All through the impeachment hearings, I couldn’t help but think of “Catherine the Great” and my grandfather, Nelson.

Maybe it was the HBO series of the same title starring Helen Mirren. (More on Nelson later.) But most likely it was because both the hearings and the miniseries were about Russia invading Ukraine and stealing Crimea. Oh, I know. You’re probably wondering to yourself—depending on your political persuasion—weren’t the hearings about Democrats trying to overturn the 2016 presidential election or saving American democracy from a dictator-wannabe?

I doubt President Trump knows anything about Catherine the Great—either the Russian empress or the miniseries. Does he suspect that Catherine, famous for demanding favor from every bed-worthy male in sight, is the title character in “Kiss Me Kate”? Unlikely. Trump was never inclined to brush up his Shakespeare. Maybe he thinks “Macbeth” is a bloody-rare McDonald’s burger he hasn’t tried yet. Or perhaps a broken chicken leg.

You think I’m kidding? Donald is an astonishingly encyclopedic ignoramus. Ask any actual reporter who’s interviewed him. Fake news? Sure. Polar ice caps are not melting and Russia is not screwing with our elections. Donald’s counting on the latter in 2020.

Name the subject, other than cheating on little people, his wives or his taxes, Donald is clueless. (Of course, he denies it all, though he paid off, or tried to, at least two of his co-fornicators.)

Trump was president for less than two weeks when, on the first day of Black History Month—that would be February following his Jan. 20, 2017 inauguration—he responded to a White House staff suggestion that the president should acknowledge a notable African-American. Apparently, he forgot the “history” part, proclaiming: “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” Trump later “noticed” that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, as if reporting a scoop. “Almost nobody knows that,” he said, assuming collateral ignorance.

At the time, I was tempted to write a commentary proclaiming “Frederick Douglass Was My Neighbor!” Trump clearly had no idea who Frederick Douglass was nor that he was long dead. As for Douglass being “my neighbor,” well, I was a century or so late. I grew up on the 600-acre farm next to Chesapeake at Easton Club East on Dutchman’s Lane, where my wife and I moved after retirement two years ago. Just a mile east, you come to Dover Neck Road and a farm (and Choptank Electric substation) that was once among several Lloyd family plantations, one of which claimed Douglass as human property upon his birth along the Tuckahoe River. Nelson, my maternal grandfather, free and white, was born at Lloyd’s Landing, east of Trappe, a former Choptank River port from which his grandfather captained a riverboat similar to one that inspired novelist John Barth’s “Floating Opera.”

Trump has failed, conspicuously, to appreciate the heroism of another former mid-Shore slave, Harriet Tubman. Thanks to him, Tubman’s image will not appear on the 20-dollar bill next year as ordered by President Obama. Trump instead preserves Andrew Jackson’s face on the currency that every ATM in America dispenses. That Jackson was a populist denigrator of people who don’t look like “us”—native Americans in Jackson’s case and Hispanics in Trump’s—is the president’s racist motive, reflected in his obsession with undoing everything Obama accomplished in his two terms, twice elected by a majority.

Trump can’t stand that he lost the popular vote to Hilary Clinton. So, he peddles the ludicrous conspiracy theory that Ukraine hacked a DNC server with the help of the California firm CrowdStrike and still hides it somewhere within borders not currently encroached by Russian invaders. That accounts, also, for Trump’s twin demands—“do me a favor”—of newly elected Ukrainian President Zelensky: Publicly proclaim investigations into the 2016 election, which would absolve Russia, and into Hunter Biden’s problematic association with Ukrainian energy company Barisma, which in turn would stain Democratic presidential candidate Joe’s reputation.

This for that. Forget the Latin quid pro quo to which Trump claims exquisite innocence. Does his legal team count on their client’s certifiable idiocy as a defense? Was he too stupid to rob the bank? Is botching a stick-up a defense before Judge Judy? Should would-be bank robbers be acquitted because the getaway driver ran out of gas a block from the target bank? Never mind that Trump’s sons, oldest daughter and son-in-law are all up to their necks in sweetheart deals with Russian/Ukrainian oligarchs.

In TrumpWorld, hypocrisy and hyper-incompetence apply only to suckers.

We’re asked to believe that Democrats conspired to hack their own server in order to leak emails embarrassing solely to their presidential nominee. Evidence of Ukraine’s perfidy against candidate Trump? A couple of critical op-ed columns. The plot, according to such Trump toads as Rep. Devin Nunes, is that Democrats conspired to lose the election so that they might later impeach and remove him from office. At the cost so far of two Supreme Court nominations—one stolen, both confirmed.

