By John Prager ·
If
you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days, you’re probably unaware
that Donald Trump Jr. committed treason.
After lying about it and realizing
that wouldn’t work, he tweeted out evidence of his guilt — something that for
some reason doesn’t have the Right up in arms like it would if anyone else did
it.
Trump Jr. received an email from a friend of his father’s
who helped
the Trump family with the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013. Trump
Jr. was told that a Kremlin-connected lawyer was offering him damaging
information about Hillary Clinton on behalf of the Russian government.
According
to Donald Trump, this is perfectly normal. You or I, he says, would have made
the decision to knowingly collude with a hostile foreign government for
personal gain.
The
New York Times reports
that this is not standard,
and that the only parallel in U.S. history involves Richard Nixon:
There is only one known historical parallel to the Trump campaign’s contacts with the Russians, and it involves Richard M. Nixon. Running for president in 1968, Nixon told H. R. Haldeman, his eventual White House chief of staff, to “monkey wrench” peace talks in Vietnam in order to scuttle any deal that would have handed Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee, a political victory in the closing days of the election.
Nixon, a former senator and vice president, had a relationship with the South Vietnamese government. Earlier in the year, he had met with the country’s ambassador and brought along Anna Chennault, a prominent Chinese-American Republican. As the author John A. Farrell writes in his new book, “Richard Nixon: The Life,” which reports the “monkey wrench” instructions, the call between Nixon and Haldeman took place on Oct. 22, 1968, and Haldeman dutifully jotted down what he was told.
A group of aides to Ronald Reagan did meet in the fall of 1980 with an individual claiming to be an emissary from the Iranian government, but that person’s legitimacy was never determined.
The
Trump family says that the meeting was not important because no usable
information came from it (though Trump himself tweeted about Hillary Clinton’s
emails for the first time about 20 minutes after the meeting ended) — like if
you rushed into a store with a gun to rob it and had to retreat after slipping
on the freshly mopped floor.
To Trump, your intentions nor the gun matter —
only that it didn’t benefit you.
This
sort of thing doesn’t happen with respectable politicians. When a Russian
ambassador reached out to John F. Kennedy and his democratic primary opponent
Adlai Stevenson in 1960, both candidates
rebuked him.
This
is not normal. This is not acceptable. Trump must be impeached before the
damage he does is irreversible.
Author John Prager is an unfortunate Liberal soul
who lives uncomfortably in the middle of a Conservative hellscape. Prager
spends much of his time poking Trump's meth-addled, uneducated fans with a
pointy stick and is currently writing a book of muskrat recipes (not really) as
well as a scrapbook of his favorite death threats. His life's aspiration is to
rule the world with an iron fist, or find that sock he's been looking for. Feel
free to email him at notjohnprager@gmail.com if
you have any questions or comments -- or drop him a line on Twitter or Facebook.