Whatever the White House says in the face of Trump’s ultimate acquittal in the Senate, U.S. administration officials and foreign officials acknowledge Trump will increasingly manufacture his own foreign policy decisions, with his personal associates, without the input of his intelligence and national security agencies. That means Trump will more likely have the ability to run his personal political errands—and business agenda—with little, if any, scrutiny. And when that scheme falls apart, and Trump’s personal associates turn on him, or decide to detail the behind-the-scenes shenanigans, the U.S. will lose credibility on the world stage…
That new reality is one that’s all but been approved by Republicans in the Senate who are set to sign off on the White House counsel’s argument that President Trump has complete authority to make crucial national security decisions as he sees fit, even if it threatens American interests overseas or runs roughshod over a process his own deputies had put in place.
A large portion of the Ukraine story has focused on how Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and other close confidants such as former Energy Secretary Rick Perry and E.U. Ambassador Gordon Sondland carried out a shadow diplomacy effort to run what Democrats have called a political errand.
And it wasn’t just Trump administration officials that played those roles. Republicans on Capitol Hill, too, engaged with figures who helped spark the Ukraine counter-narratives touted by the president’s defenders to undermine the Ukraine case. As The Daily Beast reported, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), for one, met last May with a former Ukrainian diplomat—Andrii Telizchenko—who once spread the widely-debunked theory that Ukraine worked to assist Hillary Clinton in her 2016 campaign.
Those backdoor, behind-the-scenes efforts have been hailed inside Trump’s inner circle as effective and, despite criticism, appropriate. But career civil servants, including some of the administration’s current and former top national security officials, have denounced those efforts in interviews with The Daily Beast, claiming it undermines the well-established interagency process—one that’s meant to act as a safeguard against dangerous ideas and policies moving forward.
The important part of that last paragraph is “those backdoor, behind-the-scenes efforts have been hailed inside Trump’s inner circle as effective and, despite criticism, appropriate.” Setting aside the ethics and the morality of it, they think Trump’s Ukraine plot was effective? My God. Just how deluded are these people?
Of course, it is true that they have had some success in turning Joe Biden and his family into a mirror image of Trump’s own corrupt crime family for the Fox News crowd. But Biden might not be the nominee (and it won’t be because of this) and people who will vote for him aren’t buying this nonsense. Was it worth getting impeached over?
And as far as it being effective in foreign policy, it’s joke. We are lucky to be alive. So far, no foreign leader has made a miscalculation trying to deal with his lunacy but it’s only because there is no other country on earth led today by someone this impulsive and ignorant.
The Madman Theory isn’t supposed to feature an actual madman.
Anyway:
Perhaps even more concerning to Democrats and national security officials who spoke to The Daily Beast is Trump’s reliance on conspiracy theories to form the basis of his foreign policy objectives. And acquittal, they said, would be a nod to Trump himself that his way of navigating relationships with foreign leaders and countries is not only appropriate, but preferred.
In Ukraine, Trump leaned on Rudy Giuliani to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden, a possible opponent in 2020, and his son Hunter. The former New York mayor forged relationships with Ukrainian diplomats and officials who regularly propagate Russian conspiracy theories. For example, Andri Derkach, who met with Giuliani in December, and another member of parliament, Oleksandr Dubinsky, have claimed that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election. U.S. intelligence agencies say this is the product of a Kremlin disinformation campaign.
Yet this theory and others were propped up this week by the White House counsel and other Trump-backing Republican senators who, up until the end of the witness vote, raised the possibility publicly that that theory—the conspiracy theory—could be true.
They ‘ve pushed it relentlessly on Fox and talk radio but they didn’t raise that one specifically in the impeachment trial. However, a number of Republican Senators asked questions designed to advance kooky conspiracy theories during that question and answer period.
This is shady, cuckoo-land, charater assassination that that group of Senators was willing to put into the record of the impeachment of the president of the United States. Does anyone think they won’t go along with whatever crazy conspiracy theories the voices in Trump’s head tell him in a second term?
We have to get through another year of this before we might be able to breathe a little bit easier. But he’s like a cornered animal now, desperate to win a second term and vindication. He will do whatever he thinks he needs to do to make that happen.