Last updated on July 18th, 2023 at 11:56 am
Susan Collins is concerned again, y’all. She doesn’t think Trump’s retribution against Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman is appropriate after the impeachment vote. And she will do… absolutely nothing about it.
Friday morning it was reported that Trump will push out National Security Council aid Alexander Vindman for testifying against Trump during the House impeachment inquiry.
In fact, minutes after he was acquitted with only Republican votes, Trump swiftly made public fools of vulnerable Republicans who defended their predictable cult vote by claiming that he had learned his lesson. Trump teed up his extensive enemies list while Republicans and their propaganda media lined up to help him exact revenge.
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– He had his treasury send information on the SON of his perceived political rival in 2020, Hunter Biden, to Republicans to investigate a conspiracy over something that happened in 2013 and has already been debunked. Republicans have already sent letters demanding evidence of “questionable origin” to “Cabinet departments and agencies, including the State Department, the Treasury, the Justice Department, the FBI, the National Archives and the Secret Service.” (The Treasury refused to provide documents to Democrats, but is now being used to weaponize highly sensitive information against the son of Joe Biden.)
– He rage-waged a recall threat against Republican Senator Mitt Romney, who voted to convict him on abuse of power.
– He suspended New York residents from the Global Entry program, via acting secretary of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, making an announcement on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. New York is filing suit.
What does Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine think about all of this, after she promised the country that Trump had somehow learned a lesson from getting away with even more crimes?
Brace yourselves for the strength of conviction: Collins does not think it’s “appropriate.” Oh, my. “Sen. Collins says retribution after impeachment acquittal would not be appropriate.” The Republican justified her vote with a wily way of getting around the fact that Republicans refused to ask for witnesses or evidence, “I think it’s important to understand that when you’re in an impeachment trial, you consider the evidence that is before you.”
So, Republicans buried their head in the sand, avoided all media coverage of Trump’s crimes, avoided reading the 28,578-page trial record provided to them by the House Managers and then claim surprise that Trump took their enabling of his crimes against this country as an opportunity to grab more power. Huh.
It is hard to believe a U.S. Senator could be this ignorant, but if they truly are, then they have no business being paid to be a Senator because they clearly can’t do the job.
Democratic state House speaker Sara Gideon is challenging Collins in 2020. Collins seems to believe she, like so many of her colleagues, will be immune to the will of the people in 2020, perhaps because of what looks to be illegal money pouring into her PAC.
Collins spends a lot of her time helplessly expressing “concern” over President Trump’s encroaching dictator-esque power moves, but never quite manages to find the spine to honor the oath she took to the Constitution.
And so she told us all that she voted to acquit Donald Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress without needing to see any new evidence or hear new witnesses, even in the wake of Trump’s former NSA John Bolton’s book in which he offers first hand knowledge that Trump was pressuring Ukraine to help him cheat a U.S. election, because she believed he had learned his lesson.
With such power behind her convictions, it will shock you all to hear Trump’s response this afternoon. He has learned no lesson, thank you very much. Oh, and a vague “they” will decide Vindman’s fate:
QUESTION: "Mr. President, would you like to see Alexander Vindman out of your White House?"
TRUMP: "Well, I'm not happy with him. You think I'm supposed to be happy with him? I'm not."
QUESTION: "Is he going to leave?"
TRUMP: "They'll make that decision."
— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) February 7, 2020
Trump often refers to himself in the third person, uses fake names to hide behind when he needs to push an agenda or promote himself, is frequently unable to finish a word he started, is often pushing an agenda that is helpful to the man who helped put him in the White House (who is an enemy to this country), but most of all, he utilizes this vague double speak to avoid taking responsibility for his own actions.
Trump blew up vulnerable Republicans’ cover story in just hours. That’s how much appreciation he has for their loyalty to him over their own country.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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