Impeaching the Peach One
WASHINGTON — It’s a beautiful day for an impeachment.
Or at least an inquiry about an impeachment inquiry.
So on Friday, as summer stretched on, I went to
the Capitol to see what the speaker of the House was thinking, now that
she has lowered the boom.
At the tender age of 73, Donald Trump may
finally have to face some consequences for his depredations. His casino
games have caught up with him and this time Daddy’s not here to bail him out. How delicious that a woman has the whip hand.
“Isn’t it something, Maureen?” Nancy Pelosi asks about what she calls her “wild week.”
I nod. It surely is. “The president says you’re
no longer speaker of the House, that you’ve been taken over by the
radical left,” I say to Pelosi, who looks smart in a pink pantsuit and
sparkly pink high heels.
She laughs. “See, I always think he’s
projecting: When he says ‘She’s not the speaker of the House,’ what he
really means is ‘I shouldn’t be president of the United States.’ When he
says that Adam Schiff should resign, what he really means is ‘I, Donald Trump, should resign.’ He knows that this is really very incriminating.”
The speaker is in a fine mood, now that she’s turned her focus from reining in the progressives to reining in the president.
Does she no longer think, as she said for months, that impeachment is so divisive that it needs to be a bipartisan effort?
“No, I said I hoped
it would be bipartisan. I still hope so. It’s up to the Republicans
whether they honor their oath of office or honor their oath of Trump.”
I ask her how she feels about those who say she came to this moment belatedly.
“I don’t come to anything belatedly,” she
shoots back. “I have said from the start, we’ll go where the facts take
us and we will be ready. And we are ready. And they’re shocked.”
Trump was clearly smarting that Pelosi is now
on the side of an impeachment inquiry. Is the highchair king about to
have his most epic tantrum yet?
Even Trump’s pal Chris Ruddy told NPR
that the president may not understand the implications of the inquiry
or that he’s going up against “the smartest person in Washington right
now,” as Ruddy called Pelosi.
The speaker would have preferred to send Trump
packing at the ballot box. But since he keeps contaminating the ballot
box, asking foreign countries to meddle in our elections to help him
win, what choice did she have?
The man who always claims the system is rigged
against him keeps trying to rig the system — proving Pelosi’s point that
Trump projects.
About the White House officials who engaged in
what she calls “the cover-up of the cover-up,” she notes: “You’d think
that there would be some sense of decency on the part of the people who
work for the president.”
I ask her when the last time she talked to Trump was.
“You mean the latest?” she says, laughing. “It may be the last.”
They were talking about gun violence on the
phone on Tuesday morning when the president suddenly changed the topic
to the whistle-blower complaint. “My conversation with the president was
one in which he said the phone call was perfect and he couldn’t wait
until I saw it because it was perfect. It wasn’t perfect.”
The White House says it plans to work with Democrats in Congress even less than usual. On Friday, The Times reported
that Trump met with N.R.A. ghoul Wayne LaPierre to talk about how the
N.R.A. can chip in some blood money for the president’s defense if he
stops “the games” — “the games” being any attempt to curb our periodic
human sacrifices.
Hasn’t Trump learned his lesson about scummy quid pro quos?
It’s hard to fathom why he would slip the noose
on Robert Mueller’s testimony on Russia and then turn around the very
next day and ask Ukraine to interfere in an American election.
“I’ve said before, I do not have the medical
background to analyze the president’s behavior,” Pelosi says. Maybe it’s
time to break the last taboo and put a psychiatrist on staff at the
White House to analyze a president’s mental state, or possible
impairment?
“No, I think the White House should have an honest lawyer on staff,” she says. “And not a rogue Justice Department.”
Speaking of rogue justice and psychiatric emergencies, what does she make of America’s mayor becoming America’s nightmare?
“I’m focused on the president,” she says, adding disgustedly about Rudy Giuliani: “I mean, that’s almost like a joke.”
She did not arrive at her decision lightly. In
between speaking at two funerals — that of Cokie Roberts, the
journalist, and Emily Clyburn, the wife of the House majority whip, Jim
Clyburn — she talked to her members, lawyers and constitutional experts.
“I had one phone call; it lasted all weekend,” she says dryly.
She drafted her historic statement Monday night
on the plane from New York to D.C. “‘Betrayal’ was a word that my
members wanted me to use,” she says. “I didn’t have that in my original
statement. Betrayal of the Constitution. Betrayal of our national
security. Betrayal of the integrity of our elections.”
If only she could click those sparkly slippers three times and send Donald Trump home.
Comment
Maureen Dowd, winner of the
1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary and author of three New
York Times best sellers, became an Op-Ed columnist in 1995. She is on Facebook and Twitter (@MaureenDowd).
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