Opinion

Attorney General William Barr has been gallivanting around the world trying to enlist foreign government to assist Donald Trump’s campaign discredit the US intelligence and law enforcement agencies that exposed Russia’s active measures campaign in the 2016 election. To put into perspective just how inappropriate it is for the nation’s highest law enforcement officer, who is ostensibly independent from the White House, to play that role, just consider that when former President Bill Clinton chatted with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch for 15 minutes or so while their private jets were sitting on an Arizona tarmac in 2016, conservatives considered it to be a significant scandal–and convinced many mainstream reporters and pundits to treat it as such–because Lynch’s agency oversees the FBI, which was investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails at the time.

Now that the House of Representatives has officially begun an impeachment inquiry, recollections of the other two impeachment proceedings in recent years inevitably come to mind. Bill Clinton's impeachment was just 20 years ago so most people over the age of 35 or so have a good recollection of how that went. Those of us who are older remember Watergate, which is much more analogous to what we're seeing now than the farce of the Ken Starr investigation and the absurd, prurient charges leveled against Clinton. Watergate was very serious business, exposing corruption on a scale never seen before.

One thing never really fully explained amid all the dust kicked up by impeachment talk is the increasingly shadowy role being played by Rudy Giuliani.

Everyone understands a blow job.

Donald Trump, frantic that Democrats are finally going to hold an impeachment inquiry that looks seriously at the vast criminal conspiracy in and around the White House, has quickly escalated his rhetoric to thinly veiled threats of violence.

Ever since Nancy Pelosi first announced the launching of an impeachment inquiry, many of us jumped forward in time to the Senate trial that would follow an impeachment vote in the House, wondering out loud whether Mitch McConnell would block Donald Trump’s trial from ever taking place. I thought for sure McConnell would pull a Merrick Garland stunt and insist that the trial couldn’t take place within a year of the presidential election, and then perhaps hold a procedural vote to back up his would-be scam.

Novelist Jonathan Lethem told me in a recent interview that President Donald Trump is dreaming, and there's a whole industry committed to keeping him asleep. In the several months since Lethem offered that wisdom, I have kept on wondering what happens when Donald Trump is finally forced from his slumber?

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s a long way to go, and it’s going to feel longer by the time we get to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s soft deadline of year’s end. But last week demonstrated that more Americans are now more aware of Donald Trump’s extraordinary weakness, and that we are approaching a tipping point at which that weakness is going to compound itself exponentially. The weaker this president becomes, the weaker this president will get; the closer we get to the end, whatever and whenever that is, the more Trump’s behavior is going to prove the case against him.

Sometimes a moment of clarity can change everything. The question is whether President Trump’s communication with the Ukrainian president about former Vice President Biden this past summer provides that moment of clarity in the impeachment inquiry that now has been launched by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.