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Speaking With Historian, Trump Tried To Rewrite His Presidency

Speaking With Historian, Trump Tried To Rewrite His Presidency

Julian E. Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, has been writing a series of books on the United States’ most recent former presidents — and his forthcoming book, “The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment” follows his work on President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama. Zelizer’s Trump book, the historian/author explains in an article published by The Atlantic on April 4, led to a Zoom conversation with Trump during the Summer of 2021.

“As an academic historian, I never expected to find myself in a videoconference with Donald Trump,” Zelizer explains. “But one afternoon last summer — a day after C-SPAN released a poll of historians who ranked him just above Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and James Buchanan, our country’s worst chief executives — he popped up in a Zoom box and told me and some of my colleagues about the 45th presidency from his point of view…. A few days after TheNew York Times reported on the project, Trump’s then-aide Jason Miller contacted me to say that the former president wanted to talk to my co-authors and me —something that neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama had done.”

Zelizer continues, “For someone who claimed indifference about how people in our world viewed him, Trump was spending an inordinate amount of time — more than any ex-president that we know of — trying to influence the narratives being written about him.”

According to Zelizer, Trump was calm during the Zoom conversation.

Nonetheless, Zelizer writes, “If anything, our conversation with the former president underscored common criticisms: that he construed the presidency as a forum to prove his dealmaking prowess; that he sought flattery and believed too much of his own spin; that he dismissed substantive criticism as misinformed, politically motivated, ethically compromised, or otherwise cynical. He demonstrated a limited historical worldview: When praising the virtues of press releases over tweets — because the former are more elegant and lengthier — he sounded as if he himself had discovered that old form of presidential communication. He showed little interest in exploring, or even acknowledging, some of the contradictions and tensions in his record.”

A recurring theme during the Zoom conversation, according to Zelizer, was that “the best and brightest didn’t always know what they were talking about, unlike hardworking people who lived by common sense, as he did.”

“While talking to us,” Zelizer recalls, “Trump was working to influence the narratives that were told about him — as he’d done repeatedly during his time in the Oval Office. Indeed, he had even closed out his term peddling the case that he was not a failed one-term president, like Herbert Hoover or Jimmy Carter, but someone who had victory stolen from him.”

Zelizer also notes that during the Zoom conversation, Trump repeated the claim that the 2020 election was “rigged.”

In fact, the 2020 election was quite secure; widespread voter fraud did not occur as Trump has claimed. And bipartisan recounts in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and other battleground states confirmed that now-President Joe Biden won the election fair and square, picking up 306 electoral votes and defeating Trump by more than seven million in the popular vote.

Reprinted with by permission from Alternet.

Starr Mocked Over ‘Ridiculous’ Impeachment Argument

Starr Mocked Over ‘Ridiculous’ Impeachment Argument

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Bringing Ken Starr on to President Donald Trump’s impeachment defense team seemed like a terrible idea from the start, and on Monday afternoon, the former independent counsel showed why.

As the former independent counsel who pushed for a slew of impeachment charges against former President Bill Clinton, Starr is in the odd position of having vigorously and publicly advocated for removing a chief executive under much less serious accusations that Trump now faces. So inevitably, his defense was going to draw accusations of hypocrisy.

Yet somehow, he didn’t seem to foresee this and try to mitigate the damage.

“The Senate is being called to sit as the high court of impeachment all too frequently,” he said. “Indeed, we are living in what can aptly be described as the Age of Impeachment.”

If it’s true that we live in the “Age of Impeachment,” then it’s clear that Starr is a big part of the reason why. As independent counsel, he lobbied ferociously for Clinton’s impeachment. And though there’s plenty of reason to believe that Clinton acted wrongly — he lied under oath and he had an affair with a young White House intern — his actions were far less relevant to his performance as president. The articles of impeachment Trump is faced with on abusing his power and obstructing Congress, on the other hand, go to the heart of presidential authority and the balance of constitutional powers.

And in fact, the Democratic Party was reluctant to impeach Trump and appeared prepared to let his conduct as described by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller report go unaddressed. Its reluctance was probably due, in part, to the fact that Starr’s own overly aggressive push for impeachment was seen as a political failure for Republicans.

But Starr didn’t stop there with his hypocrisy.

“A presidential impeachment is tantamount to domestic war,” he said. “It’s filled with acrimony and it divides the country like nothing else.”

He said he understood that by living through the Clinton impeachment “in a deep and personal way,” but he didn’t acknowledge his own central role in stoking that acrimony.

“I’m sorry, this is just too much to be smacked in the face with such chutzpah,” said Fordham Law Professor Jef Shugerman of Starr’s comments. “He’s 3 minutes into it with zero self-awareness. He is blaming the Independent Counsel Statute for it. What a pathetic man.”

“Straight faced #KenStarr requests Congress to practice ‘oversight’ of the president by a president who’s declared himself above the law and thumbed his nose at checks & balances is rich,” tweeted MSNBC contributor Maria Teresa Kumar.

Some even decided to add a laugh track to Starr’s speech:

“First of all, impeachment has not even remotely been normalized,” said former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega. “Second, could the Republicans not find ANYONE ELSE to give this ridiculous history lecture?”

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore
Lindsey Graham’s Most Compelling Arguments — For Impeachment

Lindsey Graham’s Most Compelling Arguments — For Impeachment

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), one of Donald Trump’s closest allies and loyal defenders, has regularly belittled or dismissed evidence that Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate a political rival and assertions that Trump has acted to obstruct congressional investigations into the issue.

