Trump wants Sen. Jack Reed to be impeached, which is foolish for all sorts of reasons – MS NOW
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The president responded furiously when the Rhode Island Democrat let Fox News viewers in on a secret that Trump desperately wants to deny.
As much of the world started to come to terms with the purported framework to end the United States war in Iran, Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, appeared on “Fox News Sunday” and made clear that he was unimpressed. Indeed, the Rhode Island senator made clear that the U.S.’ interests were far better served by the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which Donald Trump abandoned in 2017.
“First of all, we’re in a much worse position than we were under the JCPOA. The breakout time, that is, the time it would take to assemble enough enriched uranium to develop a weapon, was 12 months during the JCPOA. Today, it’s a week,” Reed said of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
“We are negotiating against a country which its leadership has been eliminated. Now we have even more fanatical leadership who has much more invested and much more to leverage their position,” the senator added. “Abandoning the JCPOA was a bad mistake by the president.”
Trump, evidently, saw the interview and responded in a decidedly Trumpian way. The Hill reported:
President Trump on Sunday called for the impeachment of Democratic Sen. Jack Reed (R.I.), after the lawmaker criticized his decision to pull out of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in his first term.
“Senator Jack Reed, a Dumocrat from R.I., lied when stating the the [sic] Deal we just made is not as good as the Obama disaster known as the JCPOA. Reed is either an outright fraud, or incompetent,” Trump wrote in a Sunday post on Truth Social.
The Republican’s missive, which referred to former President Barack Obama as “Obuma,” concluded, “Impeach Jack Reed!”
To be sure, Trump’s online tantrums have become the background noise of our civic lives and are, for the most part, worth ignoring. This one stood out for me, however, for a few reasons.
First, the idea that a U.S. official should be impeached for arguing one policy is preferable to another policy is ridiculous, even by 2026 standards.
Second, Trump keeps calling for members of Congress to be impeached despite the inconvenient fact that, at least in this country, members of Congress cannot be impeached.
It’s the sort of thing a sitting American president really ought to know. Trump no longer has any excuses for flunking Civics 101 tests, since he’s no longer the rookie who got elected despite never having served a day in any governmental capacity. Trump is now in the sixth year of his presidency, and he has had time to familiarize himself with the basics of how Washington, D.C., works.
But perhaps most important is why the president responded so furiously to Reed’s comments in the first place. The senator was letting Fox News viewers in on a secret that Trump desperately wants to deny: The Obama-era deal with Iran was a generational success story, which Trump abandoned for reasons he has struggled to explain and which created the very problems Trump’s war set out to solve.
On a daily basis lately, the Republican incumbent has railed with varying degrees of hysteria about Obama and the JCPOA, and there’s no great mystery as to why: Trump seems to understand his deal will be compared against Obama’s, and it’s apparently become a point of preoccupation.
The trouble is, this is a test Trump will flunk. His “deal” is already shaping up to be vastly worse than Obama’s, and trying to intimidate people into silence on that point is a fool’s errand.
Steve Benen
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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