What Donald Trump is trying to do to Marie Yovanovitch is disgusting
Career diplomat Marie Yovanovitch is a woman of broad professional experience and integrity. She joined the United States foreign service in 1986, enlisting in overseas assignments including Moscow, London and Mogadishu. She graduated to the ranks of the Senior Foreign Service and was named ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and then, in August 2016, the Ukraine.
In May of 2019, the Trump administration recalled Yovanovitch as ambassador to Ukraine. For some time prior she worked to block multiple attempts by Rudy Guliani to enlist the help of the government of Ukraine in manufacturing dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Yovanovitch would have none of it, and because she frustrated Guliani’s corrupt efforts Donald Trump had her fired. With Yovanovitch out of the way, Guliani could begin scheming unimpeded on Trump’s behalf.
Not content merely to push Yovanovitch out of the way so he could get on with his corruption, Trump also assassinated her character. Trump did so in a way that has become all too familiar, claiming he “heard very, very bad things about her for a long period of time. Not good.” What “bad things” Trump heard and from whom he wouldn’t say, of course. It’s enough, presumably, that the things she did were “bad,” and he has heard about those things for “a long period of time” presumably from some people.
It is in this way that Donald Trump casually eviscerates a public servant’s reputation. One minute she’s doing her job with her head down, the next she’s got, in the limited imaginations of Trump’s drooling fanatics, the most deplorable reputation you’ve never seen. The term “Trumpian” comes to mind, which for our purposes we might define as resembling or pertaining to the vicious rhetoric and uncouth style of Donald Trump.
We now know that Marie Yovanovitch testified Friday as part of the House of Representatives impeachment inquiry, and did so after the State Department attempted to block her from lawfully answering her subpoena. That she went ahead and did it anyway is to her undying credit. In her opening statement, you can deduce why Trump and company didn’t want her to testify, when Yovanovitch contrasted her longtime career in government service with a pointed lecture about what public service in the national interest means, next to a limitlessly unscrupulous president who doesn’t comprehend the difference between his interests and the interests of the nation.
Do not be surprised to see the name Marie Yovanovitch as the next surrogate for the pronoun “her” in the mantra of the brain dead, “lock her up.” Once again that lowlife scum some fools call “president” has placed in harm’s way a blameless women with an unimpeachable reputation. Fortunately for her, nothing is unimpeachable about the Trumpian Donald Trump.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.