FOCUS: These Are Turbulent Times. But We Will Persist and Prevail.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53228"><span class="small">Marie Yovanovitch, The Washington Post</span></a>
Thursday, 06 February 2020 12:51
Yovanovitch writes: "After nearly 34 years working for the State Department, I said goodbye to a career that I loved."
Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, during the House impeachment inquiry on Capitol Hill in November. (photo: Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
These Are Turbulent Times. But We Will Persist and Prevail.
By Marie Yovanovitch, The Washington Post
06 February 20
fter nearly 34 years working for the State Department, I said goodbye to a career that I loved. It is a strange feeling to transition from decades of communicating in the careful words of a diplomat to a person free to speak exclusively for myself.
What I’d like to share with you is an answer to a question so many have asked me: What do the events of the past year mean for our country’s future?
It was an honor for me to represent the United States abroad because, like many immigrants, I have a keen understanding of what our country represents. In a leap of optimism and faith, my parents made their way from the wreckage of post-World War II Europe to America, knowing in their hearts that this country would give me a better life. They rested their hope, not in the possibility of prosperity, but in a strong democracy: a country with resilient institutions, a government that sought to advance the interests of its people, and a society in which freedom was cherished and dissent protected. These are treasures that must be carefully guarded by all who call themselves Americans.
When civil servants in the current administration saw senior officials taking actions they considered deeply wrong in regard to the nation of Ukraine, they refused to take part. When Congress asked us to testify about those activities, my colleagues and I did not hesitate, even in the face of administration efforts to silence us.
We did this because it is the American way to speak up about wrongdoing. I have seen dictatorships around the world, where blind obedience is the norm and truth-tellers are threatened with punishment or death. We must not allow the United States to become a country where standing up to our government is a dangerous act. It has been shocking to experience the storm of criticism, lies and malicious conspiracies that have preceded and followed my public testimony, but I have no regrets. I did — we did — what our conscience called us to do. We did what the gift of U.S. citizenship requires us to do.
Unfortunately, the last year has shown that we need to fight for our democracy. “Freedom is not free” is a pithy phrase that usually refers to the sacrifices of our military against external threats. It turns out that same slogan can be applied to challenges which are closer to home. We need to stand up for our values, defend our institutions, participate in civil society and support a free press. Every citizen doesn’t need to do everything, but each one of us can do one thing. And every day, I see American citizens around me doing just that: reanimating the Constitution and the values it represents. We do this even when the odds seem against us, even when wrongdoers seem to be rewarded, because it is the right thing to do.
I had always thought that our institutions would forever protect us against individual transgressors. But it turns out that our institutions need us as much as we need them; they need the American people to protect them or they will be hollowed out over time, unable to serve and protect our country.
The State Department is filled with individuals of integrity and professionalism. They advance U.S. interests every day — whether they are repatriating Americans vulnerable to a pandemic, reporting on civil unrest, negotiating military basing rights or helping a U.S. company navigate a foreign country. As new powers rise, alliances fray, and transnational threats require international solutions, our diplomats are more than ready to address these challenges.
But our public servants need responsible and ethical political leadership. This administration, through acts of omission and commission, has undermined our democratic institutions, making the public question the truth and leaving public servants without the support and example of ethical behavior that they need to do their jobs and advance U.S. interests.
The next generation of diplomats is counting on something better. Our newest diplomats fill me with hope. They are smart, motivated and idealistic — and yet realistic about the unprecedented challenges facing the United States. While it is bittersweet to retire from a job that I love, I know there is a new generation of experts who will advance our interests in an increasingly dangerous world.
This Feb. 14, the newest class of diplomats will swear an oath, as so many before them have done, to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”; and “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”
These are turbulent times, perhaps the most challenging that I have witnessed. But I still intend to find ways to engage on foreign policy issues and to encourage those who want to take part in the important work of the Foreign Service. Like my parents before me, I remain optimistic about our future. The events of the past year, while deeply disturbing, show that even though our institutions and our fellow citizens are being challenged in ways that few of us ever expected, we will endure, we will persist and we will prevail.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51635"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog</span></a>
Thursday, 06 February 2020 09:45
Reich writes: "An impeached president who was on trial and is up for re-election will be delivering a state of the union address to the most divided union in living memory."
