Tag Archives: Vance

Trump & Vance Must Be Removed from Office

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I am starting to see suggestions in various social media sites that it is time to remove Trump from the presidency. I believe it is well past that time and this is why. I will be uncharacteristically brief.

If you were, say, an efficiency expert called in to evaluate how a company’s various employees were performing, you would initially conduct an investigation: Who are the people in question? What functions do they perform in the company? How can what they do be measured in terms of efficiency and perhaps other identified values?

Then and only then would you recommend to top management whether and which ones of those employees should be removed or have their functions changed. It would take time, yes. But if the true goal were to improve the efficiency of the company’s business, that is the process you would undertake.

Donald Trump has done the opposite. He brought in someone who knows little or nothing about how the federal government works. That person is very wealthy and apparently believes he is invulnerable. He and a bunch of uninformed people he hired were set loose on the government and have made a complete hash of the process of evaluating ways to, allegedly, save money.

If you have watched the reports of what this group has done, and in some cases immediately undone, you can see that this is not about cost cutting. Many of their actions are going to end up costing much more national treasure, and other costs including environmental degradation, than were being incurred before they showed up with, in most cases, unlawful claims of authority to fire federal workers at will. This is not about efficiency or lowering taxes, at least not for most people. It is a hatchet job designed to eviscerate the federal government.

Since at least the end of World War II, the United States has had the world’s strongest defense. It costs a lot of treasure, and there is always a reason to examine whether it can be done more efficiently. But it has helped, likely been essential, to the maintenance of world peace, on the whole, for decades.

Donald Trump has aligned himself with Russia against Ukraine, against NATO, against allies around the world. He has, as usual, lied openly about which country was the aggressor in the Russia-Ukraine war. WHY? Theories and speculations abound.

The overall picture is that Trump has, as he did throughout his first term, blatantly disregarded our law, the Constitution he swore to uphold, has violated the separation of powers and generally made clear he intends to operate as a dictator.

This isn’t going to change. It’s going to get worse. Trump is weakening the nation’s defenses. He is undermining the social safety net and threatening to do much more. The people he has nominated and that the Republican Senate has confirmed have, for the most part, no qualifications for the responsibilities they have undertaken and are hostile to missions they have sworn to perform. Trump knows little about how the government does its job and doesn’t care. He admires dictators and aspires to be one.

The wreckage continues to spread each day, undermining essential government services and weakening our capacity to resist aggression. Top military leadership has been removed.  Cybersecurity defenses are being eliminated.

The country does not have to accept this.

It is past time, to remove Trump, and his sycophant Vice President, from office before he weakens our defenses beyond the point of no return and Vladimir Putin decides he can safely move against us even more aggressively than he already is.

Trump’s arrogance knows no bounds. I expect tonight’s address to Congress will be a long diatribe about his brilliance, packed with lies and deflections. I have written elsewhere that I believe the Democrats should wait until Trump reaches the podium to speak, then rise as a group and walk out, leaving one member behind, ideally seated at the back in the shadows. There is no reason to continue normalizing Trump’s incompetence and treachery. Do whatever it takes to bring this catastrophe to an end before it’s too late.

Treason in Plain Sight

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“…. and soon the school feels to Werner like a grenade with its pin pulled.”

As I reread this morning Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the Light We Cannot See (2014), I reached the chapter entitled Everything Poisoned where that partial sentence appears. How astonishing that I would arrive at those remarkable words and the idea they capture as I was struggling to finish the post that follows below. Doerr’s observation about the young German Werner, one of the major characters in the story, captured perfectly how I, and millions of others here and around the world, felt watching the President of the United States, working in synchrony with his Vice President and his Secretary of State, ambush the popular, war-battered President of Ukraine at a press event called for that very purpose.

And make no mistake, while there may be no written script for the event we’ll ever see, I and many others are certain beyond any doubt that the attack was planned. The phony umbrage of JD Vance was calculated to unleash Trump’s angry denunciation of President Zelensky while Marco Rubio sat, hands folded, seemingly hoping no one would notice him. Everyone played their part to perfection at a public event that had no apparent purpose except to sabotage the mineral rights deal that Trump purported to want but only, it turns out, if Ukraine essentially surrendered to Putin’s Russia.

Zelensky wasn’t having it. Trump knew or should have known would be true and thus played out the end-game for the day: kill the deal while acting outraged that a visiting head of state engaged in an existential fight for the very survival of his country would have the temerity to disagree with the great and powerful Donald Trump making multiple demonstrably false claims about the war.

