More trouble for a troubled president

By Askia Muhammad -Senior Editor- | Last updated: Oct 24, 2019 - 1:02:10 PM

President Donald Trump

WASHINGTON—With each passing day in October 2019, the political fortunes of President Donald J. Trump proceeded from bad to worse.

Fissures have developed in Mr. Trump’s vice-like grip on Republican office holders. An uprising occurred in the House of Representatives Oct. 15 when 139 Republicans voted for a Democratic rebuke of the President’s sudden troop withdrawal from Syria.

Some Republicans have confessed, according to published reports, that Mr. Trump’s behavior is “indefensible,” as his defiance of congressional investigations only increases tensions as a vote on impeachment approaches.

“I want to get the facts and do the right thing,” Rep. Francis Rooney (RFla.) said in a Tweet supporting the impeachment inquiry. “Because I’ll be looking at my children a lot longer than I’m looking at anybody in this building.”

And there was a huge erosion of support when acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney inadvertently admitted, and then denied, that the administration deliberately used the withholding of military aid to Ukraine in order to elicit “a favor” from the government. The favor? Digging up dirt on Mr. Trump’s political rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

“I’m still thinking about it, you know?” Rep. Rooney said to The Washington Post about backing impeachment. “I’ve been real mindful of the fact that during Watergate, all the people I knew said, ‘Oh, they’re just abusing Nixon, and it’s a witch hunt.’ Turns out it wasn’t a witch hunt. It was really bad.”

There’s now a growing sense among a group of Republicans that the president is acting dangerously, and is taking their loyalty for granted as they’re forced to “defend the indefensible,” a senior House Republican told The Post.

Even former military commanders have condemned Mr. Trump’s conduct in office, using caustic language. And many of Mr. Trump’s sharpest original critics have now been driven to wondering about “deep state” conspiracies, and Russian “operatives” interfering in the 2020 elections and the federal government.

“Our republic is under attack from the President,” retired Admiral William McRaven wrote in a New York Times op-ed Oct. 18. “If President Trump doesn’t demonstrate the leadership that America needs, then it is time for a new person in the Oval Office.” Admiral McRaven is a former commander of the United States Special Operations Command—the Navy SEALs.

That same day, Mr. Trump’s former Defense Secretary and retired Army Gen. Jim Mattis scolded the president, and retired Army General Joseph Votel, who led the fight against ISIS, expressed his disappointment in an earlier op-ed for The Atlantic.

Criticism was also heaped on Mr. Trump when he awarded the upcoming G-7 Summit to his own Trump Doral resort in Florida. “There is no level of corruption greater than a President participating in the award of a contract to himself,” Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics, said via Twitter Oct. 17. “We have reached the bottom. If the Senate will not act to stop this, there is no government ethics program. It’s over.”

“This brazen president is inviting the seven most powerful countries in the world to hold its conference at his FAILING hotel in FL, the Trump Doral,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) tweeted about the Trump-Doral-G-7 decision, pointing out he’s “disregarding the emoluments clause that’s already the subject of two lawsuits?” The president rescinded the invite in the face of the criticism.

Mr. Trump’s critics in academia are also numerous. “Well, it seems clear that Trump’s melting down,” Dr. Julianne Malveaux, an economist and former president of Bennett College for Women, said in an interview. “I mean, he seems to be increasingly irrational. There are lots of accounts of what happened with the meeting with (House Speaker Nancy) Pelosi (D-Calif.). Several people say he came in there with an attitude, although he called the meeting, but he was behaving with (a) nasty attitude and it went downhill from there.”

“Trump is gone. He’s crazy,” Dr. Ray Winbush, director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University, said in an interview. “And I mean, he’s in a serious meltdown, but I don’t think the Republicans” are ready to challenge the president.

“Hopefully Trump will have a complete nervous breakdown in public, which he almost had with Pelosi the other day at the White House. I mean to talk about putting politics before country,” Dr. Winbush continued.

“It’s a different world that we’re in. And then, I know this sounds real paranoid and conspiratorial, but I’m wondering, if there are” multiple foreign espionage “assets” in high places in the U.S. government, he said. “I know this sounds like the McCarthy era, but I’m wondering,” if there hasn’t been an infiltration of the U.S. government by hostile forces.

John Kasich, a former Republican governor and former House member from Ohio, said he would now vote for impeachment, but is not ready to call for Mr. Trump’s removal from office. Mr. Kasich, who ran against the president in 2016, told CNN Oct. 17, that he decided to back impeachment after hearing Mr. Mulvaney acknowledge that Mr. Trump’s decision to hold up military aid to Ukraine was linked to his demand that Ukraine investigate the Democratic National Committee and the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. Mr. Mulvaney subsequently recanted that confession.

Another Republican, also outside of Washington, Nebraska State Senator John McCollister, asked the GOP: “Republicans: WHAT is the holdup?” via Twitter. “Trump is now flaunting impeachable offenses in front of CAMERAS. Are you just going to stand there and say nothing? Are you ok with your legacy being ‘was submissive to Donald Trump?’ Good Lord. Grow a spine and regain some self respect.”

Most Republicans appear to have ignored Mr. Trump’s obsession to holding on to power, “because they’re getting what they want, even though he’s bonkers, they are getting what they want,” said Dr. Malveaux.

“They have the courts and this unprecedented number of appointments. They’re getting what they want. So if they have to deal with the nut, they’re willing to deal with the nut.”

Republicans, Dr. Malveaux continued, may have mistakenly thought they had “enough checks and balances,” she said. “What checks and balances? Because that hasn’t worked. But I think that they think they can stop (Mr. Trump’s rowdy behavior).

“As Mitt Romney said, and I’m not fond of quoting Mitt Romney: ‘Our allies can’t trust us,’ ” said Dr. Malveaux.

Mr. Trump insists his critics are engaging in a witch hunt, and that the impeachment will backfire on Democrats. After two weeks of the inquiry however, public opinion is turning against him. According to fivethirtyeight.com, based on polls before Sept. 19 (when the Ukraine story broke), support for impeachment initially sat at 40.1 percent, and opposition was at 51.0 percent.

Two weeks later, a Washington Post-Schar School poll found that 58 percent of Americans agreed with the House’s decision to start an impeachment inquiry, and only 38 percent disagreed with it.

The Final Call