The Clown Living On Credit Driving the Car Off the Cliff

trump is a Clown living on credit
- quoted to Rick Wilson by a hedge fund manager

The last 48 hours - especially in the period since Pelosi agreed to let the House begin impeachment proceedings - have been a bit hectic and it's nearly impossible to write it all down because any minute now the shit can get crazier, but pretty much I can boil it down to this:

What the ever-fucking hell did trump and his idiots do now?

If you're following me you better be reading Balloon Juice, and I can tell you this day alone has been one of the craziest I've ever seen on there.

Mistermix's New Strategy: Admit Everything where trump pretty much just... tweeted everything out.

David Anderson's Unleash the Lawyers

The moment when it turned into farce: Mistermix's What a Bunch of Dumbshits when the White House emailed the House Democrats the Republicans' talking points (and then tried to recall that email).

I skipped over the grizzly bear fight because that's normal. The rest of this shit wasn't normal.

Betty Cracker's review of trump's flop sweat: "Lost Mustard! Naked Mopping! Suburu in a Field!"

Trump abused presidential power on live TV today in a press conference with Ukrainian President Zelensky, reiterating demands for investigations of the Bidens on camera. But that’s not even the crazy part. He also said on live TV that he thinks Ukraine has the 33K emails deleted from Hillary Clinton’s server, that the DNC server is located in Ukraine and possibly Ukraine has the remains of Amelia Earhart.

Okay, I made the Amelia Earhart part up, but seriously, he just started blurting out wingnut conspiracy theories to an uncomprehending world. It would be as if you were on global TV, saw a green balloon and started ranting about lost mustard, naked mopping and stray Subarus marooned in fields. Everyone would look at you like you’d lost your mind...

And right now Anne Laurie's open thread Do I Look Like A Man Who Would Go To Jail For This Putz?

Right now, for what I can gather, trump's rambling self-pitying performance today included VP Pence, AG Barr, Rudy, and maybe even two-thirds of his own family as co-conspirators in trump's extortion scheme on Ukraine.

There's been so much crazy today with the illegal stuff trump admitted to that asking a lawyer for an explanation won't be needed. Oh what the hell, here's commentary from Noah Feldman via a Minnesota legal blog:

...It is not uncommon for the U.S. government, including the president, to make aid to foreign governments conditional on certain conduct. Indeed, during the Barack Obama administration, U.S. aid to Ukraine was delayed while the U.S. pushed Ukraine to remove its top prosecutor, who had turned a blind eye to numerous corruption investigations. Biden’s role in that pressure is one of the things Trump says he wanted Ukraine to investigate.

What makes Trump’s alleged conduct so terrible is not that he froze aid to Ukraine for a policy purpose. What makes Trump’s alleged conduct outrageous is the appearance that he was doing it for his own personal benefit. Joe Biden is at present the leading Democratic contender to face Trump in 2020. So an investigation of Biden would not serve the national interest, but Trump’s personal interest.

And herein lies a crime — at least, possibly. It is illegal for a government official to solicit a bribe. That includes situations in which a public official extracts a bribe from somebody in exchange for taking an official act that falls within his governmental authority. (There are other bribery and extortion-related statutes, but this one is most relevant.)

It could be argued that Donald Trump wanted to extract a payoff from the president of Ukraine — namely, an investigation that would cast a negative light on Biden, a prospective political opponent. If Trump communicated that he would unfreeze aid to Ukraine in exchange for that payoff, he was offering to perform an official governmental act in exchange for the payoff. Put another way, Trump extorted the president of Ukraine by demanding a bribe in the form of action against Biden. True, political advantage is not the same thing as an envelope of cash or a gold watch. But to a president seeking re-election, dirt on the leading rival could be even more valuable.

The first key element here is that an investigation of Biden wasn’t in the U.S. national interest but only in Trump’s personal interest. If the president extracts a commitment from a foreign government that is in the national interest, that doesn’t constitute extortion under the law. That’s just foreign policy. So, we can expect Trump’s defenders to say that Trump wasn’t seeking personal gain. That may be what Trump had in mind when he told reporters at the United Nations that even if he had asked Ukraine to investigate Biden, there wouldn’t have been anything wrong with it. But would a rational person really believe it was purely a coincidence that Trump was seeking dirt on his strongest presidential rival?

A second key element is that Trump was proposing a quid pro quo: In exchange for the Biden probe, he would unfreeze aid to Ukraine. The crime of extortion requires a proposed exchange. In his defense, Trump can be expected to maintain, as he has already said, that he did not himself link the Biden investigation to the Ukraine aid. But even without a smoking-gun connection, and even when a corrupt deal is struck implicitly, the government can still prosecute extortion or bribery on a quid pro quo basis. Circumstantial evidence can be enough to prove a criminal exchange. Under conditions where both presidents knew that the question of aid was on the table, it would be reasonable to infer that when Trump brought up the Biden investigation he was suggesting a deal...

Just the phrase alone "Do us a favor" and trump is pretty much toast.

And while there's still a troubling matter of trump's dealings with Russia that the Mueller probe tried to reveal, this Ukraine scandal is more direct evidence of impeachable offenses because 1) trump himself is making these calls, he can't hide behind buffers like his family and campaign staffers, and 2) unlike the Russia case where Mueller can prove Russians were involved but couldn't prove trump knew and aided them, there are direct statements and acts of Quid Pro Quo that investigators can hang their hats on.

This is where hearing from the intelligence whistleblower is a necessity. Whoever it is, that person has full details of what went down and how bad it got.

And to wrap this all up let us quote from Charles P Pierce at Esquire:

Holy hell, will they ever get the dosage right on the tranq gun?

The president* closed his busy news day with a press availability at the United Nations in New York. He was just as dishonest and calumnizing as he usually is, but he did it with an affect, and in a voice, that made him look as though he were a basset hound on Quaaludes. Almost without looking up, he lugubriously tossed Mike Pence under the bus by telling congressional Democrats (and the press) to "look at Mike Pence's phone calls." Which, I assume, will now happen. He also seemed to say that he was correct in asking the president of Ukraine to engage in international ratf-cking because Hillary Clinton didn't campaign enough in Wisconsin.

This train wreck ain't over and trump's clown car is just hitting the railguard tonight. Oy. I gotta stop mixing metaphors.