Donald Trump Always Lies But His Behavior Doesn't

     In a quote misattributed to Winston Churchill, who neither wrote nor said it, "I no longer listen to people. People lie all the time. But behavior never lies."
     Indeed, the only thing about Donald Trump, a man who's told over 16,000 lies since Putin put him in charge, that doesn't lie are his actions, misactions and inactions. He only lies about his intent.
     I've just listened to eight straight hours of the Impeachment managers. Today and tonight, we'd heard from virtually all of them. To a man and woman, they'd presented an ironclad case proving Donald Trump's guilt in abusing his office and obstructing Congress. By turns, Adam Schiff, the lead impeachment manager, Zoe Lofgren, Sylvia Garcia, Hakeem Jeffries, Val Demmings and Jason Crow had all stated the evidence collected by the House. You could practically hear the rope around Trump's bloated throat squeak as it tightened.
     At the end of this impeachment trial, two things will happen- Either Trump will be the first president expelled from office in American history or Republicans will fully abandon the rule of law for someone who simply has a capital R after his name.
     The Democrats had made their case, this time interrupted only by breaks in the proceedings. The White House counsel did not get their turns at the podium as with the first two days. Today and tonight belonged to the Democrats.
     We know that Trump had jettisoned his own intelligence community, his National Security Council, his own FBI and his own diplomatic corps and replaced them all with a drooling idiot who can't even keep his fly up.
     Based heavily, but not exclusively, on the testimony the House was permitted to hear last fall by the furtive and secretive White House, we know the particulars of Trump's original crime, endangering our, Ukraine's and our European allies' national security for a favor that would've been advantageous to only one person on earth- Donald Trump. That's one article of impeachment: Abuse of power.
     We also know the particulars through sworn testimony, texts, emails, phone calls, voice mails, press scrums, TV interviews, etc that Trump had directed the inevitable coverup. We know the only reason the military aid to Ukraine was lifted was because the whistleblower's report (upon which Bill Barr had planted his fat pasty ass in violation of the law that stipulated it be handed over to Congress in seven days) had exposed his crooked and self-serving scheme.
     I'm not going to go over the particulars just now because, frankly, so much damning evidence was introduced and reintroduced that I frankly wouldn't know where to begin. Instead, I'm going to get into the more humane (or inhumane) aspects of what Trump had done and what his apparatchiks were helping to carry out. Let's start with the inhumane.
     In a July 26th call, the day after the more infamous one between Trump and Zelensky, Gordon Sondland called Trump from an outdoor cafe in Kiev. US diplomat David Holmes was in attendance and could hear Trump's voice loud and clear even through Sondland's phone's earpiece. "Zelensky will do whatever you ask him to do, he loves your ass." Holmes asked him after he'd hung up if Trump really cares about Ukraine.
     Sondland, the EU Ambassador who'd essentially bought his way into State with a cool one million dollar contribution to Trump's inaugural fund and seemingly asked only by Dr. Fiona Hill why the hell he was involved so heavily with a nation that wasn't in the European Union, was in a candid mood. He confided to Holmes that Trump didn't "give a shit about Ukraine and that he was only concerned about "the big stuff." Holmes said, "Well, there's some pretty big stuff going down here, like a war with Russia in the east."
     And Sondland replied, "No, he's only interested in the big stuff, meaning his reelection campaign."
     So Trump had made it known that not only did he depend upon Sondland to deliver his ultimatum, ("No investigation announcement, no WH meeting and no aid"), he'd made it clear to the billionaire hotelier that his interest, while strictly parochial, was nonetheless understood to be "big stuff."
     It didn't matter to Trump that 13,000-15,000 Ukrainians had died in their battle for independence. It didn't matter that, to this day, US diplomats posted in Kiev have to witness daily, daily ceremonies honoring their war dead. We know that Donald Trump is a heartless psychopath but even for him, this is cold. It didn't matter to Donald Trump that allowing Putin to run roughshod over Ukraine just helps him achieve his quest for world domination, or at least that of Europe. It didn't matter that Ukraine is so vital to not only our national security interests or Ukraine's but also to that of our western European allies. It didn't matter to Trump, and he may still be blissfully unaware of this geopolitical and geographical fact, that Ukraine provides a massive buffer zone protecting Western Europe from Putin and his ceaseless aggression.
     None of that mattered to him. Only his re-election mattered. What mattered to him, personally.
     It's virtually impossible to imagine a human being that's possessed of an ego that obscenely bloated. If one created Donald Trump from scratch in a novel, they'd probably get that novel rejected by every publishing house and literary agency because of how unbelievable the villain would be.
