Donald Trump’s war on Adam Schiff goes completely off the rails
Buckle up because the wild roller coaster ride that is the Trump presidency just got even wilder – as hard to believe as that is. Here is what happened. In another one of his notorious early morning tweeting sessions, the sitting U.S. president used his personal Twitter account to call for the forced resignation of the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee: “Congressman Adam Schiff, who spent two years knowingly and unlawfully lying and leaking, should be forced to resign from Congress!”
Later in the day, there was a highly contentious House Intelligence Committee hearing, during which nine Republican lawmakers chose to do Donald Trump’s bidding and presented a letter asking for Chairman Adam Schiff’s resignation. GOP Congressman Mike Conaway accused Schiff of continuously promoting a “demonstrably false narrative” and stated that he and his Republican colleagues have “no faith in [Schiff’s] ability to discharge [his] duty”.
Schiff in turn countered the accusations with a fiery speech, concisely laying out various ways in which Donald Trump and his campaign were compromised by Russian government surrogates who were involved in trying to influence the U.S. presidential election. The chairman called out the Trump campaign’s activities as immoral, unethical, unpatriotic and corrupt. He warned that the day Americans accepted this conduct would be “the day we will look back and say that is the day that America lost its way.”
Trump also used his favorite propaganda network Fox News, and called into Sean Hannity’s show on Wednesday night. He called Congressman Schiff “a bad guy” and “a disgrace to our country” and accused him of knowingly promoting a lie. At one point, Trump suggested that “in one way, you could say it’s a crime what he did” and concluded that Schiff “should be forced out of office.”
Anyone with at least a basic understanding of how things work in the American government with its system of checks and balances will be well aware that the president can’t get rid of a member of Congress via Twitter, or by calling for his ouster on the Sean Hannity show. Unfortunately, we can’t be sure that hardcore fans of Donald Trump and Sean Hannity fall into this category. What Trump did here is truly unprecedented and outrageous and it is fueling fires that are already burning dangerously strong. He needs to be stopped. The sooner, the better.