Why do this? Because Trump knew that Putin, the aggressor in the Russia-Ukraine war, did not want the United States to support Ukraine. Putin does not want peace. He wants conquest. Nothing could be clearer.

But, as he did during his first term with the COVID pandemic and the attempt to blackmail Zelensky into undermining Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy, Trump miscalculated both Zelensky’s character and the worldwide support for the survival of Ukraine as an independent democracy. The Republican sycophants who support Trump will proclaim their usual wonderment at how Trump “stood up” for the United States, but the reality is that he stood up for Putin’s Russia and sold out the United States once again.

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny among others, promptly posted a video on Substack entitled Five Failures in the Oval Office in which he outlines how Trump failed the country at the Zelensky lynching. https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/five-failures-in-the-oval-office?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email The video takes less than six minutes and should be watched.

I am going to go a step beyond Professor Snyder. This post was originally intended to address only Trump’s directive that the United States vote twice with Russia against Ukraine on United Nations resolutions condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I will return to that but first ….

I make no claim to expertise in the subject of how the Constitution defines “treason.” But I have the Supreme Court to help, along with other credible sources.

Important background:

As the Library of Congress’s Constitution Annotated notes, the Framers were wary of vesting the power to declare and punish treason in Congress. Having just won their independence from Great Britain, the Framers had seen how the English kings and British Parliament had escalated “ordinary partisan disputes into capital charges of treason.” In other words, the ruling class used the crime of treason to eliminate their political dissidents.https://constitution.findlaw.com/article3/annotation24.html

Perhaps because of the limiting history of the constitutional definitions, there is almost no precedent in case law. There is a statute on the books, however:

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States. [18 US Code § 2381 (1948)]

And there is Haupt v. United States, 330 U.S. 631 (1947) wherein the Supreme Court went to some lengths to spell out what is required to establish “treason” and which remains, as far as I can tell, as the last word on the subject.

The charges against Mr. Haupt related to aid and comfort he provided to his son with knowledge of the son’s mission to aid Germany in its war with the United States. After his arrest, Haupt volunteered information to FBI agents including that he had been present when the son told the complete story of his travel outside the U.S., his return by German submarine with large sums of money and plans to be a saboteur. During his confinement in the Cook County jail, Haupt also talked with two fellow prisoners concerning his case; they testified as to damaging admissions made to them.

Ultimately twelve overt acts in three categories asserted to be treasonous were submitted to the jury: (1) Haupt accompanied his son to assist him in obtaining employment in a plant engaged in manufacturing a bomb sight; (2) he harbored and sheltered his son; and (3) he accompanied his son to an automobile sales agency, arranging, making payment for, and purchasing an automobile for the son. Each of these was alleged to be in aid of the son’s known purpose of sabotage. The Supreme Court was faced with Haupt’s argument that his motives were merely those of a loving father supporting a son.

Key findings:

  • … the minimum function of the overt act in a treason prosecution is that it show action by the accused which really was aid and comfort to the enemy. Cramer v. United States,325 U.S. 1 (1945); This is a separate inquiry from that as to whether the acts were done because of adherence to the enemy, for acts helpful to the enemy may nevertheless be innocent of treasonable character;
  • Cramer’s caseheld that what must be proved by the testimony of two witnesses is a “sufficient” overt act.
  • … there can be no question that sheltering, or helping to buy a car, or helping to get employment is helpful to an enemy agent, that they were of aid and comfort to Herbert Haupt in his mission of sabotage. They have the unmistakable quality which was found lacking in the Cramercase of forwarding the saboteur in his mission.
  • We hold, therefore, that the overt acts laid in the indictment and submitted to the jury do perform the functions assigned to overt acts in treason cases, and are sufficient to support the indictment and to sustain the convictions if they were proved with the exactitude required by the Constitution.
  •  The Constitution requires that “No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act . . . .” Art. III, § 3.
  • And while two witnesses must testify to the same act, it is not required that their testimony be identical. Most overt acts are not single, separable acts, but are combinations of acts or courses of conduct made up of several elements. It is not easy to set by metes and bounds the permissible latitude between the testimony of the two required witnesses. It is perhaps easier to say on which side of the line a given case belongs than to draw a line that will separate all permissible disparities from forbidden ones….and it is not required that testimony be so minute as to exclude every fantastic hypothesis that can be suggested.
  • The law of treason makes, and properly makes, conviction difficult, but not impossible…. [Haupt’s] mission was frustrated, but defendant did his best to make it succeed. His overt acts were proved in compliance with the hard test of the Constitution, are hardly denied, and the proof leaves no reasonable doubt of the guilt.

