You will be shocked to learn that the Center for Public Integrity obtained emails this weekend that show a Trump administration official put in place a hold on part of the nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine just 90 minutes after the president's infamous July 25 phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky. The senior budget official in question, Michael Duffey, even asked the folks he was emailing at the Pentagon to keep the whole thing on the low. This is the quid pro quo, which they already admitted to, but here it is again in the contemporaneous emails. As a reminder, even Jonathan Turley—the witness Trump's Republican allies called before the House to naysay the impeachment proceedings—admitted a proven quid pro quo would be impeachable.

Everyone knows what happened and why. And yet we're still subjected to Republican senators saying Donald Trump was gravely concerned about generalized corruption in Ukraine. Right, just like his anti-corruption initiatives at his hotels, where he rakes in money from corporate and foreign interests—some of whom don't even stay in the rooms they pay for!—while his government makes policy that may affect those interests. The audacity of these people. Meanwhile, they refuse to allow any direct parties to the scheme—including, say, Duffey—to testify in the Senate trial. Surely, since these folks are all telling the truth about how innocent the whole thing was, they would offer the same story under oath (and penalty of perjury)?

In other news from this weekend past, you will also be shocked to learn the president gave a Very Normal Speech. If you ever wondered what, apart from generational wealth, prompted someone to become a College Republican before, the question has taken on a whole new dimension in the age of Turning Point USA. That's the new-age campus conservative outfit for Trumpists that just a couple years ago had members wear diapers as a way of ridiculing other students. The group is now vying for the hearts of young conservatives against full-on ethno-nationalist types. What a great time to be alive.

Anyway, TPUSA held a Student Action Summit all weekend, and it just happened to be in Palm Beach—you know, where Mar-a-Lago is, and where the president will be spending the festive period while trying to make the name "Southern White House" happen. Because it was all so convenient, the president popped over to the Summit and gave a speech that contained, among other things, this:

This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

If a guy at the bar sounded like this you’d slide a couple stools down as quickly as possible pic.twitter.com/4s3JfQXaSS — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 22, 2019

As Vox's Aaron Rupar aptly put it, this is the guy at the end of the bar you pick up your drink to get away from. He's the guy on the subway with whom you avoid eye contact. He's the dude on the street corner yelling at your car. He is your drunkest uncle, if Ol' Kevin's rants were continually cheered by crowds of hundreds or even thousands of people. (The official story is that Trump is a teetotaler. Does that make this display better?) That's another unnerving thing here: it's not just that the President of the United States can once again be found slurring his words and making delusional claims about the near-death of Christmas—the most ubiquitous holiday in the history of humankind—and struggling to finish a sentence. It's that his fans don't care. Whatever he says, they'll cheer, because he said it. Doesn't need to be true. Doesn't need to make a lick of sense.



That was driven home elsewhere in the speech, where a patented Windmill Rant appeared.

This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Trump’s nuts rant about wind energy: “I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much... Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes & everything.” pic.twitter.com/DvkJq9NbWg — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 23, 2019

Every week we get more damning reports about the ecological decline of our only planet and this is what the theoretical leader of the free world has to say about a core component of the clean-energy system we will need to adopt to survive. Just ranting and raving, making it up as he goes. This is not even the normal dynamic of Republican speech on energy issues, where you get the sense some donor or lobbyist has their ear. This is a petty personal hatred Trump has harbored ever since the Scottish government sought to build 11 wind turbines off the coast of his golf course in Aberdeenshire. He deemed them to be a potential eye sore. (Do they really look that bad? They are kind of cool? Nevermind.) He sued to stop the project and got trounced badly enough that his property had to pay the Scots' legal fees.

Now, though, this personal beef is the official policy of the United States of America. Or at least, it's pretty much the sum total of our president's rhetoric on clean energy. Has he ever suggested there could be some benefits to solar power? Does he have a clue what hydro or geothermal might look like? Of course not. It's not his job to know things, just say them. Even when that means slurring your way through a praise-rant about Rush Limbaugh, as a crowd of putatively young people cheer. God help us all.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io