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Laurence Tribe: Donald Trump Is America's Anti-President
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-americas-anti-president-opinion-1472384After just one week of public impeachment hearings, Donald Trump has unmistakably emerged as America's anti-president, the very model of the charlatan George Washington warned might be overtaken by "the insidious wiles of foreign influence."
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Anyone who genuinely wondered as recently as this spring what impeachable offenses this imposter of a president has committed must now wonder instead which of his multitude of impeachable offenses to highlight and how best to label them.
There will be time, once the House Intelligence Committee concludes its public hearings and transmits its report to the Judiciary Committee, to determine how best to wrap the indisputable abuses of power, betrayals of the nation and corruption of the presidential office into appropriately labeled articles of impeachment. What must not get lost in the process of categorizing and naming this man's grotesque betrayals of his oath, however, is how shamelessly he has exposed himself as not merely "unpresidential"—the moniker he has proudly embraced more than once—but as anti-presidential.
More than unpresidential, Trump represents the perfect exemplar of what Alexander Hamilton darkly envisioned when he described the danger that a demagogue might one day assume the presidency and require removal through the awesome power of impeachment. Such a demagogue, Hamilton prophesied, would be "a man unprincipled in private life[,] desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper...despotic in his ordinary demeanour." Such a man, Hamilton wrote, would one day "mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day" with the object of "throw[ing] things into confusion that he may 'ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.'" Such a man, we should all be able to see now, is Donald J. Trump.
-snip-
Anyone who genuinely wondered as recently as this spring what impeachable offenses this imposter of a president has committed must now wonder instead which of his multitude of impeachable offenses to highlight and how best to label them.
There will be time, once the House Intelligence Committee concludes its public hearings and transmits its report to the Judiciary Committee, to determine how best to wrap the indisputable abuses of power, betrayals of the nation and corruption of the presidential office into appropriately labeled articles of impeachment. What must not get lost in the process of categorizing and naming this man's grotesque betrayals of his oath, however, is how shamelessly he has exposed himself as not merely "unpresidential"—the moniker he has proudly embraced more than once—but as anti-presidential.
More than unpresidential, Trump represents the perfect exemplar of what Alexander Hamilton darkly envisioned when he described the danger that a demagogue might one day assume the presidency and require removal through the awesome power of impeachment. Such a demagogue, Hamilton prophesied, would be "a man unprincipled in private life[,] desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper...despotic in his ordinary demeanour." Such a man, Hamilton wrote, would one day "mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day" with the object of "throw[ing] things into confusion that he may 'ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.'" Such a man, we should all be able to see now, is Donald J. Trump.
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