The judgment is Affirmed.

The Court thus found that, given the incriminating testimony of the required two witnesses, it was for the jury to decide between “treason” and “just a father helping his son get along.”

Mr. Justice Douglas wrote a concurring opinion, noting “…. As the Cramer case makes plain, the overt act and the intent with which it is done are separate and distinct elements of the crime. Intent need not be proved by two witnesses, but may be inferred from all the circumstances surrounding the overt act …. The requirement of an overt act is to make certain a treasonable project has moved from the realm of thought into the realm of action.”

Mr. Justice Murphy dissented in an opinion that suggested it was for the courts rather than the jury to decide whether “reasonable doubt” existed as to the true nature of the acts in dispute. Happily, that was not and is not the law.

The foregoing, I believe, fairly summarizes the law governing sustainable findings of treason.

Before turning to why I believe Donald Trump, among others, is plainly guilty of treason, you should also be aware of some facts set out in Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (2024) by Anne Applebaum, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Gulag, A History of the Soviet Camps (2004) and author of Twilight of Democracy, among others:

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale war against Ukraine, the first full-scale kinetic battle in the struggle between Autocracy, Inc. and what might loosely be described as the democratic world. Russia plays a special role in the autocratic network, both as the inventor of the modern marriage of kleptocracy and dictatorship and as the country now most aggressively seeking to upend the status quo. The invasion was planned in that spirit. Putin hoped not only to acquire territory, but also to show the world that the old rules of international behavior no longer hold.

From the very first days of the war, Putin and the Russian security elite ostentatiously demonstrated their disdain for the language of human rights, their disregard for the laws of war, their scorn for international law and for treaties they themselves had signed. They arrested public officials and civic leaders: mayors, police officers, civil servant, school directors, journalists, artists, museum curators. They built torture chambers for civilians …. They kidnapped thousands of children, ripping some away from their families, removing others from orphanages, gave them new “Russian” identities and prevented them from return home to Ukraine. [Autocracy, Inc. at 13]

And more. And more. Those facts are not disputable by anyone with a functioning mind and the ability to disassociate from the penumbra of subordination cast by Donald Trump on his followers.

The conclusion from that and much other evidence, all well-known, is that Russia under Putin is the enemy of the United States. To anyone observing Putin and his statements and behavior, he has made it clear beyond any doubt that he regards American democracy and our constitutional freedoms as anathema. Multiple investigations here have shown beyond doubt extensive Russian interference in our elections and more.

It is also clear beyond doubt that there are more than two witnesses to Trump’s issuing of instructions to the interim U.S. representative to the U.N to vote with Russia and against Ukraine. There is no possibility she would have just done this on her own without instructions from the highest level. Speaking in Trumpish, “America’s acting envoy to the UN, Dorothy Camille Shea, described the US resolution as a “simple historic statement… that looks forward, not backwards. A resolution focused on one simple idea: ending the war”. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7435pnle0go

Now add the sickening spectacle of Trump and Vance aligning with Putin’s Russia against Zelensky’s Ukraine and you have the perfect description of multiple acts of giving “aid and comfort” to an avowed enemy of the United States.

Trump has abandoned the western alliance formed after WWII and aligned himself and now the U.S. government with Russian aggression against a free and independent democracy on its border. Given the bizarre collection of appointments Trump has made to positions high in our defense, security and intelligence apparatus, it is not farfetched to believe that he is preparing to gift Ukraine to Russia and likely a lot more.

Recall that Trump is the same person who removed highly confidential documents from the White House when he left in 2021 and that he refused to return them, lied about what he had and engaged in overt acts to hide what he had from authorities seeking their protection and return. The FBI under Trump’s new appointed leadership has just returned those documents to Trump!

