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Throughout Trump's campaign for president and the four years in the White House, he and those closest to him repeatedly sought to obfuscate about his overall health -- setting new lows in the standards of transparency for our chief executive in the process.

When Trump tested positive for Covid-19 in October 2020, it was virtually impossible to get a straight answer about his condition out of anyone in the White House -- including White House physician Sean Conley.

Conley repeatedly gave rosy assessments of Trump's health while battling the disease, conveniently parsing words to avoid acknowledging what we now know (and long suspected): This was a very serious health crisis for Trump.

"I was trying to reflect the upbeat attitude that the team, the President in his course of illness has had. I didn't want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction, and in doing so it came off that we're trying to hide something."

Which tells you everything you need to know about Conley -- and the approach to Trump's health he and the White House team took. What difference does the desire to "reflect the upbeat attitude of the team [and] the president," have on Trump's condition? And why would Conley providing accurate information about Trump's condition "steer the course of illness in another direction"? Short answer: It wouldn't.

That Trump's condition was even more dire than we knew, then, isn't surprising. A lack of transparency -- and Trump's desire to always be perceived as strong and, uh, manly -- was a feature, not a glitch, of the Trump White House.

Knowing the full picture of a President's health -- whether that President is Trump or Joe Biden or whoever comes after Biden -- is a public right. Being purposely misinformed or given very limited information for public relations reasons should not be excused. Or repeated.

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Of course Donald Trump's team didn't tell the truth about his Covid-19 illness - CNN

Yet we too are sticking to a script, as celebrants in the impeachment managers bid to win the hearts and minds of jurors who have not shown ownership of either. Mr. Trump may have railed against it and had his surrogates fight it, but the trial has given a new spotlight to an attention addict whose rehab was not going well. He is not there, but this is still The Impeachment of Donald J. Trump, about Donald J. Trump, featuring applause for Donald J. Trump, and starring Donald J. Trump as Donald J. Trump. His ego and his coffers need you to watch, to tweet, to rage.

So do you not watch, to enlarge the collective spiting of him? Do you give oxygen to an amoral human torch? The Resistance did not create or empower Mr. Trump. But we did make the classic first mistake of concluding that our insights, analysis and morality would convince his supporters that they were tragically wrong. When that failed, we made the classic second mistake of assuming we hadnt made our first mistake loudly or clearly enough. Im not ready to believe that we started it, but I, for one, have gotten loud and blasphemous enough to peel the paint off my walls.

Still, we cannot underestimate the power of righteous and organic hatred to overwhelm everything else. It is hard to fathom now, but in the epic sitcom All in the Family, one of the best running jokes consisted entirely of Carroll OConnors Archie Bunker getting in the face of Bea Arthurs Maude Findlay and announcing the identity of the worst president in history. He would elongate it and he would mispronounce it and when he would intone Fraaaaanklin. Delllllano. Roooooooosevelt!; she would erupt in paroxysms of liberal rage at his heresy.

These political passion plays were performed some 25 years after Roosevelt died, and were thus a real-time testament to something the half century since has erased: Beloved and revered as he may have been, F.D.R. was also passionately hated and blamed, and his memory alone could start political fistfights into at least the 1970s.

One wonders if the visceral hatred of Mr. Trump will end that soon. Or if it ever will.

Just as I have far more history with Mr. Trump than I would have wished, I also have some standing on the subject of people consuming political Soylent that they clearly dont like, dont want to see, and dont want to eat.

At roughly this time of year in 1998, I was at the Super Bowl on assignment for NBC and also doing a week of celebrity-themed shows for my little niche, boutique, offbeat news hour on MSNBC. We were all set up to interview John Lithgow in front of the refrigerator in the kitchen set of Third Rock From the Sun when my producer advised there had been a slight change in plans: I would instead be interviewing Tim Russert via satellite from Washington, because the president might be resigning over his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

Our audience first doubled, then trebled. The heady, news-packed and unpredictable early days of the show we subtly renamed White House in Crisis made for compelling viewing. Then came an enormous cloud of the kind of illogic which may apply to whatever follows Mr. Trumps second impeachment trial.

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Opinion | Is This the End of Obsessively Hating Donald Trump? - The New York Times

For the former prime minister Theresa May, one of the most pressing matters she confronted during her encounter with Donald Trump a few days after his inauguration went beyond mere diplomacy.

May had travelled to Washington in 2017 with the intention of persuading the new US president to make a supportive statement about Nato. Little did she expect that she would be calling her husband, Philip, to warn him that images of the US president of holding her hand as they walked through the White House would soon be flashing around the world.

With Trump out of power, those who had ringside seats during four years of dangerous and often chaotic foreign policy are now describing their often bruising encounters in a major new documentary series.

