A staggeringly broad interpretation of executive power

It all points to Trump’s desire to be a dictator.

A common thread is emerging from the impeachment bombshells, court fights and multiple scandals all coming to head this week inside the one-year mark to the next general election. It’s a picture of a President and his men who subscribe to a staggeringly broad interpretation of executive power and have no reservations about using it[,] often for domestic political ends.

The trend, which threatens to recast the conception of the presidency shared by America’s founders, shone through the first witness testimony released from the impeachment inquiry Monday.

One former ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, who apparently had been in the way of Trump’s plans to get dirt from Ukraine on former Vice President Joe Biden, was shocked when the President told his counterpart in Kiev on a phone call that the official US diplomatic representative to his country was “bad news.”

“I was very concerned, I still am,” Yovanovitch said in her October 11 appearance before investigators, saying she felt “threatened” by the harassing words of her own President.

Head of state 1 isn’t supposed to tell head of state 2 that 1’s ambassador is “bad news.” That’s not how the system is supposed to work.

Another top State Department official, Michael McKinley, testified that he had resigned partly because of the use of the State Department to dig up dirt on Trump’s political opponents.

“In 37 years in the Foreign Service and in different parts of the globe and working on many controversial issues, working 10 years back in Washington, I had never seen that,” McKinley said, according to a transcript also released on Monday.

McKinley also said under oath that he had asked his boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for a statement of support for the beleaguered Yovanovitch.

Pompeo told ABC News last month that McKinley had never raised the issue. And the top US diplomat emerges from the testimony as more loyal to Trump’s political goals than his own department’s mission.

We’re not even relevant in all this, we the people – we’re just the serfs, the proles, the cannon fodder. Trump’s only mission is to expand and secure ever more power and money for himself.

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