     He seized upon a man, like him another tv star, who was improbably elected to serve the office he'd only played in a sitcom. That nation, Ukraine, is one of the most spectacularly corrupt nations on earth and he got elected in a campaign platform to clean it up. The country is poor, it's hurting and it's at war with Russia, a nuclear nation. Just five years before, Crimea was lost to Russian annexation.
     Zelensky was vulnerable, gasping for legitimacy and he, perhaps naively, looked to Donald Trump for assistance in these matters. What could go wrong? he may have asked. The US is our ally, our friends. Of course he'll help us as every administration has since 1991. Because what helps us helps them, right?
     Except Zelensky may not have been paying attention to the Donald's own campaign in 2015 and 2016, when news of his collusion and involvement with that same Russia began circulating around the world like a barely-detected sewer gas leak. Zelensky can perhaps be forgiven for being so childishly trusting of Donald Trump. After all, every presidential administration in Washington, Republican and Democrat alike, has helped us since we achieved sovereignty in 1991, right?
     Well, originally, Pence was supposed to attend Zelensky's inauguration until Trump grabbed him by the collar and pulled him back. The highest-ranking US official who attended the inauguration was Chargé d'Affaires William Taylor, the closest thing we had to an actual ambassador since Trump had unceremoniously fired Marie Yovanovitch simply because she stood in the way of his "drug deal." A September 1st visit with Zelensky in Warsaw, a far cry from the White House, was abruptly canceled so Trump could "keep an eye on Hurricane Dorian." So he sends his flunky Mike Pence.
     Putin sees all this from the Kremlin and chortles, maybe even cackles.
     Then Joe Biden threw his hat in the ring on April 25th and everything changed.
     Giuliani writes to Zelensky on May 10th, "Let's meet." Zelensky basically tells him to fuck off. Rudy abruptly cancels his trip to Ukraine and goes on Fox to accuse Ukraine of surrounding their president-elect with "enemies of Trump." Trump starts thinking of withholding the military aid in violation of the Impoundment Act.
     By July 25th, the day after Mueller testified and showed he had no teeth, it's "I'd like you to do us favor, though." Zelensky has done and promised everything expected of him, Sondland even coached him on what to say to Trump and how to say it. He was even staying at Trump Tower the day of the call, putting money in Trump's rapidly-filling pockets. He dangles two carrots on a stick for which Zelensky is starving- The military aid and a White House meeting that would automatically elevate Zelensky's fragile standing in the international community.
     Then the whistleblower report is finally blown up in the press, Putin read the call transcript in the Kremlin and chortles. "I like Trump," Putin later said. "He listens well."
     Accusations of quid pro quo come out and Donald Trump is suddenly not coated with Teflon any more.  The aid is released as abruptly and as bereft of an explanation as it was held 90 minutes after the July 25th call. Then the coverup began. And, as Watergate taught us, the coverup is always worse than the original crime.
     The rationales for why the funds were withheld keep changing and shifting like a Broomhilda landscape. Pelosi announces on September 24th impeachment inquiries will begin, The next day, from the UN (with Zelensky in attendance), Trump finally releases a heavily censored call summary that he keeps charitably referring to as "the transcript." "Read the transcript!" he keeps screaming at us except even the much-abbreviated call transcript is in itself pretty damning.
     "I'd like you to do us a favor, though."
     Trump thinks he's not lying that the call with Zelensky was "perfect." He honestly thinks no laws were broken and, even if there were, he won't be caught or suffer comeuppance. Because Donald Trump had spent the first 73 years of his coddled life without anyone, not even his own father, telling him, "NO."
     Joe Biden's nonexistent corruption is what should be investigated. Bring in the Bidens to testify, parrot the Republicans, as if they're the ones being impeached. Deflection and distraction, it's where we are now. It's all his joke of a legal team has to offer for a "defense."
     Let's get straight about one thing, if nothing else- It's not one Donald John Trump the Republican scum in the House and Senate are defending. It's themselves. 22 GOP senators alone are up for re-election, Every Republican in the House is up for re-election. They've invested too much political capital to cash out now as long as Trump is promising a big payout in the end. He's bribing them with campaign cash, golf outings at Camp David and God knows what else in a desperate attempt to buy their loyalty.
     But they're really defending their incumbency. Whether they like it or not, they're riding Trump's coattails to the bitter end, even when (and it's a matter of when, not if) those coattails take them over the edge of the cliff.
     Adam Schiff summed up the Democrats' arguments tonight by saying over and again, "Right matters." Not might, right.