to be. Many people in the caravan have what may be, on their face, valid claims under current law. More immigration judges are needed to hear them; at the moment there are only a few hundred. (The Justice Department has begun speeding up the hiring process.) Coöperation with Mexico is essential, too. More broadly, the conundrum is how to balance the integrity of the law with the human impulse to regard “asylum” as another name for the haven that many Americans’ parents and grandparents found in the last century.

Trump has repeatedly said that the Democrats believe in “open borders and socialism,” and that they are recruiting criminals to come to America, with the help of shadowy financiers, in furtherance of their party’s dark aims, like winning elections. 

(As usual, it's nonsense!) There is no conspiracy, and Democrats in Congress have in fact worked for significant measures on border security, such as adding and equipping more agents, built into plans that include a pathway to legal status for the Dreamers—a crucial element in any comprehensive reform. (By contrast, some Republican proposals, such as sharply limiting family reunification, seem concerned less with border security than with a perceived demographic threat.) At the same time, an increasing number of Democrats have been less open to compromise, pulling the Party in different directions. The newly elected representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, both of New York, have called for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Senator Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, wants to build Trump’s wall.

Gillibrand is among the Democrats considering a Presidential run in 2020. In 2016, both parties’ primaries became laboratories for experimenting with positions on immigration. 

The Republicans ended up with Trump’s mad-scientist formula for a Muslim ban and attacks on “anchor babies.” (His assault on birthright citizenship has been his most un-American act as President.) Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, came close to pledging not to deport anyone who wasn’t a criminal. That position, in part, explains the vexed response to her comments to the Guardian last month, in which she said that European governments might as well give up on the idea of “refuge,” lest they continue to lose power to right-wing populists.

A better alternative for the 2020 campaign is to engage with voters and to convince them that a more generous immigration policy—one that, for a start, respects the asylum system and protects the Dreamers—is not only manageable but, in terms of our national ideals, a victory. That is the job, and that is what’s right. 

*Amy Davidson Sorkin, a New Yorker staff writer,