For a White House tested by stress, the irregular beat goes on
This undated image released by the House Judiciary Committee from documents provided for the impeachment probe shows President Donald Trump with Lev Parnas in Florida. Credit: AP
Key news items this week added further detail to the public understanding of how this Trump administration conducts itself.
All these developments were substantial.
None were shocking.
For months it has been evident that President Donald Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani were trying to muscle Ukraine's leaders into smearing Democrat Joe Biden.
With Trump's impeachment trial about to begin, Giuliani's alienated associate Lev Parnas released documents that add firsthand detail of the push. Echoing a Trump ambassador, Parnas says all relevant White House officials were in the loop.
“Rudy told me after meeting the president at the White House — he called me, the message was, it wasn’t just military aid — it was all aid” the U.S. would withhold if Ukraine didn’t announce desired probes, Parnas told MSNBC.
There have been doubts all along about the propriety of Trump withholding that aid. Now a General Accountability Office report says the Trump administration didn't have the legal authority to freeze the aid as it did last summer.
“Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law,” GAO wrote, unsurprisingly.
Ironically, the Ukraine government has announced an investigation — not of Biden, as Trump had demanded, but of Russian hacking into the computer operation of a big Ukrainian gas firm.
Such an alleged hack is no shock given previous Kremlin-approved cyberhacking with the potential to benefit Trump by damaging Democrats.
On a positive note, the United States and China signed what is supposed to be the first phase of a bilateral agreement that de-escalates the current trade war.
Still to be resolved, are American demands for concessions from Beijing. Intellectual property theft remains a key area of contention, but there are optimistic signs the Chinese are becoming less reliant on outside technical knowledge, obviating the need for such theft.
Trump's trade office has shown a strong pulse in other areas, too. On Thursday, the Senate gave final approval to a new North American trade deal, sending the measure to Trump for his signature on a high-priority matter.
Because Trump likes to issue tariff threats, it was no shock this week that he threatened tariffs on European autos if nations there did not help tear apart the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
The public also learned more this week about the president's special challenges regarding basic facts and history.
Two outstanding examples joined the litany of eyewitness anecdotes about Trump's lack of knowledge. They are included in the book "A Very Stable Genius."
In it, two Washington Post journalists report that Trump shocked Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi by telling him: "It's not like you've got China on your border."
On another occasion, they wrote, Trump asked Chief of Staff John Kelly as they prepared to tour the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor: “Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?”
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
