Donald Trump Must Be Impeached Again RIGHT NOW
I’ m angry at the Democrats in the House of Representatives because they are failing to do their jobs by NOT IMPEACHING Donald J. Trump AGAIN and doing so RIGHT NOW.
I understand the strategic thinking that appears to be preventing the Democrats in the House from doing their jobs. Somehow, it seems as if the Democrats have made a collective decision that it would LOOK BAD for the Democrats to impeach Donald J. Trump again – for a second time – in the days leading up to the election,
It would look like a bald faced attempt to interfere with the entire electoral process.
The Democrats are, of course, wrong.
Donald J. Trump is not insane. All of the articles that have been written claiming that Donald J, Trump suffers from one form of mental illness or another are wrong, including the ones that I have written myself, despite the fact that my clinical background, training and experience make me at least a credible as some of the other people who have been writing these opinions.
In point of fact, Donald J. Trump is neither insane nor stupid. He is, in fact, a very intelligent person who lives somewhere on the continuum of normal adaptive behaviors that would not make him subject to hospitalization for any of the presumed mental illnesses he has been diagnosed with.
I am not going to itemize here the amazing series of coincidences and twists of fate that have put Donald J. Trump into the White House. You know that litany as well as I do and reiterating them here would be a waste of time and space.
When I say that Donald J. Trump is a criminal, I mean that literally. The extensive litany of the crimes he committed before becoming president pale by comparison to the crimes he has committed since becoming president.
I’m not going to waste my time – or yours – going down the list of the crimes that Donald J. Trump has committed either before or during his presidency. I will simply stipulate that Donald J. Trump has committed some many impeachable offenses SINCE the United States Senate refused to convict him on the Bill of Impeachment forwarded to the Senate by the House of Representatives.
No, the Democrats do not have the votes in the Senate to convict him today any more than they did before…but that is not the point.
The point is to bear witness against Donald J. Trump while there is still time to do so, before he imposes a virtual dictatorship on the American people.
What is happening right now in Portland, Seattle and other cities isn’t a harbinger of some future bad act. The insertion of federal troops – and make no mistake about it, they are federal troops – into American cities is the beginnings of a coup d’etat. Several American cities are already occupied by Federal troops on the basis of the pretext that those cities are in open rebellion.
Make no mistake about it. This is Donald J. Trump’s first step toward the intimidation of the American people…and the people who are taking to the streets right now are playing a historic role that will at least give us the ability to say that we did our best.
Bullshit. This is not our best. We can do better. We must do better. (Hint: Joe Biden is better.)
It is now abundantly clear that, while there are legitimate protesters in the streets of our cities who are exercising their right of assembly, it is also abundantly clear that the demonstrations are also giving cover – aid and comfort – to bad actors who are trying to evoke a response similar to the Kent State Massacre from these poorly trained and poorly led federal troops.
Some of the bad actors among the demonstrators may be sincere radicals hoping to overthrow an unjust regime and my heart goes out to those demonstrators. I am with you although my heart is lodged in a body that can no longer man the barricades itself. Others are most definitely agents provocateur who are conducting false flag attacks that are specifically designed to give Donald J. Trump the excuse he needs to declare martial law and clamp down upon the right to assembly everywhere.
Conducting an presidential election under martial law, with federal troops selectively “protecting” polling places across the United States is an act of outright and obvious voter intimidation. Even if Donald J. Trump were to dispatch federal troops to every polling place in America – an obvious impossibility because we don’t have enough troops to do that – Trump voters in Trump districts would not be intimidated by the presence of those troops….but Biden voters in Democratic Districts would be intimidated. People of color would be intimidated and they would also be subject to harassment simply on the basis of their pigmentation.
Donald J. Trump isn’t stupid. That’s a myth. Donald J. Trump is a very clever man. He is so clever that he has convinced a great many Americans that he is stupid. He is not stupid. He has convinced a great many Americans that he is ignorant. He is not ignorant. He spouts insane-sounding beliefs that he knows appear to be insane for the specific purpose of giving a great many stupid Americans reason to identify with him and to feel that he is their man. The opinions he expresses are the opinions to which they already subscribe.
Donald J. Trump isn’t a buffoon. Donald J. Trump is a skilled actor who is playing the role of a lifetime. A failed entrepreneur who has lost several times more than any realistic estimate of his net worth, he has convinced millions of Americans that he is a successful businessman. He perfected the character he is playing today over 23 seasons of The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice which was billed as reality television but was really a series of heavily scripted episodes extracted from thousands of hours of live action video.
