LP_468x60
ontario news watch
on-the-record-468x60-white
and-another-thing-468x60

Should U.S. President Donald Trump be impeached before he leaves office on Jan. 20?  In one word, "no."

The reason for my position is neither personal nor political.  Since he came down the escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015 and announced his candidacy, I've been middle-of-the-road about this President.  I've praised him when he deserved praise, and criticized him when he deserved criticism.  I've liked some of his political ideas, economic policies and foreign policy positions, and disliked others.

While this stance has never satisfied either Trump supporters or NeverTrumpers, it's allowed me to take (I believe) a more balanced approach to this strange and fascinating period in American political history.  This includes the storming of the U.S. Capitol which took place on Jan. 6.

Trump will be facing an Article of Impeachment for the second time in his presidential term.  On Jan. 11, Congressional Democrats introduced a single Article alleging the sitting President caused an "incitement of insurrection" and "willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged and foreseeably resulted in lawless action at the Capitol."

The Article suggests "President Trump repeatedly issued false statements asserting that the Presidential election results were the product of widespread fraud and should not be accepted by the American people or certified by State or Federal officials."  This includes controversial remarks like "we won this election, and we won it by a landslide" as well as "willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged and foreseeably resulted in lawless action at the Capitol, such as: 'if you don't fight like hell you're not going to have a country anymore.'"

It also highlights Trump's leaked Jan. 2 phone call with Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's secretary of state.  The Article notes his inappropriate suggestion or threat, if you wish that the state should "find" enough votes to overturn the result from last November's presidential election.  (President-elect Joe Biden beat Trump by 11,779 votes in Georgia, or 0.26% of the total vote.)

The Article claims Trump "gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of Government."  There's also the suggestion that he "threatened the integrity of the democratic system" and "betrayed his trust as President, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States."

Is this a fair assessment of what happened, or another political stunt to impeach a President they've disliked for years?  Let's flesh this out a bit further.

I'm a wordsmith.  I know that words matter.  Many others do, too.

Trump's words had a powerful effect.  His allegations of widespread electoral fraud and that the presidential election was stolen from him may remain unfounded, but millions of Americans either believe him or believe it's possible.  That's helped mobilize Trump's defenders to consistently claim he won the election by a landslide.  Even though no legislative body or court of law has agreed with this interpretation.

Falsely claiming you won an election that you lost is very different from storming an important historical landmark such as the Capitol Building.

Trump never wrote or said a single word, sentence or phrase that endorsed the horrific attack on the Capitol.  This goes from his loss to Biden on Nov. 3, 2020 all the way to his Jan. 6, 2021 speech at the Save America March in Washington.  He's rejected the result, told his supporters to defend their votes and country, and said he would never concede the election.  That's as far as he's ever gone.

While Trump isn't blameless, he can't be directly held responsible for the violent actions of domestic terrorists.  Indeed, he didn't march alongside this angry mob.  He didn't brandish a pitchfork, or cause any destruction with his own bare hands.  It's also highly unlikely he would have even wanted people to do something as terrifying and chilling as what we saw in his nation's capital.  Not if he desires a future in politics, that is.

This brings us to the terrible precedent that a presidential impeachment could potentially have in U.S. politics.

Trump's personal frustration and inability to absorb a loss shouldn't lead to him being turfed out of office and barred from ever running for elected office again.  If Democrats and a few Republicans, truth be told are only going to move forward with an indirect association as a basis of this single Article of Impeachment, and establish an imaginary direct link that's highly suspect, it's an improper conflation of ideas.  This could have detrimental effects on the U.S. political system going forward.

And besides, every previous U.S. president from George Washington to Barack Obama has said or done something controversial.  Yes, their words and actions may not have specifically led to an uprising such as what we witnessed last Wednesday.  But if that's going to be the bar going forward, don't expect good people to ever run for politics again.

There are other ways to condemn Trump, and that process has already started.

He's been banned from Twitter (his greatest political tool), Facebook and Snapchat.  Many businesses, including Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley have permanently cut ties.  The 2022 PGA Championship will no longer be held at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey.

That's a much better way of handling this difficult situation than impeaching Trump with a false narrative and faulty logic.

 

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


Forget impeachment.  Forget the 25th Amendment.  Forget all that.

They're too late, and they don't matter.

For sure: Donald Trump, the Mango Mussolini, will slink out of town like the carnival huckster that he is.  He's not going to the inauguration, and everyone there will be relieved by that like when you hear your angry drunk uncle won't be coming to wreck your wedding.

There's a week left, give or take, and there's not enough time or votes to impeach and convict.  There's not any chance he'll be declared unfit under the 25th Amendment, either.

So he'll be gone, sure.  But Donald Trump is like a bad stain in a good rug: you can't get the stain out.  However much civil society tries to eliminate the stench of his "presidency," we will fail.

Because Trumpism is here to stay.

Trump and Trumpism populist, racist, sexist, dishonest was born in the ashes of the 2008-2009 global economic collapse.  Back then, it called itself the Tea Party.  It was one of two populist movements that were birthed that year.

The other was Occupy: the group of kids, mostly, who took over city parks and who didn't have a leader or a bank account or an ad campaign.

The Tea Party and Occupy shared some views: they hated the Davos people who had been running things.  They hated the bailouts to bankers and CEOs.  They hated the established order.

They differed, however, in this way: Occupy atomized, and fell between the blades of grass in the city parks, never to be seen again.  The Tea Party kept going.  It took over the Republican Party, squeezing out horrified New England GOP veterans.

The reality TV Star, Donald J. Trump looking down from his gilded perch on Fifth Avenue had previously been a Democrat.  But he saw the Tea Party putsch and he saw opportunity.  It needed a leader and he would be it.

