On Eve Of Impeachment, Trump Sends Bizarre Rant-Filled Letter To Pelosi
The President of the United States has sent a bizarre, rant-filled letter to the Speaker of the House. Revealing just how unbalanced he actually is.
On the eve of an expected vote in the House of Representatives to impeach a President for only the third time in American history, President Trump has sent a bizarre, rant-filled letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi that defies explanation:
WASHINGTON — President Trump on Tuesday denounced what he called a “partisan impeachment crusade” being waged against him by Democrats, calling the effort to remove him an unconstitutional abuse of power and an “attempted coup” that would come back to haunt them at the ballot box next year.
“I have no doubt the American people will hold you and the Democrats fully responsible in the upcoming 2020 election,” Mr. Trump wrote in a rambling, six-page letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent on the eve of House votes to impeach him on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. “They will not soon forgive your perversion of justice and abuse of power.”
Mr. Trump wrote that he knew his letter would not change the outcome of Wednesday’s votes, expected to occur almost entirely on party lines, to impeach him. But he said the missive was “for the purpose of history and to put my thoughts on a permanent and indelible record.”
The president angrily disputed both impeachment charges against him in the letter, saying he had done nothing wrong and asserting that Ms. Pelosi and her allies were using the Constitution to attack him for the successful policies he had implemented.
“More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials,” Mr. Trump wrote.
President Donal Trump sent a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Tuesday urging her to halt impeachment proceedings one day before the House is set to vote to impeach him, accusing Democrats of an “unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power.”
Trump, in a scathing six-page letter to Pelosi, complained about the impeachment process, defended his conduct toward Ukraine and accused Democrats of “interfering in America’s elections.”
“It is time for you and the highly partisan Democrats in Congress to immediately cease this impeachment fantasy and get back to work for the American People. While I have no expectation that you will do so, I write this letter to you for the purpose of history and to put my thoughts on a permanent and indelible record,” Trump wrote.
The lengthy missive contained many of the same arguments and featured the same heated rhetoric Trump has deployed over the last two months via Twitter and public appearances. He complains about former special counsel Robert Mueller, lists off his own achievements, bashes “ranting and raving” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and denies any wrongdoing.
“This is nothing more than an illegal, partisan attempted coup that will, based on recent sentiment, badly fail at the voting both. You are not just after me, as President, you are after the entire Republican Party,” Trump wrote in the letter, which marked his first personal correspondence with Pelosi on impeachment. “History will judge you harshly as you proceed with this impeachment charade.”
The president, who said in the Oval Office moments after the letter was publicized that he takes “zero” responsibility for facing impeachment, instead accused Democrats of committing the same actions they have alleged Trump is guilty of.
“You are the ones interfering in America’s election. You are the ones subverting America’s Democracy. You are the ones Obstructing Justice,” Trump wrote. “You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to our Republic for your own selfish personal, political, and partisan gain.”
“I have no doubt the American people will hold you and the Democrats fully responsible in the upcoming 2020 election. They will not soon forgive your perversion of justice and abuse of power,” he added.
The letter came on the eve of the House vote on two articles of impeachment against Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The Democratic-controlled lower chamber is widely expected to approve the articles of impeachment with no Republican support.
The White House has refused to cooperate in the inquiry, accusing House Democrats of a partisan and illegitimate effort to overturn the results of the 2016 election and criticizing the process as unfair.
“More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials,” Trump wrote Tuesday.
(…)
Trump vigorously defended his call with Zelensky in Tuesday’s letter, claiming it had been “fraudulently misrepresented” and reiterating claims about Biden pushing for the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor to his son’s benefit without providing specific evidence.
Trump claimed that a rough transcript of the call released by the White House, which showed him raising Biden’s name three times, vindicated him and emphasized Ukraine’s president said he felt no pressure on the call.
“You are turning a policy disagreement between two branches of government into an impeachable offense — it is no more legitimate than the Executive Branch charging members of Congress with crimes for the lawful exercise of legislative power,” the president wrote.
