NY Times Columnist: We Must “Pause” Trump’s Presidency

Last week, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh accused Barack Obama and the Democrats of staging a “peaceful coup” to unseat and/or render powerless President Donald Trump. Limbaugh said the media’s portrayal of the so-called Russian conspiracy was completely backwards: That it was the Democrats who were colluding with Russia – knowingly or not – to undermine Trump’s legal and perceived authority.

Limbaugh’s theory perhaps gained some added credibility thanks to a new column from New York Times writer Charles Blow. Blow, a certified anti-Trump writer, said it was time to “pause” the Trump presidency until his connection to the Russians could be determined.

“The American people must immediately demand a cessation of all consequential actions by this ‘president’ until we can be assured that Russian efforts to hack our election, in a way that was clearly meant to help him and damage his opponent, did not also include collusion with or coverup by anyone involved in the Trump campaign and now administration,” Blow wrote on Monday.

While conceding that we can’t have a president whose authority is completely frozen, Blow recommended that we restrict Trump’s power to the “bare minimum standard” while investigations play themselves out.

“Americans must demand at least a momentary respite from — my preference would be a permanent termination of — Trump’s aggressive agenda to dramatically alter the social, economic and political contours of this country,” he wrote.

Of course, that suggestion sounds a lot less dramatic when you look back through Blow’s archives and see that this would be his preference regardless of Trump’s connections to Vladimir Putin. We have a feeling he wouldn’t be quite so adamant about stopping Trump’s agenda if it lined up with his personal ideology, but you can make that judgement for yourself.

Regardless of whether or not the Democrats are actually engaged in a nefarious and illegal scheme to boot Donald Trump out of the White House, they are certainly giving the Russians exactly what they wanted out of this administration. The intelligence agencies said from the beginning that they suspected Russia wanted to create chaos and undermine American faith in democracy. And by threading together this picture of Trump the Traitor, the Democrats are recklessly doing Putin’s bidding.

We can have a sober and thorough investigation into Russia’s meddling without the hysterical voices coming from the now-mainstream left. In fact, that’s the only way we can find the truth.