Nadine Dreyer

Trump’s wild cards and wily bluffs

You don’t have to be a world leader at a Nato summit to know Isis fighters and jihadist sympathisers pose a threat to the streets of Europe’s capital cities

His wrongdoing strikes at the very heart of our constitution. Our democracy is what is at stake. The president leaves us no choice but to act

Democrats in the US Congress are building a case to impeach President Donald Trump, probably before Christmas. The president will then face a trial in the Senate. Nadine Dreyer explains why Trump is unlikely to be the first US president to be evicted from the White House

Even by his own imperfect standards, this wasn’t a great week for Donald Trump.

First there was the possible diplomatic calamity at the Nato summit in London this week. Prime Minister Boris Johnson was hoping like hell he didn’t get the kiss of death from the US president in the form of an endorsement. The British elections are on Thursday and any backing from his doppelgänger could possibly boomerang, and not in a good way.

The one-man diplomatic wrecking ball has a history of smashing the china on the international stage. During one G7 summit Trump took two Starburst candies out of his pocket and tossed them to German Chancellor Angela Merkel: “Here, Angela. Don’t say I never give you anything.”

In October Trump offered to hold the next G7 summit at his luxurious golf resort in Palm Beach. “Each country can have their own villa!”

He was genuinely puzzled by the subsequent outcry. White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told Fox News: “At the end of the day, you know, he still considers himself to be in the hospitality business, and he saw an opportunity to take the biggest leaders from around the world, and he wanted to promote the absolute best show, the best visit that he possibly could.”

Life? It’s all about condos and Coca-Cola.

This week Trump abandoned the Nato chinwag in a huff after other leaders were caught on video mocking him during a reception at Buckingham Palace. The group included Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Johnson, and French President Emmanuel Macron.

“He was late because he takes a 40-minute press conference off the top,” Trudeau says as the other leaders laugh. He goes on, “You just watched his team’s jaws drop to the floor.” Trump hit back by calling Trudeau “two-faced”.

He also had a go at Macron. The French president had described Nato as “brain dead” to The Economist magazine in November. Macron added that a lack of US leadership was largely to blame.

This week Trump had called these comments “nasty” and “insulting”.

According to The Guardian, he also attempted to joke with Macron about the extremist group Isis, notorious for beheading and raping captives. “Would you like some nice Isis fighters? I can give them to you. You can take every one you can,” said the wrecking ball whose utterances sometimes make barnyard oinks seem profound.

A Guardian columnist fumed: “You don’t have to be a world leader at a Nato summit to know that Isis fighters and jihadist sympathisers pose a serious threat to the streets of Europe’s capital cities.

“You just have to be a grown-up who pays attention to the news, such as the fatal stabbings on London Bridge just last week. But that may be asking too much of the man-baby who watches TV somewhere close to the Oval Office."

The nightmare for Trump minders didn’t end there. During that 40-minute impromptu press conference the US president was asked why North Korea had continued its nuclear programme despite three meetings between himself and Kim Jong-un.

“I have a lot of confidence in him, we’ll see what happens.”

Then, as if speaking about one of his golf buddies, he added: “He definitely likes sending rockets up, doesn’t he?”

From bad to worse … “That’s why I call him Rocket Man. If I weren’t president you’d be at war right now.” (North Korea responded to the “Rocket Man” nickname by calling Trump a “dotard”.)

Trump flew back to the US to face the latest political storm. On Thursday speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi announced that she was instructing Congress committee chairmen to move forward with articles of impeachment against Trump in the wake of the Ukraine scandal.

“His wrongdoing strikes at the very heart of our constitution.

Our democracy is what is at stake. The president leaves us no choice but to act because he is trying to corrupt, once again, the election for his own benefit,” she said against a backdrop of US flags.

A two-month inquiry by Democrats on the House intelligence committee concluded in a 300-page report that Trump abused his power by pressuring President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to announce investigations into former vice-president Joe Biden while withholding a White House meeting and $391m in military assistance.

The report accuses Trump of what it calls an “unprecedented campaign of obstruction of this impeachment inquiry”, saying he denied documents to Congress and tried to block state department diplomats and White House officials from testifying. It accused the president of engaging in “a brazen effort to publicly attack and intimidate” witnesses.

