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Trump Is Doing Exactly What He Was Elected to Do

November 20, 2019
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The impeachment effort against President Trump hinges on his motives. Presidents have wide discretion when dealing with foreign governments, and Mr. Trump’s actions have all been within the scope of his office’s power. But has he used that power for personal gain?

Ukrainian prosecutors took an interest in possible corruption involving Burisma Holdings, the company that paid Hunter Biden tens of thousands of dollars per month to serve on its board, long before Mr. Trump became president. And the Obama administration, including Vice President Joseph Biden, used America’s clout to influence Ukraine’s government. The questions about these relationships that Mr. Trump has pressed Ukraine to answer were matters of established public concern. A president has a right to seek answers about them, whether or not doing so has collateral implications for an election.

And for this president, the personal is political. What that means to him and his supporters is very different from what it means to his opponents. As his statements going back decades show, Mr. Trump believes that America’s leadership class has harmed the country even as it has enriched itself and entrenched its power through the federal bureaucracy and a self-protecting consensus among top politicians.

The very “norms” by which Washington operates, covering everything from America’s objectives in foreign policy to the imperative of multilateral trade deals to the legal ways in which career politicians and their families can make millions off their connections, are seen by Mr. Trump and his voters as the source of the country’s ills — from endless wars to declining manufacturing employment to the unresponsiveness of politicians in both parties to the country’s pain.

These norms, and the corruption inherent in “business as usual,” are not just abstractions but find embodiment in politicians like Mr. Biden and Hillary Clinton, as well as John McCain and the Bush family. They are personified as well in much of the permanent bureaucracy — the “deep state.”

Mr. Trump, as crude as he may be and as blind to the defects of his own associates as he is, was nonetheless elected as a force for change. (Note that Mr. Trump, unlike many of the politicians he denounces, made his fortune before entering politics.)

Those marked for overthrow by Mr. Trump do not see things his way. To them, this president is attacking what is most sacred in America’s traditions of government. But the means Mr. Trump has employed, in the matter for which he is now being impeached, are among his office’s well-established powers.

Those powers include the ability to delay supplying congressionally authorized aid. Even using a delay to get foreign leaders to cooperate with an administration’s demands is not itself an offense of the kind that the Constitution demands for impeachment. In 2015, Vice President Biden employed the threat of withholding aid to pressure the president of Ukraine at that time, Petro Poroshenko, to dismiss the country’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin.

Mr. Shokin was widely perceived as corrupt by United States and international officials. Mr. Biden potentially stood to gain something himself from the prosecutor’s firing, though Ukrainian officials say no Burisma case was active at the time Mr. Biden called for Mr. Shokin’s firing.

Republicans, including President Trump, see corruption in the Biden family’s mix of business and politics in Ukraine. But in May this year, the last prosecutor general to serve under President Poroshenko, Yuriy Lutsenko, declared that Hunter Biden had violated no Ukrainian laws. That might have been the end of the matter, except that Mr. Poroshenko’s presidency came to an end that same month. He had been defeated by a challenger, Volodymyr Zelinsky, who had painted the incumbent as corrupt.

So what can be proved about the motives of an American president who tries to get Ukraine’s new leader to look into Burisma, the Bidens and Mr. Shokin’s dismissal? Democrats are in the habit of assuming Mr. Trump’s guilt. They assumed he was Vladimir Putin’s puppet, and many still do so even after the yearslong F.B.I. investigation that culminated in the Mueller report, which found nothing to substantiate the claim.

So, unsurprisingly, when his foes look at President Trump’s behavior toward Ukraine, they see only an obvious case for impeachment.

The thinking continues,

In all this, Mr. Trump’s opponents treat norms as if they were laws. But Mr. Trump openly campaigned in 2016 as someone who would rescind the nonlegal norms of American politics. He said he would “drain the swamp.” Washington’s traditional way of doing business, the legal but corrupt trade in money and influence, was something he was elected to attack. He has only contributed to the problem in the eyes of his critics, but for supporters the goal remains the same.

Mr. Trump was also elected to transform America’s foreign relations. The nation’s leadership in both parties and the Civil Service had embroiled the country in endless wars and a string of humiliations. That Mr. Trump considers officials serving in places like Ukraine to be part of the problem he was elected to solve is no secret. The testimony such officials have so far offered during impeachment hearings bears him out: Their view of American objectives is different from his. Such differences are supposed to be decided publicly, through elections. Mr. Trump happened to win the last one.

President Trump was doing exactly what voters elected him to do when he asked President Zelensky to account for Ukraine’s dealings with the Bidens. It’s a question related to the overall system linking American politicians with Ukrainian interests. No doubt Mr. Trump sees that system as reflecting more poorly on Democrats than on his own party or himself. But exposing that system, whatever its partisan overtones, is both a legitimate interest of the United States and something that Mr. Trump’s voters expect of him in light of his 2016 campaign.

Are motives like these grounds for impeachment? Democrats might still think so. Unelected officials might think so, too — but officials who believe that they, and not the elected president, are the guardians of America’s foreign relations.

But at core the questions here are political ones, involving not crimes but the deep disagreements about America’s role in the world and the role of the world’s interested parties — including Ukraine — in influencing American policies and the politicians who make them. The price of being a world power is that “the swamp” extends beyond your own borders. Mr. Trump may not know how to do it, but he wants to change that.

The post Trump Is Doing Exactly What He Was Elected to Do appeared first on New York Times.

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