So now, etched in our memories forever, is the pathetic spectacle of Trump and his henchman JD Vance, with the silent acquiescence of Marco Rubio, attacking and berating Volodymyr Zelensky in an almost certainly staged event for that very purpose. Trump, self-satisfied that he had accomplished his mission, freely noted at the end that it would “make great television.” In this pathetic demonstration of anti-American animus, Trump gave further aid and comfort to a declared enemy of the United States he took an oath to defend. You can read a reasonably accurate account of the episode here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/us/politics/trump-zelensky-us-ukraine-russia.html

This was a first in American diplomatic history and, I believe, an obvious effort to sabotage Zelensky and Ukraine in front of the American people. Trump set up the press event and, with VP Vance chiming in with a personal attack near the end, erupted when Zelensky tried to explain the true situation Ukraine faces with Russian aggression. Vance and Trump acted like Zelensky had forced his way into the White House, called the press event himself and then outrageously used it to stand up for the freedom of his country that is under existential attack designed to eliminate the very existence of the country.

Trump, as usual had spent the first two-thirds of the press event talking about himself, what a great negotiator he is, how he only wants the best for the United States, how he was persecuted, how terrible Presidents Obama and Biden were, on and on and on, the same old mindless lies and blather.

In my opinion, the entire nightmarish scene was planned to undermine Ukraine and Zelensky. Trump knows Putin does not want peace; he wants conquest. And it won’t stop with Ukraine if he’s successful. Trump had no intention of making a deal with Zelensky unless it involved the total surrender of Ukraine to Russia.

I have no idea what leverage Putin has on Trump – you have no doubt read many of the same stories and speculations as I have – but whatever it is, it must be very strong to produce such overt appeasement that rivals or exceeds anything ever seen in world relations. Russian media ate it up, of course, just as one would expect. Peter Baker, White House reporter, wrote that

Never has an American president lectured the leader of an ally in public like this, much less the leader of a country that is fighting off invaders.

I have covered the White House since 1996. There has never been an Oval Office meeting in front of cameras like this in all that time.

The damage Trump/Vance did to United States standing in the world is immeasurable and unforgivable. It was, I believe, pure and simple treason.

Duplicity at the Washington Post

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I was planning to name this post “Out-Snarking George Will’s Snark” but in the event, the bigger issue loomed larger. Following Jeff Bezos’ incoherent and logically deficient decision to withhold the endorsement that the editorial staff had prepared, the Post has continued its “both sides are equivalent” approach to what it thinks of as journalism.

The prime example that leapt to mind as the election looms is the continued publication of George Will’s “Opinion” articles. I have no insight as to why the Post has felt for decades now that Mr. Will’s “opinions” have such merit as to warrant regular presentation to what was once the Post’s vast audience. Mr. Will is, we know, a stalwart “conservative,” and a bastion of “conservative thought.” How this came to be I don’t know and don’t much care.

I address this now, on the eve of the most important election in, most likely, the history of the country, because Mr. Will’s latest exercise in verbal chicanery caused a hormonal overload of angst that I am helpless to control. I can exorcise it, if at all, by writing about it. Doing so will not change anything except perhaps bringing my heart rate back to safe levels.

Mr. Will’s “opinion” at issue here is entitled, “Voters face the worst presidential choice in U.S. history.”https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/01/donald-trump-kamala-harris-worst-choice/

One might think that he was both-sides-ing again (“There have been mediocrities and scoundrels in the 59 previous presidential elections. But nothing like this.”), but that would be wrong. Mr. Will’s duplicitous article, presumptively acceptable to the Post that published it, is, properly understood, an endorsement of Donald Trump.

A snarky aside: George Will is 83 years old, older even than I am. The photo accompanying his opinion articles is either Photoshopped or from decades ago. Compare the Getty Images at https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/george-will-columnist or in this idolatrous piece in the National Review wherein Mr. Will is lionized as a “dazzling writer and political thinker.” https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/george-f-will-an-appreciation/ Return now to the main point.

Mr. Will’s gift for word play is on full display in this piece: “Why prolong this incineration of the nation’s dignity?” While accurately describing Trump as a “volcano of stray thoughts and tantrums” who is “painfully well known,” he immediately pivots to insulting Kamala Harris by defining her exclusively by “her versatility of conviction” that “means that she might shed her new catechism as blithely as she acquired its progressive predecessor.”

