Daniel DePetris

Kamala Harris began her campaign with an impressive display of political might: a gigantic late-January rally in her hometown of Oakland, California, where 22,000 people turned up for her first major speech as a presidential candidate. “We are at an inflection point in the history of our nation,” the senator from California bellowed into the microphone. “We are here because the American dream and our American democracy are under attack and on the line like never before. And we are here at this moment in time because we must answer a fundamental question: Who are we?”  On 4 December, it all came crashing down.

Donald Trump was given a hard deadline from judiciary committee chairman Jerrold Nadler: if you want to defend yourself against impeachment, you must do so by 6 December. It didn’t take Trump long to respond: over my dead body. But while Trump's bravado is not a surprise, his impeachment strategy is not without its risks.  White House counsel Pat Cipollone delivered a five-page letter to the senior Democratic lawmaker excoriating the process and taking issue with the entire inquiry.

If all it took to become president of the United States was massive spending on television and digital advertisements, Mike Bloomberg would win the 2020 presidential election in a landslide. As the eighth wealthiest person on the planet with a net worth of over £41bn ($53bn), Bloomberg has a practically unlimited war chest at his disposal. And he is more than happy to use it; the former New York City mayor spent £85m ($110m) in the 2018 midterm election cycle on behalf of the Democratic party. Now that he’s officially a Democratic candidate for president, Bloomberg will be leveraging a good chunk of cash on his own prospects.

If there was one person who could directly tie president Donald Trump to the alleged quid pro-quo with the Ukrainians, it was Gordon Sondland. The multimillionaire hotel executive-turned-ambassador had a regular channel of communication with Trump and was a central driver of Washington’s Ukraine policy. As Rep. Mark Meadows, one of Trump’s most committed defenders, said, “The impeachment effort comes down to one guy, Ambassador Sondland.” The White House was likely preparing for a rough day, and Sondland rose to the occasion.

It didn’t take long after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement of an impeachment investigation into President Donald Trump for the top Republican in the Senate to rally his troops. In mid-October, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell schooled his fellow GOP lawmakers on the mechanics of an impeachment process and the Senate’s role as juror and decisionmaker. A tutorial on impeachment is the easy part for McConnell, the shrewd political operator who has battled in the Washington trenches for his entire adult life. The more difficult feat for the veteran politico is balancing the Senate’s job of being a serious jury with the Republican objective of acquitting one of their own and limiting the political damage to their vulnerable incumbents.

The first public hearing into President Donald Trump’s impeachment began with a bang. And it proceeded throughout the afternoon into a constellation of two completely different realities. By the time the hours-long testimony was over, you might find yourself having trouble separating truth from conjecture. Bill Taylor, the interim US ambassador to Ukraine and the star witness of the inquiry, told the panel of a previously unreported phone call between US ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, and president Trump. According to Taylor, one of his aides overheard the conversation, in which Trump was inquiring about the status of Ukraine launching the politically-motivated investigations into the Bidens he was asking for.

If President Donald Trump hoped the release of a memo detailing his July 25 telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was going to exculpate him from questions about misconduct in office, his hopes were dashed the moment the public read the transcript.    Suspicions of Trump trading £323m ($400m) in military aid to Ukraine in return for Zelensky launching a corruption investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden have coloured this entire affair. If a quid pro-quo was offered, it would be a severe violation of the American people’s trust and a gross misuse of the president’s powers.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi may be a liberal from San Francisco, California and a diehard political opponent of President Donald Trump, but she is also an institutionalist at heart. Having gone through the saga of former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in the late 1990s, she has never been a fan of using the procedure to push a president out the door. For Pelosi, Trump’s impeachment has always been a political risk for the Democratic Party, particularly for Democratic politicians in Trump districts who face a tough re-election campaign next year. The dam, however, has broken.

Saudis woke up last Saturday to find the crown jewel of their oil industry in smoke. The attack on the al-Abqaiq oil processing facility, allegedly conducted by cruise missiles and launched from a staging area inside Iran, resulted in the sharpest single-day increase in crude prices since the 1991 Gulf War. Saudi Arabia’s largest oil installation, however, wasn’t the only thing that went up in smoke last weekend. The volley of missiles screeching into Saudi airspace may have also ruined French president Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to deescalate tensions in the Persian Gulf and save the 2015 Iran nuclear deal from a slow and agonising death.

From the moment Donald Trump stepped onto the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president of the United States, there have been people in the Republican party who have sought to bring him down.   During the 2016 GOP primary, Republican national security officials wrote scathing and embarrassing open letters against him. Conventional Republican strategists and commentators like Karl Rove, Bill Kristol and Spectator USA’s own Rick Wilson blasted him as an incompetent, indecent, moron who shouldn’t be ten miles from the Oval Office. Trump’s primary opponents even tried to scuttle his nomination at the convention, an attempt that fizzled out before it really began. Three years later, these Never Trumpers are at it again.

The president of the United States has to wear many hats. When a crisis hits the world, it’s the president who is often called to help solve it. And when a crisis hits the home front, whether it be a mindless mass shooting, a major hurricane, or a mass-casualty terrorist attack, it’s the president who is expected to play the healer-in-chief. It’s now a proven fact that Donald Trump cannot play the role of a healer. The two deadly shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio that claimed the lives of nearly 30 innocent people thrusted an immediate catastrophe upon Trump’s shoulders. And despite pledging to leave the usual political bickering out of it, he couldn’t help himself. Trump did what most of his predecessors have done in a similar situation.

Former Vice President Joe Biden had a gentle plea for Sen. Kamala Harris before the debate even began. As the two clasped hands and greeted one another with a cheerful hello, Biden asked Harris if she could do him a favour: 'go easy on me, kid.' The remark was made in jest; Biden is a politico pro and had no expectation any of his opponents on Wednesday night would let him get off the stage unscathed after two-plus hours. Sure enough, they didn’t. While the frontrunner had a far more aggressive and crisp performance than his low-key appearance in late June, Biden was the proverbial piñata. Every candidate, even the no-names with less than 1 per cent in the polls, tried to hit drop rhetorical anvils on his head.

It wasn’t so long ago when Beto O’Rourke, the punk-rock band member and three-term congressman from West Texas, was the man to beat. O’Rourke was the energetic, dashing politician who looked like a Kennedy and talked like a Kennedy. He may have lost his Senate campaign to the incumbent Ted Cruz, but he made history by scooping up over £64m ($80m) in fundraising in the process. His three-percentage point loss was the closest a Democrat in Texas came to winning a state-wide race in over 25 years. Beto is learning, however, that running a national campaign for president is a different animal—and that viral moments and smooth oratory on countertops will only get you so far.  O’Rourke has a big problem, and he knows it.