Unfortunately, for Donald J. Trump and the people of the United States, Donald J. Trump has not adjusted to the fact that he is now going live, 24 hours a day, and no longer has the ability to edit his performances down to a finely honed presentation. He is working without a net, and so are we.
Donald J. Trump uses an eighth grade vocabulary because that is the vocabulary with which his followers are comfortable. He has tuned his rhetoric to their ears. He’s not talking to you – to the educated and the well-informed – because he knows that the educated and the informed aren’t ever going to vote for him.
Donald J. Trump has committed – and continues to commit – impeachable offenses on a daily basis, operating on the theory that The Emergency Powers Act of 1976 gives him the right to do whatever he wants….and he is almost right about that.
There is only ONE mechanism that exists to remove an out-of-control president from power…and that is impeachment mechanism.
The Democrats in the House of Representatives MUST impeach Donald J. Trump again. They must bite the bullet and appear to be partisans – and, in fact, to be partisans for the American people – by unfairly upsetting his presidential campaign by forcing him to fight off another impeachment effort.
There is enough time left to save the Republic by impeaching Donald J. Trump now because, if he wins re-election through the campaign of voter repression and voter intimidation that is now on display on the nightly news, we will never get another chance. Giving Donald J. Trump another four years in the Oval Office will destroy this nation and thrust us into an ongoing civil war.
Unfortunately, throwing Donald J. Trump out of the White House will have the exact same effect. Donald J. Trump will not stop trying to destroy the country even if he is not re-elected. There is no way to shut him up. This man will leave the White House with numerous state secrets in his head. This is not good for the United States, or anyone else who wants life on Earth to continue.
Nevertheless, the United States and the entire planet will be better off for getting rid of the Asshole in the White House. If we fail, this is what the future will look like:
07/28/2020 @ 3:13 pm
I agree that Donald Trump should be impeached. I just do not agree that it should be done now. I think Trump should be impeached as soon as a new government is seated next January. It is within the Democrats power to crush him electorally and probably to take the Senate as well. Those should be their top priorities and in that order. Impeachment afterwards would ensure that he can never hold public office again. That combined with taking the House and the Senate would effectively choke off Trumpism.
As for Trump’s intelligence, he’s dumb as a door nail. He’s not clever. He’s not a strategic genius. The degree to which he has avoided accountability says more about the rest of society than it does about his abilities. He’s dumb, dude. He’s about the dumbest adult human I have ever contemplated. He’s really, really stupid. He’s is a moron.
There are ways that Trump’s utter idiocy can be gleaned. He burdens through too many resources and runs too many risks to be doing anything by design. He burned through nearly $400 million dollars in a few decades, right down to nothing. He could have invested his cash in an S&P 500 fund and been worth something like $20 billion dollars.
Trump benefits from a modus operandi which does not draw as much suspicion as it does admiration. If he were a common criminal, he’d be incarcerated by now, if not dead. I can watch simplistic thought occur to him as they float across his dull mind. I recall an interview with Chris Matthews where he was asked about abortion and the law. Trump made up in the moment how “there must be a punishment.” The answer was multi-level stupidity, concocted by a stupid person. You could see the thought form like cracking an egg and watching it ooze. Trump has been prostituting himself in a certain particular way that has been self defeating. He allows opponents access and sells the inside to the outside. He has done it with his family, with his businesses, and now with the United States. There is nothing clever about it. It is also not difficult.
I admit that I have never seen a person who some people believe is so intelligent, while being so utterly moronic, but that is a matter of perception. That is not Trump’s doing.
Oh, how I could go on about his stupidity. “Make America Great” is plagiarized. He plagiarized a speech by Michelle Obama. Donald John Trump has roughly the intelligence of a quarter teaspoon of moss…really, really dumb moss.
07/28/2020 @ 3:19 pm
Impeachment would be an exercise in futility.
And, you said it yourself:
“Unfortunately, throwing Donald J. Trump out of the White House will have the exact same effect. Donald J. Trump will not stop trying to destroy the country even if he is not re-elected. There is no way to shut him up. This man will leave the White House with numerous state secrets in his head.”
The Inauguration takes place at 12 noon on 20 January 2021.
Trump should be placed under arrest by 1PM that very afternoon….
07/28/2020 @ 7:30 pm
You might not expect me to say it Ron, but you’re funny and exactly on point.