The three-part BBC series, Trump Takes on the World, by the award-winning documentary maker Norma Percy, reveals extraordinary access to key observers of the president.

With testimony from a whos who of world leaders and senior US officials, it offers an unmediated reflection of Trump shorn of political hypocrisies.

It was not just May who found Trump unsettling: to European diplomatic observers, he seemed a strange creature. And he also triggered alarm among some American officials in the room with him, with one defence official noting that the presidents notoriously short attention span suggested a squirrel careening through the traffic.

Mays encounter with Trump, which is described to Percy by British aides as well as Trump insiders, was a taste of what was to come. May was seen as not strong by Trump, according to KT McFarland, the former US deputy national security adviser. But the prime minister had gone into the meeting determined to persuade the president to make a statement backing Nato and warn him over his closeness to Vladimir Putin.

The meeting took a bizarre twist as they walked through the White House.

He held her hand going through the colonnades, which took us all by surprise, and as it turns out, took Theresa by surprise, Fiona McLeod Hill, the former joint chief of staff at No 10, told Percy.

She couldnt really take her hand back, so she was stuck And the first thing she said [afterwards] was I need to call Philip just to let him know that Ive been holding hands with another man before it hits the media.

Before May had the opportunity to call her husband, Trump hosted her for lunch, where another boundary-shattering episode was waiting. First May was treated to the full bloom one of Trumps stream-of-consciousness rants, described by Thomas Shannon, then US undersecretary for political affairs, as running the gamut from his own inauguration to his disdain for the press.

Then, keen to raise the issue of Putin, May asked Trump if he had spoken to the Russian leader, which Trump denied. At that point, however, Trumps chief of staff intervened to tell the president that Putin had actually called, but not been put through.

Hill takes up the story of the toe-curling outburst. Trump at this point looks not orange but red. He flipped. Furious. In front of May, he scolded his advisers in what Shannon recalled as an unseemly moment. He said: Youre telling me that Vladimir Putin called the White House and youre only telling me now during this lunch? Vladimir Putin is the only man in the world who can destroy the United States and I didnt take his call.

May was far from alone in being exposed to Trumps flagrant disregard for boundaries.

From his unilateral withdrawals from the Iranian nuclear treaty and the Paris climate accord to his dealings with the Palestinians, Russia and China, few even those close to him could ever fully grasp the extent of his unpredictability or his disdain for detail.

The former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was thrown off balance by Trumps behaviour during an encounter at a G20 meeting in Hamburg also in 2017.

Like May, Turnbull had important issues on his mind, in this case steel tariffs. Taking his chance, Turnbull collared Trump, who was obsessing about something else. Donald said: Malcolm, do you want to see my SCIF? It is so cool. I had no idea what he was talking about. I thought he was talking about a boat [a skiff]. We turned around a corner and there was this big steel box about the size of a shipping container.

Trump pulled Turnbull into what turned out to be a sensitive compartmented information facility, an ultra-secure communications hub, with the new French president, Emmanuel Macron, also in tow.

He said: This is so cool when youre in there, nobody can hear you, not even the Chinese. Its so secret.

Expectations of Trump from European leaders were not so much low as non-existent. For the former French president Franois Hollande, who dealt with Trump only briefly, an early red flag was raised when the US leader asked him in all earnestness who he should appoint to his team in the White House. I thought he was just being courteous; it was pretty outrageous. Imagine I phoned Obama and said: You know France well, who should I appoint as an adviser? Later, briefing his successor Macron during the transition, Hollande was clear how he regarded the US leader sentiments Percy herself regards as a summing up how many foreign leaders viewed the Trump era.

I said to [Macron], Hollande recalls, dont expect anything from Donald Trump. Do not think youll be able to change his mind. Dont think that its possible to turn him or seduce him. Dont imagine that he wont follow through with his own agenda.

Some friends asked me why I was doing it, said Percy, who has made the documentaries The Death of Yugoslavia, End of Empire and Watergate, and who filmed the new series under lockdown. The view was that we knew what Trump was like. He was on the news every night. But this is the inside story of those who had to deal with him.

Trump Takes on the World begins on Wednesday at 9pm on BBC Two

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How Donald Trump's hand-holding led to panicky call home by Theresa May - The Guardian

While the House impeachment managers have focused on events leading up to the Capitol breach, it was the real time response from Donald Trump to the rioters which yields smoking gun evidence of his intent to incite the insurrection. Trump failed to promptly call off his followers or to summon timely assistance for the police, despite pleas from his fellow Republicans caught up in the mayhem. His final words that day connect his incendiary statements about a stolen election to the storming of the Capitol.

