This morning the president tweeted this crap.

This is a variation on his usual theme: The impeachment inquiry isn’t fair and is a violation of his rights. Somehow. Except, obviously, it is not.

Also, President White Supremacist probably shouldn’t be trotting out “lynching” to describe his entirely justified impeachment. But aside from that bullshit…

Trump’s been beating this drum pretty regularly since the impeachment kicked off seven thousand years ago – that because he can’t talk to witnesses, and/or because the House didn’t hold a formal vote, and/or fill in the blanks, the impeachment inquiry is illegal, immoral, impinging on his rights, a farce, whatever. But that’s not how this works.

For starters, a formal vote to begin impeachment proceedings isn’t constitutionally required. It’s been customary, but it’s not legally required. And, to be honest, in this particular moment of history, holding a formal vote is lose-lose for Pelosi and the House Democrats. A formal vote would pass, but it would do so along party lines. If Pelosi doesn’t hold a vote, Trump whines that the impeachment inquiry is invalid. If she does, the impeachment inquiry gets smeared as a strictly partisan attempt to discredit Trump. There’s no win scenario in an impeachment inquiry vote right now.

But the longer the inquiry goes, and the more dirt that gets dragged out, and the more often Trump loses his temper and fucks up (see: the Kurds, Mick Mulvaney, Trump National Doral, etc.), the more likely it is that the House Democrats pick up some House Republicans to vote for an impeachment inquiry. And that would be a pretty hefty blow to Trump.

See, the thing is, Republicans do have lawyers and are asking questions. We’ve all seen open hearings, where Democrats and Republicans take turns asking questions, and where the person testifying shows up with a veritable army of lawyers, and where, sometimes, the House shows up with lawyers of their own to lead the investigation. And as to transparency – that comes with the trial, not the inquiry.

An impeachment proceeding works sort of similarly to a criminal investigation. At the moment, we’re in the “investigation” stage.

If this were a cop show, it would be the part where the cops were following leads, finding clues, and questioning witnesses. And you’ll notice that in every single cop show you’ve ever seen, the actual criminal was not hanging out with the cops also questioning witnesses and looking at clues. In fact, as a general rule, the cops try to avoid letting the criminal know they’re being investigated, so that the crook can’t interfere or destroy evidence or whatever.

The next stage of the impeachment proceedings is a courtroom show – the Senate trial. There’s where evidence is presented and lawyers get involved and we get our transparency – or at least as much as national security will allow. That’s where Trump – or rather, whatever lawyers he manages to scrape together who haven’t also been arrested for crimes *coughRudycough* – gets to talk to witnesses and see evidence.

Like, we all watch TV. We all know that’s how this works.

Okay, well, all of us with any sense left, anyways. I suppose the diehard MAGA crew doesn’t know much of anything.

I mean, it was definitely, 100% intended to be this way for the president, especially if the president is a blatant criminal. That’s why the impeachment process was included in the constitution – so we’d have a way to remove crooks from the presidency.

But besides that, I just wanted to point out Trump’s campaign of smearing the impeachment proceedings as illegitimate, and the House leaders involved as corrupt, mentally ill, etc. This is a standard tactic of his – if he doesn’t like something or someone, he goes on an endless tirade of abuse and lies, painting the person or situation as unfair, morally wrong, illegal – all that jazz. And I’m pointing it out because it works. If he keeps hammering this nail, and his propaganda outlets like Fox News, RT, Infowars, and various botnets, flunkies, and diehard MAGA fans on Twitter and Facebook keep repeating it, and the regular media covers it… it becomes “common knowledge.”

Pretty soon otherwise rational people who aren’t tits-deep in the news everyday like me are saying things like, “I dunno… the way the Democrats are handling this impeachment thing seems a little fishy to me…”

That’s why it’s important to push back on Trump’s garbage. That’s why you have to call this shit out and correct it when you see it. Because otherwise, Trump makes it the truth.