Robert Reich. (photo: Getty)
The State of the Dis-Union
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
06 February 20
n impeached president who was on trial and is up for re-election will be delivering a state of the union address to the most divided union in living memory. He will be giving his address to both his jurors and prosecutors, and most importantly, to the voters that will decide his fate in November.
It’s not unprecedented for an impeached president to give a state of the union address. Bill Clinton delivered his State of the Union in 1999 while in the middle of his Senate trial. But that’s where the similarities end.
Clinton was not up for re-election when he gave his speech, so he didn’t need to employ any campaign-style rhetoric. Trump is a polarizing, divisive president who is addressing an America that has never been so divided.
But this begs the question: why are we so divided?
We’re not fighting a hugely unpopular war on the scale of Vietnam. We’re not in a deep economic crisis like the Great Depression. Yes, we disagree about guns, abortion, and immigration, but we’ve disagreed about them for decades. So why are we so divided now?
Ferocious partisanship is not new. Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House who led the House’s impeachment investigation into Clinton, pioneered the combative partisanship we’re used to today. But today’s divisions are far deeper than they were then.
Part of the answer is Trump himself. The Great Divider knows how to pit native-born Americans against immigrants, the working class against the poor, whites against blacks and Latinos, evangelicals against secularists — keeping everyone stirred up by vilifying, disparaging, denouncing, defaming, and accusing others of the worst. Trump thrives off disruption and division.
But that begs another question: Why have we been so ready to be divided by Trump?
One theory is the underlying tension that an older, whiter, and less educated America, concentrated in rural areas, is losing out to a “new” America that’s younger, more diverse, more educated, and concentrated in urban areas. These trends, while much more prominent these days, have been going on since the start of the 20th century. Why are they causing so much anger now?
Another hypothesis is that we are geographically sorting ourselves into Republican and Democratic regions of the country, surrounding ourselves with like-minded neighbors and friends so we no longer talk to people with opposing views. But why are we doing this?
The rise of social media sensationalizing our differences in order to attract eyeballs and advertisers, plays a crucial role in exacerbating the demographic and geographic trends I just mentioned. But it alone isn’t responsible for our polarized nation.
Together, all of these factors contribute to the political schism we’re experiencing today. But none of them alone point to any large, significant change in the structure of our society that can account for what’s happened.
Let me have a go.
In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina for a research project I was doing on the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the same people I had met twenty years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as with some of their grown children.
What I heard surprised me. Twenty years ago, many said they’d been working hard and were frustrated they weren’t doing better. Now, that frustration had been replaced by full-blown anger — anger towards their employers, the government, Wall Street.
Many had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession following the financial crisis of 2008, or knew others who had. By the time I spoke with them, most were back in jobs but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before in terms of purchasing power.
I heard the term “rigged system” so often I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about flat wages, shrinking benefits, and growing job insecurity. They talked about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, soaring CEO pay, and “crony capitalism.”
These complaints came from people who identified as Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. A few had joined the Tea Party, while a few others had been involved in the Occupy movement.
With the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked them which candidates they found most attractive. At the time, Democratic Party insiders favored Hillary Clinton and Republican insiders favored Jeb Bush. Yet no one I spoke with mentioned Clinton or Bush.
They talked instead about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up” or “make the system work again” or “stop the corruption” or “end the rigging.”
In the following year, Sanders – a seventy-four-year old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t a registered Democrat until the 2016 presidential primaries – came within a whisker of beating Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates from Democratic primaries and caucuses.
Trump – a sixty-nine-year-old ego-maniacal billionaire reality-TV star who had never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican Party and who lied compulsively about everything – won the Republican primaries and then went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America (although he didn’t win the popular vote, and had some help from the Kremlin).
