Nancy Pelosi just taught Donald Trump a lesson he so richly deserves

| 7:00 pm EST November 14, 2019
Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.

Now that yesterday’s first day of televised House impeachment hearings has gone well for the House Democrats and poorly for Donald Trump, and the next round of hearings doesn’t start until tomorrow, all we got today was dueling press conferences. We didn’t get a chance to watch House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s press conference, so we’ll just assume he tripped over his own lies and accidentally set his podium on fire. But Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s press conference was the stuff of legend.

Donald Trump is still whining that he’s somehow not getting due process in the House impeachment hearings, even though his House Republican allies had the opportunity to submit legitimate witnesses and instead submitted the kind of laugh-out-loud list that had to be rejected. So now Nancy Pelosi is pointing out the obvious: Trump isn’t even bothering to mount a defense, and he’s blocking a number of first-hand witnesses from testifying.

But Pelosi took things further, twisting the knife by pouncing on Donald Trump’s notoriously simplistic rhetoric and lack of vocabulary: “If the President has something that is exculpatory – Mr. President, that means you have anything that shows your innocence – then he should make that known.”

Nancy Pelosi also echoed Adam Schiff’s assertion yesterday that Donald Trump is guilty of “bribery” in the Ukraine scandal. That’s an easy crime that most Americans implicitly understand, even if they’re not familiar with concepts like quid pro quo.