“Our nation is founded on the principle that we do not have kings. We have presidents. And the Constitution is our compass. When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something, to do something. Our children and their children will ask us, ‘What did you do? What did you say?’ For some, this vote may be hard. We have a mission and a mandate to be on the right side of history.” – Congressman John Lewis, December 18, 2019
A day after, newspaper headlines across the U.S. on Dec. 19 were: “Trump impeached: President is third in US history to face Senate Trial” (The Washington Post); “Trump impeached – Divided House advances articles for only 3rd time in American history; 45th president joins Clinton, Johnson as process now shifts to Senate for trial” (Chicago Tribune); TRUMP IMPEACHED – BECOMES THIRD PRESIDENT TO FACE TRIAL IN SENATE (The New York Times); House Impeaches Trump-He becomes third president to face removal as lawmakers approve abuse of power, obstruction articles (Los Angeles Times); IMPEACHED – The Democrats: No one is above the law; this is a constitutional duty; The Republicans: No crimes committed; the process was unfair; The President: Nothing happened; this is an assault on America; The People: US divided, profoundly split on country’s future (USA Today); IMPEACHED – Trump becomes only third president to be impeached; Accused of abuse of power, obstruction of Congress; Donald Trump threatens integrity of 2020 elections (Politico).
On Feb. 23, 2019, 10 months before this House’s historic vote, I wrote about the distinction between an indictment and an impeachment. The indictment, as you know, is arrived at by a grand jury voting on a proposed felony charge, witnesses’ testimony and other evidence presented by the District Attorney. Meanwhile, impeachment is a process coming from the legislature against a government official and is based on a statement of charges. It is like an indictment with the charges listed, but only it is coming from Congress.
So now we await current Special Counsel’s Robert Mueller report and with baited breath, we predict that it contains all the criminal charges traceable to all the president’s men and those who have been arrested, indicted, pled and have served their jail time: Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, Alex van der Zwaan, George Papadopoulos, Richard Pinedo, 13 Russian nationals and three entities, 12 Russian military intelligence officers and Konstantin Kilimnik, according to Andrew Witherspoon of Axios.
If all the president’s men have been indicted, arrested, served time, could his inner circle be reached, as well as the president himself? Would any of these be the fate of this sitting U.S. President Donald Trump?
In the Nov. 23-26 2019 issue, I wrote another op-ed asking President Trump if he has offered his life to wrongdoings?
Let me excerpt salient points:
The word patriot has been thrown around on television this month of November 2019 when the 116th U.S. Congress through its chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, presided over the publicly televised proceedings on impeachment of the 45th U.S. President Donald Trump, and said, excerpted here from The New Yorker’s The Talk of the Town, Nov. 25, 2019.
If we find that the President of the United States abused his powers and invited foreign interference in our elections…must we simply get over it? Is this what Americans should now expect from their president? If this is not impeachable conduct, what is?
The concern of Adam Schiff mirrors the concerns of Andrew Jackson then who believed that no undue favors and advantages attached to the rich and powerful, as well as Alexander Hamilton who wrote to George Washington in 1792, further quoted by the New Yorker, “When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents…is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day — It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into the confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.”
Why was there such a concern? First, U.S. President Donald Trump took this oath of office, swearing on the bible held by his wife, Melania Trump, “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” on January 20, 2017, one thousand thirty-seven days, as of this published article.
That moment, Mr. Donald Trump became U.S. President Trump, sworn to uphold the interests and common good of all Americans. From that oath of office, he was transformed from being a private businessman position to a position of public trust, a position with potentials of adverse impact on the integrity and/or efficiency of the country’s mission to the rest of America.
That day marked the start of his presidential role to be the guardian of American democracy and the interests of all American citizens to have an honest president, who shall protect its US elections. He was no longer Mr. Trump, the businessman, seeking to run his businesses from the confines of the White House.
He is now our U.S. president, enjoying taxpayer-funded Air Force One, U.S. Secret Service, the entire cabinet and legal staff inside the White House, the White House residence, plus he is now our U.S. Commander-in-chief, whose interests should be America first and foremost.
Yet, Mr. Trump is still Mr. Trump, 1,036 days later and has failed to muster his presidential duties to benefit the public’s common good.
President Trump is still governing as Mr. Trump
The day after Robert Mueller testified in U.S. Congress on July 24, 2019, U.S. President Donald Trump had a phone conversation with a comedian who was elected as Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25, 2019.
Trump congratulated Zelensky and encouraged him to do an investigation on the Bidens, as the New York Times’ Mark Mazzetti and Eileen Sullivan reported on Nov. 15, 2019, ”During that call, Mr. Trump appeared to condition American military aid to Ukraine on whether Mr. Zelensky agreed to pursue investigations into the Biden family and he claimed that Ukrainians tried to undermine the Trump campaign in 2016.”
Dr. Fiona Hill, the former National Security Council official specializing in Russian and European affairs, testified at the impeachment public hearings and debunked the claim of U.S. President Donald Trump that, “Ukrainians tried to undermine the Trump campaign in 2016.”
She said, “Russia’s security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election.” She warned us all on televised proceedings that we are running out of time to stop them. Two more witnesses who appeared in the impeachment proceedings stressed the fact that American intelligence agencies’ consensus is that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential elections. New York Times in 2018 reported it as eight intelligence agencies’ consensus.
Dr. Hill called it a fiction, a narrative being advanced by Russian operatives, “Russia readily exploited partisan divisions to undermine the United States from within.”
Yet, Mr. Trump advanced the lie that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 Presidential elections in the U.S., even though the facts and indictments are plainly clear and directly traceable to what Vladimir Putin’s talking points. All the while, Robert Mueller testified before U.S. Congress that the interference was sweeping and systematic which led to the indictment of 26 Russian citizens and three Russian organizations.