As he watched the insurrection unfold on television, with some delight according to witnesses, Trump made no immediate demand that the rioters leave the Capitol. He failed to heed the pleas of Republicans in Congress, who desperately tried to call him with no response. We are begging essentially, and he was nowhere to be found, Representative Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio said. We know Trump did call Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama after mistakenly dialing Senator Mike Lee of Utah. Trump called Tuberville not to ask about his safety or to offer assistance, but to discuss a strategy for objecting to the count of electoral votes.

When rioters breached the Capitol in full view of cameras, Trump did not appear on television to denounce them or tell his followers to cease and desist. Instead, he stoked the incitement with a tweet to attack his vice president and double down on claims about a stolen election. He wrote, Mike Pence did not have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution, giving states a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones.

Trump later sent a tweet in the passive voice, Stay peaceful! He sent a similar message more than half an hour later. He still had not appeared in person on any medium at this point. Trump eventually released a video that told his supporters, You have to go home now. But he prefaced that with another incitement, I know your pain. I know you are hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it. He praised the rioters, We love you. You are very special.

However, the smoking gun tweet came that evening but was later deleted. Trump wrote, These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously and viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly and unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love and in peace. Remember this day forever!

Trump admitted in his own words that violent protest was a likely moment of grievances over an election that thwarted the will of his supporters. But it was Trump himself who ginned up these grievances for two months with a drumbeat of lies about the election that culminated in the fiery rhetoric of his rally. In his tweet, Trump further assured rioters with love that they had acted as patriots rather than insurrectionists. Their storming of the Capitol, he implied, should be forever cherished instead of reviled.

The rioters themselves understood they were summoned by him. Video of the mayhem shows them shouting at the police their claims of legitimacy, We were invited by the president of the United States. The Trump loyalist Jenna Ryan declared after the Capitol breach, We were going in solidarity with President TrumpDonald TrumpDOJ to seek resignations of most Trump-appointed US attorneys: report Trump attorney withdraws request to not hold impeachment trial on Saturday Kinzinger in op-ed calls on GOP senators to convict Trump in impeachment trial MORE. This was our way of going and stopping the steal. Meanwhile, Trump has yet to acknowledge the victory of Joe Biden or to retract his claims of a landslide win snatched away by massive fraud.

Allan Lichtman is an election forecaster and a distinguished professor of history at American University. He is the author of The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present. He tweets @AllanLichtman.

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Here is the smoking gun evidence to back impeachment of Donald Trump | TheHill - The Hill

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At noon on 20 January, presuming he doesnt have to be dragged out of the White House as a trespasser, Donald Trump will make one last walk across the South Lawn, take his seat inside Marine One, and be gone.

From that moment, Trumps rambunctious term as president of the United States will be over. But in one important aspect, the challenge presented by his presidency will have only just begun: the possibility that he will face prosecution for crimes committed before he took office or while in the Oval Office.

Youve never had a president before who has invited so much scrutiny, said Bob Bauer, White House counsel under Barack Obama. This has been a very eventful presidency that raises hard questions about what happens when Trump leaves office.

For the past four years Trump has been shielded from legal jeopardy by a justice department memo that rules out criminal prosecution of a sitting president. But the second he boards that presidential helicopter and fades into the horizon, all bets are off.

The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, is actively investigating Trumps business dealings. The focus described in court documents is extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization including possible bank fraud.

The government is going to have decisions to make about how to respond

A second major investigation by the fearsome federal prosecutors of the southern district of New York has already led to the conviction of Trumps former lawyer Michael Cohen. He pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations relating to the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, the adult film actor who alleged an affair with Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.

During the course of the prosecution, Cohen implicated a certain Individual 1 Trump as the mastermind behind the felony. Though the investigation was technically closed last year, charges could be revisited once Trumps effective immunity is lifted.

It all points to a momentous and fiendishly difficult legal challenge, fraught with political danger for the incoming Biden administration. Should Trump be investigated and possibly prosecuted for crimes committed before and during his presidency?

It looks like the incoming administration will have to confront some form of these issues, said Bauer, who is co-author of After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency. The government is going to have decisions to make about how to respond, given the potential that it becomes a source of division.

Any attempt to hold Trump criminally liable in a federal prosecution would be a first in US history. No exiting president has ever been pursued in such a way by his successor (Richard Nixon was spared the ordeal by Gerald Fords contentious presidential pardon).

Previous presidents have tended to take the view that it is better to look forwards in the name of national healing than backwards at the failings of their predecessor. And for good reasons any prosecution would probably be long and difficult, act as a huge distraction, and expose the incoming president to accusations that they were acting like a tinpot dictator hounding their political enemy.