Mr. Will pivots again to attacking the Democratic Party’s “reckless disingenuousness regarding the president’s frailty” followed by “the nimbleness of those without the ballast of seriousness about anything other than hoarding power … foisted on the electorate a Play-Doh candidate. Her manipulators made her malleability into her platform. Prudence is a virtue, so do not fault her handlers for mostly shielding her from public interactions more challenging than interviews with grammar school newspapers.” That is followed by more insults of Tim Walz whose “achievement during his pirouette in the spotlight has been to make his counterpart, JD Vance, resemble Aristotle.” Aristotle? I think not. More like Marcus Junius Brutus who conspired to murder Julius Caesar.

Mr. Will pivots again quickly to undermining Vance: his “stories,” or “fairy tales” claimed to be didactic, “might be if he, a bristling porcupine of certitudes, candidly demarcated his fictions from reality.” Pivot again to stating that Biden and Trump are equally guilty of bad choices of running mates. Mr. Will purports to prove his “both sides are bad” argument by outlining each side’s “pitiless exposure of the candidates’ peculiar promises and reprehensible silences.”

Mr. Will thus compares Trump as “pithy” when promising the impossible to “settle” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 24 hours to Harris as “loquacious” in an interview about the US role in trying to influence events in the Middle East. He says, rightly, that Trump will not state, “Putin is an enemy” and Harris will not defend what he describes as Israel’s “right to fight as fiercely against genocidal enemies next door as the United States fought in World War II against enemies oceans away.”

I interject here if Mr. Will knew a tenth as much as he presumes to know about the Middle East, he could comment with authority. But it’s apparent to me he has either not read Bob Woodward’s new book, War, or simply refuses to understand the inconvenient realities of possibly the most complex political, cultural, ethic, and religious situation in modern history.

Mr. Will pivots again to whining about what he calls “entitlements,” referring to the large sums of my, and your, money withheld from your pay over your lifetime to assure you had a fiscal lifeline in retirement by returning your money to you. Entitlement? Nah. And Medicare, the other subject of Mr. Will’s angst? We might not need it if our health and related insurance systems weren’t such a pathetic joke.

I will here skip over some of Mr. Will’s further distortions of stated positions to the real beauty in this article. He purports to claim that the award for “most embarrassing voice” this year goes to an unnamed “Idaho Republican who, in a public forum, told a Native American to “go back where you came from.” Mr. Will concludes that part with “Let’s do go back to where we come from: the nation’s founding of a limited government.”

Ah! So, there it is. Mr. Will believes “where we came from” as a nation is “the founding of a limited government,” the siren song of the traditional, now long lost in the miasma of Trumpism, “conservative” understanding of what the country is all about and how it got there. Unwittingly, perhaps but likely not, Mr. Will gives us the “big reveal” by failing/refusing to grasp the parts of our national history that inconveniently ignore the “Americans” who were here before us and the abject inadequacy of the Articles of Confederation that failed to produce a national government that could manage even the rudimentary nation that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution.

The Articles were the “limited government” of Mr. Will’s fever dreams. They are close to the most likely model for the “government” that Trump/Vance promise to give us and that the Supreme Court has to some extent already ordained as the preferred method of managing our more than 330 million people spread over more than 3.7 million square miles of contiguous territory. Trump/Vance promise to eviscerate the federal government, returning us to the fantasy land of yesteryear when a confederacy of states each of which will be in charge of its own destiny (at least until the next hurricane strikes) and the “United” States will withdraw from most international relationships in favor of an isolationist “America First” that in the past has led straight to war.

Thus, in the end, while purporting to argue that the two presidential candidates of 2024 are deficient in all and mostly mutual respects, Mr. Will ultimately buys into Trump/Vance’s “vision” of a country consisting of 50 separate entities, each acting as its “locals” prefer with a national government populated by political loyalists of the President and free from the inconvenient constraints of the Constitution and criminal laws.

You would think Mr. Will has not read or understood much of American history, modeling Trump’s “don’t tell me, don’t ask me to read it, I already know everything I need to know to benefit me.” Mr. Will’s opening suggestion that both candidates are equivalent and deficient is overwhelmed in the end by his implicit recognition that his historical understanding fits neatly with Trump/Vance’s ravings. Thus, although Mr. Will claims the 2024 candidate have been “greeted … by grimaces from sea to shining sea” (sorry, but I had to include it), in the end only one will be victorious and if it’s Mr. Will’s “favorite among equals,” the nation is in for a disastrous end. See, for example, https://shiningseausa.com/2024/10/25/america-trump-wants-for-you-your-children/ and https://shiningseausa.com/2024/07/02/another-day-that-will-live-in-infamy/