GEORGE T. CONWAY III

If there's one thing we know about President Trump, it's that he lies and he cheats. Endlessly. And shamelessly. But still, mostly, incompetently.

That's what it's all about for Trump. It's always about winning - winning for Trump, by making him look good in each day's reality-television production. It's never been about the country.

It's simply not bias for a judge to explain her reasoning in a dissent.

Donald Trump is like a practical joke that got out of hand.

Fiduciaries are people who hold legal obligations of trust, like a trustee of a trust. A trustee must act in the beneficiary's best interests and not his own. If the trustee fails to do that, the trustee can be removed, even if what the trustee has done is not a crime.

Instead of channeling Trump, and attacking the courts in ways that are as bad as or worse than the president's, public officials who ought to know better should behave better.

I think the Republican Party has become something of a personality cult.

As all presidents must, Trump swore an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, and to faithfully execute his office and the laws in accordance with the Constitution. That oath requires putting the national interests above his personal interests.

Trump's erratic behavior has long been the subject of political criticism, late-night-television jokes, and even speculation about whether it's part of some incomprehensible, multidimensional strategic game. But it's relevant to whether he's fit for the office he holds.

The electoral calendar is set in stone, by law.

If a president makes a reasoned decision about what best serves the nation's interests, even if he turns out to be wrong, he has committed no impeachable offense. The Framers didn't intend, through impeachment, to transform such policy disputes or mistakes into high crimes.

Any litigator will tell you that adding to your legal team on the eve of trial most likely will not produce better lawyering but, rather, chaos.

One of the bad things about bad behavior by politicians (particularly by Donald Trump, because he's president, but by others as well) is that it not only can encourage bad behavior by politicians of all ideological stripes but also can be cited to justify it.

Particularly as a supposed 'conservative,' Trump ought to know something about the relationship between the federal government and the states.

For Trump, success always has a single father - himself. Failure has a hundred - everyone and anyone else. The media. The Democrats. The 'deep state.' Disloyal staffers. Prosecutors. Judges. Anyone who doesn't do his bidding or sufficiently sing his praises.

Extreme narcissists exaggerate their achievements and talents, and so Trump has spent his life building up a false image of himself - not just for others, but for himself, to protect his deeply fragile ego. He lies endlessly, not just in the way sociopaths do, which is to con others, but also to delude himself.

If anything has cheapened or trivialized the process by which Trump was impeached, it was House Republicans' refusal to treat the proceedings with the seriousness the Constitution demands.

Trump revels in issuing pardons, because that power is essentially absolute.

It's about the principles, it's about the rule of law. You don't have to stay silent when you see something that you don't like that is inconsistent of these timeless principles.

It's also not true that 'abuse of power' is not impeachable, or that a statutory crime is necessary for impeachment.

Any U.S. attorney's office would fall over itself to investigate, for example, a state governor who, while running for reelection against a former mayor, so much as hinted to the mayor's successor that, say, highway funds would be restricted unless the current mayor were to announce an inquiry into her predecessor's alleged corruption.

Trump's lawyers are right that if a president does what he honestly thinks is simultaneously in his personal electoral and the national interests, that's not impeachable, in the following sense: If a president cuts taxes because he thinks it will get him reelected and it will create jobs, that's fine. That's ordinary electoral politics.

The Constitution sets out no standards for granting pardons. They require no consent from Congress, and courts can't second-guess them.

The Framers of the Constitution expected the presidency to be occupied by special individuals, selfless people of the highest character and ability. They intended the Electoral College to be a truly deliberative body, not the largely ceremonial institution it has become today.

I don't, frankly, want to be on television.