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Is there enough of an unconstitutional/criminal pattern for the "Third Time's a Charm" Impeachment? [1]
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Date: 2025-05-28
Trump fears a third impeachment due to GOP lawmakers potentially leaving the house. Tariff failures as unconstitutional won’t help.
The thing is, it has been obvious all along that Trump’s use of the 1977 International Economic Emergency Powers Act to justify Smoot-Hawley level tariffs was a massive abuse of power. I mean, since when are 4 percent unemployment and 2.5 percent inflation an emergency justifying the reversal of 90 years of policy? But I guess I just assumed that things like that didn’t matter anymore.
The cases centered on the president’s use of a 1977 federal economic emergency law to issue many of his steep duties, including some of his tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, and his “reciprocal” rates on much of the rest of the world, which Mr. Trump announced and then suspended in April.
The ruling, by the U.S. Court of International Trade, delivered an early yet significant setback to Mr. Trump in his campaign to strike a series of agreements that reorient the nation’s trading relationships, setting up a legal fight that could soon reach the Supreme Court.
A panel of federal judges on Wednesday blocked President Trump from imposing some of his steepest tariffs on China and other U.S. trading partners, finding in two cases that he vastly overstepped his ability to issue those expansive duties under federal law.
When it was all over, Trump apparently decided he had been thinking too small. In his first term, he made improper millions. In his second term, he is reaching for billions: a $2 billion investment by a United Arab Emirates state-owned enterprise in the Binance crypto exchange using the Trump family’s stablecoin asset. An unknown number of billions placed by Qatar in a Trump-family real-estate development in that emirate, topped by the gift of a 747 luxury jet for the president’s personal use in office and afterward. Government-approved support for a Trump golf course in Vietnam while its leaders were negotiating with the United States for relief from Trump tariffs. Last week, Trump hosted more than 200 purchasers of his meme coin, many of them apparently foreign nationals, for a private dinner, with no disclosure of the names of those who had paid into his pocket for access to the president’s time and favor.
The record of Trump real-estate and business projects is one of almost unbroken failure; from 1991 to 2009, his companies filed for bankruptcy six times. Few if any legitimate investors entrusted their money to Trump’s businesses when he was out of office. But since his return to the White House, Trump has been inundated with cash from Middle Eastern governments. Obscure Chinese firms are suddenly buying millions of dollars’ worth of Trump meme coins. So are American companies hard-hit by the Trump tariffs and desperately seeking access and influence. After Trump invited major holders of his crypto funds to dinner, Wired quoted a crypto analyst about the coin’s value proposition: “Before, you were speculating on a TRUMP coin with no utility. Now you’re speculating on future access to Trump. That has to be worth a bit more money.”
Nothing like this has been attempted or even imagined in the history of the American presidency. Throw away the history books; discard feeble comparisons to scandals of the past. There is no analogy with any previous action by any past president. The brazenness of the self-enrichment resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a postcolonial African dictatorship.
Paul Rosenzweig: American corruption
“Everybody does it” became Trump’s all-purpose excuse. The excuse worked, to the extent it did, because of widespread disinformation about the “everybody,” the “does,” and the “it.” If Trump and his supporters can defame others, they can dull voters’ awareness of the astounding and horrible uniqueness of Trump’s corruption.
Listen: The most corrupt presidency in American history
The Trump story, by contrast, is almost too big to see, too upsetting to confront. If we faced it, we’d have to do something—something proportional to the scandal of the most flagrant self-enrichment by a politician that this country, or any other, has seen in modern times.
www.theatlantic.com/...
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[1] Url:
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