The whistleblower memo details Trump’s systematic attack on American democracy

The Ukraine whistleblower complaint doesn’t only describe egregious misconduct by President Trump and White House staff. It details a systematic war on core principles of American democracy itself.

The complaint confirms what seemed fairly clear from the readout of Trump’s July call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky released on Wednesday: that Trump was offering quid-pro-quo policy favors in exchange for Zelensky investigating Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The complaint goes further than that, in revealing that the call was one of several actions taken by Trump and his allies to corral Ukraine into interfering in the 2020 election.

“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistleblower writes, before describing a pattern of Trump-sponsored pressure on Ukraine dating back months.

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What’s more, the complaint says, the White House’s lawyers knew what they were doing was wrong at the time — engaging in a significant cover-up effort to hide Trump’s indecent proposal.

“In the days following the phone call, I learned from multiple US officials that senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all records,” the whistleblower writes. “White House officials told me that they were ‘directed’ by White House lawyers to remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which such transcripts are typically stored.”

The twisting of the tools of statecraft to advance the president’s political interests violate private political ends, and the purging of government records to hide misconduct, the basic animating ideals of democratic government. These revelations illustrate the ways in which the Trump presidency threatens American democracy — and the need for an impeachment process to hold him accountable.

The whistleblower complaint shows how Trump threatens American democracy

A common feature of modern democracies that have backslid into a form of autocracy — places like Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela — is that leaders cease drawing distinctions between their personal political interests and the national interest.

They begin using policy, ranging from relations with foreign states to tax policy, as a tool to enhance their own political position and weaken their opposition. This behavior often overlaps with corruption, exploiting political power for financial gain; it’s all driven by a bone-deep belief that the leader is entitled to use whatever means necessary to hold on to their position and gain advantage from it.

This belief, the modern authoritarian’s twist on Louis XIV’s “l’etat, c’est moi,” is antithetical to democracy. Democratic governments depend on what Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call “forbearance,” the idea that you need to tolerate the opposition rather than use every tool available to crush them completely. Absent this sense of forbearance, a willingness to restrain yourself from all-out institutional warfare, then even democratically elected leaders start undermining the central idea of democracy: that disagreement is legitimate, and the opposition has a right to take power if they can win a free and fair election.

The Republican Party’s commitment to forbearance has been weakening for a while — see extreme partisan gerrymandering and the blockade of Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination.

Trump, who has amply demonstrated his disinterest in democratic ideals, has taken this to new lows. The Ukraine scandal — actively trying to push a foreign power to undermine one of his chief political rivals through coercion — shows his would-be authoritarian attitude in action.

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Indeed, Trump doesn’t even seem to think there was anything wrong with his conduct. The White House voluntarily chose to release a summary of the call between Trump and Zelensky on Wednesday, a baffling move given that it included several lines basically confirming that Trump offered Zelensky quid pro quo — policy favors in exchange for going after Biden.

After its release, the president helped clarify some of the logic by tweeting that the summary vindicated him. “Will the Democrats apologize after seeing what was said on the call with the Ukrainian President? They should, a perfect call — got them by surprise,” the president wrote, suggesting he literally did not understand why his words as relayed by the summary were so troubling and concerning.

The whistleblower shows us that this anti-democratic attitude has taken hold at the White House.

The White House lawyers who reviewed the July 25 call clearly understood that it showed presidential misbehavior, but their reaction wasn’t to blow the whistle themselves — it was to cover it up.

Not only cover it up, in fact, but deepen the level of anti-democratic abuse. In one of the most damning passages from the whistleblower complaint, its author details allegations that White House lawyers hid the records of the call on a system that’s supposed to be for highly classified information — and that this isn’t the first time they’ve misused this procedure to hide politically damaging information:

The transcript was loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature. One White House official described this act as an abuse of this electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective...

According to White House officials I spoke with, this was ‘not the first time’ under this Administration that a Presidential transcript was placed into this codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive — rather than national security sensitive — information.

It’s not just the president’s own misbehavior that screams out as undemocratic. His staffers are taking a system for preserving national security secrets and using it to deliberately hide information from Congress and the public to protect their boss. The (unnamed) White House officials who did this not only accept the president’s idea that the instruments of state are his to command, but are willing to act on it as well.

Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

And with a handful of exceptions, most of the institutional Republican Party appears to be backing up Trump and his staffers. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who rivals Trump in his hostility to forbearance, seems entirely uninterested in taking the whistleblower allegations seriously. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) dismissed the whistleblower’s memo as a “a coordinated effort to take second-hand information to create a narrative damaging to the President,” an absurd characterization that nonetheless reflects much of what you’re hearing from elected Republicans and allied media. Partisanship overwhelms any commitment to democracy.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates the authoritarianism at the heart of this episode more clearly than comments by Trump to staff shortly after the whistleblower report’s release. In the remarks, reported by the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, Trump suggests the whistleblowers’ sources are tantamount to foreign agents — and implies that he would like to execute them.

“I want to know who’s the person who gave the whistle-blower the information because that’s close to a spy,” the president said. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart with spies and treason, right? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

Trump seems to think that exposing his own troubling behavior to the public is the moral equivalent of providing classified information to a foreign power, that crossing Trump is committing treason. It’s pure conflation of the state and the president, to say nothing of the longing for the ability to inflict violence.

The notion that someone with this sort of mindset could win the presidency preoccupied America’s founders. It is the express reason why they included the impeachment power in the Constitution.

“He might pervert his administration into a scheme of [embezzlement] or oppression,” James Madison warned during the Constitutional Convention debate over the power. “He might betray his trust to foreign powers.”

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

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