https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/10/trump-is-openly-telling-us-hes-above-law-heres-his-next-move/

By Greg Sargent Opinion writer

Oct. 10, 2019 at 10:02 a.m. EDT

It’s worth stepping back and stating in plain language just how profoundly President Trump is corrupting our political system right now. Several new media analyses take a stab at this — see this CNN piece or this New York Times take — by correctly suggesting that Trump’s total defiance of oversight poses a massive challenge to our constitutional order.

But they aren’t quite grappling with the magnitude of what we’re seeing. That’s only half the story.

So let’s try it this way. Trump is not merely staking out an absolute refusal to cooperate with any and all lawful subpoenas, on the deeply absurd grounds that the House’s impeachment inquiry is illegitimate, as the White House counsel has argued.

Rather, Trump is adopting that stance while simultaneously claiming the absolute right to bend large swaths of the government toward his goal of rigging the next election on his own behalf. Thus, Trump is declaring absolute authority to use extraordinarily corrupt means to avoid facing a fair election next year, while also declaring total immunity to any and all congressional efforts to prevent him from rigging that election, or even to hold him accountable for it.

The upshot of this, then, must be that Trump’s explicitly declared position is that he is constrained by no existing legitimate mechanism of accountability.

Trump’s next moves in the coverup
Now the New York Times reports that Trump and the administration will likely take new steps to prevent testimony from an enormously important witness: William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine.

The texts released by Democrats show that Taylor twice objected to a direct quid pro quo in which Trump held up hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into helping him corrupt the 2020 election on his behalf.

Trump and his consiglieri have undertaken a long-running plot to press Zelensky to undertake “investigations” to magically produce “evidence” validating a conspiracy theory undercutting the confirmed fact that Russia sabotaged the 2016 election to help Trump, and bolstering a fabricated narrative about invented corruption on the part of potential campaign opponent Joe Biden.

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