Deconstructing President Trump’s letter to speaker Pelosi

Does it matter if President Donald J Trump is removed from office if, in truth, there is no (or no sufficient) factual foundation to satisfy the requirements of Articles I and II of the US Constitution? "In truth"? Does the truth matter? President Trump has made a big issue of the "truth" being distorted or concealed in the media and public debate. His implacable foes brand him as a pathological liar. All sides appear to be in furious agreement that the truth does matter.

If it is assumed that President Trump is every bit the loathsome amoral monster depicted by his foes (including those in Australia such as the ABC), can the hypothetical reasonable person nevertheless openly express the opinion that the President is entitled, in keeping with the electoral college decision in 2016, to resist all efforts to eject him from office? Or, does the President's alleged unique malevolence compel us to say nothing that might afford him comfort and support? For example, should every truth-seeking Australian be obliged to adopt the recent assessment of the ABC Q&A guest Alastair Campbell – he must be taken as speaking the truth, rather than merely expressing his opinion – when he likened President's Trump's misbehaviour in office to what Hitler was doing in 1930s Germany?

One means by which interested Australians can form a response to such questions is to consider the six-page letter sent by the President to House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi on 17 December 2019 protesting the House's then proposed impeachment resolution (which it adopted two days later), and the public reactions to the President's letter.

It is an odds-on certainty that some (perhaps many) Australian readers of the President's letter would conclude that American antagonists of their President are right to describe it as, for example, "a 6-page tantrum", "a diatribe", "a 6-page letter of insults", "a 6-page shriek", "angry", "blistering", "bluster", "bizarre", "deranged", "ferocious", "fiery", "fascistic", "really sick", and "unhinged".

Those condemnations are no more than opinions, and opinions on the impeachment resolution approved by the House will, necessarily, differ. This is demonstrated by the majority and minority reports of the Trump Impeachment Inquiry conducted by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in Consultation with the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs (December 2019), and of the corresponding conflicting reports of the separate inquiry by the HouseCommittee on the Judiciary (December 2019).

As always, the soundness and force of an opinion depends on its factual foundation. Accordingly, other Australians would supply the short answer: why all the fuss about the President's letter? Some would opt for the marginally longer but more direct response: Is not the President entitled to give as good as he gets when subjected to a hypocritical and preposterous partisan stunt intended to nullify the 2016 Presidential election result? What if, in the fullness of time, it turns out that the "facts" bolster the President's stance?

Here is a non-exhaustive list of suggested bases upon which the President's ardent supporters and anyone else might (and do) – they say, reasonably – contend that the latter assessments are soundly/factually-based:

· Affront to democracy. Lacking the fortitude and good grace to accept the electoral college result, the 45th President's most resolute enemies in the US Congress and elsewhere set about on election day 2016 (or earlier), regardless of the truth, to remove him from office because, in their scheme of things, he was not meant to win;

· The tsunami of "hate speech". Some Australians would say that the inventors of the compendious contemporary slur of convenience, "hate speech" (the speech which such folks love to hate), are at the forefront of its most florid exponents. There is a lot to choose from including this image of an entertainment celebrity holding up the severed head of the President;

· "Russiagate" – missing in action.Other Australian readers of the President's letter would insist on a clear explanation for why the central allegation - that the President colluded in Russian government-directed interference in the 2016 US election - is not front and centre in the House of Representatives impeachment resolution. Furthermore, nobody should be surprised if now and then an Australian lawyer might be heard to say that abandoning a serious charge (perhaps tantamount to treason) after banging on about it to the exclusion of almost every other charge of perfidy without proffering a thoroughgoing convincing explanation, would look highly opportunistic to a jury;

· A modern Aesopian fable?Perhaps the Congressional pro-impeachment majority is having a bet each way on the "Russiagate" charge given that it seems to be hinted at in both Article I and Article II of the impeachment resolution;

· Real spooky: The Steele Dossier. Some Australian readers would, understandably, have concluded what had been clear almost from the outset of the Trump haters' crusade to drive him from office, and which would be confirmed on a reading the short executive summary of the gargantuan Mueller Report (March 2019), namely, that the haters had been made to look childishly gullible in their stampede to rely on the manifestly ridiculous "Steele Dossier", even without regard to its anti-Trump money trail which led directly to where? To the Democrat Party National Committee (DNC), that's where;