But in 1999, when Graham was one of the House managers for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, he regularly made public statements in support of an investigation of Clinton.

1) Graham implored senators to “please allow the facts to do the talking,” and told them, “Don’t decide the case before the case’s end.”

2) Graham said that a “high crime” didn’t have to be a criminal act: “What’s a high crime? How about if an important person hurts somebody of low means? It’s not very scholarly. But I think it’s the truth. I think that’s what they meant by high crimes. Doesn’t even have to be a crime.”

3) Graham said that lying justified impeaching President Clinton: “He is the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of the land. He encouraged people to lie for him. He lied. I think he obstructed justice.”

4) Graham slammed Richard Nixon for ignoring a subpoena: “The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena is the day he was subject to impeachment because he took the power from Congress over the impeachment process away from Congress, and he became the judge and jury.”

5) Graham called for hearings where principals involved in the case could be heard. “The depositions, I think, will determine whether or not we go forward with hearings. I think it’s a very smart thing to do, to depose these people and find out what they’ve got to say and not drag this thing out unnecessarily. And it’s going to end by the end of the year.”

6) Graham called for live witnesses to appear: “There may be some conflict that has to be resolved by presenting live witnesses … That’s what happens every day in court and I think the Senate can stand that.”

7) Graham said impeachment would be negatively impacted if witnesses weren’t called: “The whole point that we’re trying to make is that in every trial that there’s ever been in the Senate, regarding impeachment, witnesses were called.” He added, “You’re basically changing impeachment” if witnesses aren’t called.

8) Graham argued that not calling witnesses in the Senate “would be bad” for impeachment law: “That would be bad for impeachment law. That would be against precedent, and I hope that doesn’t happen here.”

9) Graham said excluding witnesses and leaving the case to lawyers would “bore everybody to death” and avoid getting to the truth: “You can have three days of lawyers talking to each other on both sides, 16 hours of question, and basically bore everybody to death, talk everybody to death; but when you have a witness who was there, who was engaged in it, who was in the middle of it telling you about what they were doing and why, that’s a totally different case, and it’s the difference between getting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

Now, with Trump, Graham has reversed his positions and even opposed holding a Senate impeachment trial at all. He opposes calling witnesses, promised to side with Trump before hearing evidence, and has repeatedly argued that Trump did nothing wrong. It’s like his days as a leader during the Clinton impeachment didn’t exist at all.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

In Defense Of Iowa

In Defense Of Iowa

We have reached that time in every presidential nominating year when distinguished, national opinion leaders beat up on Iowa and that admirable state’s influential role in determining the two major parties’ eventual presidential nominees and, therefore, the next president. The USA Today editorial board indicts Iowa for being “one of the least ethnically diverse states in the country” and its status as the first-in-the-nation presidential test every four years as ” un-American,” while Paul Waldman writes in The Washington Post that the Iowa caucuses “are a crime against democracy.”

It is time someone stood up for Iowa and Iowans. It’s true that Iowa is neither very representative of the entire nation nor very average. Scholarly studies have ranked Iowa as tied for first place in percentage of the adult population who are high school graduates. Iowans are fourth highest in access to health care (more “representative” Florida and Texas rank 46th and 47th respectively in citizens’ access to health care); first in broadband access; and third highest in public libraries per capita. True, the Hawkeye State leads the nation in production of corn, soybeans and pork, but Iowans are at the top of the nation in literacy, and the state has the U.S.’s 14th lowest murder rate.

But Iowa remains a small, rural state in the middle of the country. How representative can its voters be of the nation at large? The answer: amazingly so. In 1992, Democrat Bill Clinton won 43 percent of the national vote and the White House; in Iowa, Clinton won 43 percent of the vote. In 1996, winner Clinton carried 49 percent of the national vote and 50 percent of the Iowa vote. In 2000, Democrat Al Gore won the national vote by one-half of 1 percent and Iowa by one-third of one percent. Republican George W Bush won reelection in 2004 with 51 percent of the national vote and 50 percent in Iowa. Democrat Barack Obama, in 2008, got 53 percent of the national vote and 54 percent of Iowans. In 2012, Obama was reelected nationally by a margin of four percent and in Iowa by five percent. In 2016, the exception: Donald Trump, who lost the national vote by two percent to Hillary Clinton, carried Iowa by a solid ten percent.

Yes, Iowa’s 2008 Democratic caucuses were 93 percent white, and those mid-American Caucasians made history by giving legitimacy and momentum to a freshman senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. In Iowa, the African American underdog won an upset victory over the heavily favored former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and was propelled to the top of the national polls.

In fact, the rest of us owe Iowa our thanks. Iowans faithfully and earnestly fulfill their civil responsibilities by showing up at campaign town halls and listening and questioning the men and women who seek the White House. They take their responsibility seriously and then, on a cold winter night, hundreds of thousands of Iowans leave their homes and go to the local church hall, firehouse or school gym and spend a couple of hours declaring and defending their presidential preference openly in front of neighbors and friends. In the caucus, firefighters join shoulder-to-shoulder with nurses, teachers, retirees, students and small businesswomen in truly vibrant democracy. Here in Iowa, because Iowans give them a full and fair chance, the underfinanced, underdog candidate has a real chance. It was in Iowa that Jimmy Carter broke through and where George H.W. Bush’s upset win would lead to his being chosen vice president.

Thank you, Iowa, for serving the nation so well.

To find out more about Mark Shields and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.