The impeachment inquiry is legitimate. The president has committed criminal, impeachable offenses. He should be removed from office. At the very barest least, he should be made to go through this process, and all his dirt should be dragged into the light, and it should be shouted from the rooftops, and then the Senate, better than half of which is complicit in Trump’s crimes, should be made to vote on it, so they can be on record for all time.

And then in 2020, we should vote every last single one of those bastards out of office.

As of 2018, there are 327,167,434 million US citizens and 253,768,092 (78%) of them are 18 or older. Of that, about 153 million are registered to vote. That’s about 47% of the total population and about 60% of eligible US voters.

Of those voters, as of 2017, Gallup polling showed that “46% are either “Democrats or Democratic leaners” and 39% are either “Republicans or Republican leaners.”

So, roughly, 98,969,555 of the voting population of the US leans or is Republican. (Leaving 116,733,322 as Democratically-aligned.)

According to the Gallup’s most recent polls Trump has an 87% approval rate with Republicans. That’s about 86,103,512 registered voters.

In 2018, voter turnout was about 53%. In 2016, voter turnout was about 61%. The 2018 turnout was unusually high for a mid-term election, but 2016’s turnout was about bang-on for a presidential election (contrary to popular belief). I would expect to see a higher-than-usual turnout for the 2020 election due to the 2018 turnout and just because so much is on the line and things have been so fraught these last few years, but let’s not count those chickens before they hatch. We’ll assume a 61% turnout rate for 2020.

That means about 154,798,536 people will vote in 2020, of which about 60,371,429 will be Republican or Republican-leaning, and of that, about 52,523,143 (according to the current Gallup numbers) will vote for Trump.

In a nation of 257 million registered voters, where around 155 million of them are expected to actually vote, about 53 million might vote for Trump.

(Assuming I mathed right, which is always a crap shoot, but I sourced my numbers, tried not to guesstimate too much, and used a calculator widget to figure the percentages, so…)

So, call that 53 million Trump’s base. That’s… not a lot, relatively speaking.

Trying to come up with a hard number for Trump’s base is tricky. I’ve done a lot of Googling and reading about it, and I have not found much in the way of hard numbers. I’ve seen a lot of percentages based on this poll or that, calculated from adults 18+, registered voters, likely voters, etc, counting this number of people as “hardcore” supporters or that number of people as “likely supporters,” and so on, and so forth, but… not much by way of hard numbers.

What it does come down to is that “Trump’s base” is not large. It’s not even close to any kind of a majority. And I think that’s important to know in this frightening and disheartening age of ours.

Sources

• DataCenter.KidsCount.org
• www.Statista.com
• Wikipedia: Political party strength in U.S. states
• News.Gallup.com
• www.Census.gov
• www.Census.gov: Voting in America: A Look at the 2016 Presidential Election

News is breaking so fast on this impeachment thing that it’s hard to keep up. Here’s a roundup of resources you can use to keep an eye on things.

• What the Fuck Just Happened Today? – My fav, a 5-day-a-week blog of all the Trump news fit to print.
• Current Status – Built by the WTFJHT guy, this site tracks trending US political stories.
• Impeachment.guide – From GovTrack.us
• ImpeachmentResources.org – From the Center for American Progress, an “independent, nonpartisan policy institute and advocacy organization that is dedicated to improving the lives of all Americans, through bold, progressive ideas, as well as strong leadership and concerted action.”
• Impeachment.fyi – This one just popped up this morning and I don’t know a lot about it, but it provided bullet-pointed articles and summaries similar to WTFJHT, only strictly about impeachment. ETA: This is put together by Dan Sinker, a former journalist who’s currently running a politics podcast with author Maureen Johnson.

I’ll update this as I find more. I know a few newspapers are rolling out email newsletters for impeachment information, so I may add some of those, too.

ETA: You can sign up for the New York Times’ “Impeachment Briefing,” an email newsletter, here. I don’t suggest it, really – I haven’t been thrilled with the way the Times has been covering Trump, either in their news section or (especially) their opinion section. They’re a little too ass-kissy for my taste. If you’re wanting something that shows up once a day in your email, you’re better off signing up with WTFJHT or impeachment.fyi.

