by Joe Walsh
He went on like that for a minute before bookending his “this is the essence” caveat with “This is in sum and character what the president was trying to communicate with the president of Ukraine.” Whether it actually was what he was trying to communicate hadn’t been formally investigated at the time—but from Trump’s perspective, it wasn’t.
Now, if you’re a hard-core Trump supporter, you probably absolutely loathe Schiff—and even if you’re a garden-variety Republican, an independent, or (believe it or not) a journalist, you’re likely to be skeptical of his conduct in some way. George Stephanopoulos, the former Bill Clinton aide turned ABC News host, asked Schiff during his weekly Sunday program why he would “make up dialog for dramatic effect, even if it’s a parody, as you say?”9 I mention that to make clear that I’m not about to defend Schiff. Rather, I want to show how Trump’s reaction to Schiff demonstrates his delusions of grandeur. First, there was this tweet:
Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people. It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?10
There you have it: the president of the United States just casually wondering if federal law enforcement should arrest the House Intelligence Committee chair and charge him with a crime punishable by death. “Well, maybe he was just joking,” one might say. Well, here Trump is later that week speaking to press in the Oval Office:
The whistleblower started this whole thing by writing a report on the conversation I had with the president of Ukraine. The conversation was perfect, it couldn’t have been nicer. I saw [Senator] Rick Scott, I saw many of the senators talking about it, many of the congressmen talking about it—not a thing wrong. Unless you heard the Adam Schiff version, where he made up my conversation. He actually made it up. It should be criminal, it should be treasonous. He made it up, every word of it, made up, and read it to Congress as though I said it. And I’ll tell you what, he should be forced to resign from Congress, Adam Schiff. He’s a lowlife. He should be forced to resign. He took a perfect conversation, realized he couldn’t read it to Congress, because it was perfect—it was a very nice conversation. I knew many people were on the phone. Not only were many people on the phone, we had stenographers on the phone taking it down word for word. He took that conversation—which was perfect—he said, I can’t read this. So, he made up a conversation and reported it and said it to Congress and the American people. And it was horrible, what he said. And that was supposed to be coming from me. But it was all fabricated. He should resign from office in disgrace, and frankly, they should look at him for treason, because he is making up the words of the President of the United States. (My emphasis.)11
He called a conversation “perfect” four times, which was weird enough. (Have you ever heard someone use that word to describe a damn phone call?) But he also described Schiff’s actions as “treasonous” and, to make sure there was no misunderstanding, said Schiff should be “looked at”—meaning investigated—“for treason.” Now, I want you to read the federal statute that spells out the consequences for being guilty of treason. Pay special attention to what—not who—the object of treason is in this language from the US Code:
Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
Whoever “levies war against” . . . the United States.
Whoever “adheres to [the] enemies” of . . . the United States.
Whoever gives “aid and comfort” to the enemies of . . . the United States.
Treason is a crime of acting against the nation.
Leave aside for a moment the fact that nothing Adam Schiff did was—my word, I can’t believe I actually have to say this—actually “treasonous.” He embellished, overstated, what have you, the president’s portion of a call transcript with a foreign leader, and he qualified it twice by saying that the embellishment or overstatement was what he read between the lines. The issue relevant to Trump’s narcissism is that he believes this was an offense committed against the nation. In effect, Trump is saying that treason is a crime that attacks not the United States but Donald Trump. When another politician mischaracterizes Donald Trump, it is treason. He said that. And his words carry weight because he’s the president.
This is so nuts, so manipulative, so self-obsessed, so megalomaniacal that I don’t know where to begin, because there are so many places to do it. I guess I may as well start here: “treason” is not a word you bandy about when you’re the president. Look, I understand that Trump has cheapened the meaning of words—and our politics in general was already devaluing them before he came along. A progressive nonprofit called the Action Project released an ad in 2012 that showed an actor playing House Speaker Paul Ryan wheeling “granny” off a cliff—to criticize his position on Medicare reform.12 For years, Republicans called Barack Obama a socialist—a word we’ve gained a new appreciation for in the era of politicians such as Bernie Sanders. I confess that as a talk radio host, I was part of the trend of using hyperbole to criticize public figures and government policies I disagreed with. But I can’t underscore this enough: there is a massive difference between a person who is not the president of the United States using exaggerated political language and a person who is the president of the United States saying, adamantly and repeatedly, that somebody inside the Department of Justice should “look at” one of his political opponents for the heinous act of treason just for exaggerating a comment that was clearly made for dramatic effect. If we can’t agree on that—if we can’t say that the nation’s chief executive directly accusing a member of the other party of that crime is a bridge far, far too far—then we can’t ever screw the lid back on. Because what will happen is that we will normalize presidents explicitly saying that someone on the other side of the aisle should possibly face death over something as minor as a rhetorical dispute, until one of those presidents is just crazy enough to get DOJ to try the case.
