As Republicans love reminding us, in tones that often suggest they feel this outcome is tragic, Donald Trump never fully consummated his extortion plot against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. This was because Trump, much like convicted rapist Brock Turner, was caught mid-act and therefore unable to bring his entire scheme to completion. And as with Turner’s father grousing that his son only got “20 minutes of action,” Trump’s Republican defenders like House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., argue that because the conspiracy was unearthed before Zelensky gave in to Trump’s blackmail, it doesn’t really count as a crime to have blackmailed Zelensky in the first place.
Republicans sometimes seem to believe that Trump got cheated out of the very thing this criminal conspiracy set out to get, which was juicing up a bunch of lies about former Vice President Joe Biden, who leads the polls for the 2020 Democratic nomination. And so, in an especially disgusting twist, the Republican strategy for defending Trump appears to center on giving him the very thing he was trying to extract from Zelensky: Extensive media coverage of false allegations of corruption against Biden.
In fact, that’s just one element of what appears to be the overall defense strategy of Trump, which is to get as many Republicans in Congress directly involved in the actual conspiracy that led to Trump’s impeachment in the first place. Rather than trying to create any illusion of distance from Trump’s behavior, Republicans are, en masse, becoming co-conspirators.
View the complete November 25 article by Amanda Marcotte from Salon on the AlterNet website here.