For a supposed strongman, President Trump pays little heed to his constitutionally enshrined executive power. Executive staffers serve at the pleasure of the president for the good of the people. But instead of remembering this and simply firing those who displease him, Trump is currently grasping at the powers of a fading reality star sobering up from a quarter century of fame. He’ll continue to govern like a bad parody of a mob boss and catapult himself towards impeachment until he uses the executive powers he has instead of the inane ones he doesn’t.
To anyone with a Twitter account, it was evident for months that the president did not like since-ousted Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. For months this spring, Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and son Donald Trump Jr. took to Twitter and cable news to run with a hit piece by John Solomon, which elevated since-retracted claims from former Ukrainian prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko. Without evidence, Trump’s allies claimed that Yovanovitch issued a “do not prosecute” list to Lutsenko (per his own retraction and the State Department’s refutation, this was an outright lie) and called for her ouster. In reality, the smear campaign came from Giuliani’s since-arrested foreign henchmen Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who viewed Yovanovitch’s focus on combating corruption as an obstacle to their financial possibilities in Ukraine.
But the damage was already done. Trump wanted her out.
The president has every right to listen to conspiracy theorists instead of his own intelligence agents, and if he wanted Yovanovitch, a career diplomat who served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, that was also his right. But for all that Trump likes to playact a tyrant on Twitter, he undermines his own presidency by refusing to exert his actual power in real life.
Instead of just recalling Yovanovitch from Ukraine as he eventually did nearly a year after the beginning of the right-wing conspiracy theory, he tormented the State Department for a year on television, leaving Yovanovitch in her post while discrediting her publicly. Not only was it impossible for her to do her job effectively, but per impeachment hearing testimonies, the State Department also felt unable to publicly defend her and restore her credibility in fear of Trump then undercutting her with another Twitter thread.
Elections have consequences, and absent abuses of power, Trump is allowed to fire whom he pleases. If he wanted Yovanovitch out, he should have fired her from the start. Instead, he kept her around while compromising our official diplomatic channels to Ukraine by attempting to discredit her publicly, only to draw even more attention by firing her in October than he would have by doing so quietly when he initially wanted to. Now he’s facing increasing odds that the House will indeed impeach him, and the only person he has to blame is himself.
