Exactly 21 years and six days ago, former President Bill Clinton took to the podium in the White House Rose Garden and delivered a stone-faced apology to the American people for “what I said and did.”
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President Trump has made clear repeatedly over the last week that he is not only vindicated but wants payback meted out against his political opponents. Susan Collins lamely claimed Trump had learned his lesson by being impeached. Even she had to take that back and say she hoped he had. Numerous press reports from news organizations with strong sourcing inside the White House say that Trump not only feels vindicated and wants payback but feels something like invincible. All the ‘adults in the room’ told him not to do this and not to do that. He did all of it and more and what happened? He’s still President. He’s even reasonably well positioned for reelection. So, he reasons, he was right all along and he can in fact do anything he wants.
Along those lines I want to point out just two things we’ve learned in the last forty-eight hours.
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We’re in a pretty dramatically different situation in the Democratic primaries than we were a week ago. Everything could change on Tuesday. But for now it looks much more likely that Bernie Sanders will be the nominee than it did a week ago or certainly a month or two ago. With that in mind, I wanted to flag a set of facts that tie back to what I discussed earlier this afternoon about Trump’s even more blatant post-impeachment abuses of power.
Most of these facts have been rattling around my head for the last six months but a reader from the Bernie world flagged an article to mention this evening which renewed my attention.
Back in 2016 and then again into 2017 a series of press reports raised questions about Sanders’ wife Jane Sanders and her time as President of Burlington College. The college underwent a dramatic expansion under Sanders’ leadership and then closed in 2016 under a mountain of debt. Press reports and political critics suggested that Jane Sanders and Senator Sanders’ Senate office had pressured People’s United Bank to make a $6.7 million loan to the bank which underwrote the expansion.
President Trump was never going to just roll over and take solace in his acquittal.
And after yesterday’s dark and blatantly bonkers speech from the White House celebrating his acquittal, it’s no surprise that he and his allies are already retaliating against those who wronged the President. As an image-obsessed leader who demands nothing short of cult-like loyalty from all who have access to him, it’s easy to believe new reports from Bloomberg News and the Washington Post that the White House is planning to reassign Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman back to the Department of Defense.
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I had thought the intra-Democratic divisions this year couldn’t help but be less than 2016. Divisions usually come more to the surface when a party has had a decent run in power. They’re not as hungry for the presidency. The risks of its loss are less palpable. There’s more focus on reordering who the dominant party faction is. The crisis of President Trump you would think would concentrate people’s minds. And indeed poll after poll shows just that: overwhelmingly Democrats want whoever can beat Trump.
But that’s not how it’s looking.
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Through the Ukraine scandal, there’s been a persistent question about the rush to get Zelensky to play ball and whether similar efforts occurred before Zelensky took office. Josh Kovensky has unearthed new evidence that confirms just that.
President Trump appears to be in the midst of firing some or all of the government appointees and career officials who appeared before Congress under subpoena. Lt. Col. Vindman and his brother Eugene, who works as a lawyer at the White House, were both escorted out of the White House today without notice. And just a short time ago EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland announced that he has been notified that he has been fired effective immediately.
8:52 PM: Good on Buttigieg for not getting goaded into saying he would have ordered the assassination of Soleimani. The ABC guy definitely tried.
8:48 PM: Bernie is 100% right. Reliving, relitigating 2016 is a disaster.
8:27 PM: Biden: “The politics of the past I think was not all that bad. … I don’t know what about the past of Barack Obama and Joe Biden was so bad.”
8:21 PM: One thing I keep thinking about in these health care debates is, can someone make the point that President Trump is trying to get rid of the ACA and eliminate protections for pre-existing conditions? I’m not saying that’s all that matters. We need to build on the ACA. But politically speaking, you just can’t never mention that.
8:16 PM: I respect Sanders for saying unprompted that everyone on the stage is going to support the nominee. I don’t doubt he means it. But that’s not what’s happening with his supporters. Not most of them, but many of the most vocal. That’s a big problem for all Democrats.
8:10 PM: Good follow-ups by Stephanopoulos. Bernie constantly talks about game-changing turnout, reshaping the electorate. But his own campaigns show little evidence of that.
8:08 PM: This is a rough display. I think Biden is right that both of the current frontrunners – Sanders and Buttigieg – are big big risks as the Democratic nominee. But Sanders is just more dynamic and coherent making his case than Biden is, in this specific exchange.
10:38 PM: Given that some really big things are going to be decided Tuesday and in the week or two just after I didn’t come out of this debate having any more sense of what is going to happen.
9:05 PM: This David Muir guy really typifies the worst of how the big news organizations approach foreign affairs. Most of his questions have centered on goading people into saying they’d start more wars, kill more people. There’s more to our role in the world than macho test questions about whether you would have killed this person or attacked that country. And it’s not like I’m a big pacifist. But that’s a really skewed, warped way of looking at our role in the world.
9:03 PM: Biden started the debate distant and vague. He’s at least showing energy here and focus. Not the highest standard of course.
An update from the New York suburbs from TPM Reader FB …
JoinTonight, a Republican County Legislator in Westchester County New York, David Tubiolo from Yonkers, switched parties and became a Democrat. This left the 17-member Westchester County Board of Legislators, which as recently as 3 years ago had a Republican coalition majority and arch-conservative County Executive, with NO REPUBLICANS. The sole remaining member of the minority caucus is a registered Conservative from the town of Mt. Pleasant.