(…)
In a personal jab at Pelosi, Trump also blasted the Speaker over what he called a “false display of solemnity.”
“You apparently have so little respect for the American People that you expect them to believe that you are approaching this impeachment somberly, reservedly, and reluctantly,” Trump wrote. “No intelligent person believes what you are saying.”
Trump’s entire six-page screed, which I’ve embedded below, reads more like the script of one of the President’s political rally than it does correspondence from the President of the United States to a duly-elected Constitutional officeholder who is second in line to the Presidency. In any other Administration, it’s something that never would have even been considered never mind drafted and actually sent. The fact that it was is yet another indication of the extent to this President and this Administration not only do not abide by the norms of American politics but the extent to which this President is clearly unhinged and simply unable to act politically without communicating in the vilest, most insulting way possible. In that regard, it says more about him personally, and the people around him, than it does the target of the letter itself. Indeed, throughout this process, Speaker Pelosi has acted in what can only be described as a sane, sober, and careful manner. The President and his supporters, on the other hand, have acted in some of the most bizarre ways conceivable.
This isn’t just about Trump. His top staff were obviously in the loop about this letter, and like the Emperor with no clothes, they said nothing even though it makes Trump sound like a drunk guy standing on the street corner ranting at the sky. Rather than restraining Presidential rages, the people around Trump are reinforcing and defending them. The result is that he sees no problem with pushing the envelope further and further. If nothing else, just like the tweeting, it shows the extent to which this entire Presidency has become a meme from The Simpsons:
This, my friends, is what this Presidency has been reduced to. The only difference is that, unlike Abe Simpson, Donald Trump commands the most powerful military in the world and has control over the most powerful nuclear stockpile on the planet. No wonder I have trouble sleeping some nights.
Here’s the letter:
Donald Trump Letter To Pelosi by Doug Mataconis on Scribd
I’ll just link to my comment from the Open thread…
https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/open-forum-124/#comment-2484472
Reads like a teenagers letter to his girlfriend who dumped him.
I know this won’t change your mind, but…
The POTUS is a fuqing child.
To be fair, it probably reads better in the native Russian…
Trump wrote a letter to his deplorables, and a warning to his enablers. Pelosi has nothing to do with it.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
The strange capitalisation reminded me of German, while the double spacing at the end of sentences recalled the days of typewriters. I strongly suspect that Trump wrote this and that his aides merely corrected the more egregious grammatical errors.
Every head of state around the world is laughing his or her keister off. We’re an international joke.
A bad joke.
@CSK:
George W. Bush and Dan Quayle are on the phone, wondering WTF?
To me, and evidently many of you, it’s ridiculous. To some supporters at least, it shows that “Trump’s a fighter!”.
Sigh.
I love this comment from someone at Redstate: “President Trump is appearing fully Churchillian in his solitary stand for decency against the Democratic axis of evil.”
Churchill was a master of the English language. Trump is a master of gibberish.
@CSK: I don’t think they are commenting on his use of language, just on his “up yours, Nazis!” attitude.
I mean, yeah, that letter is just chock full of “decency”, right?
BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!! There’s no way to reason or compromise with such delusional imbeciles…
A helpful condensation of the letter, using only sentences with exclamation points:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EMA3vMfWkAAqX6Z.jpg
Seen on Twitter:
“Trump makes case against impeachment by making case in favor of 25th Amendment”
“Indelible” is right – there will be no forgetting this screed on paper.
It’s a cold comfort today, but the history books written about this era, once all of Trump’s secrets are revealed (because it is a certainty that he won’t be able to hide his records forever), should tell a story that all his enablers will never be able to escape.
This one is even better…hahaha…
https://twitter.com/TheTattooedProf/status/1207070182025388038
Batshit. The word you are looking for is batshit
You know, Bill Maher said, back in late 2015, before 63 million people decided to give up on reason and facts:
So, here we are, he’s raging, he’s seething, he’s …. he’s being his normal self.
Has Trump! figured out what exclamation points! are for!?
