Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire: Donald Trump Jr.’s Russian Meetings

You’ll seldom find me agreeing with arch Republican columnist Charles Krauthammer, but his editorial entitled “Bungled Collusion Is Still Collusion” of Sunday, July 16th (Quad City Times) contains some sentiments that I want to share with you. And then I’ll include some remarks from “the other side.”

Quoting Krauthammer re the burgeoning Donald Trump, Jr. Russian meeting and Russian collusion, in general: “My view was, Collusion? I just don’t see it. But I’m open to empirical evidence. Show me. The evidence is now shown. This is not hearsay, not fake news, not unsourced leaks. This is an e-mail chain released by Donald Trump Jr. himself.” Krauthammer continues: “Once you’ve said, ‘I’m in,’ it makes no difference that the meeting was a bust, that the intermediary brought no such goods. What matters is what Donald Jr. thought going into the meeting, as well as Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, who were copied on the correspondence, invited to the meeting, and attended.” (8 people, in all, were present).

Krauthammer goes on to say: “It’s rather pathetic to hear Trump apologists protesting that it’s no big deal because we American are always intervening in other people’s elections and they in ours.” He goes on to say this is RUSSIA, our sworn adversary, and says, “This defense is pathetic for two reasons. First, have the Trumpites not been telling us for 6 months that no collusion ever happened? And now they say, ‘Sure it happened. So what? Everyone does it.’ He concluded that, no, not everyone does it (Gergen offered oral testimony that both the JFK campaigns and the Al Gore campaign said no to such foreign assistance offered to their campaigns) and said, “But it is not merely stupid. It is also deeply wrong, a fundamental violation of any code of civic honor.”

Just before typing this excerpt from a columnist with whom I seldom agree, I listened to David Gergen explain on television that the presidency requires someone in that office who sets a moral tone for the entire administration and the entire country. This seems self-evident and easy to understand, but that standard is not being met by the White House’s current occupant, whose ethics officer, Walter Schoud, just resigned, saying that the White House, unlike the 2 previous administrations, is doing nothing to cooperate with them on ethics violations and continues to violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which forbids a president or his family from profiting from the office while holding it. The fact that Donald Trump is constantly promoting his businesses is a given. Schaud said he told Donald Sr. numerous times that he must withdraw from his private holdings and shouldn’t be seen at his numerous golf courses (all but 4 weekends in office he has been playing golf at one of them or at Mar A Lago), thereby promoting that business. It was widely reported that the dues at Mar A Lago, Trump’s private Florida club, doubled from $100,000 to $200,000 after his election.

The Donald

Leonard Pitts Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2004.
His editorial is entitled “What Is Wrong with Trump?” Pitt does not mince words. In his Monday, July 17th essay, African-American writer Pitt said: “This has been said a million times: Donald Trump is a lying, narcissistic, manifestly incompetent child man who is as dumb as a sack of mackerel. But he is the president of the United States because 63 million people preferred that to facing inevitable cultural change. So I am done asking—or caring—what’s wrong with him. Six months in, it’s time we grappled with a far more important question. What in the world is wrong with us?” (Quad City Times, p. A4)

In conclusion, I would refer you to my own Letter to the Editor, which appeared in the Sunday paper (Moline “Dispatch”). (It was on one of those annoying fold-over ad portions that you want to immediately rip off and throw away, so I doubt if many saw it on p. A11, which I almost could not find.)

I put my original letter on my blog in its entirety (scroll back) because generally my letters to the editor are round-filed without comment. I’ve sent 3 letters to the “Dispatch” editor and never once have they used one or contacted me to say it needed to be changed in some fashion. One letter was sent by snail mail on letterhead.

While I am glad that one (of 3) letters I took the time to write finally did see the light of day, I wrote today to ask why the credentials of all other writers are generally placed after their names. My credentials for writing a letter about our current political situation were placed at the end of my letter when I submitted it, but there was no mention of my having been named Content Producer of the Year (’08) for Politics by Yahoo (in 2009) or my 2 wins from the Illinois Women’s Press Association as the Best Writer of the Year in a contest judged by experts from the Chicago area, not by its members. (I won the Silver Feather Award, as it is known, in both 2012 and 2014.)

And I didn’t even mention the 2 books that came from my coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign, or the fact that I (also) covered 2004 and 2012. As per usual, no response to my e-mail asking why my credentials were completely absent. Read my entire letter on here, but know that it concluded this way: “Trump’s arrogance at home and abroad has isolated us on the world stage and his inability to know how to behave as our representative is a national embarrassment.”

Driskell Hotel, Austin, Texas