Even Fox News is sick of Donald Trump’s crap
Donald Trump can chalk up yet another embarrassing week – flaunting his ignorance during a visit to one of America’s longest and most trusted allies, dishonoring a war hero on the anniversary of D-Day, and nearly crashing the economy with a reckless new trade deal. The worst part is he may not even be aware of any of it, lying on Twitter that the people of London showed him lots of love, despite the streets being swarmed with protestors and the fact that two-thirds of the country disapprove of him.
While he is a pathological liar, it’s very possible that he is only seeing what his handlers are letting him see. Among his few complaints about his trip to the United Kingdom was that he didn’t get to watch his favorite network there, Fox News – which he has regularly playing in the White House and aboard Air Force One – but it may not be his favorite network for much longer.
While right-wing pundits on Fox News are largely trying to sell the idea that Trump’s impeachment is a partisan revenge plot by bitter Democrats, its own senior legal analyst, Judge Andrew Napolitano has another take. Although Donald Trump simultaneously thinks that the Mueller report is total garbage and completely exonerates him, Napolitano solidly lays out a thoughtful case for Congress to begin impeachment.
He argues that while there may have not been enough evidence to indict, it isn’t the same as having no evidence at all. 127 phone calls between the Trump campaign and Russian agents may not be enough evidence to prove a crime in a court of law, but it shows a suspicious relationship with a hostile foreign government. While Mueller investigated Donald Trump, there were ten to eleven known instances in which his staff were asked to either lie or falsify evidence on his behalf, which Napolitano says are clear examples of obstruction of justice. He even takes it further, arguing that a sitting president can be indicted, that anything less would make the president above the law, a breach of the American ideal that no one individual is above the law.
Napolitano may not change many of his viewers’ minds, but he is getting through to the average, middle of the road viewer – and the fact that he’s saying this on Fox News is a sure sign that he’s trying to target the current White House argument with the message that if the Democrats are hungry enough for it, they have a good case for impeachment. He’s also putting his network in the firing line, forcing them to choose between their own pundits or appeasing Donald Trump.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making