Ideas and Impressions: Trump will stop at nothing to win

Jason Moscovitz

By Jason Moscovitz

While the world watched the impeachment trial of U.S. President Donald J. Trump, you had to wonder if Mad magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman had it right when he’d say, through that sizable gap in his front teeth, “What, me worry?”

I can imagine Trump’s face on Mad having the same impact as Alfred E. Neuman. The look is the same. A satirical idiot is still an idiot and, guess what, Trump has graced the front cover of recent editions of Mad. Actually I had no idea Mad was still around until I Googled it.

How could baby boomers know one day that someone just like Alfred E. Neuman would be occupying the Oval Office? For me, that’s the tragedy. I grew up never believing it possible that such a flawed individual would be the most powerful person in the world.

There are those who like Trump’s “America first” politics, his support of Israel, and there is no denying how employment and American stock exchange numbers have improved since he became president. But, as Shakespeare wrote, it still smells “rotten in the state of Denmark,” no matter how you cut it.

Trump’s behaviour led to the impeachment process – even though the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate would never vote to remove Trump from office. While Democrats argued impeachment was about protecting the constitution, Republicans maintained it was about protecting the presidency from unhinged partisanship, and so went the straight-laced politics.

While experts and pollsters will sway back and forth on who won the impeachment bunfight, the impeachment cannons on both sides are loaded and ready to fire with the primaries, the nominating conventions, and the presidential election now just days, weeks and months away.

The key question for many is whether Trump can win again. For many outsiders around the world, like us looking in, it is hard to imagine Trump winning again. However, hold on, anything is possible in America.

The Democratic candidates for president who are still standing represent a political party in disarray as the Democrats seem to sorely lack the necessary policy cohesion and discipline to move forward. The candidates offering to go to war against Trump in November appear weak, or at least, no one has yet been able to stand up and lead from a position of strength.

I’ve nothing against old people – I’m one of them – but former vice-president Joe Biden is past his best-before date. Senator Elizabeth Warren may have had it, but then blew it when she couldn’t gravitate to the centre. Mayor Pete Buttigieg is an intelligent, interesting newcomer, but the question remains, is a gay president even possible in today’s United States of America? Senator Bernie Sanders is further left than Warren. Senator Amy Klobuchar shines in that crowd, but can she shine throughout the country in sufficient numbers to win the presidency?

Democratic Party candidates are just not impressive and it makes you wonder how Hillary Clinton must feel about that. What a story it would be, if, because they couldn’t do better, Democrats drafted Hillary Clinton or dragged her into another battle with the same Trump she was once friends with until he savagely nicknamed her “Crooked Hillary” and then went on to beat her in the states that counted the most in the 2016 election.

What a rematch that would be, another battle of titans Trump and Clinton. It would be electrifying entertainment, but it would also do something positive and concrete. Somehow it would be good to know if Trump was a fluke in 2016 because a whole bunch of bad things happened to poor Clinton – when bad luck, bad judgement, and a bad campaign cost her the presidency.

Trump beat her in the Electoral College. He did it by belittling his opponent. When Trump threw dirt all over Clinton, he proved how far his killer instinct could bring him in politics. History will remember that Trump bullied his way to the presidency in 2016.

Post-impeachment, Trump appears to be ready to bully some other Democrat this year. We now know this man, this president, stops at nothing. There is a scary side to Trump that goes beyond him.

And what is actually scarier than Trump are the thousands of crazed, angry Americans who egg him on at his rallies.

Ideas and Impressions: ‘Not enough shock and zero shame’

Jason Moscovitz

By Jason Moscovitz

As the Trump impeachment “breaking news” drama in the U.S. continues to feed on itself, I am more interested in the big picture than the details. The big picture inevitably brings me to comparisons with the Watergate scandal that crushed president Richard Nixon.

The historic Watergate hearings in the summer of 1973 coincided with my graduating from journalism at Carleton University. My major was political science. Watergate became my passion and I absorbed everything. I had the time to go full throttle.

After graduation, I worked part-time doing media research. I worked on my own schedule, so I had lots of free time to follow Watergate all summer. I watched every second and then the replays at night.

The spectacle of watching the unthinkable every day for weeks was a measure of how the Watergate hearings had to be one of the best live dramas in the history of television. That and the mourning weekend for president John Kennedy would be the classics.

Not to diminish anything on the Kennedy side, Watergate ran on high over a long shelf life. It never got boring. It just got better. What made it so interesting was that back then, many Americans didn’t think a president could do such rotten things.

Today, people take it for granted that President Donald Trump is no angel, but Nixon had a checkered past as well. He was called Tricky Dicky long before Watergate. Point being, back then, the president of the United States, by virtue of the office, was usually, at least initially, given the benefit of the doubt.

In Nixon’s time, there was no all-news television or social media. The president was allowed to breathe and some things really were kept top secret. It was a cloistered public existence compared to today’s madness.

But for all the differences, there are similarities – one of them glaring. The root of both presidents’ trouble was actions they undertook to get dirt on political opponents, past and present. Nixon was bloodthirsty for dirt on the Kennedys.

Nixon would have survived Watergate except for those countless tape recordings in which he clearly incriminated himself. Once the Supreme Court decision forced their release, Nixon’s Republicans in the U.S. Senate jumped ship and his presidency was dead.

You would have to wonder if the call with the Ukrainian president was taped or preserved when Trump was seeking dirt on Joe Biden. Somehow, you would think not. One would assume Nixon was the last of the U.S. presidents who taped themselves for posterity, but in that nut house environment, who knows. What we do know is that there are hotly contested differences over the veracity of the transcript.

Officials on the call with Trump have given sworn testimony that the White House version is missing some key parts that would put Trump in an even worse light. Missing parts?

It reminds me of a pivotal Nixon tape with an 18-minute gap. Nixon said Rosemary Woods, his executive assistant mistakenly erased the 18 minutes while transcribing. There was so much bad stuff without the gap one could only assume the 18 missing minutes was a smoking machine gun.

There was something else about Nixon. The Watergate break-in was not Nixon’s only faux pas. His long list of misdeeds included another break in at a psychiatrist’s office to get dirt on another political enemy. And how about his threat to use the Internal Revenue Service to go after enemy journalists?

Trump’s long list of misdeeds stem from a Nixon-like mind that sees enemies everywhere while Trump surpasses Nixon when it comes to adultery and illegal payoffs to keep women quiet.

Watergate had “Deep Throat,” Mark Felt, the second-in-command at the FBI who was passed over by Nixon when he named a new director. On one of the tapes, Nixon referred to Felt as “that Jew from the FBI,” even though Felt was not Jewish.

Trump’s Ukrainian extortion attempt burst open when a whistleblower came forward because, as in the Nixon era, it ultimately came down to a president’s abuse of power.

Nixon resigned before he was impeached. Trump won’t have to because in today’s world of five scandals a day, his bad behaviour is the swamp that is the Trump presidency.

Unlike Watergate, there is not enough shock and zero shame.