There have been a lot of smoke and mirrors offered up in defense of Trump’s actions vis-à-vis Ukraine; but one of the weakest defenses is the notion that we have to ascertain Trump’s motives to know whether he did wrong, and that ascertaining those motives is challenging, complicated, and difficult.
The issue of motives arose during the Senate impeachment trial Wednesday when Sen. Collins (R-Maine) asked a question on behalf of herself and Senators Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Romney (R-Utah). The Senators wanted to know how they should consider Trump’s actions if he had more than one motive—rooting out corruption, say, as well as personal political gain.
On the most fundamental level, of course, the question of motives is utterly irrelevant. What matters, after all, is what the president did, not what motivated him to do what he did.
If, for example, you steal a car, embezzle money, rape a woman, or murder someone, does it matter what motivated you? Isn’t what matters that you committed a heinous and illegal act irrespective of your motive? We punish people for crimes and misdeeds, not because they have bad motives or thoughts.
Indeed, as Renato Mariotti observes in Politico:
“At trial, the motive behind a defendant’s commission of a crime usually doesn’t matter. Even if a public official took bribes in order to pay his medical bills, he is still guilty of bribery. If a fraudster ripped off billionaires and gave the money to charity, she is nonetheless guilty of fraud.”
Exactly. So, even assuming that we can’t know what motivated Trump’s actions vis-à-vis Ukraine, we do know what he did: He withheld Congressionally authorized aid to Ukraine while asking the government there to do him a “favor”: investigate Joe Biden and Burisma.
Thus he solicited a personal political favor from a foreign government; he asked that government to interfere in our presidential election by “investigating” his top political rival; and he implied or suggested to that government that their Congressionally authorized aid might be withheld if they were less than forthcoming and helpful to him on this matter.
All of this is wrong and arguably impeachable. Case closed.
Now, whether Trump should be convicted and removed from office for this offense is an altogether different question; but his underlying actions are clearly and obviously wrong. At the very least, Trump should be formally censured by Congress, not simply acquitted, or, as his apologists will no doubt wrongly describe any acquittal, “exonerated.”
Yet, the Wall Street Journal today devotes a brief editorial to regurgitating this irrelevant and disingenuous defense of Trump.
“House managers,” says the Journal,
“concede that President Trump broke no laws with any specific actions. Instead, they claim that he abused his power because his motives for asking Ukraine’s President to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden were self-interested—to assist his re-election rather than as Mr. Trump claims to investigate corruption.”
First, it has been well-established that a president need not break the law to be impeached. Jonah Goldberg explains why in an excellent piece in The Dispatch. But more to the point, as I’ve just explained, we don’t need to know what motivated Trump to know that what he did was clearly and obviously wrong.
No American president should ever ask a foreign government to investigate his top political rival; and no American president should try and use Congressionally authorized aid as leverage to secure such an investigation.
Motives. That said, it doesn’t require any great powers of discernment or clairvoyance to know what motivated Trump, and it surely wasn’t a zeal to root out corruption in Ukraine.
Trump, after all, had never before expressed even a slight interest in the topic; and, during his phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the word corruption never once left his lips. Moreover, as CNN’s Marshall Cohen has observed,
“Trump showed little interest in fighting corruption before Biden launched his campaign, and official government records suggest Trump was motivated by politics…
“Trump’s effort to end foreign corruption is only focused on one family: the Bidens. Republican Sen. Mitt Romney pointed out that this is no coincidence, noting that ‘it strains credulity to suggest that it is anything other than politically motivated.’”
Additionally, there have been no corresponding anti-corruption policy initiatives or funding pushed by Trump and his administration. Yet, such initiatives, if they existed, would obviously lend credence to the notion that Trump was interested in fighting corruption.
To the contrary, as Cohen notes, Trump’s State Department is trying to reduce funding for federal anti-corruption efforts.
And of course, now there is the unpublished book manuscript by former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, which reportedly confirms Trump “wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens…”
In short, we know what Trump did and we know why he did it, and we know that he did wrong. What we don’t know is why his apologists continue to spin and make excuses for his obvious misconduct.
Feature photo credit: The Hill.