Republicans and Democrats appear to have wildly different definitions of the word “perfect.” For example, to many of us on the left, a “perfect call” was predicting Donald Trump would eventually be impeached for doing something mind-bogglingly oafish, corrupt, and self-serving. Whereas to Republicans, a perfect call involves extorting a vulnerable ally in order to manufacture dirt on your likely future opponent so no one can stop you from vaporizing NATO.
For some years now, Republicans have kept at least one foot in a phantasmagorical Bizarro World where the Mueller Report exonerated Trump (uh, nope), Trump’s July 2019 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was “perfect,” and our 45th (and worst) president was something other than a slop trough full of regurgitated yams and rancid ideas.
Of course, if you actually read the transcript Trump kept telling everyone to read, you’d know that Trump very clearly abused his power—after having his mind poisoned against Ukraine by a murderous dictator who wanted to annex the country—in order to stay in office and grease the skids for that dictator’s imperial adventures. In other words, he was attempting to permanently destabilize all of Eastern Europe just to impress Bumblefuck Hitler.
So now one Republican is going out of his way to redress the “outrage” that was the first Trump impeachment. Meanwhile, he’s shoehorning it back into the news cycle while the murderous dictator is off a-murderin’. I say we let him:
Oklahoma GOP U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Markwayne Mullin Tuesday is introducing a resolution to expunge former President Donald Trump's first impeachment – saying Democrats didn't prove "high crimes and misdemeanors."
Mullin's nine-page resolution, if passed by the House, would declare "expunged" Trump's 2019 impeachment over allegedly leveraging U.S. military aid to Ukraine for political favors involving investigations of the Bidens. It accused Democrats of “flippantly exercising one of the gravest and most consequential powers with which the House of Representatives is charged.”
Sigh. Be sure to remember this when a Republican-controlled House impeaches Biden for eating a can of cold SpaghettiOs over the kitchen sink.
In a statement, Mullin told Fox, “Impeaching a sitting president is the most serious action Congress can take, and our Constitution is extremely clear on what is an impeachable offense. Democrats abused our Constitution for their political gain, manipulating a perfect phone call with a vulnerable nation. … We cannot allow this behavior to go unanswered. And we are seeing in real time what being behind the eight ball actually looks like for US support to Ukraine. My resolution is about restoring credibility to the impeachment process and ensuring a political play like this never happens again.”
Really? I can’t believe we’re still forced to do this, but let’s review that “perfect” call, shall we?
ZELENSKYY: “I would also like to thank you for your great support in the area of defense. We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps. specifically we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.”
TRUMP: “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it.”
In case Google Translate still doesn’t recognize “corrupt gibberish” as a discrete subdialect, here’s the gist of that CrowdStrike blather. Trump believed—likely at Putin’s suggestion—that it was actually Ukraine, and not Russia, that had meddled in the 2016 election. This was all nonsense, of course, but Trump swallows more nonsense before breakfast than most people do in a decade. According to CNN, “Trump’s interest in CrowdStrike and the DNC server, more than three years after the hacks, is part of a larger effort to undermine the notion that Russia meddled in the 2016 election to help him win.” So, as usual, he was doing Putin’s dirty work for him.
And then came the coup de grâce:
TRUMP: “Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it. ... It sounds horrible to me.”
For the record, the prosecutor who was “shut down” was actually corrupt as hell—which, to be fair, is likely Trump’s default definition of “very good.”
So has Mullin actually read the transcript? I have my doubts, because the transcript makes crystal clear that Trump corruptly attempted to extort a foreign country that was desperately seeking support from the White House in the middle of an ongoing military conflict with Russia.
But sure, let’s just wipe all that off the record, shall we? Why not expunge the second impeachment, too? After all, Trump gave a perfect speech that led to a perfect siege of the Capitol. And as we all know, if Dear Leader does it, it’s by definition “perfect.”
I thought every real American knew that by now. Sheesh.
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