Something very big had happened, and it wasn’t due to Sanders’s magnetism or Trump’s likeability. It was a rebellion against the establishment.
That rebellion is still going on, although much of the establishment still denies it. They have come up with myriad explanations for Trump’s ascendance, some with validity; some without: It was hatred of Obama, it was hatred of Hillary, it was people voting third party, it was racism and xenophobia.
It’s important to note that although racism and xenophobia in America date to before the founding of the Republic, they have never before been so central to a candidate’s appeal and message as they’ve been with Trump. Aided by Fox News and an army of right-wing outlets, Trump used the underlying frustrations of the working class and channeled them into bigotry, but this was hardly the first time in history a demagogue has used this cynical ploy.
Trump convinced many blue-collar workers feeling ignored by the powers that be that he was their champion. Hillary Clinton did not convince them that she was. Her decades of public service ended up being a negative, not a positive: She was indubitably part of the establishment, the epitome of decades of policies that had left these blue-collar workers in the dust. (It’s notable that during the primaries, Bernie Sanders did far better than Clinton with blue-collar voters.)
A direct line connects the four-decade stagnation of wages with the bailout of Wall Street, the rise of the Tea Party (and, briefly, Occupy), and the successes of Sanders and Trump in 2016. By 2016, Americans understood that wealth and power had moved to the top. Big money had rigged our politics. This was the premise of Sanders’s 2016 campaign. It was also central to Trump’s appeal (“I’m so rich I can’t be bought off”), which he quickly reneged on once elected, delivering everything big money could have imagined.
The most powerful force in American politics today continues to be anti-establishment fury at a rigged system. Vicious partisanship, record-breaking economic inequality, and the resurgence of white supremacy are all byproducts of this rigged system. The biggest political battle today isn’t between left, right, or center: it’s between Trump’s authoritarian populism and democratic (small “d”) populism.
Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement that tackles runaway inequality and heals the racial wounds Trump has inflicted. Even though he’s a Trojan Horse for big corporations and the rich – giving them all the tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks they’ve ever wanted – he still has large swaths of the working class convinced he’s on their side.
Democrats must stand squarely on the side of democracy against oligarchy. We must form a unified coalition of people of all races, genders, sexualities, and classes, and band together to unrig the system. Trump is not the cause of our divided nation; he is the symptom of a rigged system that was already dividing us. It’s not enough to defeat him. We must reform the system that got us here in the first place to ensure that no future politician will ever again imitate Trump’s authoritarian demagoguery.
For now, let’s boycott the State of the Union and show the ratings-obsessed demagogue that the American people refuse to watch an impeached president continue to divide us.
Trump Won't Be Vindicated. The Senate Won't Be, Either.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53225"><span class="small">House Impeachment Managers, The Washington Post</span></a>
Thursday, 06 February 2020 09:43
Excerpt: "Over the past two weeks, we have argued the impeachment case against President Trump, presenting overwhelming evidence that he solicited foreign interference to cheat in the next election and jeopardized our national security by withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance to pressure Ukraine to do his political bidding."
Senators vote on the first article of impeachment against President Trump on Wednesday at the Capitol. (photo: AP)
Trump Won't Be Vindicated. The Senate Won't Be, Either.
By House Impeachment Managers, The Washington Post
06 February 20
ver the past two weeks, we have argued the impeachment case against President Trump, presenting overwhelming evidence that he solicited foreign interference to cheat in the next election and jeopardized our national security by withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance to pressure Ukraine to do his political bidding. When the president got caught and his scheme was exposed, he tried to cover it up and obstruct Congress’s investigation in an unprecedented fashion. As the trial progressed, a growing number of Republican senators acknowledgedthat the House had proved the president’s serious misconduct.
Throughout the trial, new and incriminating evidence against the president came to light almost daily, and there can be no doubt that it will continue to emerge in books, in newspapers or in congressional hearings. Most important, reports of former national security adviser John Bolton’s forthcoming book only further confirm that the president illegally withheld military aid to Ukraine until Kyiv announced the sham investigations that the president sought for his political benefit.
