A generous argument

Let’s consider in the most favor- able light the confession last week by acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.

It’s a worthy intellectual exercise to try to think for a while in another’s head.

This favorable light will require acknowledging without partisanship the plain evidence that Donald Trump is uncommonly defined by megalomania, narcissism and grandiosity, and that the people around him must operate within that context.

In his personality disorder, Trump may not be able to separate what his ego craves and what his mind conceives.

That’s a favorable view, at least when compared to simple abuse of office, which is the other option.

Mulvaney said that the White House held up congressionally authorized military aid to Ukraine because Trump wanted an investigation by Ukraine into “corruption,” primarily meaning reports that a server hidden in Ukraine was used to concoct the appearance of supposed Russian interference in the last presidential election.

Mulvaney said foreign policy leverage of that sort has happened regularly with all presidents.

“Get over it,” he said.

Hours later, Mulvaney put out a statement that he did not say the aid was held up because of any election-related quid pro quo benefiting Trump.

Can those statements be reconciled even in any remote way?

It’s creatively do-able. You could argue that Trump was wanting Ukraine to investigate a general concern—reported cyber-interference in the ’16 election from within its borders.

This, then, would be the most favorable scenario:

• Because of his vast ego and narcissism, Trump believes that the epic political feat he performed in 2016 has not been truly appreciated for its greatness, not to mention legitimacy. • He blames the idea that the Russians won him a decisive number of votes by their sinister meddling in his behalf.

• He believes, or professes to believe, that elements of our own nation’s intelligence community ran a conspiracy against him by making it appear the Russians were helping him. He does not believe he can trust his nation’s own investigatory bodies to delve into those allegations credibly. • So, being consummately transactional, Trump saw an opportunity in a big pot of money that Ukraine needed. He viewed the money as a way to get somebody on the outside to look into corruption involving forces within his own government.

The problem is that Trump is not the nation; that Congress had approved the money; that even Republican congressional leaders were getting irked that the money was being held up, and that an American president accusing elements of his own government of corruption ought to make that case himself domestically, if he has one to make, and mobilize, if he can, the American people and American institutions to get to the bottom of it.

Most people seem to dismiss Trump’s suspicion as an easily debunked conspiracy theory—as the delusion or dishonesty of a man who went around saying Barack Obama wasn’t a native-born American.

But we don’t know all that the CIA does, rogue or otherwise.

What we do know is that, if elements of the CIA ran an operation to beat Trump, they failed spectacularly. They’d have been better off infiltrating the electoral college.

By winning, Trump may install people he wants in jobs he wants and thus direct the internal reviews he desires. He has the singular ability to take his case to the American people through the world’s most powerful bully pulpit.

Yet he sought to make Ukraine a kind of personal secret American police. He turned to investigative tactics he can’t know and that we can’t trust.

This famous nationalist became an internationalist only when it came to farming out an investigation of his own government to a foreign government, and a teetering one at that.

This much is certain: The two investigative objectives Trump mentioned in that phone call to the Ukrainian president would have served Trump’s prospective personal political interest.

One would have gone after Joe Biden, perhaps the chief threat to Trump’s re-election. The other would have gone after allegedly illicit activities against him.

Trump thus sought, singularly or in effect, to use a foreign government to help him retain an office that he wants everyone to know he won without foreign help in the first go-round.

Ego disorders are not always consistent or linear or logical.

Are these actions, whether outrages or delusions or simply stupid, impeachable?

Sure. Congress can impeach Trump on the mere grounds that he’s Trump. He’s a walking “high crime” and a talking “misdemeanor.” A presidency he occupies is in a constant state of besmirching.

But conviction in the U.S. Senate seems to remain out of the question. Republicans are not going to give up Supreme Court nominations without an election.

Anyway, it would be infinitely better for the republic if a few thousand swing voters in the upper Midwest would deal with the disorder-in-chief by coming to their own senses by next November.