@Kathy: Obviously not, since he hasn’t yet figured out capitalization.
Listen all –
I’ve been trying to tell you all that we are discounting what a large segment of the population actually believes because we’re in our own little bubble. Here are some comments from National Review, Althouse, and Hot Air. These are actual quotes from seemingly otherwise rational partisans:
I won’t even get into what’s going on at Lucianne or Breitbart.
Alternate. Reality.
As has been noted many times before with the extreme right today, the sheer projection is extraordinary.
@EddieInCA: I check Lucianne.com every day. It’s like a multiple car collision: horrendous, but you can’t take your eyes off it. Trump is worshiped there.
@EddieInCA:
I used to visit Hot Air around the time of the Iraq war, and a bit into Obama’s first few months. I read the blogs, not the comments. They talked a great deal about the left’s “epistemic closure.” All the while I wondered whether they were not epistemically enclosed themselves. Their defense of the Iraq War, then the Surge, and then the quagmire, was increasingly detached from the facts, especially after no WMDs were found. So were their criticisms of Obama, even when valid.
IMO, the news media isn’t biased either left or right when ti comes to reporting the news, but it’s really skewed in the editorial and opinion pages. that’s where the bubbles form.
And they obviously edited it for him as well, as there is no way he knows how to spell words like jurisprudence, nullification, unfettered, and egregious (among many others in the letter), much less define them…
I’d love to find anyone who could defend that statement…
That was … if not “unhinged” at the very least “differently-hinged.”
Wow.
And so many lies. So very many lies.
@Gustopher: Sorry, my phone screen is skinny but my thumbs are fat. Unintended downvote.
Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll stroke out. If he does, I’m going to start going to church.
This is all about his base. They will love this.
Steve
@Kit:
Hey! I double space! It’s not a typewriter thing, it’s an ease of reading thing! I like two spaces, because it is a visual queue that there is an end of a thought and the next.
tl;dr ok boomer
The “letter” is an embarrassment. What I don’t get it is how anyone can defend it. Brooks says Trump represents the true underbelly of America but if so he then should criticize them, he doesn’t. He is coward. As to “them”, I get the impression the civil war never ended. It was a conflation of media, politicians, racism and hopelessness. They don’t believe in ideas or solutions but just in grievances.
@Scott F.:
I hope you’re right, but if Trump get’s another term history will fall under the line abused by the Birch Society, “Treason doth never prosper. What’s the reason? Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
@Kathy: There was, around then, a lot of talk about epistemic closure on the right, for obvious reasons. What you saw at Hot Air wasn’t even projection, it was just lazily paraphrasing what someone wrote about the right but substituting “left” wherever the original said “right”. Grade school playground, “I’m rubber and you’re glue.”
@Kathy:
Are you sure? From what I can recall, the first person to use that term in that way was Julian Sanchez in 2010, and he was diagnosing the right, not the left.
@Sleeping Dog:
No shyt, huh? On a more sardonic note, balls to bollocks he doesn’t even know what “indelible” means.
@Sleeping Dog:
I’m hoping that he strokes out on the toilet and needs to spend the next thirty years learning how to swallow, and barely able to speak, but fully aware of what’s going on and everyone who has abandoned him.
As an atheist, all I can hope for is hell on earth.
Not that I have thought about this a lot.
@Liberal Capitalist:
Off my lawn, you snot-nosed brat, and take your typewriter with you!
Oh, and it’s a visual cue :-p
@DeD:
Of course he does. It clearly means “not delible.” 😛
Jim Swift at http://www.thebulwark.com has a pretty funny take on this screed: “A Close Textual Reading of Trump’s Letter to Nancy Pelosi.”
@gVOR08:
The rubber-glue argument may as well be renamed the Trump Fallacy.
@Kylopod:
I am quite sure. But I admit I may be mistaken. for certain they meant that term even if a different wording was used.
BTW, “epistemic closure” sounds like it should be some kind of surgical procedure, “Yeah, we had to perform an epistemic closure on the patient’s large intestine.”
