Donald Trump and Gordon Sondland

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, New York Times columnist, Michelle Goldberg, tried to analyze Gordon Sondland’s thinking in cozying himself up to the likes of Donald Trump.  Her conclusion was that Sondland paid $1 million for an ambassadorship and bought himself disgrace.  Here is an excerpt.  The entire column is below.

“Ever since Donald Trump began his nightmarish political ascent, some psychologists have been warning us, with increasing urgency, about what it means to have a malignant narcissist in power. In many cases, they’ve been more accurate about the trajectory of the last three years than the Washington hands who assumed Donald Trump would be constrained by our institutions.

But the people whose psychology I really want to understand are those like Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union who is now trying to squirm out of responsibility for his role in the Ukraine scandal. A wealthy hotelier, he seems to want the respect and admiration of the world outside the MAGA bubble, and he knew going into the administration that Trump was trash. Though a lifelong Republican, in 2016 Sondland and a business partner withdrew their support for Trump over the candidate’s attacks on the family of Humayun Khan, a Muslim soldier killed in Iraq, saying that Trump’s “constantly evolving positions diverge from their personal beliefs and values on so many levels.”

Yet once Trump won, Sondland donated $1 million to his inauguration to buy himself an ambassadorship, and then worked slavishly for the president’s approval. “Current and former U.S. officials and foreign diplomats say Sondland seemed to believe that if he delivered for Trump in Ukraine, he could ascend in the ranks of government,” reported The Washington Post. In the process, he may have made himself party to a criminal conspiracy.

Sure, people sell their souls all the time — but why for something as small as a chance to serve a man whose depravity Sondland himself once recognized?”

Tony

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Ever since Donald Trump began his nightmarish political ascent, some psychologists have been warning us, with increasing urgency, about what it means to have a malignant narcissist in power. In many cases, they’ve been more accurate about the trajectory of the last three years than the Washington hands who assumed Donald Trump would be constrained by our institutions.

But the people whose psychology I really want to understand are those like Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union who is now trying to squirm out of responsibility for his role in the Ukraine scandal. A wealthy hotelier, he seems to want the respect and admiration of the world outside the MAGA bubble, and he knew going into the administration that Trump was trash. Though a lifelong Republican, in 2016 Sondland and a business partner withdrew their support for Trump over the candidate’s attacks on the family of Humayun Khan, a Muslim soldier killed in Iraq, saying that Trump’s “constantly evolving positions diverge from their personal beliefs and values on so many levels.”

Yet once Trump won, Sondland donated $1 million to his inauguration to buy himself an ambassadorship, and then worked slavishly for the president’s approval. “Current and former U.S. officials and foreign diplomats say Sondland seemed to believe that if he delivered for Trump in Ukraine, he could ascend in the ranks of government,” reported The Washington Post. In the process, he may have made himself party to a criminal conspiracy.

Sure, people sell their souls all the time — but why for something as small as a chance to serve a man whose depravity Sondland himself once recognized?

On Thursday, Sondland testified before House impeachment investigators. His opening statement was damning for Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. It also appeared deeply dishonest about his own role in trying to extort Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to pursue investigations that would be of propaganda value to the president. Sondland is desperately spinning to distance himself from this whole debacle, suggesting he knows he’s at the center of something reprehensible. What I can’t comprehend is how anyone could think that working for Trump would end up any other way.

In his statement, Sondland provided a partial timeline of the Ukraine pressure campaign. On May 23, he said, he was part of a group of officials who urged Trump to speak to Zelensky by phone and to arrange a White House visit. Trump, however, had questions about the Ukrainian president’s record on “anti-corruption” — which, in Trumpspeak, means willingness to open spurious investigations — and told the group to talk to Giuliani.

Sondland said that he and his colleagues were “disappointed by the president’s direction that we involve Mr. Giuliani,” but felt compelled to follow it. Still, he said, “I did not understand, until much later, that Mr. Giuliani’s agenda might have also included an effort to prompt the Ukrainians to investigate Vice President Biden or his son or to involve Ukrainians, directly or indirectly, in the president’s 2020 re-election campaign.”

There are two possibilities here. Either Sondland was wildly, almost inconceivably ignorant about what was going on around him, or in trying to salvage his reputation, he just lied to Congress.

By May 23, everyone knew that Giuliani wanted the Ukrainians to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. On May 9, The New York Times ran an article headlined, “Rudy Giuliani Plans Ukraine Trip to Push for Inquiries That Could Help Trump,” which described his search for dirt on the Bidens. (“There’s nothing illegal about it,” Giuliani told The Times. “Somebody could say it’s improper.”) The next day a CNN piece was headlined, “Giuliani Defends Going to Ukraine to Press for Investigations Connected to Biden.” As the controversy grew, Giuliani canceled the trip.

So while it may be a mistake to overestimate the acuity of Trump appointees, it’s probably safe to say that Sondland knew exactly what he was involved with.

He tried to play the naïf elsewhere in his testimony as well. Toward the end of his statement, he condemned the idea of a president leveraging military aid to get a foreign government to help him politically. “Withholding foreign aid in order to pressure a foreign government to take such steps would be wrong,” he said. “I did not and would not ever participate in such undertakings.”

The record suggests he did. In July, the former national security adviser John Bolton reportedly told his aide Fiona Hill, “I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up.” And as Sondland testified behind closed doors, Mick Mulvaney, the White House acting chief of staff, appeared at a manic, combative news conference and made it clear what said drug deal involved.

One reason military aid to Ukraine was temporarily frozen, Mulvaney said, was that Trump wanted the country to investigate a conspiracy theory that Ukraine intervened in the 2016 election. “The look-back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the thing that he was worried about in corruption with that nation,” Mulvaney said. He added, sneering: “Get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy.”

It’s a common Trumpist strategy to brazenly admit crimes in public, disorienting people through sheer shamelessness. It’s also common for Trumpists to do what Mulvaney did a few hours later, when he issued a statement denying that he’d said what we all heard him say. (“Once again, the media has decided to misconstrue my comments to advance a biased and political witch hunt against President Trump,” Mulvaney wrote.)

But Sondland’s not really a Trumpist. Based on news reports, he mostly just seems like an insecure opportunist. According to The Post, Sondland had envied some of his rich friends who’d been given ambassadorships in the past, and coveted one of his own. I can understand the longing for honor and status. What confounds me is how anyone could think that working for Trump might provide these things, and not see that any title achieved in this crime-syndicate administration will always come with an asterisk after it, or worse.

I’m not a lawyer and have no idea whether Sondland will face criminal liability. But he has obviously disgraced himself and he appears to know it. “Mr. Sondland now fears that he will be blamed for the scandal, while more powerful players will be protected, one person close to him said,” The Times reported. That’s the thing about deals with the devil. You get what you want, and then it ruins you.