The Trump administration’s “transcript” of Trump’s call with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is out. Here’s NPR’s article about it, and here’s the “transcript” itself.

Let’s talk a little bit about this “transcript,” the situation with Ukraine, and impeachment.

For starters, you see the word “transcript” and you may think you’re reading a verbatim account of the phone call. You are not.

To make transcripts of official calls between any US president and another foreign leader-type person, what happens is the president calls somebody, and a bunch of people sit in on the call on both sides. Some of those people are typing/writing furiously as the leaders speak. After the call is edited, these notes are edited and/or summarized, and that’s the “transcript.” IE, it’s not being recorded. They stopped doing that after Nixon got in all his trouble.

So this isn’t a verbatim account of the call. This is what the Trump administration claims was said on the call. And of course we all know how far we can trust the Trump administration when it comes to the truth. 🙄

Speaking of, you should read their account. I’ll cop to having not read very many accounts of phone calls between actual national leaders of the world in real life, but I gotta tell you, this transcript reads like the fakest fake thing I’ve ever read. I mean, shit, son, real people do not speak to each other this way. And like some of that is almost certainly the Ukrainian president blowing smoke up Trump’s ass, but I’m pretty sure some of it is just bullshit, too.

Now, about that situation with Ukraine – a very basic summary goes like this: Ukraine has relied on aid from the US since 2014, and just prior to this phone call, which happened in July, the Trump administration cut off aid to Ukraine. The Trump admin has struggled to explain why they cut off aid. Then this phone call about drumming up an investigation into one of the front runners Trump might be facing in the 2020 elections happened, and the aid started flowing again. You can read a more detailed and in-depth explanation here.

All that happened and someone in the government, who seems to be privy to even more context than we currently have, saw it and was like, “Well this looks shady as balls,” and took their complaints and concerns up the chain, legally, becoming the whistleblower that everyone’s been talking about. The thing to note here is that the whistleblower followed all the legal steps to address their concerns.

You’re probably used to thinking about whistleblowers as people who are technically breaking some law or a contract they had with their job to get the word out about corruption or illegal things they witnessed or can prove, because that’s usually how things work. That’s not what happened here – there are legal ways to address corruption and/or lawbreaking in the government, and that’s what this whistleblower is doing.

The whistleblower took all the right steps to address the issues they’d discovered, which resulted in a report which is supposed to be turned over to Congress, except the Trump admin is refusing to deal with that report, which is, very definitely, illegal.

As per the norm with the Trump administration, because they suck at everything including doing crimes, this all blew up in Trump’s face, which led directly to intense pressure on the House Democrats, and Nancy Pelosi in particular, to cough up an impeachment inquiry. Which was announced yesterday.

One of the things you’re probably hearing on the news is that these impeachment investigations “aren’t really happening” and “nothing has changed” because the House has to vote to begin impeachment investigations, and there hasn’t been a vote. That, my friends, is bullshit. The only vote the House needs to do, constitutionally, for impeachment, is when they vote on the actual articles of impeachment, which is what sends them on to the Senate for an impeachment trial. To start an impeachment investigation, all they technically need to do is start investigating.

The House investigated Nixon for almost a whole year before they actually did a vote to start calling it “impeachment” officially. For that matter, the House has been investigating Trump since 2018 when we voted in a Democratic majority. (They were investigating before that, but it wasn’t going anywhere because the Republicans were in charge.)

If you want to read more about how impeachment works, Reuters has a really good explainer.

One final thought – assuming the House brings articles of impeachment up for a vote (which is kinda like filing charges against the president), the Senate begins a trial. Common wisdom has it that the Senate won’t convict the president, IE, impeach him, and that’s probably true?

A thing to remember though is that Mitch McConnell is not necessarily Trump’s friend. Mitch loves power, and Mitch loves keeping the GOP in power. Trump is a means to an end for McConnell, and if those means aren’t getting Mitch to his ends… that worm might turn, y’all. No honor among thieves and all that shit.