During the impeachment of President Trump, an expert witness called by Democrats floated a theoretical scenario involving the president threatening a state hammered by a natural disaster, to illustrate the corruption of Trump’s shakedown of Ukraine.
What would we think if Trump dangled federal disaster aid as leverage to force a governor to do his political bidding, asked Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, adding: “Wouldn’t you know in your gut that the president had abused his office? That he betrayed the national interest?”
Trump has now done something very close to this. And the answer to Karlan’s question is: Yes, Trump is abusing his office and betraying the national interest:
In case you haven’t heard parts of Michigan are underwater this morning, with record rain and dams failing. Nice of Trump to threaten the state as people are being evacuated.
He’s been threatening states when he felt like it from the beginning of his term. He just recently said that he wouldn’t provide aid unless they agreed to get rid of sanctuary cities. He has repeatedly made inane threats to California that if we refuse to “rake the forest” or some such nonsense he would not allow any federal aid. It’s a little unusual for him to go after a state that he badly needs if he wants to win re-election but I guess he feels he can leverage hatred for the Democratic governor to his advantage. (The problem is that she has a 70% approval rating, but whatever.)
Much of this is bluster that he cannot follow through on. But this latest threat has an even more nefarious purpose. He is working overtime to prime his cult to believe the election was rigged against him because people voted by mail.
During a pandemic.
Which he has made exponentially worse with his corruption and incompetence.
It’s going to be a very fraught election. They will cheat because they always do. But under Trump, we can’t be sure that even if the Democrats manage to score a win big enough that they can’t contest it that they will accept the results.
Sargent is right. This is exactly the scenario that Karlan was illustrating.