Although Bolton told the House that he would sue rather than appear to testify pursuant to a subpoena, he appeared to have a change of heart and made it clear that he would be willing to testify in the Senate. Yet, rather than hear what Bolton had to say, Republican senators voted to hold the first impeachment trial in U.S. history without a single live witness or new document.
Notwithstanding the Constitution’s mandate that the Senate shall have the sole power to “try” impeachments, a narrow majority of senators opted not to, and instead acted as though it were an appellate court precluded from going beyond the record in the House. Nothing supported this unprecedented prohibition on witnesses and documents, except the overriding interest of a president determined to hide any further incriminating information from the American people and a Senate majority leader in his thrall.
Instead, the president’s defenders resorted to a radical theory that would validate his worst, most authoritarian instincts. They argued that a president cannot abuse his power, no matter how corrupt his conduct, if he believes it will benefit his reelection. The Founders would have been aghast at such a sweeping assertion of absolute power, completely at odds with our system of checks and balances. Even some of the president’s lawyers were ultimately forced to back away from it.
And so, at last, the president’s team urged that it should be left to the voters to pronounce judgment on the president’s misconduct, even as it worked to prevent the public from learning the full facts that might inform their decision. More ominously, this leaves the president free to try to cheat in the very election that is supposed to provide the remedy for his cheating.
Just this week, with the vote on impeachment still pending before the Senate, the president’s personal lawyer and emissary, Rudolph W. Giuliani, repeated his call for Ukraine to investigate the president’s political rival and urged the president to carry on seeking such illicit help.
When we made our final arguments to the Senate, we asked whether there was one Republican senator who would say enough, do impartial justice as their oath required, and convict the president.
And there was. Mitt Romney. The senator from Utah showed a level of moral courage that validated the Founders’ faith that we were up to the rigors of self-governance.
No one can seriously argue that President Trump has learned from this experience. This was not the first time he solicited foreign interference in his election, nor will it be the last. As we said during the trial, if left in office, the president will not stop trying to cheat in the next election until he succeeds.
We must make sure he does not.
Republican leadership in the Senate had the power to conceal the president’s full misconduct during the trial by disallowing witnesses and documents, but they cannot keep the full, ugly truth of the president’s conduct, and that of all the president’s men, from the American people. Not for long.
Because of the impeachment process, voters can now stand forewarned of the lengths to which the president will go to try to secure his reelection, violating the law and undermining our national security and that of our allies.
By denying the American people a fair trial, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) also deprived the president of something that he desperately sought — exoneration. There can be no exoneration without a legitimate trial. Out of fear of what they would learn, the Senate refused to hold one. The president will not be vindicated, and neither will the Senate, certainly not by history.
The Constitution is a wondrous document, but it is not self-effectuating; it requires vigilance, and a pledge by every new generation of voters and public servants to safeguard and fulfill its lofty promise. And it requires a kind of courage that Robert F. Kennedy once said is more rare than that on the battlefield — moral courage. Without it, no constitution can save us, but with it, no hardship can overcome us. We remain committed to doing everything in our power to preserve this marvelous experiment in self-governance.
The DNC Can't Steal the Election From Bernie Sanders Despite the Iowa Chaos
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=49998"><span class="small">Bhaskar Sunkara, Guardian UK</span></a>
Wednesday, 05 February 2020 15:12
Sunkara writes: "Yes, the Iowa caucuses were a disaster, but Sanders supporters need to remember that if they organize and turn out to vote they can indeed win."
Senator Bernie Sanders speaks to the media after boarding a plane at the Des Moines international airport en route from Iowa to New Hampshire. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
The DNC Can't Steal the Election From Bernie Sanders Despite the Iowa Chaos
By Bhaskar Sunkara, Guardian UK
05 February 20
Yes, the Iowa caucuses were a disaster, but Sanders supporters need to remember that if they organize and turn out to vote they can indeed win
his has been a confusing 24 hours, to say the least. The Iowa caucus appeared to go fine, but then a tabulating fiasco delayed official results. We’re still waiting on them.
