Donald Trump: xenophobe in public, international mobster in private

Approved – NV

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Robert Reich

The Guardian

Two Hours Ago, Saturday, October 12, 2019

The founding fathers said betraying America to foreign powers was an impeachable offense. The president must go.

The most xenophobic and isolationist American president in modern history has been selling America to foreign powers for his own personal benefit.

There could be another reason. Trump never divested from his real estate business, and the Trump Towers Istanbul is the Trump Organization’s first and only office and residential building in Europe. Businesses linked to the Turkish government are also major patrons of the Trump Organization. Which may be why Trump has repeatedly sided with the Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been intent on eliminating the Kurds.

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Trump justifies his trade war with China as protecting America from Chinese predation. But he asked China to start an investigation of Biden, and last week his adviser on China conceded he spoke with Chinese officials about the former vice-president.

During the 2016 election, Trump publicly called on Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. Within hours, Russian agents sought to do just that by trying to break into her computer servers.

Special counsel Robert Mueller found that Russia sought to help Trump get elected, and Trump’s campaign welcomed the help.

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According to a former Trump Organization official, foreign governments spent more than a million dollars at Trump businesses in 2018, mostly at the Trump International hotel in Washington. Trump will make even more money if he carries out his plan to host next year’s G7 meeting at his Doral golf resort, in Florida.

All of this is precisely what the founding fathers sought to prevent.

When they gathered in Philadelphia 232 years ago to write a constitution, a major goal was to protect the new nation from what Alexander Hamilton called the “desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils”.

They also gave Congress the right to impeach a president for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”. During the Virginia ratifying convention, Edmund Randolph confirmed that a president “may be impeached” if discovered “receiving [help] from foreign powers”.

Bugs Marlowe

Article URL : https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/13/donald-trump-ukraine-turkey-impeachment