The Week That Everything Changed

[babylonsister]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/09/trump-impeachment-ukraine-whistleblower-complaint-very-fast.html


The Week That Everything Changed
By Lili Loofbourow
Sept 28, 20199:43 AM


snip//

And suddenly, overnight, the party has acted. An entire landscape of political feeling that felt drearily constant seems to have changed. A whistleblower’s complaint about Donald Trump pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden for his own political gain—with help from Rudy Giuliani and William Barr, and from White House officials who tried to hide the conversation by relocating the transcript—seems to have blown open political possibilities that were previously unthinkable. For the moment at least (but what a notable moment!) the impression is of one of a party pursuing a clearly-defined goal while the opposition careens wildly. Understatement can communicate power, and Democrats who railed against Trump’s actions during the Mueller Report have spoken about the Ukraine affair more in sorrow than in anger. It’s remarkable what a difference a day (and a formal inquiry) can make. What just weeks ago may have seemed like lackadaisical resignation on the part of Democratic leadership now somehow scans as sober purpose. “This is not a cause for any joy that we have to go down this path,” Nancy Pelosi told New Jersey Democrats Friday night, the reluctant warrior. While Breitbart is tweeting “President Trump says Pencil Neck Has to Go!” and GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz claims that House Speaker Pelsoi has been “functionally catfished” based “on a bloodlust for the president,” Adam Schiff’s calmness comes off as steely by comparison. While Trump implies that members of his own White House are “close to spies” and appears to wish them dead, even friend-of-the-resistance Rep. Ted Lieu is echoing the speaker’s “last option” and “sad time” rhetoric. You don’t do that unless you’re more confident of the hand you’re playing—one that makes bombast and hyperbole unnecessary.

Just as instructive is what’s happening to Trump’s defenders: Despite emailing their talking points to everyone—including the Democrats, by accident—the right has not figured out how to respond. It is not in control of its tone. Money may be pouring in for Trump’s re-election as the threat of impeachment looms (his more fanatical supporters will follow him no matter what he does) but the discourse on the right, which is supposed to rationalize that loyalty, is scattershot and unfocused—even sensitive. Take Fox News: Trump acolytes on the network’s The Five started literally shouting at co-host Juan Williams when he brought up the talking points that had, by this point, circulated widely. “What does that mean?” Gret Gutfeld yelled. “Are you saying I got talking points? You got to answer to the accusation!” The rest of the network is no more composed: Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman reports that Lachlan Murdoch is considering a new post-Trump direction for the network, that Paul Ryan, who now sits on the board, is urging him to cut ties with Trump, and that Shep Smith and Tucker Carlson are feuding. Chris Wallace appeared on Fox News colleague Sandra Smith’s show to object to “the spinning that has been done by the president’s defenders over the last 24 hours.” Carlson was reduced to calling Rep. Schiff “mentally ill” on Thursday night, and even Sean Hannity, Trump’s smarmiest propagandist, told a confidant that the allegations in the complaint were “really bad.” Elsewhere, Breitbart referred to the whistleblower (whose identity is unknown) as a “partisan federal employee” and the Federalist called the exploding scandal “an elaborate gossipy game of telephone.” But no one can quite agree on the angle: While some have argued that the complaint was sloppy, others aver that it was much too polished: A commentator and former Trump staffer claimed that the complaint is “too convenient and too perfect to come from a typical whistleblower.” A lack of confidence is leaching through most of these attempts to launder tribalist loyalty into a principled stand. There might be no better approximation of the current state of the right’s rhetorical power than Devin Nunes’ claim at Thursday’s hearing that Democrats want “nude pictures of Trump.”

That doesn’t mean the right won’t find its footing. But its machinery is actually slow and ungainly relative to the whistleblower story, while what the Democrats have working for them is speed. The impeachment inquiry feels like an emergency (because it is one, even if others have come before it and gone unrecognized). And the Democrats’ single-minded sense of urgency is somehow outpacing the hurricane of misinformation the right usually generates to drive American news cycles.

It helps that this is a pretty straightforward case that has unfolded in good time. The whistleblower’s complaint builds on what we already know about how Trump operates and crystallizes the stakes in a new way, and perhaps most importantly it’s packaged in a way Americans can easily recognize as a scandal. The Mueller Report was too long and too complicated, too kneecapped by Justice Department guidelines and too already-reported for the average busy American to process and understand. But the Ukraine situation is clear cut, and the complaint is mercifully short. These factors have turned out to be key ingredients in a remarkable turn in political expression.

snip//

Things are moving fast. Friday morning, the White House blamed National Security Council lawyers for relocating the Ukraine transcript to the server it had no business being on. Some interpret this as another sign the circular firing squad is taking aim. As my colleague Ben Mathis-Lilley pointed out, Trump’s and Giuliani’s inclination to keep talking is generating a very useful list of witnesses for the impeachment hearings. And amid all this chaos, something palpable has shifted, and it might be our collective sense of how the seesaw of power has tilted anew, perhaps not so subtly. On the day Trump tweeted that if his “perfect phone call” wasn’t considered appropriate, “then no future President can EVER again speak to another foreign leader!,” Nancy Pelosi went on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to say that “the clarity of the president’s actions is compelling and gave us no choice but to move forward.” She was by then in a position to afford some magnanimity. “I pray for the president,” she added. “I pray that God will illuminate him to see right from wrong.”

[unblock]

1. i've been struggling to figure out what's different about "this time"

i like that this article says it's an emergency "even if others have come before it and gone unrecognized".

but the key difference is that democrats are responding to it like it is an emergency. perhaps that's due to the nature of the scandal itself, that it's more easily packaged as something new and bite-sized or whatever.

but the bottom line is that we pounced on it, opening up 6 impeachment investigations, *calling* them impeachment investigations, and treating it like something brand new (even though we've known he's done crap like this all along) is key.


it's like finally punching the bully in the nose. the thing that's different isn't so much what the bully did that finally made you feel like this is enough. it's the fact that you finally punched back that makes this time different.

[babylonsister]

2. I think you're right. We're ecstatic that we've

finally found a way to punch back that people understand. WE know he's had it coming for a long time.

[murielm99]

3. Early in the trump administration,

there was a meeting of legislators behind closed doors. They never disclosed what was discussed. But they came out of the meeting looking ill, angry, disgusted. I have a feeling they discussed Russian interference and some of the other ways the election was stolen. I think Russian interference was at the top of the list.

Maybe now they have their chance to put things right.

[unblock]

4. Not just Russian interference -- Republican complicity

It would be one thing if Russians interfered and republicans agreed we had to do something.

What made them come out of that meeting with that look was that the republicans said they were siding with the Russians.