Freak Out Friday – September 27, 2019

I’ve been through this before.

Back in the 1970s, Richard Nixon had a fairly high approval rating and a solid support base. And then the combination of the Woodward and Bernstein stories, the widening of the Watergate investigation, and ultimately the release of the White House tapes that sank Nixon’s support and got him to resign rather than face certain impeachment. The Republican support evaporated as they sensed Nixon had become a hot-button issue and Nixon himself was smart enough to realize his cause was doomed. So he left.

I still remember being at a friend’s party the night that Nixon went on television and announced that he was resigning. We cheered. Best party of my high school career.

This generation is now seeing the exact same thing that I witnessed back in the 1970s: the beginning of the end of a presidency.

Yes, I know, that phrase has been used before when it comes to Trump. He has displayed an astounding ability to survive screw up after screw up, one treasonous act after another. With the combined support of Mitch McConnell and Trump’s blind, typically racist, uniformly stubborn core base, Trump has managed to withstand every accusation hurled at him using the same means: 1) denying it; 2) declaring other people are guilty of it; 3) attacking is accuser(s); 4) claiming the “fake media” is fostering yet another untrue story.

That’s not working this time.

Deep Whistle remains anonymous, so Trump’s accusations of his being a Democratic foil are more baseless than ever before. He can’t deny it; instead he admitted it and boasted about the notion that what he unethically did wasn’t unethical at all…and to add insult to injury, threw his Vice President under the bus with him, declaring that we should listen to Pence’s conversations as well, which you know Congress is now going to do. He’s reduced to lambasting the media for allegedly deliberately screwing up the punctuation of his tweets, even though his history of spelling and punctuation errors and grammatical mistakes is on the record and legendary (not to mention typically compared to Obama’s list of word-perfect tweets.).

The most significant development, of course, is that he’s pushed Nancy Pelosi off the bench and onto the playing field. For months she has resisted the notion of impeachment; now she’s all in. And there is no smarter politician out there than Pelosi, which means that if she’s on board, she knows there’s a case.

What’s pushed it to a whole new level is the news that the White House attempted to cover it up. As opposed to the president’s secretary erasing a tape, we have the transcript being tossed into classified storage that’s designed for matters of national security, not political convenience. So we have a Watergate level burglary and, even more significant, a Watergate level coverup.

So after receiving a score of instances of Trump’s impeachable offenses, the House has finally been pushed into doing exactly what they are supposed to do. They are undertaking their constitutional obligation to oversee the executive branch and not allow fear of his tweets or accusations of his followers to deter them from doing what must be done.

And Trump, who is far more stupid than Nixon, has not yet realized that things have changed. That the end has begun. Instead he has declared that Deep Whistle is a spy…which he likely is since he works for the CIA, but he’s a patriotic spy who works for this country. And just as he declared that the innocent guys who were arrested for the assault on the Central Park jogger should have been executed, he has declared that Deep Whistle should be charged with treason and likewise executed.

Because that is one of the most common tactics of an abuser. When he is accused of an action, it is his habit to state that his accusers are the true criminals. So naturally when Trump is accused of treason–which he has in fact committed–his tactic is to turn around and claim that his accuser is the real traitor. Which is absurd, but that won’t deter him.

The fact is that Deep Whistle is a patriot. He saw the chief executive abusing his power and availed himself of the legally mandated avenues available to him. And when Trump goes down, he’s dragging Bill Barr and Rudy Giuliani and Mike Pence with him.

And he is going down. I know, I know, there have been many times in the past two years where it seemed that he had crossed the line. But his delays and obfuscations and stone walling have always outlasted the news cycle and people have moved on to something else. I don’t think that’s going to happen this time. It just feels too similar to Nixon this time.

And when he goes, I sure hope he takes plenty of company along.

PAD