07/28/2020 @ 10:04 pm
@AWS; If it weren’t for Vladimir Putin, William Barr, Mitch McConnell, and his base, Trump would be a joke and the laughing stock everywhere and anywhere literate people and people of moderate concern for the well-being of the country gathered to discuss their interests…
07/28/2020 @ 4:00 pm
Bitey: Nope! He isn’t actually either stupid nor ignorant. He his evil. I actually knew Donald back in the day, hanging out in the same clubs in New York in the early seventies, but I should perhaps say that I observed him closely because I was aware of him but he wasn’t aware of me. Our families were once in conflict over a small real estate matter. My father tuned Fred up over that. Trump is not stupid. He isn’t even ignorant. He is evil. He is playing a role for a specific purpose that has been finely tuned to a specific objective.
I will grant you that he might be getting senile. Given his dietary habits, that’s not unlikely but we all lose a step or two by the time we reach our seventies.
I believe that throwing an impeachment at him right now would really upset his apple cart depending upon which way voter opinion broke on the issue. I think that most of the Republican Senators running for re-election would think twice about giving Trump a second pass.
As a political tactic, however, impeaching him now would offset much of the advantage he holds in terms of his control over the media.
07/28/2020 @ 4:31 pm
That’s not persuasive, Alan. I have observed him enough to bet my life that he is stupid. He is quite ignorant too. He is deeply ignorant. I can’t say whether or not he is approaching senility, nor do I think it really matters. He is dim witted. He’s dull. If I felt like I did not have enough of a sample to know, I’d say so. I’ve watched him like a hawk for about the last 5 years.
Now, I can’t account for what Impressed you when you knew him, but I know of his professor who said that he’s the dumbest damn student he ever had. I know his numerous employees who say he’s stupid. It wasn’t diabolically clever when he suggested using disinfectant medicinally. It was idiocy. Whether he intended to do it himself (which I doubt), or not, it was idiocy to say so publicly. It didn’t benefit him one iota to say so. He’s a moron. He does and says moronic things. He is ruled by his instinctive drives. He has the vocabulary of a 6 year old.
Now, I can recall seeing him be interviewed for the past, maybe 4 decades. I can say that he did not appear quite so stupid then as now, but you can also go back and watch many of his interviews. He was never particularly bright. Once you have unfolded his moronic patterns, even old interviews don’t seem too bright.
He paid for someone to take his college entrance exams. We don’t know how much. Why would he do that if he were not stupid and ignorant? He doesn’t read, Alan. How could he NOT be ignorant if he does not read? Osmosis? He’s 74, and he hasn’t read a book cover to cover for over a half century. No person alive could avoid information to that degree, for that long, and NOT be ignorant. He is the quintessence of ignorance. He can’t become knowledgeable to any significant degree by watching television and talking to people exclusively. He doesn’t read his presidential daily brief, and it is already reduced to pictures and bullet points. He lectures his advisers rather than listen to them because he fears showing his ignorance. He’s a dope.
07/28/2020 @ 8:45 pm
There isn’t any way one can avoid reading and not be ignorant. Ignorance is lack of knowledge. He relishes his ignorance because he knows he can spew constantly.
07/28/2020 @ 6:11 pm
If Trump had a scintilla of intelligence it would have surfaced in some form or another. It would take far too much psychic and mental energy to hide or sublimate it…Besides , Trump is far too vain to engage in such ‘deception’…
He is constantly boasting about how brilliant he is and has yet to deliver the goods on any score and at any level.
He hasn’t uttered a coherent or cogent policy statement or plan since taking office and his failure to heed the advice of his ‘advisors’ speaks volumes about his intellectual deficiencies….
There isn’t a single ‘accomplishment’ to his credit that he didn’t buy his way into….
No ‘President’ in his right mind would state that Washington’s Colonial Army took over the airports with a straight face…..
The fact that he is a compulsive and habitual liar is evidence of a compelling desire to cover, conceal, and compensate for his abject lack of knowledge and his inability to retain and process rudimentary information…
In short, Trump doesn’t have sense enough to pour piss out of a boot without the directions on the heel…
07/28/2020 @ 10:01 pm
The IQ is designed to have both mean and median = 100. That means half the population has a 2 digit IQ.* Occam’s razor. You all might be over-complicating this whole thing.
*I don’t know how to account for the number that has IQ = 100 which I suppose changes things.
07/28/2020 @ 6:25 pm
“For more than a year now, I’ve been hearing from people in the inner circles of official Washington – GOP lobbyists, Republican pundits, even a few Republican members of Congress – that Donald Trump is remarkably stupid.