We can be sure now that Trump will be impeached. And unless Rudy Giuliani & Thug Associates do something stupider than usual—physical violence against such impeachment witnesses as Iraqi war hero Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman or courageous and unflappably articulate coalminer’s daughter Fiona Hill—Trump will be “exonerated” in a Senate trial.

Which brings us to still more Maryland links to the impeachment of Donald J. Trump. Although impeachment is constitutionally sanctioned, Article II (which Trump obscenely claims allows him to do whatever he pleases), Section 4 provided no means for the House of Representatives to enforce its prescribed duty until Oxford shipbuilder and Revolutionary War financier Robert Morris demanded to clear his name against media gadflies charging that he enriched himself on the new nation’s dime. Morris insisted in a letter to George Washington and both houses of Congress that he be investigated, essentially establishing the power of subpoena to which the current White House flips its middle finger. Congress acquitted Morris of “maladministration,” but he wound up in debtor’s prison near the end of his career. Still, I recommend lunch at Robert Morris Inn.

To most observers, with the encouragement of Trump sycophant-in-chief Nunes, who gives dairy farmers—my dad was one—a bad name, the Russia and Ukraine inquiries are separate and serial issues. If at first you don’t succeed, try something else, the GOP see-no-evils say. Hey, he didn’t succeed in shaking down the Ukrainian president, so what’s the problem? But both the Mueller and House investigations into Trump’s assault on American democracy draw directly from the same playbook.

I don’t know what Vladimir Putin has on Donald Trump. I suspect Putin owns him—he and his Kremlin enablers—perhaps explaining why the president’s tax records are, for now, a state secret. But I do know, and everyone who pays attention knows, that Trump bows to Putin’s every wish, most likely owing to a time when no U.S. bank would loan to bankrupt-prone Donald. Is that why he’s subverted our NATO and European Union commitments? Not yet accomplished, though Trump does his best. How about abetting Russia’s Mideast ambitions in Syria? Mission accomplished. And how about betraying U.S. ally Ukraine so Putin can start fulfilling his perceived destiny—to re-establish the Soviet Union? That begins with Ukraine. It was Catherine’s greatest ambition more than two centuries ago at the time of our own independence—to secure a warm-weather port on the Black Sea with access to the Mediterranean. Such hegemony persists in Moscow today, though if Putin is patient enough—his re-election fix is guaranteed—global warming avails thousands of miles of navigable ports on the Arctic.

But I digress

If Ukraine falls to Russian aggression, what’s to stop Putin from taking over Georgia—no, not you guys in Atlanta—or Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Armenia? You get the picture. Donald’s at Vlad’s service. He is compromised, somehow. Not an agent so much as a useful and semi-literate idiot.

Just after Robert Mueller stumbled haltingly in his testimony before Congress, Trump took it as a green light. Our president tried the very next day to extort political favors from the Ukrainian president facing existential threats engineered by Putin’s global ambition.

In his closing remarks after the final witnesses testified, Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff quoted the late Oversight Committee Chairman and Baltimore champion Elijah Cummings: “We are better than this!” Not since Francis Scott Key wrote “O’ say can you see” in the harbor within cannon-fire of Fort McHenry has American resolve been better articulated.

Steve Parks is a retired journalist and lifelong patriot now living in Easton.

Feature cartoon by DonkeyHotey

Until recently, I was not in favor of impeaching President Trump for the very good reason that, while impeachment seems all but certain in the House of Representatives, conviction and removal from office is a long shot in the Senate. And as we have seen in the culmination of the Mueller investigation, Trump will declare such a result “complete exoneration.” 

What changed my mind, as well as Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s, was the whistleblower alert to Trump’s phone call to Ukrainian President Zelensky, who said he’d like to buy American-made Javelin missiles to help repel Russian-backed insurrection in his country. Trump replied that “I need a favor from you though.” Two favors, actually. The first was for Zelensky to order an investigation into the far-fetched theory that Democrats conspired with Ukraine to hack the party’s own emails as an “insurance policy” against Hillary Clinton losing the 2016 presidential election. Under this scenario, Democrats, seeking to nullify Trump’s election, accuse him of colluding with Russia. The other favor Trump asked of Zelensky was to collect “dirt” on former vice president/current presidential hopeful Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who served on a Ukrainian energy company’s board.

