Day 1,028: Trump impeachment hearings were damning, his day with Erdoğan was humiliating
Wednesday, the House of Representatives opened their first public impeachment hearings related to Donald Trump’s pressuring of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden in exchange for military aid. At the same time, Trump hosted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the White House. Both went about as poorly as possible for Trump.
Testifying were the top diplomat in Ukraine, William Taylor, and another diplomat, George Kent. Together they rebuked Trump’s actions that put personal gain over policy. They noted that a more secure Ukraine made for a more secure U.S., and holding up aid threatened national security. Moreover, Ukraine was aware that the aid was being held up and conditioned on them investigating Trump’s political rivals.
The testimony illicited plenty of damning information against Trump, including new details.
Trump was linked directly with Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland in the scheme to pressure Ukraine. They spoke on the phone, presumably many times, and it’s clear what their mutual intent was: pressure Ukraine to drum up an investigation against Trump’s political foes.
It didn’t better throughout the day for Trump, as the testimony showed the brazenness and uniqueness of Trump’s unethical and illegal conduct.
Republicans, meanwhile, seemed content to throw absurd conspiracy theories against the wall.
The White House apparently couldn’t keep track of Trump’s whereabouts throughout the day.
The GOP’s likely biggest talking point after the day of testimony is that there was predominately hearsay testimony and no one spoke to Trump about any of the conduct. Yet Sondland is set to testify next week and virtually everyone else has been blocked by the White House.
Meanwhile, on the Erdoğan front, Trump touted his decision to let Turkey invade Syria by pointing out that “we have the oil” and “we left troops behind only for the oil.”
As Trump’s former head on ISIS noted, that’s highly illegal.
Moreover, Erdoğan openly called the Kurds “terrorist organizations” in the White House on Wednesday. But later in the day, Trump still seemed to think that Turkey gets along with the Kurds despite currently engaging in a targeted ethnic cleansing campaign against Kurdish civilians after the U.S. withdrew forces in the region.
Throughout the day, Trump was woefully unprepared and overly sycophantic to Erdoğan, who is a brutal dictator.
During a joint press conference Wednesday afternoon, Trump stood alongside Erdoğan — whom Trump said he’s a “big fan of” — and let the Turkish leader repeat his talking points, unchallenged. The US president proved himself to be woefully unprepared, or indifferent, to what’s actually going on in Turkey.
Two moments stood out, both of which came in the question-and-answer session. The first was when Trump encouraged Erdoğan to call on a Turkish journalist for a question. “Would you like to pick somebody?” Erdoğan responded in Turkish, and Trump continued: “A friendly person from Turkey, friendly. Only friendly reporters. We like to see, there aren’t too many of them around.”
But in Turkey pretty much the only reporters around are friendly to the president. Since the 2016 failed coup attempt, Turkey has jailed more journalists than any other country in the world for three years straight. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 68 journalists were jailed in Turkey last year alone. And that doesn’t include other dissidents or Erdoğan’s perceived political enemies who’ve been arrested in the thousands.
Trump is a national embarrassment on virtually every level, and Wednesday encapsulated that perfectly. He doesn’t even do the bare minimum to be prepared for highly important meetings. That led to him bragging about committing war crimes and remaining wholly ignorant about both Turkey’s threat to American allies and the elimination of the free press. All the while, damning impeachment testimony was being heard just a mile away about him pressuring a foreign nation to do his political bidding.
1,028 days in, 434 to go
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