Permitting Trump to continue in office would come at “the peril of our republic”, said Pelosi.

She accused Russia’s President Vladimir Putin of being the mastermind behind a conspiracy that went way beyond an isolated pressure campaign against Ukraine.

“This isn’t about Ukraine; this is about Russia, who benefited by our withholding of that military assistance.

“So sometimes people say, ‘Well, I don’t know about Ukraine, I don’t know that much about Ukraine.’ Well, our adversary is Russia. All roads lead to Putin. Understand that.”

Among other things Democrats in the House of Representatives have to decide is whether to focus on the Ukraine scandal or to broaden the charges to include alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election to benefit Trump, and moves by the president to obstruct investigations into all of this.

Trump faces making history as the third US president to be impeached. There have been 45 US presidents including Trump and so far two — Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton — have been impeached. Richard Nixon jumped before he was pushed.

Johnson, the 17th president, was a poor white Southerner who became a slaveholder. He became president when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.

Before taking his oath of office for the vice-presidency Johnson got so drunk that he mumbled his way through an incoherent speech. (Lincoln commented: “This Johnson is a queer man.”) Johnson was an obnoxious, die-hard racist who opposed the 14th amendment that guarantees equality before the law to all persons and citizenship to all born in the US.

He once pardoned a white Virginian who murdered a black man in broad daylight. Abolitionist Lydia Maria Child wrote about him: “Every true lover of the country must want to creep into a knothole and hide himself, wherever the name of our president is mentioned.”

The process of booting a president out of office consists of two stages.

Part one is impeachment in the House of Representatives. Charges are put to the president and if the majority passes a guilty vote, the president is impeached.

Then the matter moves to the Senate, where a trial is held. The chief justice of the Supreme Court presides over the trial. A two-thirds majority vote of those present is required in the 100-member Senate to evict the incumbent from the White House.

In Johnson’s case he was impeached by the House of Representatives. The Senate mostly voted against Johnson but was unable to obtain a two-thirds majority by a single vote.

Nixon’s disgrace followed the Watergate scandal that had its origins in June 17 1972 when five men were arrested after breaking into the Democratic national committee’s headquarters at the Watergate hotel in Washington. The burglars were trying to bug the offices.

In the face of overwhelming evidence that he was complicit in these criminal activities, Nixon resigned in August 1974 before he could be impeached. He is the only US president to have done so.

Bill Clinton’s impeachment followed a series of lurid accusations. He was impeached for lying to a grand jury, committing perjury by denying his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and obstructing justice.

Clinton had denied under oath having an affair with Lewinsky, but transcripts of tape recordings of her talking about the affair went public in October 1998 and Clinton was forced to admit he had lied under oath. Then there was the tale of the blue dress and the sex act.

He was tried by the Senate, which was then controlled by the Democrats, and acquitted on February 12 1999. Like Johnson, he held onto his job.

Chief among the debates for Democrats gunning for Trump is whether to draft articles of impeachment solely on the Ukraine scandal, or also on Russian involvement in the 2016 elections.

The Democrats hold the majority in the House of Representatives, but the Republicans hold 53 of the 100 votes in the Senate. Since 67 senators (or two-thirds present) would have to vote for his removal, a major Republican revolt would be needed to evict Trump. This is unlikely since Republican senators remain firmly behind the president.

The White House was quick to react, with Stephanie Grisham, Trump’s press secretary, saying the Democrats “should be ashamed”.

“Speaker Pelosi and the Democrats should be ashamed. Donald Trump has done nothing but lead our country — resulting in a booming economy, more jobs and a stronger military, to name just a few of his major accomplishments. We look forward to a fair trial in the Senate.”

Trump has called the Democrats “crazy” and said they were trying to “Impeach me over NOTHING” .

“This will mean that the beyond important and seldom used act of Impeachment will be used routinely to attack future Presidents,” he tweeted. “That is not what our Founders had in mind.”

In a world where reality is virtual and news often fake, what will happen in the end is anybody’s guess.

Meanwhile, Trump calls impeachment a “dirty word”.