White House chief of staff Mick MulvaneyEvan Vucci/AP

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, for some reason, has just admitted that aid to Ukraine was held up because President Trump wanted them to investigate political opponents:

After @jonkarl points out the White House’s explanation for its dealings with Ukraine was quid-pro-quo, the chief of staff replies: “We do that all that time with foreign policy.”

To those concerned about political influence in foreign policy, he says, “Get over it.” pic.twitter.com/AYoTajGLTL

— Josh Campbell (@joshscampbell) October 17, 2019

There are probably a few people who genuinely don’t understand the distinction here. Luckily, I’m here to help. Consider the following two cases:

CASE 1: “If we lift the embargo on Cuba, it will hurt us with the Cuban immigrant vote in Florida. We shouldn’t do it.”

CASE 2: “I want Ukraine to investigate Democrats. We should hold up military aid until they promise to do it.”

Mulvaney is right: presidents do #1 all the time. Domestic politics invariably affects foreign policy, sometimes crassly and sometimes not.

But #2? Presidents absolutely don’t do that all the time. This is not “domestic politics.” It’s using the official power of the US government to force a foreign country to smear a political opponent.

The only way to not see the difference between these two cases is to deliberately close your eyes and refuse to see it. They are night and day. What Trump has done with Ukraine is very clearly not something that happens “all the time” in foreign policy. Until now, in fact, it never happened.

President Trump has announced that next year’s G7 meeting will be held at the Trump National Doral in Miami. His acting chief of staff explains that there’s nothing wrong with this:

MULVANEY: “Again, anticipating your questions, how is this this is not emolument violation? Will the president profit from this? The president pretty much made it very clear since he got here, he doesn’t profit from being here. He has no interest in profiting from being here.” pic.twitter.com/wLY55ZHA5V

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 17, 2019

To summarize for those of you who are a little slow, Trump won’t profit from this because he says he won’t profit from this. Any questions?

I wonder what Trump has promised Mick Mulvaney in return for being willing to say stuff like this in public? It’s gotta be something.

Watergate vs. Ukrainegate:

According to HR Haldeman, what Richard Nixon said upon being told he needed to pay off the Watergate burglars to keep them quiet: “That would be wrong.”

Gordon Sondland on the effort to get Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden: “Withholding foreign aid in order to pressure a foreign government to take such steps would be wrong.”

The Ukraine scandal is looking more Watergatish every day. It feels more Watergatish too. There’s just so much wrongness it’s hard to keep track.

Pew Research has released its latest survey of religion in America, and it comes as no surprise that organized religion continues to shrink. Here’s the decline in a nutshell:

There’s something worth noting here: although the number of “religiously unaffiliated” has increased from 16 percent to 26 percent over the past decade, the number identifying as atheist has barely budged, increasing only two percentage points. What this says is that although a quarter of the population is nonreligious, very few of them are aggressive about it. Those of us willing to flatly own up to being atheists make up a tiny, tiny minority.

In other words, feel free to mock religion with your flying spaghetti monster stuff, but don’t act all surprised when most Americans take offense and feel reluctant to vote for your candidates. You know what you’re doing.

Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire via ZUMA

Hooray! We have a Brexit agreement.

But I’m a little puzzled. I may be misreading something, but once you cut through the fog it appears that everyone has agreed that there will be no customs border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. Instead, goods will travel freely between Ireland (part of the EU) and Northern Ireland (not part of the EU) and Britain will then sort out all applicable customs and tariffs internally. In other words, there’s now a de facto border between Northern Ireland and the rest of Britain.

But this has always been one of the options on the table. Why is it acceptable now if it wasn’t two years ago?

Part of the answer, I suppose, is that October 31 is increasingly looking like a real deadline, and the prospect of a hard no-deal Brexit has concentrated everyone’s minds. Another possibility is that it’s not acceptable even now: we won’t know until Parliament votes on it. If Labour opposes the deal and DUP opposes the deal, it might fail. We should know soon.

Douglas Christian/ZUMA

NBC News reports today about a White House meeting with Ukrainian officials that took place earlier this year. The Ukrainians wanted to agree on a meeting date between President Trump and newly elected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, but John Bolton was noncommital. Then Gordon Sondland piped up:

Sondland directly contradicted Bolton by telling the Ukrainians that in fact, Trump was committed to meeting with Zelenskiy on the condition he open a corruption investigation, two people told about the matter tell NBC News.

Bolton abruptly ended the meeting.

But, the individuals say, Sondland then invited the Ukrainian officials to continue the conversation separately, escorting them to a private room in the White House basement, the individuals said. That’s when Sondland was overheard discussing Burisma Holdings, whose board of directors former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden joined in 2014.

There’s a massive amount of evidence now that Trump has spent nearly a year obsessing over how to get Ukraine to investigate a political opponent. He has co-opted Rudy Giuliani, Mick Mulvaney, Gordon Sondland, Rick Perry, and probably many others in this campaign, and he has used as bait both military aid and a personal meeting with Ukraine’s president at the White House. This was no off-the-cuff effort.

This is as clear a case of abuse of power as anyone could imagine. How is it possible to leave a man in office who does something like this?

Apparently the White House has confirmed that this is real:

EXCLUSIVE: I have obtained a copy of ⁦@realDonaldTrump⁩’s letter to #Erdogan. ⁦@POTUS⁩ warns him to not “be a tough guy! Don’t be a fool!” Says he could destroy Turkey’s economy if #Syria is not resolved in a humane way. Details tonight at 8pm #TrishRegan #FoxBusiness pic.twitter.com/9BoSGlbRyt

— Trish Regan (@trish_regan) October 16, 2019

This was sent on October 9. A week later, it’s obvious just how seriously Erdogan took it. Donald Trump sure has improved our standing in the world, hasn’t he?

President Trump gives himself an A+ for his handling of Syria:

“That has nothing to do with us,” Mr. Trump said, all but washing his hands of the Kurdish fighters who have fought alongside American troops against the Islamic State for years but have now been left to fend for themselves. “The Kurds know how to fight, and, as I said, they’re not angels, they’re not angels,” he said.

Mr. Trump insisted his handling of the matter had been “strategically brilliant” and minimized concerns for the Kurds, implying that they allied with the United States only out of their own self-interest. “We paid a lot of money for them to fight with us,” he said. Echoing Mr. Erdogan’s talking points, Mr. Trump compared one faction of the Kurds to the Islamic State and he asserted that Kurds intentionally freed some Islamic State prisoners to create a backlash for him. “Probably the Kurds let go to make a little bit stronger political impact,” he said.

“Declare victory and go home” was the way to handle Vietnam, Sen. George Aiken said half a century ago. Donald Trump now becomes the first US president to actually try that. Trump being Trump, though, it’s not enough. He has to insist that our former allies were never worth fighting with in the first place. What a guy.

This is a lovely red lupine set in a field of California bluebells. The picture was taken along Santiago Canyon Road somewhere, probably close to Jamboree. But you can find them pretty much anywhere around here.

This is neither here nor there, but back when Republicans were impeaching Bill Clinton I always wondered what would happen if Clinton simply refused to participate and Democrats boycotted everything except the final Senate vote. Until now, it was just an idle counterfactual, like wondering what would have happened if Germany had invented the atomic bomb first.

But this is apparently going to be Trump’s strategy. The details of the underlying offenses are very different, of course, but it looks like I’m finally going to get at least an idea of whether stonewalling is a good strategy in an impeachment case.