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Credit to Author: Garrett M. Graff| Date: Thu, 06 Feb 2020 16:55:06 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Garrett M. Graff<\/span><\/a><\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n After making it through a criminal investigation and political impeachment unscathed, Trump now has free rein to invite election interference and more.<\/p>\n Welcome to a dark day in America\u2019s modern experiment with democracy. Despite becoming the first president ever to receive votes from both parties to convict and remove him from office in an impeachment trial, President Donald Trump today woke up in the White House unbound.<\/p>\n Senator Susan Collins justified her vote to acquit the president Tuesday by saying she hopes the impeachment trial has taught Trump a \u201clesson<\/a>,\u201d but it\u2019s clear from the president\u2019s words and actions that the opposite is true. After emerging unscathed from a criminal probe and political impeachment, there\u2019s no one left to stop him. Today marks the day where the worst\u2014and least democratic\u2014impulses of Donald Trump are unofficially unleashed.<\/p>\n Trump survived the Mueller investigation and a scathing report of corruption and attempted abuses of power that would have devastated any normal presidential administration. Then the day after Congress made clear it would not act on Mueller\u2019s findings, Trump picked up the phone, called Ukraine\u2019s president, and asked him for a \u201cfavor:\u201d investigating the family of his political rival Joe Biden.<\/p>\n The news of that actual<\/em> abuse of power touched off five months of impeachment hearings, two articles of impeachment charging presidential high crimes and misdemeanors, and a joke of a trial where the Republican-controlled Senate did everything possible to avoid coming face-to-face with the evidence and venality of the president\u2019s crimes. And yet even his own party, deep down, knows that the president\u2019s actions were wrong.<\/p>\n \u201cThe president is guilty of an appalling abuse of the public trust,\u201d GOP senator Mitt Romney said Wednesday as he announced that he would make the conviction vote bipartisan. \u201cIt was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security interests, and our fundamental values. Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one\u2019s oath of office that I can imagine.\u201d<\/p>\n And yet, hours later, majority leader Mitch McConnell\u2019s chamber voted to acquit the president, choosing to be on record\u2014vote by vote, 51 times\u2014as complicit in Donald Trump\u2019s abuse of America\u2019s rule of law.<\/p>\n Which brings us to today.<\/p>\n Donald Trump today stands unleashed and uncontrolled.<\/p>\n Today, 10 months remain in an election where the president now knows that there is practically nothing he can do that would cause his removal from office. The Justice Department maintains that Trump cannot be criminally charged while president, and the GOP has made clear that their ultimate test this year is to \u201clet the voters decide.\u201d That combination leaves no path for accountability. The House may very well continue its investigation of Trump\u2019s various crimes starting today\u2014perhaps by calling John Bolton\u2014but Donald Trump knows he is, as Axios\u2019 Jonathan Swan reported this week, borderline invincible<\/a>.<\/p>\n The upshot is that Donald Trump can apparently do anything he wants to rig, influence, or invite foreign powers to tinker with the integrity of the election that will decide his fate. And he can do it all with the full powers of the presidency.<\/p>\n Trump has long been aware<\/a> of his teflon nature. \u201cI could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn\u2019t lose any voters,\u201d he famously proclaimed in January 2016. Even then, he was pulling the wool over America\u2019s eyes: Those comments came the same month Michael Cohen was\u2014unknown to voters\u2014busily at work trying to set up meetings with Vladimir Putin about the Trump Tower Moscow project<\/a>.<\/p>\n More recently, Trump\u2019s impeachment defense lawyers have argued that he could hand Alaska over to Vladimir Putin without repercussions outside of Election Day. \u201cAssume Putin decides to \u2018retake\u2019 Alaska, the way he \u2018retook\u2019 Crimea,\u201d\u00a0Dershowitz wrote<\/a> in 2018, a year and a half before officially joining Trump\u2019s legal team. \u201cAssume further that a president allows him to do it, because he believed that Russia has a legitimate claim to \u2018its\u2019 original territory.\u201d\u00a0Even that wholesale reneging on the sovereignty of the United States would not, in Dershowitz\u2019s views, constitute an impeachable offense.<\/p>\n Donald Trump today stands unleashed and uncontrolled, with 8,400 hours\u2014a half-million minutes and umpteen tweets\u2014left in his first presidential term. The guardrails are gone. The adults have left the room.<\/p>\n Today, allies and adversaries around the world\u2014from Ukraine to China to the UK\u2014woke up knowing precisely how to ingratiate themselves with the leader of the most powerful nation on the planet: Investigate his rivals, sway the election in his favor<\/em>. There\u2019s no ambiguity.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also every reason to believe Trump will court those actions. This is a man who stood on a campaign stage and openly asked Russia to help find Hillary Clinton\u2019s emails. As Robert Mueller\u2019s investigation made plain, they did just that. Three years later, Trump dialed up Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to ask directly for a similar \u201cfavor.\u201d<\/p>\n Then, when publicly confronted about his actions following alarm from within the State Department and the intelligence community, Donald Trump stood on the White House lawn and told<\/a> reporters his hopes explicitly on camera: Not only Ukraine but China, too, should investigate the Bidens. Trump\u2019s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who spent two years living at the center of the Russia investigation, has said<\/a> he wouldn't necessarily call the FBI if Russia showed up offering help again this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n It's hard to say what should be more worrying to our democracy: our president unplugged or our adversaries unimpeded? Trump has made it all too clear that he continues<\/a> to think the Zelensky call was \u201cperfect.\u201d If anything, the lesson he\u2019s learned is that he should lean on more<\/em> allies and adversaries to help him personally.<\/p>\n So what happens today? What happens tomorrow? What, weeks or months from now, will turn out to be the next \u201cZelensky call\u201d?<\/p>\n America is completely unprepared for this era where the greatest threat to our democracy is the man leading it.<\/p>\n The one thing we know for sure: Today marks the beginning of a troubling new chapter.<\/p>\n Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg<\/a>) is a contributing editor for WIRED and the co-author of<\/em> THE DAWN OF THE CODE WAR: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat<\/a>. His latest book<\/em>, THE ONLY PLANE IN THE SKY: An Oral History of 9\/11<\/a>, was published in September. He can be reached at garrett.graff@gmail.com.<\/em><\/p>\n