Far too much rope

Stupidity of Trump forces impeachment

Icover more than my share of public corruption accusations. So I have some small-scale but practical experience when reading President Donald Trump’s account of his July 25 talk with Ukraine’s president.

Any corrupt politician who knows what he is doing would be aghast at Trump’s blunders.

Our president wants Ukraine to do a smear job on his most-feared political rival. The best smear jobs are true. The one Trump wants is not. Two wrongs do not make a right, and there are a whole lot more than two here.

Ukraine depends on our military aid. The president held up this aid. He also had his very own TV camera-loving ranty clown of a private lawyer press the Ukrainians on the matter since May at least.

Using a personal envoy ties Trump directly to this mess. He should have used official channels if the smear could have been true. He still could have used official channels and dropped hints. Adept corrupt pols know how to hint. Failing that, he should have used several go-betweens. Failing all that, at least the chosen envoy should have been someone physically capable of shutting up. Instead, he sent Rudy Giuliani.

Then Trump blurted out what he wanted in the phone call. There was no need. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, clearly had already gotten the message. Naturally people here tend to focus on what our president said in his account of the phone call. Pay more attention to what Zelensky said. He speaks the language of underhanded dealing quite well. He also sweetened it with the over-the-top flattery our president loves. These two are kindred spirits. The smear Trump proposed would smear Zelensky’s political enemies, too.

There is no more universally unspoken but understood concept in dirty politics than “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” Trump, however, is incapable of subtlety.

This phone call included a dozen people listening in just on our end — as normal. There was no spying on Trump here. This was routine record-keeping of a talk between two heads of state. Trump must have known this.

Trump rages almost every day about leaks. Yet two years and eight months into his term he demanded a smear job while a dozen people, not counting Ukrainians, listened. He has learned nothing.

Trump brought up the U.S. attorney general by name in the phone call too, saying he could help with the smear. This is almost indescribably dumb. Attorney General Bill Barr — like him or hate him —is the most competent bodyguard and fixer the president has left. Now Trump himself fingered Barr as part of both the smear and the cover-up.

Then Giuliani went to Madrid, Spain, to meet with one of Zelensky’s buddies right after the phone call in which too much was said already.

Then someone blew the whistle. The rest of Trump’s legal team stonewalled the House. Giuliani went on TV and bragged about the whole deal.

The whistleblower says the legal team abused the classified records system to hide evidence right after the phone call. This is the worst thing yet, besides being a crime.

It is never the scandal. It is always the cover-up. This is the most famous rule in scandals. We now also are told the legal team classified these kinds of things before. So there are other phone call records to look for. Trump also blared out the details of the whole mess before releasing his account of this phone call.

Trump practically fired off flare guns while wearing a clown suit and a sandwich sign saying “Impeach Me!” for a week. The flares set his clown suit on fire.

“Think the first Trump term is wild? Wait until the next one with no adult supervision.” I wrote that just last week. I was already behind the times.

The House impeachment inquiry is beyond justified even though Trump cannot be removed from office. Blind GOP loyalty still grips enough senators to prevent removal. But we all get to watch more of this flamboyant incompetence roll out in full view.

Speaking of blind loyalty, this kind of thing can only happen when someone can be nominated for president without even having to show his tax returns. Then he was never checked or balanced as long as his party retained majority control of both houses of Congress.

Blind party loyalty gave Trump more rope than anyone ever needed to hang himself.