President Donald Trump is under impeachment investigation in House of Representatives. In the past few weeks, six Democrat-chaired committees have taken depositions and held closed-door interviews of witnesses, some of them only agreeing to do so after being issued subpoenas and others, at the direction of the stonewalling White House, refusing to do so. Next week they will begin open hearings in which some of these same witnesses will appear again to be questioned by both Democrat and Republican members of these committees. But this time, the hearings will be nationally televised as they were during Watergate about 45 years ago that I watched. Chairman Adam Schiff of the House Intelligence Committee will lead these open hearings.
Republican members of Congress have been offering all kinds of defenses of President Trump, especially regarding his July 25th phone call to Ukraine President Zelensky in which it appears Trump committed a quid pro quo (“this for that”) in holding up $391 million in military aid to Ukraine for political dirt on Trump’s opponent Joe Biden and his son. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, after being reticent to conduct an impeachment of the president, announced these proceedings on September 24th after this phone call was made public knowledge and Trump released an edited transcript of the phone call.
At first, Republicans argued President Trump committed no quid pro quo on the phone call, just as Trump was claiming and still claims. He has continued to describe it repeatedly as “a perfect call.” But now it is so obvious that this is not true because the House committees have been releasing lengthy transcripts of its private interviews of witnesses in which so many of them testify that it certainly was a quid pro quo.
So, Republicans are trying other tactics with which to defend President Trump. One is really hilarious. Lindsey Graham is a senator from South Carolina, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and a guy who used to have a brain. But somewhere and at sometime it apparently got fried, maybe due to global warming. This week, Graham–who is Trump’s biggest supporter in the Senate and one of his golfing buddies–changed his defense of Trump. Graham said, effectively, that Donald Trump is not smart enough to be a crook. And that’s the self-proclaimed “stable genius” he’s talking about. He said, “What I can tell you about the Trump policy toward the Ukraine, it was incoherent … They seem to be incapable of forming a quid pro quo.”
Worse yet, Graham had said weeks ago that, except for the July 25th phone call transcript, if Trump clearly committed a quid pro quo, “that would be very disturbing.” But polls say a majority of Americans, as well as those House witnesses, say that phone was clearly a quid pro quo that is proved by the transcript. Plus, Trump’s press man Mick Mulvaney admitted it in a televised response to reporters last week, adding that people needed to “get over it,” meaning that it was not a crime. Yet Graham said this week that he has not read the phone call transcript and will not read it. He explained, “I’ve written the whole process off. I think this is a bunch of B.S.” Is that the kind of chairman we want for the Senate Intelligence Committee, which will play a large part in impeachment proceedings if they move to the Senate?
The late night TV comics are having a heyday with Trump in the White House. So often he’s a cartoon figure. Jimmy Kimmel said this week that with all the fake news that is floating around in the airways and wherever, the best way to tell if something is true is if Trump tweets that it is not true. Kimmel said, specifically, “there’s only one way to make sure a story about Trump is true and that’s if he rage-tweets his denial.”
As the self-proclaimed master of deals, Trump the real estate mogul is always looking for a good deal. And I believe he has little or no moral conscience about how he makes one happen. For instance, he wants to buy Greenland. You read that right. He wants to buy that great big giant island-nation up there somewhere near the North Pole. I believe that’s why Trump announced this week his first move for withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement of which every nation in the world is a member in an effort to reduce human-induced global warming. This withdrawal will be final the day after the presidential election next year, on November 4th.
If Trump loses that election, whoever is president will immediately reinstate the U.S. membership in the agreement. But if Trump wins the election, the lack of U.S. membership in the agreement will drastically hurt this movement to restrict the increase in global warming. That’s what Trump wants because he wants to buy Greenland. Withdrawal from the agreement will greatly accelerate Greenland’s ice melt. That will make Greenland a paradise. Tourists will flock there. Before it happens, Trump will buy Greenland and turn it into a golfing mecca. He will build a bunch of golf course resorts all over the place. He would rename the country Trump National Greenland and advertise it as “the golfing capital of the world.” So, he will steal that title from the Scots, which he will hate to do because he always talks about his mother having been Scottish.
That’s where I would come in. I would convince The Donald to build “the world’s first floating golf course.” We would get 18 of those big glaciers that have broken off of Greenland and are floating around. Each one would represent a golf hole. We would chain-link them together. On this frozen, floating links, golfers would hit green-colored golf balls with Trump’s name on them colored green inside a white replica of the White House. Those golf balls would sell like hot cakes. But that’s only so long as this impeachment “witchhunt” that Trump calls it doesn’t turn the Trump brand into DIRT.
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