‘It’s about who Trump is, who he always was and who he always will be. It’s about the complete mismatch between the man and the office he holds…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In an unhinged Washington Post op-ed Wednesday that seemed to demonstrate zero self-awareness, NeverTrumper George Conway ironically claimed that President Donald Trump had fired a White House staffer simply for being related to a political enemy.
Conway, the husband and perennial embarrassment of Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway, suggested that the president’s recent relieving of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman; his twin brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman; and former European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland should trigger yet another impeachment.
All three had actively taken steps to undermine Trump and his policy agenda, costing them his trust and confidence. None were protected under whistleblower statutes or other legal guidelines, instead serving strictly at the will of the president as sole head of the executive branch.
Yet Conway, long ago embittered at being bypassed by Trump while his wife was elevated to the president’s inner circle, suggested their dismissal was grounds for an unprecedented double-jeopardy attempt at presidential removal.
Conway drew parallels with former President Richard Nixon’s so-called Friday Night Massacre, which he claimed “could have been a crime.”
“If Richard M. Nixon was to be impeached for authorizing hush money for witnesses, and Trump himself was actually impeached for directing defiance of House subpoenas, then there should be no doubt that punishing witnesses for complying with subpoenas and giving truthful testimony about presidential misconduct should make for a high crime or misdemeanor as well,” Conway claimed.
Notably, part of the reason House Democrats’ entirely partisan impeachment effort against Trump failed the first time around was the fact there was no crime involved, with neither of the House Democrats’ impeachment articles for “abuse of power” and “contempt of Congress” being statutorily defined.
Conway did not elaborate on why he thought the outcome of a second, do-over attempt that would further subvert the principles of American jurisprudence using legal loopholes, semantics and technicalities would have a different result than the first.
Fittingly, Kellyanne Conway preemptively made the case against her husband’s accusations in an appearance Monday on “Fox and Friends.”
She noted the Vindmans had been transferred to the Pentagon, and that such re-assignments were commonplace.
“And in the case of Ambassador Sondland, here is someone who—it was nice of the president to give him that post in the first place,” she said. “Here’s somebody who was, you know—I think leaned into what some others in the establishment Republican Party were doing.”
She said—contrary to Sondland’s claims that he was close to Trump—that the hotel executive’s ties to the president amounted to little more than his campaign patronage, and that he was hardly someone that Democrats would want to hang their political fortunes on.
“He wrote a big check to the inauguration but wasn’t really there before the president … And here’s somebody who, when he was testifying, couldn’t keep his own story straight.”
Their Own Playbook
The fact that the president’s opponents are so singular in their determination to impeach him also does a disservice to their actual efforts to conduct it under shaky pretenses.
Trump already enraged Democrats—to the point of ripping up his State of the Union address—when he experienced a boost in his approval rating following his Senate acquittal, as people increasingly saw the greater “abuse of power” resting with his political adversaries.
Conway, who claims to be a Republican despite all evidence to the contrary, admitted that his own personal vendetta was the primary justification for his argument.
“[I]t’s really not about this one day, or this one egregious act,” he acknowledged. “It’s about who Trump is, who he always was and who he always will be. It’s about the complete mismatch between the man and the office he holds.”
Like many on the Left, Conway failed to recognize that the reasoning behind his attack on Trump was precisely the source of Trump’s political appeal for conservatives outraged by decades’ worth of Democratic hypocrisy and impunity.
In a sense, it is not at all about who Trump is but what he symbolizes: the proverbial red-line in the sand for those fed up with the Swamp’s cronyism, games and back-room bargains that scoff at the will of the people.
What rightfully infuriates Democrats is that rather than capitulating to extortion by immoral power-brokers, conservatives are pushing back with the Manhattan real-estate mogul who cut his teeth and made a fortune navigating the corruption of New York City politics.
The more Trump’s enemies try to advance their political outcomes, the deeper they force themselves into a “briar patch” from which no amount of deep-state wrangling can disentangle them.