I figured they couldn’t be right because really stupid people don’t become presidents of the United States. Even George W. Bush was smart enough to hire smart people to run his campaign and then his White House.
Several months back when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “f—king moron,” I discounted it. I know firsthand how frustrating it can be to serve in a president’s cabinet, and I’ve heard members of other president’s cabinets describe their bosses in similar terms.
Now comes “Fire and Fury,” a book by journalist Michael Wolff, who interviewed more than 200 people who dealt with Trump as a candidate and president, including senior White House staff members.
In it, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster calls Trump a “dope.” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus both refer to him as an “idiot.” Rupert Murdoch says Trump is a “f—king idiot.”
Trump’s chief economic adviser Gary Cohn describes Trump as “dumb as sh-t,” explaining that “Trump won’t read anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”
When one of Trump’s campaign aides tried to educate him about the Constitution, Trump couldn’t focus. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” the aide recalled, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”
Trump doesn’t think he’s stupid. “Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” he tweeted last Saturday. As he earlier recounted, “I went to an Ivy League college … I did very well. I’m a very intelligent person.”
Trump wasn’t exactly an academic star. One of his professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and Finance purportedly said that he was “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.”
Trump biographer Gwenda Blair wrote in 2001 that Trump was admitted to Wharton on a special favor from a “friendly” admissions officer who had known Trump’s older brother.
But hold on. It would be dangerous to underestimate this man.
Even if Trump doesn’t read, can’t follow a logical argument, and has the attention span of a fruit fly, it still doesn’t follow that he’s stupid.
There’s another form of intelligence, called “emotional intelligence.”
Emotional intelligence is a concept developed by two psychologists, John Mayer of the University of New Hampshire, and Yale’s Peter Salovey, and it was popularized by Dan Goleman in his 1996 book of the same name.
Mayer and Salovey define emotional intelligence as the ability to do two things – “understand and manage our own emotions,” and “recognize and influence the emotions of others.”
Granted, Trump hasn’t displayed much capacity for the first. He’s thin-skinned, narcissistic, and vindictive. As dozens of Republican foreign policy experts put it, “he is unable or unwilling to separate truth from falsehood. He does not encourage conflicting views. He lacks self-control and acts impetuously. He cannot tolerate criticism.”
Okay, but what about Mayer and Salovey’s second aspect of emotional intelligence – influencing the emotions of others?
This is where Trump shines. He knows how to manipulate people. He has an uncanny ability to discover their emotional vulnerabilities – their fears, anxieties, prejudices, and darkest desires – and use them for his own purposes.
To put it another way, Trump is an extraordinarily talented conman.
He’s always been a conman. He conned hundreds of young people and their parents into paying to attend his near worthless Trump University. He conned banks into lending him more money even after he repeatedly failed to pay them. He conned contractors to work for them and then stiffed them.
Granted, during he hasn’t always been a great conman. Had he been, his cons would have paid off.
By his own account, in 1976, when Trump was starting his career, he was worth about $200 million, much of it from his father. Today he says he’s worth some $8 billion. If he’d just put the original $200 million into an index fund and reinvested the dividends, he’d be worth $12 billion today.
But he’s been a great political conman. He conned 62,979,879 Americans to vote for him in November 2016 by getting them to believe his lies about Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and all the “wonderful,” “beautiful” things he’d do for the people who’d support him.
And he’s still conning many of them.
Political conning is Trump’s genius. This genius – combined with his utter stupidity in every other dimension of his being – poses a clear and present danger to America and the world.
The 25th Amendment must be invoked before it’s too late. “— Robert Reich
07/28/2020 @ 6:38 pm
The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and Finance is the graduate school.
Trump attended a couple of undergraduate classes in the Wharton building. He has the bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He does NOT have the MBA from the Wharton School…
07/28/2020 @ 6:50 pm
The Wharton School does award the undergraduate Bachelor’s Degree in Economics…
I’m uncertain re Trump’s claim that his degree is The Wharton Degree or the more general University of Pennsylvania Bachelor’s…
07/28/2020 @ 8:56 pm
Trump has a BA in Real Estate from Penn. He gets away with saying he was in the Business School because Real Estate is in the Business college. The Wharton School, as you say, generally refers to the graduate school. Trump is doing a bit of fluffing there…a lot of fluffing.
07/28/2020 @ 9:55 pm
And weren’t both the way Wharton was organized and it’s reputation quite different when trump went there?
