Trump’s Ukraine call reveals a president convinced of his own invincibility

“We haven’t seen anything like this in my lifetime,” said William A. Galston, a senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution who graduated from college just before Watergate. “He appears to be daring the rest of the political system to stop him — and if it doesn’t, he’ll go further.”

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The effort — which came as the Trump administration was withholding financial and military support from Ukraine to help the small democracy protect itself against Russian aggression — illustrates Trump’s expansive view of executive power and what appears to be a cavalier attitude about legal limits on his conduct.

While Mueller’s investigation did not place Trump directly in the Russian conspiracy to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and boost Trump’s candidacy, the president was an active participant in the Ukrainian episode, which was brought to light by an intelligence official’s whistleblower complaint…

Democrats’ frustration with their inability to check Trump and hold him accountable for his conduct after nine months in the majority is starting to boil over. Lawmakers for the first time are saying publicly that their caucus looks feckless, and some are fretting that their flimsy oversight and reliance on the courts to eventually rescue them have proved fruitless.

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