@Kathy: “Epistemic closure” is a term from philosophy, but I don’t think it meant quite what Julian Sanchez implied it to mean in his 2010 blog post, which caught on like wildfire and may plausibly have been picked up by the right. I have heard other terms for basically the same concept, such as “the bubble” or “the closed information loop.” (I also should mention that Sanchez is a libertarian, not a liberal of leftist, but he still saw the problem as existing primarily on the right.)
Another thing. While I agree the right engages heavily in rubber-glue, the left has on occasion borrowed terms invented by the right and originally applied in the opposite direction. For example, who do you think first referred to “Clinton Derangement Syndrome”? It was actually coined as “Bush Derangement Syndrome” by Charles Krauthammer in the 2000s, and from there both the left and the right have applied it presidents they think the other side is “deranged” in opposition to.
@Kylopod:
That’s a more accepted practice, with a long history behind it. It’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s highly unoriginal. And sometimes it’s rubber-glue Trump-level fallacy.
The rubber-glue argument is dishonest in that a valid accusation gets turned around to the accuser. While this may be so (think of motes and beams), it usually isn’t, and usually it doesn’t even make sense.
I had almost forgotten about one of the funnier parts of Trump’s letter, namely his doubling down on his strange use of the word perfect. Obviously, he felt compelled to hammer home that word because the original fell on the ear with such a jarring clang. Looks like anything he says three times must be the truth.
Long ago I wrote a blog. As a feature I had guest posts from God the Father and a series called Incoherent Rage. That was meant to be funny. It was meant as satire.
And now the most powerful man on earth is reduced to incoherent rage. Of course the culties love it, incoherent rage describes their state of mind. Rage, rage, rage because their god doesn’t exist, the coal mine’s dead, women won’t let them cop a feel and somewhere a black man has something they don’t.
BTW…Trump supported Impeaching both Bush43 and Obama.
@Kathy: Nonsense! Indelible is the opposite of outdelible and has to do with whether sandwiches are called for at or delivered from the shop.
@just nutha:
I believe you mean “hamberders.”
@just nutha:
Oh, you win this one. congrats!
“outdelible?” Take out from the Deli…
And here I thought delible (in or out) referred to cold cuts made from beef. So pastrami is delible, but capicola is not.
@CSK: Hamberders come from drive ins and diners and are not delible at all.
@Moosebreath: That may be the case. I’m not an expert at what is delible and what it not, so their may be issues with keeping kosher of which I’m unaware. Additionally, my family normally only made sandwiches with hard salami and were more likely to use capicola like bacon or proscuitto.
@Kathy: In the Trump era, the GOP’s rubber-glue antics have become comically absurd. It springs from the behavior of the Master himself, who quite literally sounds like a 2-year-old: “No puppet, you’re the puppet!” Before Trump’s rise, no one would have believed that was a real quote.
But determining the merits of a rubber-glue argument isn’t always so clear-cut. If conservatives were accusing liberals of “epistemic closure” after that term was lobbed at them, they were probably (and this was a point Sanchez himself made in a follow-up post) confusing the term with the broader concept of groupthink, which indeed exists on the left. What Sanchez was describing was something more specific: people who get all their info from the network of right-wing media and reject more mainstream sources of information when it conflicts with their beliefs. In Sanchez’s words:
The conservative critique of liberal groupthink is more the flip-side of that: what they see as liberals’ over-acceptance of mainstream media, or the groupthink of the mainstream media itself. (The failure to anticipate Trump’s victory, down to a refusal to even consider it as even a remote possibility, is perhaps the most convincing example, and one they will probably still be rubbing in our faces for decades to come.)
@just nutha:
Oh, please. Trump gets his sackful of hamberders delibbered from Mickey D’s every night.
@CSK: I suppose that it’s possible that hamberders are simply delible–as opposed to indelible or outdelible, but I’m sure that having them delibbered [edit:] or even delibberated is not specifically related to indelibility or outdelibility, but rather a whole new category. 😉