And just in case this seems like an isolated incident, the previous week Trump made a similar charge against the person who spoke to the whistle-blower who had uncovered the Zelensky phone call. “Whoever the hell they saw—they’re almost a spy,” he said at a private event. “. . . Who’s the person who gave the whistleblower information? Because that’s close to a spy. You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”13
Back in February 2018, Trump took issue with Democrats who refused to clap at his State of the Union address. He blustered that they were “Un-American. Somebody said treasonous. I mean, yeah, I guess, why not? Can we call that treason? Why not?”14
Remember something I highlighted in a previous chapter about the president abusing his power: he does not see a line between himself and the Justice Department, which is supposed to make prosecutorial decisions independent of his suggestions and free of White House interference. He bullied his first attorney general for not opening investigations he wanted opened—and that AG, Jeff Sessions, was eventually pushed out.
He said the Time Warner–AT&T merger shouldn’t happen—and the Department of Justice filed suit to block it.
He said his Democratic rival Adam Schiff should be brought up on treason charges. What will happen next?
Folks, can we not mess around with this one? Okay? Can we not? Because it’s a little too scary. It’s a little too like the totalitarian governments that sanction the murder of political dissenters. Let’s not get even 5 percent of the way to that. Let’s not even begin down that path. Let’s remember what our nation is not, which is a nation that exh
ibits even a morsel of the habits of Kim Jong-un and his barbaric forerunners. Let’s put a stop to this right now and say that Donald Trump doesn’t belong within a thousand miles of the type of power he threatens to use casually, all because someone hurt his feelings.
That, my friend . . . is why this matters. Rhetoric has consequences.
And then, as covered earlier, there’s Trump’s delusion that he’s the world’s foremost expert ever on virtually everything. This one flows straight from the second excerpt of Conway’s essay, in which he names all the subject areas that Trump says he knows more about than anyone else. Literally anyone else. If the president believes he knows better than anyone else how to handle the likes of Kim and Xi and Putin, how to set the country’s trade policy, how to fix our leaky southern border and immigration policy generally, and how to eliminate the national debt—then what information do you think will inform his decisions? Going back to the quote from a few paragraphs ago: “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”
When you’re drunk on your own superiority like this, you’ll reason that you can do anything, because the rules don’t apply to you. We’ve seen this with Trump and the rules of arithmetic and economics. There are also rules—even informal ones, or what are called “norms”—covering the president’s comportment in office. I want to highlight one of them here, in the context of his narcissism: not selling out your country for your personal political gain, of which there are all too many examples. One is Trump’s phone call with Zelensky the morning of July 25, 2019, which reads at some junctures like standard, diplomatic sucking up—and then some. “We worked a lot” to win an election, Zelensky said, “but I would like to confess to you that I had an opportunity to learn from you.” And then: “Well yes, to tell you the truth, we are trying to work hard because we wanted to drain the swamp here in our country.” I guess the Ukrainian leader really takes the marketing advice “Know your audience” to heart.
But other parts of the call weren’t so funny. At one point, Zelensky said his government was “almost ready to buy more Javelins [missiles] from the United States”; Trump responded right after by saying “I would like you to do us a favor, though,” which was when he went into this conspiracy theory stuff about a server being housed in Ukraine and how Zelensky’s government should work with Attorney General William Barr to investigate it. Zelensky responded approvingly: “Yes it is very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President, it is very important and we are open for any future cooperation. . . . I also plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly. That I can assure you.”
Then Trump continued, “Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. . . . The other thing, [t]here’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it. . . . It sounds horrible to me.”15
Then there was the interview he did with Stephanopoulos about a month and a half before the Zelensky call:
Stephanopoulos: Your campaign this time around, if foreigners, if Russia, if China, if someone else offers you information on opponents, should they accept it or should they call the FBI?
