And What About Trump’s Misdemeanors?
Even Donald Trump noted the lack of misdemeanors in the proposed impeachment charges in the House, when he wrote a demeaning letter to House Speaker Pelosi. I considered writing about this before, but the envisioned long list would exceed my limits of recall, editing and readability. So I will concentrate on lies, known lies, and sexual assaults.
The Access Hollywood grabbing tape came out just before the election. Hidden, but a crime of hiding the funds used to pay off Stormy Daniels as a campaign expense, for which his lawyer went to jail. The Trump sexual harassment count was up to 21, when Ronan Farrow just published a book, “Catch and Kill” with 43 more, bringing Trump’s count up to 64. One allegation was of an actual rape. Trump, of course, denies all of these.
Yesterday, the Washington Post has updated its Fact Checker on Trump since the day he took action up until Dec. 10, and had 15,413 untruths. His overall average is 14.6 lies a day. I would have thought 15 might be enough for misdemeanors, or 150, or 1,500, but no, its over 15,000. Clinton was impeached for a single lie, under oath, of course. Trump’s yearly breakdowns are 1,999 in 2017, 5,589 in 2018, and 7,725 in 2019, so far. That is 22 a day in 2019. In the last two months he is in overdrive at 32 a day. The Fact Checker will have the three year total on January 20th of 2020.
I think that those are enough misdemeanors for their part of the impeachment charges.
One encouraging note, after my article that “You can fool some of the people all the time”, is an October, 2018 Fact Checker poll, fewer than 3 in 10 Americans believed in his most common false statements. Only 1 in 6 considered themselves strong Trump approvers, and they accepted many, but not all falsehoods as true.
In recent polls, 71% want his aides to testify, while only 22% do not. Those who want and do not want impeachment are about equally tied. There is more debate before the vote tomorrow, Wednesday. FiveThirtyEight averages and tracks polls, and shows that 82% of Democrats interviewed want impeachment, 43.2% of independents do, but only 9.8% of Republicans do.
Wednesday: It was embarrassing to have to watch every House Republican kneel down and kiss the Trump ring. Most followed Trump’s (Steven Miller’s?) letter to Speaker Pelosi, and vilified the Democrats. Their most common word was Trump’s “Sham”. Some said that the House should instead be working on solutions, despite the House having passed 400 bills which went straight into Mitch McConnell’s trash can. Trump’s claimed “coup” requires him to read the Constitution, where he will find out that his obsequious running mate, Vice President Mike Pence, will take over, and NOTHING ELSE will change. Of course, everybody knows that the impeachment will not succeed, so why even call it a “coup”. It is just an exercise in Constitutional integrity.
