A president incapable of learning
Every day Donald Trump gets another chance “to expose his incompetence,” said Steve Chapman—and every day, “he seizes the opportunity.” Consider just his recent additions to an astonishing portfolio of “unforced errors”—blunders ranging from the slapstick to the potentially lethal. During a recent visit with American troops in Iraq, he tweeted a video clearly showing the faces of Navy SEALs, violating a precedent of protecting special forces operatives’ identities. On that same trip, he
falsely told troops they’d had no salary increases for a decade, and that he’d given them a 10 percent hike. (They actually got 2.4 percent.) Days earlier, he even botched a ceremonial Christmas Eve phone call, cluelessly asking a child if she still believed in Santa Claus and adding, “because at 7, it’s marginal, right?” In December, the president threw financial markets into a tailspin by threatening to oust his handpicked Federal Reserve chairman. As Trump creates unending chaos at home, he cozies
up to foreign autocrats like Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin, who toy with him like the amateur he is. Face it: “This man is simply awful at his job—the important stuff, the trivial stuff, and everything in between.”
The impeachment question
As 2019 begins, “Donald Trump faces a legal assault unlike anything previously seen by any president,” said Garrett M. Graff in Wired. The White House is now embroiled in at least 17 investigations—and only about half stem from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation
into Russian election interference. “Prosecutors are studying nearly every aspect of how money
flowed both in and out of Trump’s interconnected enterprises,” including whether Trump’s inauguration committee broke corruption laws by trading favors for a record $107 million in donations, some of which may have illegally come from foreign sources. The Trump Foundation, which recently agreed to dissolve itself in response to a lawsuit by the New York State attorney general, is now under criminal investigation for illegal use of its funds for noncharitable purposes. None of this includes the new Democratic majority in the House’s committee investigations into Trump’s taxes and financial dealings with foreign countries. Truly, we are in Watergate territory.
“The odor of personal corruption on the president’s part” is becoming too great to ignore, said
Elizabeth Drew in The New York Times. The most likely outcome of these myriad investigations is that Trump will be impeached and forced to resign. Knowing he will face the possibility of being indicted and imprisoned after he leaves office, Trump may follow Richard Nixon’s lead and step down in return for pardons for himself and his family. The sooner the better, said James Carroll in USA Today. Whether or not Republicans in the Senate are willing to convict Trump, it’s the House’s constitutional duty to impeach Trump if there’s evidence the president committed crimes. Otherwise, Congress will be declaring that America’s president is effectively a king, unbound by the rule of law.
Impeaching Trump would be “a disaster for the Democrats,” said Marc Thiessen in The Washington
Post, unless Mueller finds “incontrovertible evidence” of a criminal conspiracy with Russia. Americans knew that Trump was a philanderer with “shady business dealings” before the 2016
election, and 63 million voted for him anyway. Impeaching him for his business dealings or paying
off a porn star “would be received in Trump country as nothing short of an attempted coup.” It would boost Trump’s popularity, and could cost the Democrats “the chance to take back the presidency
in 2020.”