President Donald Trump is fast approaching an impeachment trial that is expected to take place in the Senate early next year. In the meantime, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has already declared that he will be in total coordination with the White House over strategy for dealing with the Democratic case. This week on CNN, host Chris Cuomo zeroed in on just how far off into the deep end that Trump, McConnell, and their supporters have gone — and he promoted a hashtag dinging Trump as “Dirty Donald” in the process, which many people have used in the time since Cuomo’s show.
We all know how fragile Trump’s ego is, so something as blunt as that hashtag could get right under his skin, just like the mocking Trump Baby balloon imagery that’s at some protests.
Cuomo shared:
‘Once again, this president’s pull on his party seems to trump all and the adherence to any oath doesn’t seem to matter except the loyalty oath to him… Asking the president what should happen — that’s what Republicans are doing, and they are continuously subordinating their oath to oversee just to be loyal to this president. It’s not illegal, but there is another word that keeps seeming to fit so much what of this president and his pals do: ‘dirty.’.. All of it, maybe not illegal, but just dirty. Hashtag: Dirty Donald.’
Watch:
Is it good for potus’ defenders to basically argue that being #DirtyDonald is ok? https://t.co/ldEwydPu0W
— Christopher C. Cuomo (@ChrisCuomo) December 14, 2019
McConnell got wildly blunt in his explanation of how much he’s planning on colluding with the subject of the impeachment proceedings himself. He and his colleagues are supposed to be impartial judges of the case that Democrats have brought, and they’re already falling in line behind the subject of that case before it’s even officially on its way to the Senate. (There’s set to be a full House vote on the articles of impeachment this coming week.)
The Senate Republican leader told Fox News:
‘Everything I do during this, I’m coordinating with the White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president’s position and our position as to how to handle this to the extent that we can… I’m going to coordinate with the president’s leader.’
Besides the debacle surrounding McConnell’s proclamations about the impeachment trial, Cuomo also noted a whole range of complete failures of leadership that depict the president as “Dirty Donald.” That range includes his secret hush money scheme targeting women with whom he had affairs, his much more recent public belittling of a teenage climate activist who happened to challenge the corporatism that he loves so much, his endless rounds of antagonism of marginalized communities like immigrants and LGBTQ people, and much more.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has noted that the impeachment proceedings are not meant to deal with some of these more political issues. Republicans like the House Judiciary Committee’s ranking member Doug Collins (Ga.) have alleged that Democrats just hate Trump, but when a reporter asked Pelosi — with a straight face — if that was true, she told them not to “mess with” her. They’re defending basic legal stability — and they’re perpetually unable to count on a shift from even a minority of Republicans following rounds and rounds of new evidence coming out.
