President Trump's disgraceful dealings

Day by day, hour by hour, the steady drip of evidence that President Donald Trump is callously misusing his office builds. Trump tried to make military assistance for Ukraine conditional on that government helping him to secure a win in the next election and whitewash the last one.

The detailed information from a whistleblower, State Department officials and, most significantly, from Trump himself, depicts a president who will disregard our laws, defy Congress and undermine our nation's reputation as a beacon of democracy if it will help him personally. As he said Friday, defending his demands that Ukraine investigate conspiracy theories about the 2016 election, it's about "Me! Me!"

The House of Representatives' impeachment inquiry stems from a whistleblower complaint alleging that Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a July 25 phone call to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Ukraine was desperately trying to get Trump to release $390 million in military aid, which was needed to resist renewed Russian military incursions,  that Congress had appropriated. Trump's administration kept Congress in the dark about what he was doing, including during two phone calls to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. 

The rough transcript of Trump's Ukraine telephone call, texts between State Department officials, documents, and the words and actions of Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, all confirm that linking the money to an investigation of the Bidens was Trump's intent.

Congress had determined that the military aid was essential to U.S. national interests, but Trump decided that his personal interests in harming a leading Democratic rival were more important. 

Despite the Ukraine furor, on Thursday, Trump doubled down with another craven message. Addressing the upcoming negotiations over trade tariffs that have China’s economy growing at the slowest rate in 26 years, Trump said, "I have a lot of options on China, but if they don't do what we want, we have tremendous power."

And what do “we want” from China?

“China should start an investigation into the Bidens,” Trump said moments later.

But such an investigation, no matter what it unearthed, wouldn’t shrink our trade deficit or bolster our nation’s steel industry. It wouldn’t protect our intellectual property or bring prosperity to farmers pummeled by China’s refusal to buy their products. Again, it's not about the nation, it's about "Me! Me!" 

What makes Trump’s manipulation and misdirection so hard to dismiss is the core kernel of truth they build on. Our politics are a swamp. Everywhere Trump points, there is at least a trace of slime. And he is often able to generate outrage at the status quo to short-circuit disgust at his own depredations. 

Hunter Biden, 49, has too often taken advantage of his father’s position to further his own prospects. He’s a drug addict, was kicked out of the military after testing positive for cocaine, and is, by all reports, a poor businessman who usually has failed to deliver the results implied by his connections.

Hunter Biden never should have taken a post making $50,000 a month to sit on the board of a Ukrainian energy company run by a Russian oligarch while his father was vice president. But a mountain of evidence shows Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin was removed from office because the international community, Republican senators from the United States and the majority of Shokin’s own party agreed he was doing nothing to address massive corruption. And the timing shows that Shokin's investigation of the energy company and his dismissal were never connected to Hunter Biden. 

Hunter Biden should not have founded a fund focused on investing Chinese capital in companies based outside of China while his father was in office. Voters can legitimately penalize the father for the son, but there is no credible evidence that Joe Biden did anything to further Hunter’s interests there.

The investigation of the illegal demands Trump was making of the Ukraine president details how Trump has made our nation's top officials complicit. Trump directed Vice President Mike Pence to delay a meeting with Zelensky and told the Ukraine leader to work with Attorney General William Barr on the Biden probe. Trump also deployed Giuliani to Ukraine to arrange trading a state visit to Washington in return for a Biden probe.

Giuliani shouldn't have been deployed to shake down foreign leaders.  Barr undermined the integrity of his office by squashing the two attempts by the whistleblower to bring attention to the Trump Ukraine call. 

Most Republicans are silently watching this debasement of our nation's values, though Sen. Mitt Romney, the party's standard-bearer in 2012, is a notable exception.

Trump doesn't deny what he does, calculating that the admission of his wrongdoings will cleanse them of consequences. He follows that up with baseless claims of conspiracy fueled by profane, irrelevant and often untrue attacks against his political opponents. 

We are writing history now, and it’s the president’s disgraceful behavior that is the story. Don't be distracted by the footnotes.