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On the third day of Donald Trump's second impeachment trial, the prosecution rested. Having made a very strong and climactic case yesterday, today the House managers finished up their presentation and ended with their closing argument, part of which was a pre-buttal to the expected arguments from the defense.
This isn't just the Keystone Kops, it's now a full-on Keystone Koup attempt. Before we get to any of it, however, we have to pause to wish Joseph Robinette Biden Junior a happy 78th birthday. Many happy returns, Joe!
Biden is now several steps closer to being sworn in as America's next president in less than nine weeks, as state after state certifies that Biden did indeed beat Donald Trump. Georgia did so today, and several other important states are slated to do so on Monday. By December 8th, all states will have done so and appointed their electors to the Electoral College.
We have a new contender for the biggest Trump lie yet. This is mostly due to its all-encompassing nature. Trump is lying not only about the issue of the day, but about his entire political career as a whole, as well.
As time goes by, it is looking more and more like the television show Trump: The Reality-Show President is just not going to be renewed for a fifth season. After all, Fox News just released a poll showing Donald Trump a whopping 12 points behind Joe Biden. That's tough news from your sponsoring network, obviously. When CNN released an earlier poll showing Trump down 14 points, he had his lawyer try to intimidate the network into retracting the poll. It didn't work, of course. So what will Trump's lawyer now have to say to Fox?
We're number one! Well... number one hundred thousand and climbing, at any rate....
Yesterday, the United States of America took the lead on the world stage, but not in a good way. We're now the most-infected nation on the planet, and are now the number one epicenter of the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak. Today, the number of cases in this country surpassed 100,000 -- a grim milestone indeed. We still have a ways to go before we are the country with the most deaths from the disease, but at the rate we're going that won't be long either.
This doublethink continued this week, as every sitting senator (except the one who was absent due to a family medical emergency) swore a solemn oath to be an impartial juror -- an oath that several Republicans have already publicly promised to utterly disregard. Because, you know, all that business about being for law and order and all that tut-tutting over the sins of "moral relativism" is so 1990s.
To use a sports metaphor, we're right at the end of the pre-season and about to start the actual games that count. Tonight was the last presidential debate between the Democratic candidates before Iowa votes in its caucuses. From now on, in each subsequent debate, we'll know not just who is up in the public opinion polling, but who has done better at the actual polls, where voters cast their ballots for the Democratic nomination.
We've said it before and we're sure we'll have to say it again before the year's out, but President Trump is the personification of what Richard Nixon used to call the "Madman Theory" of foreign policy. Back then, it was a bluff -- if Nixon acted crazy enough, then perhaps the North Vietnamese would think he was so crazy he might just drop a nuclear bomb on them. This would tend to restrain them more than if they were sure he wouldn't.
Today, I'd like to step back from a day-to-day analysis of Donald Trump's actions in order to look at a slightly bigger picture. Because at this point, it almost seems like we should all start calling him "Precedent Trump," since he is setting so many of them for future presidents to either use or abuse at will. Republicans who now slavishly insist upon supporting anything and everything Trump does -- no matter how outrageous, no matter how disruptive -- should be warned that future presidents (Democratic ones most definitely included) may one day point to current GOP behavior while insisting that they have exactly the same rights that Trump has claimed for himself. Because this is always the ultimate test of supporting any expansion of presidential powers: would you support a president of the other party doing such a thing? Again, Republicans would do well to consider this in the Trump era, because it's my guess that some of these precedents are going to come back to bite them later on. And it'll be pretty tough for them to argue against these precedents after so wholeheartedly supporting them now.
The next Democratic presidential debate is going to almost have to focus intensely on questions of foreign policy. No matter what anyone had planned previously, the situation almost demands it now. So far, the debates have been remarkably light on foreign policy, which has allowed almost all the candidates to utter platitudes about the type of world they'd like to see as president, without delving too far into any specifics about what they'd do as president at all (except perhaps on minor differences between the candidates' policies). This is no longer good enough, as we all wait to see what happens next with Iran.