Ross: The problem with businessmen in charge of politics
Oct 23, 2019, 8:12 AM | Updated: Oct 29, 2019, 1:48 pm
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Donald Trump’s future could now depend on a message exchange between two very different ambassadors: diplomat Bill Taylor and businessman Gordon Sondland.
Ross: I’m begging you, Ukraine, just find those emails
Taylor is the acting ambassador to Ukraine, who just delivered an unambiguous statement to the House impeachment investigation: That President Trump delayed security assistance to Ukraine, to push Ukraine’s president into promising that he’d investigate Hunter Biden, and some theory that the hack of the 2016 election came from Ukraine.
Ambassador Taylor had a big problem with that, and said so to European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland. He did that only to have Sondland tell him – and this is according to Taylor’s notes – that President Trump “is a businessman — when a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something, the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the check.”
Sondland, like Trump, is also a businessman. He runs hotels. Nice ones. I’ve stayed in a couple of them. He gets it. This is how businessmen behave.
Are you ready for some prime impeachment TV?
Whereas Ambassador Taylor went to West Point, was an infantry officer, served with the 101st airborne in Vietnam, and was a diplomat in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Jerusalem. He doesn’t see foreign policy as a business deal between two men — he sees it as a matter of national security involving two nations.
I think we all know which approach the Founding Founders would have chosen. But they’re all dead, which means it’s going to be up to us.