Image Credits: LA Times.
Well, Michael Scherer, when you put it like that:
As the first full month of his impeachment investigation began to wane, President Trump unleashed a rhetorical onslaught.
He announced that his Democratic rivals are “crazy,” “hate our country” and “want to destroy America.” He apparently called the House speaker “a third-grade politician” to her face, labeled his GOP critics “human scum,” knocked his first defense secretary as “the world’s most overrated general,” and argued that the Kurdish people of northern Syria “are no angels” as they faced Turkish invasion and a possible genocide.
While his lawyers argued presidents cannot be investigated for murder and threatened to sue CNN for claiming to produce journalism, Trump joked that he would defy the constitution’s 22nd Amendment to stay in office 20 more years, while dismissing “that phony emoluments clause” in Article I, Section 9. He repeatedly implored Americans to vote for his former press secretary on “Dancing with the Stars,” mistakenly called his current defense secretary “Mark Esperanto,” instead of Esper, and threatened to get involved with a murder trial in Anguilla.
“A lynching,” “witch hunt,” and “scam,” he called the impeachment investigation that began on Sept. 24. “Don’t be a fool!” he wrote to the Turkish president in a formal letter that threatened to destroy the nation’s economy with sanctions, weeks before announcing that he was dropping all sanctions. “I want to see the server,” he said in the Oval Office, reviving a conspiracy theory that could exonerate Russia for hacking Democratic emails in 2016.
It’s no wonder that Republican lawmakers are struggling to defend President Trump and even the White House feels that they are losing the messaging battle.
It’s probably better to focus on the legacy of a great American like Elijah Cummings, whose funeral services are being held today in Baltimore. Trump recently said his city is infested by rats and that no human being would want to live there.
Fortunately, I can pay attention to two things at once. For example, this is amusing:
Federal prosecutors in New York have subpoenaed the brother of one of the recently indicted associates of Rudy Giuliani, according to two people familiar with the matter, as they escalate their investigation in the campaign-finance case.
The subpoena to Steven Fruman is the latest indication of prosecutors’ actions since the rushed arrest two weeks ago of his brother, Igor Fruman, and another defendant, Lev Parnas, at a Washington-area airport. Since then, investigators have doled out multiple subpoenas and conducted several property searches, in one case blowing the door off a safe to access the contents, sources tell CNN.