The problem, in part, was rooted in a “Shadow Inc” application used to help tally the votes. The app had gotten attention in the weeks before the caucus, with experts worrying that it could be vulnerable to hacking.
There’s no indication that happened, and since the results were also all recorded manually, we should have confidence in their integrity (if not the byzantine caucus system itself). But it’s just another reason why some voters might not trust election results. Liberals have at times made hysterical claims that Russia “hacked” the election results in 2016. Keith Olbermann even went as far as to say that the United States was the victim of a “Russian coup”.
On the right, Donald Trump pushed the idea that illegal voting could swing elections in 2016, paving the way for him to contest a potential Hillary Clinton victory that year. And he’s renewed those claims recently, stating last July that “You’ve got people voting that shouldn’t be voting. They vote many times. Not just two times, not just three times … It’s a rigged deal.” Of course, the widespread problem is not illegal voting, but voter suppression – the systematic effort by Republican officials to make it harder for poor people, particularly people of color, to participate in elections.
On the left, Bernie Sanders supporters have a more reasonable beef. The Democratic National Committee pushed its preferred candidate in 2016, helping the Hillary Clinton team beat Bernie Sanders through measures such as limiting the number of debates (25 in 2008, but down to six in 2016). But these actions have been inflated into a narrative that the DNC “rigged” an election that Sanders would have otherwise won.
The key reason why Sanders fell short by several million votes in the primaries – that he was a relatively unknown candidate who ran out of time as he was gaining momentum – doesn’t have the same visceral appeal as a “stolen” race.
With Iowa, these claims will only get more attention. With 62% of the vote released as of Tuesday night, it appears that Sanders won the first and second rounds of the popular vote, but is slightly behind Pete Buttigieg in the delegate count. But on Monday night Buttigieg was able to take the stage and prematurely claim victory, and more importantly Sanders’ main rival, Joe Biden, was able to escape to New Hampshire without having the media reckon with the fact that the presumptive national frontrunner probably placed fourth in Iowa.
It’s all quite convenient. And the name of the tech company that made the dubious app that caused much of the trouble is Shadow Inc!
But fellow Bernie Sanders supporters hear my plea – we gain nothing by playing into the idea that the process is so stacked against us that we can’t win. For one, saying that elections are all “hacked” or manipulated nowadays is a great way to encourage working people not to come out and vote. Why bother supporting an insurgent candidate, if the outcome is already assured?
Beyond that, this emphasis is a distraction from both the economic concerns that Bernie Sanders excels at talking about and the grassroots organizing that’s propelling him so far this campaign. Sanders placed well in Iowa, not because his Twitter warriors memed the DNC hard enough, but because his volunteers knocked on 500,000 doors in the state in January alone. Despite only 4% of caucus attendees being Latino, they poured $1.5m into bilingual mailers. The campaign made so many phone calls (more than 7m) that they had to tell volunteers to stop – they had virtually no one left to call.
This unprecedented ground game was all in the service of a popular candidate running on a popular set of issues. There’s a reason why Democratic party elites like John Podesta are worried about the Sanders campaign – Bernie could very well win. With a dedicated base of supporters and turnout from lower-propensity voters, like working-class Latinos, Sanders has reliable votes and volunteers. And by the time the establishment coheres around Biden or some other candidate it will be too late.
We need to be vigilant for dirty tricks and rule changes meant to undermine us, but we should feel confident that victory is possible. And that means letting people know that their vote will be counted, and that even the flawed institutions of American democracy can sometimes deliver progress.
Trump's Speech Was a Nationalist, Anti-Immigrant, Socialism-Hating Game Show
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53220"><span class="small">Sam Brodey, Spencer Ackerman and Asawin Suebsaeng, The Daily Beast</span></a>
Wednesday, 05 February 2020 15:12
Excerpt: "The 2020 State of the Union didn't bother sneering at impeachment. Trump took a different sort of victory lap-one heavy on spectacle."
