If lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives wind up voting to impeach President Donald Trump, Ye Olde Windbag will have nothing but his own mouth to blame.
And for a person who believes every word he utters is spun gold, that won’t be easy to swallow.
The White House on Wednesday released a memo — not a “transcript,” but a “memorandum” — summarizing Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The expectation among those of us who trust the president about as far as we can throw him was that this would be another vague or sanitized, possibly even Sharpie’d up, bit of nonsense from an administration abundantly comfortable with lying.
Trump even tweet-boasted about the memo’s upcoming release Wednesday morning, wondering if Democrats would apologize once they get a look at the “perfect call.” I have to wonder whether anyone read President Perfect the memo before it was released. Because it ain’t good, and the only one who should be apologizing is him.
On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi formally launched an impeachment inquiry into Trump’s attempts to get the Ukrainian president to interfere in the 2020 election by ginning up dirt on Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden.
And the memo released Wednesday shows (drumroll, please): Trump attempting to get the Ukrainian president to interfere in the 2020 election by ginning up dirt on Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden.
After reminding the Ukrainian president that “we do a lot for Ukraine” and after the foreign leader expresses appreciation for the help and his country’s plans to buy more military equipment from the United States, Trump says: “I would like for you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.”
He then encourages Zelenskiy to look into debunked allegations that Biden, as vice president, pressured Ukraine to get rid of a prosecutor who was investigating a Ukrainian energy company that had Biden’s son on its board. (That claim has no factual basis and has been reported on extensively, just Google “Biden Ukraine son prosecutor fact check.”)
An ‘act in plain sight’
Trump then says his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and U.S. Attorney Bill Barr will be in touch regarding the investigation. (That’s a whole other kettle of fish that must now be sniffed.)
So it appears Trump’s argument was: “Read the transcript and you will see that I definitely did a bunch of impeachable stuff but I’ll still say I didn’t and my supporters will believe me.”
Even if the House votes to impeach, Republicans in the Senate are terrified of Trump, his supporters and facts — not necessarily in that order — and are as likely to convict as I am to start writing Ronald Reagan fan fiction.
But none of that matters. What matters is that Democrats are finally — finally! — standing up to Trump’s self-serving betrayal of America.
Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California sits on the House Judiciary Committee. I spoke with him Tuesday night, before the damning memo of Trump’s phone call was released. The congressman said: “His own words were that he asked the Ukrainian president to investigate a political opponent. Those words in and of themselves are asking a foreign government to interfere with an election. … If that was the only thing that we had, it would certainly rise to the level of an impeachment investigation.”
“Sometimes the act is in plain sight,” Swalwell said. “The president, he copped to asking a foreign government for help in a U.S. election.”
And now Trump’s own administration has released a summary of a phone call that confirms the act of seeking foreign assistance to tar a political opponent.
I’d like to believe anyone, Democrat or Republican, would find that unacceptable. But Trump’s supporters will excuse anything. We know that all too well. And Republicans in Congress traded their souls for Trump-branded steaks long ago.
So it’s up to Democrats and anyone not fully under Trump’s spell to say, “Enough.”
“We just have to decide as a country, do we want a president asking other countries to get involved in our elections?” Swalwell said. “Are we willing to accept what that means, which is that a president who did that would owe a foreign government something and put another’s country’s interest ahead of our own. That’s what we give up.”
Buckle up, America. This stretch is going be bumpy, but it’s a road we have to go down.
Rex Huppke is a Chicago Tribune columnist. Email: rhuppke@chicagotribune.com.