He had never run for anything before, really.  Not seriously.  And the grifters in his circle didn't know how to run a presidential campaign.

But Trump had two things none of his future Republican rivals would have: his "fake news" refrain and his mastery of social media.

Trump wasn't bright, but he was smart enough to know like Justin Trudeau, ironically that traditional media was in trouble.  Voters were gravitating in droves to Twitter and Facebook and the like.

That's where the ratings are, and Trump understands ratings better than most.  He shortly became the biggest presence on social media in the world.  He would come to not just dominate the agenda: he owned it.

He'd drop a little silver ball on Twitter, and we in the media would chase it.  Every.  Single.  Time.

But when negative stories would start to surface in traditional media something that was inevitable with a crook like Trump the president-to-be had a solution.  It was all "fake news," he'd say.

Over and over he'd say that, like an incantation, and it would do its magic.  "Fake news" was a way to cast doubt on every news story Donald Trump didn't like.

Mueller probe?  Fake news.  Russian hacking?  Fake news.  Lining pockets?  Fake news.

It worked, just like the Twitter strategy did.  And it inevitably led to 100,000 deranged mouth-breathers storming onto Capitol Hill, leaving bodies and destruction in their wake.

Impeachment or not, 25th Amendment or not, Donald Trump will soon be gone.  And for those who say we'll never see his like again?

We will, we will.

The beast that Trump aroused is awake, and it is slouching towards Bethlehem, once again.

[Warren Kinsella worked for Joe Biden's presidential campaign.]

Photo Credit: BBC

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


As angry sentiment against politicians who travelled over the holidays in the midst of a global pandemic continues to smoulder, people in Alberta are turning their eyes toward the promise of recall legislation.  While Jason Kenney has been trying to deflect from his culpability in overseeing his ministers and MLA travelling, taking responsibility for a red herring designed to divert attention, there are those who are demanding the immediate resignation of those MLAs for their actions including those ministers who already faced demotion and if they won't resign, then there are enough angry people who want to demand that their terms end as soon as possible, and have been promised a mechanism to make that happen.  Nevertheless, recall laws are bad news no matter how you look at it.

For starters, the lure of recall legislation is yet another Americanism that populists in this country have long been enamoured with while ignoring the conventions of Responsible Government that can be a better remedy for the problems associated with troublesome representatives, were they being properly respected and not being subverted by party shenanigans as is so often the case these days.  Alberta has experience in attempting recall legislation, having enacted and repealed it in the 1930s when it was used against the premier at the time.  The Reform Party certainly was enamoured with the idea, and as one of its last surviving adherents, Jason Kenney again promised it to his people.

Of course, he had to try and be clever about it, and looked to his neighbours in BC for how their recall legislation works.  There, the petition to initiate a recall election requires forty percent of a riding's total voting population to sign on something that has generally been a suitable threshold in the province where five of the six times it has been triggered, there were too many discrepancies and ineligible entries among the signatures, and on the sixth time, the MLA in question resigned.  The proposal for Alberta not only adopts this threshold, but also protects MLAs from such a petition within the first eighteen months after an election, and from having a second recall petition initiated against them if they survive the first one.  Not only that, it would create a "recall election" another Americanism before the seat is declared vacant and a by-election called, whereas BC's forgoes this step and simply declares the seat vacant.

In other words, Kenney's high thresholds are much more about the appearance of "direct democracy," which he claims to be an Alberta value, than the actual value of it.  Which isn't to say that there shouldn't be high enough safeguards around its use it's a notoriously fickle beast that tends to bite the hands that created it but this tends to fit Kenney's pattern of thinking himself cleverer than he really is, particularly when it comes to his particular modus operandi of setting fires and then waiting for people to show up before he puts them out so that he can look like a hero.  I have no doubt that his intention with this kind of legislation was for it to be used tactically whip up his adherents' irrational anger against his perceived enemies, and then ensure that they face the wrath of the mob.  Alberta politics has been very good at unseating opposition leaders in the past, often with the help of a lot of corporate money flooded into their ridings, and no doubt Kenney had hoped to do more of the same in the future.  Of course, life comes at you fast, and he is now facing the very irrational anger that he fomented as his party's actions in the pandemic is coming around to bite him in the ass.

While Kenney and other populists like to claim that recall laws enforce accountability and are much more immediate about it than waiting for a general election, it's generally bad for the practice of democracy because it emboldens populist mobs.  I think there is value in giving problems time, both for tempers to cool because it's always a mistake to make political decisions when you're in the middle of a white-hot rage but also for the possibility that opinions can harden.  In this case, a party might hope that the recall of one or two MLAs might placate said mob and spare the rest of the party in hopes of re-election, rather than letting those MLAs stay on and reflect badly on the rest of them.  I will grant you that there is also the possibility of redemption for MLAs who have misbehaved, and there are better ways to demonstrate that than in a by-election.

With that said, there are already mechanisms inherent in our system that should be used rather than recall, such as the mobilization of the riding association to ensure that the misbehaving incumbent is not given the chance to run again.  Deny them the nomination, send the signal that their political career in the party is over, and the same effect is achieved within the confines of the existing system.  And if the party intervenes and protects that MLA's candidacy, then that also sends a signal about what the party is willing to tolerate and what they really think about the grassroots democratic process that they claim to respect, which recall legislation is supposed to reflect (when it is really just an end-run around it for populist gain).

Do I think these particular MLAs need to face recall?  Not really but if their riding associations are as steamed about their behaviour as they seem to be, then they should organize to deny them their nominations for the next election.  And if Kenney protects them, then it demonstrates again his particular moral bankruptcy amongst everything that has transpired, which shouldn't be too hard to gauge regardless.  But simply adopting more Americanisms and trying to weld them onto our system only creates more problems than it solves, and we would be better off without them.

Photo Credit: Twitter

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.