Senator Bernie Sanders speaks to the media after boarding a plane at the Des Moines international airport en route from Iowa to New Hampshire. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
Trump's Speech Was a Nationalist, Anti-Immigrant, Socialism-Hating Game Show
By Sam Brodey, Spencer Ackerman and Asawin Suebsaeng, The Daily Beast
05 February 20
The 2020 State of the Union didn’t bother sneering at impeachment. Trump took a different sort of victory lap—one heavy on spectacle.
n Tuesday evening, President Donald Trump stood before the assembled lawmakers and cameras on Capitol Hill to assure the nation in his State of the Union address that he definitely was not mad.
The president wasn’t there—as he so often does in public and televised settings—to gripe loudly about his impeachment, the Ukraine saga, or the soon-to-conclude Senate trial. He wasn’t there to air his many grievances about the Democratic lawmakers in the chamber whom he so routinely blames for obstructing his nationalist agenda. He wasn’t even there to rail against “Crazy Bernie,” “Sleepy Joe,” “Pocahontas,” “Alfred E. Neuman,” or “Mini Mike,” at least not by name.
He was there to stay glued to the teleprompter and to toast the “great economic success,” “blue-collar boom,” and “manufacturing might” of the Trump era. He peppered in call-outs to criminal justice reform and paid leave legislation. He even waxed longingly about his desire for long-elusive infrastructure reform.
The real heart of Trump’s address, though, was a series of moments that transformed the staid State of the Union into a made-for-TV spectacle—executive produced, of course, by Trump himself. In the span of just over an hour, Trump held forth from the dais, playing magnanimous host to a public reuniting of a military family, the awarding of a scholarship to a young student, and the bestowing of a high honor upon a gravely ill conservative hero.
Republicans were enthralled; Democrats were disgusted. “It was a right-wing reality show,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD). “The only thing we didn’t have was a marriage proposal.”
It was suddenly morning in Trump’s America—though the way he phrased it nodded to nighttime menaces. “The days of our country being used, taken advantage of, and even being scorned by other nations are long behind us,” he said, which might come as a surprise to the other nations.
Trump, who has historically used his annual addresses to extend both olive branches and middle fingers to his Democratic rivals, dabbled in much of the same in what could be his final address to Congress.
The middle finger came before a word was even said, when the president didn’t shake House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hand. It was there when Trump, perhaps hoping to trigger his liberal opponents, awarded the medal of freedom to Rush Limbaugh, the caustic conservative firebrand who recently announced an advanced cancer diagnosis. It was there when Trump called gun rights “under siege all across our country.” And it was there when he invoked the evils of socialism—a charge he’s been dying to use against his 2020 opponents.
At one point, the president hailed his guest, the Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who despite U.S. support has failed to dislodge Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro from power. As Guaidó received one of the night’s few enthusiastic bipartisan ovations, Trump declared in what seemed like a veiled shot at a possible 2020 rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), “socialism destroys nations, but always remember, freedom unifies the soul.” Later, the president called out the “132 lawmakers in this room” who he alleged “have endorsed legislation to impose a socialist takeover of our health care system.”
Although the speech was subdued by Trump standards, the hard-right, nationalist agenda that is his political trademark often burst through. He railed against “providing free, taxpayer-funded health care to millions of illegal aliens,” which he contrasted with the policy preferences of “the radical left.” Trump praised “our nation’s heroic ICE officers” and railed against the “sanctuary cities” where “radical politicians” resist cooperation with immigration raids. It wasn’t long before Trump described undocumented immigrants as “criminal aliens” and portrayed them as bloodthirsty murderers. For good measure, “radical Islamic terrorism” returned to Trump’s lexicon.
It was the first State of the Union speech that Trump has delivered as an impeached president, though the topic was never mentioned during his prime-time address. On Wednesday, Trump will almost certainly be acquitted by the Senate, marking the culmination of the Ukraine scandal that led directly to his impeachment by the House as he entered a presidential election year.
