Trump impeachment news: President claims no president has ever done as much as him 'for religion' as he escalates Christian magazine attacks
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As Donald Trump reels from Wednesday’s House vote making him only the third American president to be impeached, a Washington Post reporter has claimed he overheard a White House staffer wishing colleagues a “Merry Impeachmas”, suggesting the president’s inner circle is not as united as he likes to insist.
Mr Trump has meanwhile taken to Twitter to denounce the influential religious periodical Christianity Today, founded by legendary evangelist Billy Graham, after it called for his ousting and criticised his “profoundly immoral” conduct. “I won’t be reading ET again!” he frothed, offering a memorable typo.
The president has also been attracting criticism from his fellow Republicans after attacking Democratic congresswoman Debbie Dingell and suggesting her late husband is looking on from hell during his midweek rally in Battle Creek, Michigan, with Oklahoma’s Tom Cole branding his remarks “extraordinarily inappropriate”.
As Mr Trump prepared to sign a series of spending bills to avoid a government shutdown and to approve 2020 defence budgets, among other budgetary concerns, reports revealed that the White House had threatened a presidential veto for the measures if they included language that mandated any aid earmarked for Ukraine be "released quickly" to that country.
The president is accused of withholding aid to Ukraine in a bid to pressure Kiev to investigate his political opponents, an abuse of power at the heart of his impeachment on Wednesday.
Democrats intended to prevent that aid freeze from happening again by including the language in the proposal, but administration officials threatened a veto for the $1.4 trillion spending bill.
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Anxious Trump awake and tweeting after just six hours of sleep
Trump's last tweet yesterday came in at around 11.49am DC time and saw him quoting total nonsense from Laura Ingraham on Fox:
His first of today was posted at 6.12am in Washington, meaning the president got just six hours of sleep:
According to one study from Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, that puts him at risk of an early death.
His wretched junk food diet is surely partly to blame for the lack of sleep but it's hard not to conclude from this that the president is genuinely concerned about the impeachment process, whatever he says to the contray in public.
He clearly had not been expecting Nancy Pelosi's plan to hold back the articles from an imminent crushing by his pals in the Senate, hence his repeated posts denouncing the tactic yesterday.
The New York Times reports this morning, for one, that Trump is "shellshocked" by the vote behind the scenes.
As The NYT puts it, yesterday "was the first day of his new reality, the first day when he woke up with the scarlet letter of impeachment marked with indelible ink on his page in the history books".
Avidly watching TV in the morning, he repeatedly asked advisers of Pelosi: "Why do you think she’s doing that?"
Here's Sam Lovett.
Ex-senator Al Franken likens top Republican to serial killer cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer
Former Minnesota Democratic senator Al Franken has ridiculed the aforementioned McConnell after the top Republican said of the impeachment process on Thursday: "Let's be clear: the House's vote yesterday was not some neutral judgment... It was the predetermined end of a partisan crusade."
"Listening to Mitch McConnell talk about the decline of bipartisanship is like listening to Jeffrey Dahmer complain about the decline of dinner party etiquette," Franken joked in response on Twitter.
For the mercifully uninitiated, the ex-Saturday Night Live stalwart and politician - forced out of office in 2018 after sexual misconduct allegations were levelled against him - is referring here to the notorious Wisconsin serial killer and cannibal who raped and murdered 17 men between 1978 and 1991, preserving and eating their body parts.
Trump attacks Christianity Today in misspelled rant: 'I won't be reading ET again!'
Alienating America's Christian right is rarely a smart move for a Republican but here is the president, bold as brass, attacking Christianity Today over its editorial calling for his ousting.
He says CT "knows nothing about reading a perfect transcript of a routine phone call" (it was a memo, not a verbatim transcript) and says the magazine would rather back "a Radical Left nonbeliever, who wants to take your religion & your guns". Who is he even talking about here? The Dems are still months away from settling on their nominee and none of the candidates are proposing any such thing.
Of course, there's a typo in there to make him look even more ludicrous:
Who seriously believes this man ever read Christianity Today in the first place?
Here's our breaking story.
Pierce Brosnan praises Trump's handling of economy
One of Trump's retweets this morning concerned former 007 actor Pierce Brosnan's unexpected praise of the economy.
Here's Roisin O'Conner with the details.
How Trump’s impeachment compares with Clinton’s
For Indy Premium, Mary Dejevsky recalls her time covering the impeachment of Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair in 1998 with the events of the last week.
'Rhetorical nothing burgers'
Hawaii senator Mazie Hirono has been channelling Charlie Brown ("Good grief!") in laying into the Republicans over their desperate anti-impeachment language, some fine examples of which we saw in the House on Wednesday when the process was compared to both the crucifixion and the bombing of Pear Harbour by particularly unhinged members of the GOP.
Ivanka Trump claims impeachment has 'actually energised' her father
This sounds like pure spin from the first daughter on This Morning, intended to counter the sort of reporting we've seen from The NYT today about Trump's anxiety over Pelosi withholding of the articles of impeachment from the Senate.
Trump trails defence spending bill
How many times has this man written "smocking" in his tweets? Lunacy or a deliberate ploy to own the libs in the MSM? You decide.
Trump voters 'responsible before God' for his crimes, Iranian cleric warns
During Friday prayers in Iran this morning, hardline cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Emami-Kashani urged Americans not to vote for Trump next year or else they will be complicit in his future "crimes", according to BBC Monitoring, citing a local radio broadcast.
"The people of America should know that if this incompetent and ignorant man wins the vote again, they will be accomplices in all the bloodshed that will take place. His voters will be partners in all the crimes he commits," Emami-Kashani said during his sermon on 20 December, which was broadcast live by Radio Tehran.
(Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty)
"The birthday anniversary of Jesus Christ is approaching... if the people of America truly believe in Jesus Christ, they will push away this incompetent leader of America... If the people of America vote for this man and, God forbid, he wins again, they will be responsible before God, before humanity and before history", he added.
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