Sound familiar? Donald Jr. told a Russian intermediary who promised “dirt” on Hillary Clinton that he would “love it.” Yet we’re asked to believe that nothing ever came of that exchange, even after we heard candidate Trump implore Russia on national TV to find his opponent’s “30,000 missing emails.” Next day, hacked Democratic Party emails embarrassing to Clinton were released by WikiLeaks. For arcane legal reasons, Robert Mueller’s Russian-interference investigation failed to make a prosecutable case against Trump while leaving no doubt that Russia meddled in the 2016 election. 

But there’s nothing arcane about Trump’s Ukraine shakedown. The president used an implied threat to withhold a request for missiles as well as an actual delay in releasing $391 million in congressionally authorized military aid to coerce foreign-manufactured political dirt.

Republicans argue there’s no quid pro quo in the president’s words, though he repeated on TV his appeals—both to Ukraine and China—to investigate the Bidens (promising Chinese President Xi to forsake Hong Kong). Inviting foreign interference in U.S. elections is illegal. It’s also a highly impeachable crime. Trump’s defenders change the subject by equating his Ukrainian conversations with Biden’s, though no one accuses Biden of recruiting foreigners to smear American presidential candidates. Another diversionary tactic, employed by Republican Rep. Andy Harris at his Easton town hall, is that the impeachment inquiry is an unconstitutional effort to overturn the 2016 election. 

Ken Starr, whose investigation of President Clinton resulted in his impeachment, calls the current Democratic-led probe a “star chamber.” He and other Trump defenders demand that the House hold open hearings. Now. They question the fairness of an inquiry based on hearings behind closed doors. But similar inquiries happen every day in our judicial system—and for good reason. Grand jury proceedings are secret in order to prevent various witnesses from readily aligning their testimony.

This is particularly relevant in an impeachment proceeding in which the president claims blanket executive privilege and orders even associates who don’t work for the White House not to testify or cooperate in producing documents. Further, the usual investigatory options are unavailable to this impeachment inquiry. Attorney General William Barr has proved himself to be the president’s legal protector. Never mind his misrepresentation of the Mueller report before its release and hearings on its content. He’s more recently embarked on international missions to revive the aforementioned, long-debunked conspiracy theories espoused by Rudy Giuliani and his jailed Fraud Guarantee cohorts. Not even the FBI can be trusted as long as its director reports, ultimately, to this compromised attorney general.

If this sounds like extraordinary circumstance—even for impeachment of a president—it is.

Which brings us to another call the president made a couple of Sundays ago. We don’t have a transcript of that one. But we see the daily fallout of what the president said or didn’t say as the Turks bombard Kurdish movements inside Syria where, until recently, the Kurds fought alongside American troops. The president, in dereliction of his duty, routinely refuses to read or listen to daily intelligence briefings.  To make decisions, he consults his “gut” instead. Trump doesn’t listen to advice from career government experts, dismissing them as “deep state” suspects intent on subverting his mandate. He spends his “executive time” watching cable news while tweeting or making phone calls informed only by his “great unmatched wisdom.” 

As a result of lazy habits and willful ignorance, Trump evidently gave the green light to Turkish President Erdogan’s military incursion into Syria. Whether it was an Erdogan ultimatum or a Trump invitation, the president neglected to secure a safe and orderly withdrawal of American troops. They were fired upon by Turkish insurgents within hours of the president’s call. Besides the shameful abandonment of Kurdish allies who helped retake the ISIS caliphate and imprison thousands of its terrorists—many now on the loose—Trump’s action, or inaction, put troops under his ultimate command in mortal danger. Sending U.S. troops into precipitous retreat in the face of Turkey’s invasive onslaught makes Americans look like cowards and America an unreliable ally. Soldiers have said they felt ashamed for the first time in uniform. Trump bullies his allies but when foreign adversaries say “boo,” he turns into chicken-in-chief. The only winners in this debacle are Russia, Iran and Syria’s accused war-criminal president, Assad.

Impeachment proceedings should, indeed, proceed as diplomats are testifying in defiance of Trump. But if, in light of the president’s foreign policy incompetence or worse, possible collusion with foreign agents, Congress and the Cabinet with Vice President Pence’s highly unlikely assent, could remove him from office under the 25th Amendment. Trump has shown himself manifestly unfit for the presidency, failing to uphold the constitution in virtually every way imaginable.

The president must be held accountable. 

Steve Parks is a retired journalist now living in Easton.