Elected to Break the Law?

I've heard many commentators make the point that Donald Trump was elected to shake up the system or to challenges the establishment or, in his words, to drain the swamp.

This opinion piece is just one more example whereby his apologists attempt to tell the majority of voters in this country, you know, the ones who voted against him, that Trump should be given the benefit of his victory to enact whatever policies he wants. Please don't impeach him; he's only doing what he was elected to do.

This is an argument?

I will say from the outset that I do agree with some of the premises of the article because we have elected a class of officials who have enacted policies that enrich themselves and their businesses, foundations, universities, and foreign cronies. Hunter Biden should never have gotten the position with Burisma. We have reenacted the Gilded Age and defended it by elevating money to the point that it's become the point of the discussion. Box office receipts lead the Monday morning news. Salaries for athletes, performers, CEOs and hedge fund managers are defended as what the market will bear, or that their talents are so specialized, that they are worth the (m)(b)illions Stock market programs lead the ratings. And we have, to use a timely phrase, bought the goods. Literally. We are in an unending war in Iraq because George W. Bush decided to lie about the threat it posed to the country. It poses a threat now, but only because of his policies. President Obama never confronted Syria over its use of chemical weapons. The middle of the country was left to rot and ruin while international trade took jobs from the working class.

Donald Trump was elected to clean all this up, and in some ways he's tried to do that. The problem is that his methods and policies are informed by conspiracy theories, FOX News hosts who know he's watching and feed him a steady diet of fear for him to tweet to the general public, and his own wide, bloated, unending ignorance of the law, the constitution, and basic manners. So when I read the article above, I saw the point that Mr. McCarthy was trying to make. The problem is that the course Donald Trump has followed has been disastrous for the country, and now for him.

To address a few of McCarthy's points, Mr. Trump is more than crude. He uses vile, divisive language that attacks people and calls them unfit, traitorous and dangerous simply for disagreeing with him.

He is being impeached not for doing something analogous to Vice President Biden's asking the Ukrainian President to investigate corruption in his own administration, but because Trump believed in a debunked conspiracy theory and wanted Biden investigated to help Trump get elected.

There might not be direct evidence of Trump working with Vladimir Putin, but the effect of Trump's policies and pronouncements have benefited Putin handsomely, from taking his word that Russia didn't interfere in the 2016 election to denying Ukraine aid to fight the Russians.

Donald Trump might have been elected to transform America's foreign policy, but he has done nothing of the sort, except to make it worse. Our allies don't trust us, he's made decisions in a moment based on faulty information, and refuses to think about the long-term effects of his actions. When Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, Racep Tayyip Erdogan, and Xi Jinping have all played you, you're not making anything better. Remember that we sold out the Kurds so we could keep the oil, at a time when the last thing the world needs is more oil. Isn't that where our foreign policy went awry in the first place? In 1919?

And now the president is putting himself in the middle of the military justice system, going beyond his powers as Commander-in-Chief to act as both judge and jury. Please tell me how that helps the country.

If a minority of the country's voters want a president who bathes in conspiracy and wants to bend the law to his own benefit, then they should vote for that. It doesn't mean that it's the right thing or the moral thing or the legal thing. Because its isn't.

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