Trump: I think maybe you do both. I think you might want to listen, I don’t, there’s nothing wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country, Norway, “We have information on your opponent.” Oh, I think I’d want to hear it.
Stephanopoulos: You want that kind of interference in our elections?
Trump: It’s not an interference, they have information. I think I’d take it. If I thought there was something wrong, I’d go maybe to the FBI. If I thought there was something wrong. But when somebody comes up with oppo research, right, that they come up with oppo research. Oh, let’s call the FBI. The FBI doesn’t have enough agents to take care of it, but you go and talk honestly to congressmen, they all do it, they always have. And that’s the way it is. It’s called oppo research.16
Then there was what Trump said on the White House lawn in October amid the Ukraine mess. He was critical of business dealings involving companies associated with Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s son, and China: “China should start an investigation into the Bidens, because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine.”17
Those are two clear-cut examples of Trump asking a foreign government to investigate his political opponent—sandwiching his admission that he’d accept dirt from a foreign government on a political opponent—in the span of three and a half months. He does it because he thinks he can get away with it. When he says, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” it’s fair to interpret him pretty broadly.
In writing about how the United States elects its presidents in The Federalist Papers, No. 68, “The Mode of Electing the President,” Alexander Hamilton stated this: “Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?”
That’s not quite so straightforward—the language is a little outdated for how we communicate today. But the point is this: it is vital that foreign governments do not influence our presidential elections. Trump asks for this influence directly—he did it in 2016 from Russia, he did it in 2019 from Ukraine and China, and he’s extended an open invitation to anyone else, because to him, it’s just “oppo research.”
He thinks he knows better than anyone else the basic definitions of a “trade deficit” and a “budget deficit.” He thinks he knows better than the economists’ consensus about trade: Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw, who left the Republican Party in October 2019 partly because of Trump, wrote that “[e]conomists are famous for disagreeing with one another, and indeed, seminars in economics departments are known for their vociferous debate. But economists reach near unanimity on some topics, including international trade.” That consensus, according to a letter to congressional leaders from Mankiw and thirteen other economists who have led the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, is that “[i]nternational trade is fundamentally good for the U.S. economy, beneficial to American families over time, and consonant with our domestic priorities.”18 But as unintelligent as these two things are, they do not actively betray the public trust. Trump thinks he knows better than Alexander Hamilton—than the no-brainer that another nation should not be a player in a presidential election.
That, Mr. President, is “traitorous.” And politics be damned, it’s impeachable on principle.
Chapter 7
Fixing the Presidency
The greatest danger that Donald Trump poses to this country domestically isn’t about tariffs, as bad as I think those are. It’s not about the national debt, as much as I care about that, and it’s not about the wall, as much as I think the country needs one. It’s about something that goes beyond how we look at the world from either “the right” or “the left.” It’s about Trump himself: his unfitness, his dishonesty, his disloyalty, his cruelty, his incompetence, his narcissism, and a whole host of other adjectives I’ll spare you so I don’t belabor the point. In January 2017, someone took over the office of president only to begin destroying it—with his personality, which bends to no laws or rules, and hi
s self-interest, which directly conflicts with the president’s job to do what’s right for the country instead of himself. It’s now up to us to set aside our political differences and take the well-being of our democracy into our own hands.
I get that this isn’t the sexiest thing in the world. It’s not the red-team-versus-blue-team type of problem that we’re used to shouting about on Twitter or a cable news panel. But please trust me on this one: we won’t have a United States of America if we let the presidency permanently turn into a gig for narcissistic charlatans who don’t give a damn about the Constitution, norms, and tradition. What good will Congress be if the president ignores the laws it passes or goes around it to, in effect, make his own? What’s the point of draining the swamp if the president will just refill it using any means necessary? How will the public be able to trust the president at all if he looks out only for himself? How will our allies? And how will our adversaries use it to their advantage?
It was evident before Trump that the presidency wasn’t perfect or invulnerable. Hell, just look at what Richard Nixon did during Watergate. In the same way we moved on from that era, Congress, the American people, and future presidents themselves have to pledge to shoring up the weaknesses in the office that Trump has exposed. It’s the only way we can make sure that our nation’s chief executive is answerable to the public and the other branches of government; to make sure that we aren’t elevating strongmen by a different name. In this country, we don’t elect kings. And we need to make sure that we have the laws and the universal commitment to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”