If you do nothing you are saying that though the president of the United States is not above the law, in fact he is

That a possible Trump prosecution is being discussed at all is a sign of the exceptional nature of the past four years. Those who argue in favor of legal action accept that there are powerful objections to going after Trump but urge people to think about the alternative the dangers of inaction.

If you do nothing you are saying that though the president of the United States is not above the law, in fact he is. And that would set a terrible precedent for the country and send a message to any future president that there is no effective check on their power, said Andrew Weissmann, who was a lead prosecutor in the Mueller investigation looking into coordination between Russia and Trumps 2016 campaign.

As head of one of the three main teams answering to the special counsel Robert Mueller, Weissmann had a ringside seat on what he calls Trumps lawless White House. In his new book, Where Law Ends, he argues that the prevailing view of the 45th president is that following the rules is optional and that breaking them comes at minimal, if not zero, cost.

Weissmann told the Guardian that there would be a price to be paid if that attitude went unchallenged once Trump leaves office. One of the things we learnt from this presidency was that our system of checks and balances is not as strong as we thought, and that would be exacerbated by not holding him to account.

Bauer, who was an adviser to Biden during the presidential campaign but has no role in the transition team, is also worried that a sort of double immunity would be established. Presidents cannot be prosecuted while in office under justice department rules, but under such a double immunity nor could they be prosecuted once leaving the White House in the interests of national healing.

And so the president is immune coming and going, and I think that would be very difficult to square with the idea that he or she is not above the law.

Biden has made clear his lack of enthusiasm for prosecuting Trump, saying it would be probably not very good for democracy. But he has also made clear that he would leave the decision to his appointed attorney general, following the norm of justice department independence that Trump has repeatedly shattered.

Other prominent Democrats have taken a more bullish position, adding pressure on the incoming attorney general to be aggressive. During the Democratic primary debates, Elizabeth Warren called for an independent taskforce to be set up to investigate any Trump corruption or other criminal acts in office.

Kamala Harris also took a stance that may come to haunt the new administration. The vice president-elect, asked by NPR last year whether she would want to see charges brought by the Department of Justice, replied: I believe that they would have no choice and that they should, yes.

Trump issued a series of pardons largely characterized by political self-interest

There are several possible ways in which the justice department could be forced to confront the issue of whether or not to take on Trump. One would be through a revelation as yet unknown, following the emergence of new information.

Weissmann points out that the Biden administration will have access to a wealth of documents that were previously withheld from Congress during the impeachment inquiry, including intelligence agency and state department files. Official communications sent by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump through their personal emails and messaging apps an ironic move given the flak Hillary Clinton endured from the Trump family in 2016 for using her personal email server may also become available for scrutiny.

But the two most likely avenues for the pursuit of any criminal investigation would relate to Trumps use of his presidential pardon power and alleged obstruction of justice. Trump issued a series of pardons largely characterized by political self-interest, Weissmann said.

Though the presidential pardon power is extensive, it is not, as Trump has claimed, absolute including the absolute right to pardon himself. He is not immune from bribery charges if he were found to have offered somebody a pardon in exchange for their silence in a judicial case.

For Weissmann, the way Trump continually teased his associates including Roger Stone and Paul Manafort with the promise of pardons in the middle of federal prosecutions was especially egregious. There may be a legitimate reason to give somebody a pardon, but whats the legitimate reason for dangling a pardon other than to thwart that person from cooperating with the government?

Perhaps the most solid evidence of criminal wrongdoing compiled against Trump concerns obstruction of justice. John Bolton, the former national security adviser, went so far as to say that for Trump, obstruction of justice to further his own political interests was a way of life.

In his final report on the Russia investigation, Mueller laid out 10 examples of Trumps behavior that could be legally construed as obstruction. Though Mueller declined to say whether they met the standard for charges the US attorney general, Bill Barr, suggested they did not, but gave no explanation for his thinking he did leave them in plain sight for any future federal prosecutor to revisit.

In one of the starkest of those incidents, Trump tried to scupper the special counsel inquiry itself by ordering his White House counsel, Don McGahn, to fire Mueller. When that became public he compounded the abuse by ordering McGahn to deny the truth in an attempt at cover-up.

Weissmann, who played a key role in gathering the evidence against Trump in the Mueller report, said that such obstruction goes to the heart of why Trump should face prosecution.

When the president, no matter who it is, obstructs a special counsel investigation there have to be consequences. If you can obstruct an investigation criminally but you dont have to worry about ever being prosecuted, well then, theres no point in ever appointing a special counsel.

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How real is the threat of prosecution for Donald Trump post-presidency? - The Guardian