· Pull Mr Putin's Left leg. From the outset, dissenters on the US liberal/progressive "Left" (for want of a more precise label) had been harping on the claim that the real story concerning the "Steele Dossier" namely, that the accusation that Trump was "Russian President Putin's stooge",was nonsense on stilts;

· US "Left" contempt for the Democrats' witch hunt. Some Australian readers who follow US politics closely would have known that sections of the US "Left" (who had worked hard to defeat Trump), were also emphatic in their attribution of the election of President Trump to the nomination of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Party candidate in 2016. Their case focussed on her smug "identity"-based contempt for low paid (if employed) working class Americans expressed in her unique contribution to the "hate speech" lexicon, the compendious slur of convenience that half of Trump's supporters could be put in her "basket of deplorables" – they were, she said,"racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it. There are people like that. And he [ie, the monster - Trump] has lifted them up". Elsewhere on the US "Left", the Democrats' impeachment crusade has been called an absurd wild goose chase;

· We, The People v the Washington DC "Swampers". There was also the broader issue that what Trump enjoyed poking fun at, the murky swamp-like world of Washington, DC political charades, was a loathing which millions of Americans heartily embraced. One observer on the Republican side has described the hysteria and antagonism produced by Trump winning the presidency as the response of the folks whose main concern was the fight for political spoils, between Team Evil (the Democrats) and Team Stupid (the Republicans);

· The President's perceived enemies within. As one year passed by since the 2016 election and then another, and then another and the Congressional Democrats and their allies intensified their anti-Trump hate speech onslaught, some sceptical Australian readers would have taken the time to familiarise themselves with the findings of inquiries related to the election of the 45th President and subsequent events commencing with the Report of the Office of the Inspector General of the US Department of Justice (Inspector General) reviewing the actions of the FBI and the Department in advance of the 2016 election (June 2018). Then came the Inspector General's investigation of former FBI Director James Comey's disclosure of sensitive Information and Handling of Certain Memoranda (August 2019);

· Once More - Please explain!And more recently came the Inspector General's report on his review of four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications and other aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation into the Trump 2016 campaign (December 2019). This report no doubt bolstered the determination of the aforesaid "deplorables" to see their hero in The White House vanquish the aforesaid odious "DC "swampers";

· The duty of candour flouted. Australian lawyers reading the President'sletter could readily understand the President's annoyance in having to contend with what he calls a congressional witch hunt, particularly in light of the findings of her Honour Judge Rosemary M Collyer of the US Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court set out in her decision on 17 December 2019 that the FBI, in breach of its solemn duty of candour to the Court, had provided false information to the Court in support of the applications and had withheld material information which was detrimental to its case for authority to conduct electronic surveillance targeting a US citizen, Carter W Page who was affiliated with the Trump presidential campaign and who was suspected of being a Russian agent. Soon, the US Government will comply the Court's order that it explain the deception practised on the Court.

Finally, interested Australians would have received almost no assistance whatsoever from our credulous national broadcaster's coverage of the President's letter to Speaker Pelosi. Why? Because the ABC, in blatant disregard of its duty under s 8 of the Australian BroadcastingCorporation Act1983, to ensure that its gathering and presentation of news and information is accurate and impartial according to the recognized standards of objective journalism, is at the forefront of thosesegments of the Australian mainstream media which have an institutionalised loathing of the 45th President of the US. That assertion can be tested in the context of the President's letter to Speaker Pelosi by considering the one-sided interview (in truth, yet another ABC hatchet job on Trump) first broadcast on ABC RN at 6:45am on Thursday, 19 December 2019.

However, among those Australians who rely on the ABC there will be some readers of the President's letter to the House Speaker who will be aware that W C Fields (1880-1946) is reputed to have said that "Anyone who hates small children and dogs (or animals) can't be all bad." They will give credit where an off-setting credit is due for the ABC for some good old-fashioned objective journalism via the folks at Planet America who on 19 September 2009 publicised one aspect of the US Left's exposé of the Steele Dossier jiggery pokery in the run-up to publication of the Inspector General's December 2019 report.