If you ever wondered what Donald Trump could possibly be doing all day besides seething in his jammies while gorging on cable news, now we know. He's not just rage tweeting from America’s taxpayer-funded residence. He's running an entire criminal enterprise of a scale beyond your wildest dreams straight out of the Oval Office.
For that reason, Democrats' "narrow" impeachment inquiry into Trump's extortion of Ukraine is already unfolding a little like a trip to the grocery store for just that one item when you're famished. If you're not careful, you can get so distracted with all the tantalizing mouth-watering options falling into your cart that when you reach the checkout line, you realize you entirely forgot to pick up that one item.
We should have known it would be like this. Every time the corruption surrounding Trump has become the center of a media storm over the past several years, the amount of willful misconduct and intentional obstruction has turned out to be staggering larger than anyone who isn't a serial criminal can imagine. For instance, it wasn't just that Trump's campaign and transition had weird contacts with Russia, it was that it had more than a 100 contacts, Trump publicly solicited the Kremlin's help, then hired the guy responsible for some of those contacts as his top national security adviser, asked his chief investigator to quit investigating that adviser, fired his top investigator, told the target of those investigations (Russia) how relieved he was and that he couldn’t care less about any of their election misdeeds, fired his acting attorney general, forced out his attorney general, and repeatedly attempted to end the investigation that blossomed out of his repeated efforts to end the original investigation.
But it's not like Russia was the only instance of Americans thinking, good god, how much worse can this get? Remember when we first learned in January 2018 that Trump's former lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen had opened a shell company weeks before the 2016 election to make hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. Wow, just wow. Oh wait, there's more: Cohen also used that same LLC to pay off another dalliance by top GOP/Trump donor Elliott Broidy, then he received other payments totaling nearly $5 million from multiple Fortune 500 companies and one company tied to a Russian oligarch for his 'consulting' advice that involved zero expertise other than opening doors to the Trump administration. Oh, but there wasn't just one Trump affair to hide in advance of the 2016, there was another and that was handled through a "catch-and-kill" scheme (a new phrase to most Americans!) in which the publishing company of the National Enquirer bought the exclusive rights to former Playboy model Karen McDougal's story then locked it away—in a safe. There was a safe! Full of stories publisher David Pecker had allegedly considered too radioactive to leave just laying around somewhere for discovery, and possible leaks, or even tawdry publication. Egad!
So the notion that Trump was capable of keeping himself focused on just a single way to personally enhance himself by leveraging the capital that someone else amassed was pure farce from the get-go. It reminds one of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich famously getting caught by a wiretap saying of the open U.S. Senate seat in his state, "I've got this thing and it's fucking golden. And I’m just not giving it up for fucking nothing.” In Trump's case, that "thing"—that resource—is practically boundless, flush with the cash of some 150 million taxpayers whose ancestors have been building up pretty solid credit around the globe over a century’s worth of international diplomacy. And now that thing, known as the U.S. government, is in Trump's clutches and he's not giving it up for frickin' nothing—or really ever, if he can help it.
What that means is, that clear-cut July 25 phone call in which Trump tried to extort Ukraine into investigating his political rival right after President Volodymyr Zelensky asked for desperately needed military aid was bound to be wrapped up in a giant ball of twine leading to an endless thread of grift and misconduct. And so it is. There's Rudy Giuliani and his clown car of criminals working to smear Joe Biden while simultaneously lining their own pockets. There's a Trump-driven Giuliani-aided effort to sideline real public servants so corruption can flow uncorrupted. There's a super secret criminal server where all the crimes are kept super secret. There's multiple cabinet members—Mike Pompeo, Mick Mulvaney, William Barr, and Rick Perry—ensnared in either the perpetration or cover-up or both of said wrongdoing. There's texts and whistleblowers (plural!) and high-profile resignations. There's Trump, on the White House lawn, publicly enlisting campaign help from China. And then there's Turkey—what the hell is going on with Turkey?—with Trump pressuring former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to drop a case against Giuliani's Turkish client, not to mention the mystery phone call with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan that resulted in the presently unfolding Middle East mayhem. Really, where does it end? Russia, it always starts and ends with Russia.
Trump has spent his entire adult life as a felonious businessman who never knew anything different. And so when he was elected to "serve" the public, he simply moved his entire criminal enterprise with all his seedy skills into his new perch in the Oval Office, where it took him a couple years to pare down the operation until nearly every single person around him would turn a blind eye on his transgressions and he could swindle in peace. By the time Trump made that infamous July 25 call that triggered immediate chaos among his national security aides, he was unencumbered and unleashed, having escaped the tentacles of a multi-year, multi-pronged criminal investigation that had finally been put to rest. After surviving that, he could get away with anything—or so he thought.
And now House Democrats are left with both the blessing and the curse of Trump's boundless malfeasance. It is perhaps a good problem to have if you’re forced into impeaching a president for the sake of the republic, but that doesn't mean it will be easy to navigate.