07/28/2020 @ 9:00 pm
I doubt Trump has a three digit IQ. Have you ever watched him read a typed page? He wiggles and waves his shoulders like he’s a 4th grader doing a book report. He doesn’t speak in complete sentences, and he makes it appear that he is trying to keep up with his abundant thoughts. What he is really doing is keeping you from concentrating on his utter vacuousness. He’s a dope. Dumber than a bucket of warm spit.
07/28/2020 @ 8:12 pm
The difference in perceptions of Trump’s intelligence is probably due to deterioration. If you see video of Trump in the eighties, he doesn’t seem moronic at all. He doesn’t seem like the same person. As to whether it could be an act, I don’t think he could fool everyone 24/7. Too much work. I think he does have emotional intelligence in terms of manipulation. I think most of his power comes from Mitch McConnell, who has made sure Trump isn’t accountable for anything. Trump gives McConnell all sorts of cover. Without McConnell, Trump’s antics would have made him a laughingstock among a greater portion of the population.
I don’t think he gets a dictatorship. The unmarked Federal agents thing will not energize enough of his base at this point. For a coup he needs the military and the military is not behind him. The press isn’t playing along with his Portland stunt. They’re publicizing his shock troops breaking the arm of a nonviolent veteran, charging non-violent women, etc. The pictures are there. And there’s a reason the mayor opposes him, which the mayor wouldn’t do if his city was violently out of control. He’s rapidly running afoul of States’ Rights, which doesn’t play well with Republicans. And the former Republicans’ voices are getting louder and louder. The hardest hitting ads are coming from former Republicans and especially from veterans, who are openly accusing him of treason.
Impeachment? I’m of two mines, both tactical. The first is we absolutely don’t want him to be able to play the victim. Right now he’s the oppressor and that’s where we want him. On the other hand, the advantage of impeachment is what it would do in the Senate. If it fails, that vote will haunt a lot of Senators very soon. My first inclination is to keep him from being a martyr. The election isn’t far.
If he screws with the election, he won’t have a successful coup, he’ll have a revolution. The Portland demonstrations are spreading, and they’re nothing compared to what happens if he blatantly rigs an election. If a coup happens it will be a military coup and we’d be better off with that than with Trump, because this wouldn’t be a coup to overthrow the Constitution but to protect it.
He’ll leave, but I don’t know how much blood it will take. I hope not much.
07/28/2020 @ 9:12 pm
Scroll through some videos of Trump being interviewed in the 1980s. The only difference from now is that he is younger. He answers just as he does now. He had no depth then. He had people convinced that he was mysterious and sophisticated. He wasn’t. He was a moron then just as he is now.
You can look at interviewers and sometimes the audiences, and they are fascinated by this mysterious, allegedly wealthy man, but it is all crap. He rarely completes a sentence…even then. He never discussed issues with depth or insight. There is tones of video on him since then.
07/28/2020 @ 9:48 pm
(This is following kosher & bitey’s exchange. I can’t tell where it will end up in the order.)
I think it was pretty well known around NY even in the 70s and 80s that trump was an empty suit and a fraud. The popular media pandered to him but I have the impression that they had schedules to fill and the unwashed audiences ate him up.
Or maybe it’s all my cynicism but you know how it’s always said about him that he’s wanted to be accepted by the big shot Manhattan developers and they always looked down on him and he resents it. Listen to Mary Trump say that she and the rest of the family couldn’t believe his candidacy would ever go anywhere because he’s a basic nothing and how surprised they were and are that people couldn’t see through him. I think he’s been a known quantity to anyone who paid attention to him. Or maybe I read New York magazine too much in the 70s.
07/30/2020 @ 1:31 am
I have watched earlier interviews. Shallow, yes. A cretin, no. His speech rhythm was entirely different. Quicker. More aware. More responsive. Better vocabulary. Ideas weren’t completely foreign to him.
09/10/2020 @ 4:37 pm
Ah, I found it! I had to concede to your point. Trump is not stupid. I went to great detail about how dumb I think Trump is. I was wrong. For the first time, I think yesterday, I was convinced that he is not a moron. My thoughts were exactly like this writer, and I think probably like many around the nation.
“…Yet in recordings Woodward has released of Trump talking about the coronavirus — excerpts from interviews conducted for Woodward’s new book, “Rage” — the president doesn’t sound ignorant or deluded. Rather, he sounds uncommonly lucid…”
I would have bet my life that Trump was an idiot. Hell, I probably did. You were right. I was wrong. That is very clear to me now. Also, Trump operates with a certain level of mendacity that does make it appear to be stupidity, even when you are specifically trying to account for that. Anyway, you were right. The man is not stupid.