But more than that, Mr. Trump is now soliciting an investigation from Ukraine to benefit himself, for Ukraine to do opposition research on Biden, for the purpose of benefiting Mr. Trump in the 2020 presidential elections. Why and how? Mr. Trump wanted an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, who was a board member at Burisma, an energy company, from 2014 to 2019. Mr. Trump is presuming Biden will be the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 2020.
But aside from that solicitation of the investigation from Ukraine to benefit Mr. Trump’s prospective reelection, Mr. Trump in his capacity as Pres. Trump, leveraged the security assistance funds to pressure Ukraine to do it and ordered a hold on nearly $400 million, security assistance funds approved through bipartisan support in U.S. Congress.
Note that U.S. presidents are not given any spending powers by the U.S. Constitution, that spending power lies squarely in the hands of Congress. The framers of the U.S. Constitution wanted separation of powers, or else the enormous weight of U.S. spending powers, placed in the hands of elected presidents would amount to unchecked corruption. It was meant to be a system of checks and balances so that each branch has certain powers to check and balance other branches.
The case for impeachment
Have you read the 290 pages of “The Case for Impeachment” published and written in 2017 by Allan J. Lichtman, a distinguished professor of history at American University, in fact with care and concern for the 45th U.S. president to succeed and have a meaningful legacy? This book predicted the impeachment of Pres. Donald Trump by what he thought would be a Republican-controlled Congress.
Lichtman did not figure on an electorate that will decidedly change the make-up of Congress, midterm 2018. Had that not occurred, much of the high crimes and misdemeanors or abuses of presidential power by Pres. Trump will still be hidden, using the false story that he was working on getting rid of national corruption in Ukraine. In fact, Ukraine had qualified to receive the national security aid package, approved by a bipartisan vote of Congress. Instead, Pres. Trump leveraged it to extract “political dirt” on what he perceived to be his major opponent for the 2020 Presidential elections, Joe Biden through his son’s tenure as part of the board of an energy company in Ukraine.
Lichtman wrote chapters on “flouting the law; his various conflicts of interest; lies, lies and more lies, Trump’s war on Women; A Crime against Humanity; The Russian Connections; Abuse of Power; The Unrestrained Trump; Memo: The Way Out and The Peaceful Remedy of Impeachment” in his book.
In “Memo: The Way Out,” the author wrote with care what Pres. Trump must do to be a better president:
1) “divesting yourself from all your business interests and putting the proceeds into a genuine blind trust, managed by an independent administrator, is the only way for you to avoid the inevitable conflicts of interest that will expose you to impeachment.”
It was not the emoluments clause and his enrichments to his private businesses that he was impeached, instead it was Pres. Trump’s egregious interference in the 2020 Presidential elections withholding national security aid for Ukraine for his private political gain in the 2020 Elections.
2) “Support a carbon fee and The Paris Accords” – apparently, “in 2009, Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka signed an open letter calling for effective measures to control climate change in order to protect humanity and our planet.” Imagine if Pres. Trump had done that, we would be much more ahead in getting changes in manufacturing, in controlling emissions in the U.S. and with no fracking and mining in national forests and national parks.
3) “Add a shrink to the White House physicians.” He believed “a psychiatrist at your disposal will provide you with valuable counseling and help you to restrain your more vulnerable tendencies and avoid the impeachment traps discussed in this book.”
4) “Use a fact-checker. The Washington Post has deployed a browser extension to add their fact-checks to your tweets in real-time, and Google has introduced a new feature to tag and help users find fact checking in large news stories. You’ve got to be more careful with the facts, Mr. President,” he wrote.
5) “Treat women with dignity and respect. He quotes the President, “nobody has more respect for women than I do,” and wrote, “but your actions haven’t matched your words. You demeaned some of your accusers for their allegedly unflattering looks and you didn’t treat Hillary Clinton with much respect as a woman during the campaign. In the tape [Access Hollywood tape], you also admitted to having an out-of-control libido, and that you just can’t resist making non-consensual advances on women.”
6. “Curb the Mussolini Act. America today is not Italy of the 1920s, and you are not Mussolini and don’t want to be. Stop picking and choosing among companies based on the allure of rewards and retributions.”
7. “Steve Bannon, You’re fired. Well, the campaign is over; it’s time to think about your presidency. Already, he’s led you down the primrose path with a travel ban that only hurt your standing in the nation and across the world.”
8. “Protect your legacy. But you can’t build a legacy on rallies and tweets. You need solid accomplishments that make America great and safe and that will secure your reelection in 2020.”
“No previous president has entered the Oval Office without a shred of public service or with as egregious a record of enriching himself at the expense of others. Trump’s penchant for lying, disregard for the law, and conflicts of interests are lifelong habits that will permeate his entire presidency. His dubious connections to Russia could open him to a charge of treason. His disdain for constitutional restraints could lead to abuses of power that forfeit the trust of even a Republican Congress,” he wrote in 2017, only to not have forecasted that it will be a Democratic-majority Congress in 2018.
Much more will be written about Pres. Donald Trump, but the biggest detractor he has is himself.
* * *
Prosy Abarquez-Delacruz, J.D. writes a weekly column for Asian Journal, called “Rhizomes.” She has been writing for AJ Press for 12 years. She also contributes to Balikbayan Magazine. Her training and experiences are in science, food technology, law and community volunteerism for 4 decades. She holds a B.S. degree from the University of the Philippines, a law degree from Whittier College School of Law in California and a certificate on 21st Century Leadership from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She has been a participant in NVM Writing Workshops taught by Prof. Peter Bacho for 4 years and Prof. Russell Leong. She has travelled to France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Japan, Costa Rica, Mexico and over 22 national parks in the US, in her pursuit of love for nature and the arts.