On Friday, a senior administration official previewed parts of Trump’s State of the Union speech to reporters at the White House, stressing that they wouldn’t confirm “if he’s gonna call anybody out” during the address but noting that the president would indeed feel quite “comfortable” doing so. But when Tuesday night arrived, the words “impeachment” and “Ukraine” did not appear anywhere in his prepared remarks, with Trump evidently planning on saving his rage for another venue.
Some of his top lieutenants and closest advisers were not ready to let things go, either, even after all the scandal and massive heartburn caused by Trumpworld’s Ukraine shenanigans.
When asked Monday night if he was still planning on “ramping up” his investigations into the Bidens following the president’s acquittal, Rudy Giuliani—Trump’s personal lawyer whose shadow diplomacy and Biden-related probe helped trigger his client’s impeachment—simply told The Daily Beast, “Yes, [because] it’s a matter of the fair administration of justice for real.”
Talk of revenge and investigations were nowhere to be found in Trump’s address. But the mood seemed charged by it, visible in the facial expressions of the president and the opposition party. Sitting prominently on Democrats’ side of the chamber—front and center for Trump to see—were the lawmakers who just days ago urged his removal from office: the seven impeachment managers who prosecuted the case against him on the Senate floor. One of them, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY), held a pocket Constitution.
That Trump resisted diving into the waters of the impeachment fight must have come as a relief to congressional Republicans, many of whom publicly worried that he’d turn his State of the Union into a swaggering victory lap.
“There are a lot of really great things he should talk about and stay away from maybe what the proceedings are,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) on Monday. “I just really want him to project a strong message about everything that he and his administration, partnered with a Republican Senate, all of those wonderful things that we’ve been able to do.”
From the second he stepped into the chamber, Trump got a raucous and adoring reception from his Republican allies, punctuated by repeated standing ovations at his applause lines and dutiful laughs at his characteristic rhetorical flourishes.
Republicans got into the election-year spirit before Trump even uttered a word, with a booming chant—“four more years!”—breaking out within the GOP ranks when he stepped into the chamber.
It was a departure from last year’s speech, which didn’t come in the context of a presidential election and which gestured at broad foreign-policy goals.
Nevertheless, on Tuesday, Trump reiterated that he was “working to end America’s wars in the Middle East,” though the restored Afghanistan peace talks were the entirety of his evidence. Jeffrey noted last week that “we’re not planning any withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria in the near future” and Trump, who has talked about such a withdrawal repeatedly, made no mention of it on Tuesday. Nor was there any mention of Trump’s 14,000-troop buildup in the Middle East. Instead, Trump recounted the Baghdadi slaying and the end of the “barbarians’” caliphate, but, like his last two predecessors, evaded saying when the end of a mission would yield the end of a war. More poignantly, Trump paid tribute to Kayla Mueller, the American aid worker murdered by ISIS in 2015, with her parents in the chamber.
But the speech’s foreign-policy horizons for 2020 were much lower, and geared toward his re-election audience. There was the Baghdadi killing and the Soleimani killing, conflated as one undifferentiated threat. Trump declared victory over China in the trade war he launched and took credit for NATO member countries increasing their defense budgets. While Trump has spent his term insisting immigration posed a “crisis” on the southern border that required its militarization, Trump’s speech pronounced the border “secure.” His Mideast peace deal, one that permits Israeli annexation of West Bank settlements and already rejected by the Palestinians, was called “groundbreaking.” North Korea, once the locus of hope for a legacy-cementing nuclear deal, went entirely unmentioned.
For the president, Tuesday night was a Trump rally, but without the ad-libs, bizarre cultural references, or unbridled name-calling. “My fellow Americans, the best is yet to come,” he insisted at the end of his speech, which wrapped just before 10:30 p.m. ET.
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fter nearly 34 years working for the State Department, 
ver the past two weeks, we have argued 
his has been a confusing 24 hours, to say the least. The Iowa caucus appeared to go fine, but then a tabulating fiasco delayed official results. We’re still waiting on them.
