Trump's unprecedented power grab
by digby
He's an original, that's for sure:
One day in October 1992, four Republican congressmen showed up in the Oval Office with an audacious recommendation. President George Bush was losing his re-election race, and they told him the only way to win was to hammer his challenger Bill Clinton’s patriotism for protesting the Vietnam War while in London and visiting Moscow as a young man.
Mr. Bush was largely on board with that approach. But what came next crossed the line, as far as he and his team were concerned. “They wanted us to contact the Russians or the British to seek information on Bill Clinton’s trip to Moscow,” James A. Baker III, Mr. Bush’s White House chief of staff, wrote in a memo later that day. “I said we absolutely could not do that.”
President Trump insists he and his attorney general did nothing wrong by seeking damaging information about his domestic opponents from Ukraine, Australia, Italy and Britain or by publicly calling on China to investigate his most prominent Democratic challenger. But for every other White House in the modern era, Republican and Democratic, the idea of enlisting help from foreign powers for political advantage was seen as unwise and politically dangerous, if not unprincipled.
A survey of 10 former White House chiefs of staff under Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama found that none recalled any circumstance under which the White House had solicited or accepted political help from other countries, and all said they would have considered the very idea out of bounds.
They clearly didn't understand that the president has an "absolute right" to use his "unmatched wisdom" in any way he deems necessary. Kind of quaint when you think about it.
Keep in mind that the person who continuously whispers in the president's ear that he has unlimited power is none other than Bill Barr. I wrote about one Barr episode back in 1992 when he was working for Bush Sr:
[I]n Barr's previous tenure as attorney general, under George H.W. Bush, he tasked the U.S. attorney in Arkansas with digging up Whitewater dirt on then-candidate Bill Clinton during the 1992 presidential campaign.
As the legendary Gene Lyons noted in the Arkansas Times back in 2016, that U.S. attorney knew that the story was bunk as well as inappropriate and refused to proceed, telling Barr he would not be a party to such an overtly political act, and pointing out that "even media questions about such an investigation … all too often publicly purport to legitimize what can’t be proven.“ Indeed they do.
I'm going to guess he wasn't one of the people who counseled Bush Sr about asking the Russians for assistance in smearing Clinton.
Trump will tell his ecstatic cult members that his actions are the actions of a "winner" who won't let America be "taken advantage of" anymore like those previous losers. And he's not just talking about being "taken advantage of" by foreign countries. He's talking about being taken advantage of by simpering losers who insist that the president doesn't have unlimited power to do anything he pleases. And they will cheer and cheer.
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