by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
NOTE:
“Mmm-Peach-Mint” was a novelty flavor introduced by the Baskin-Robbins ice
cream company in the summer of 1974 as a commercial tie-in to the House
Judiciary Committee’s deliberations on impeaching then-President Richard Nixon.
“What doesn’t
kill you makes you stronger,” said Friedrich Nietzsche — in a line later
appropriated by singer Kelly Clarkson. During the 2016 Presidential campaign, I
compared Donald Trump to Antaeus, the giant whom the Greek hero Herakles (you
probably know him better by his Roman name, Hercules) had to fight as one of
his 12 legendary “labors.” The problem was that Antaeus was the son of Gaea,
the earth mother, so every time Herakles knocked him to the ground, he got back
up again, refreshed by a boost of strength from his mom. The only way Herakles
could defeat Antaeus was by holding him in mid-air with one hand while beating
him up with the other, so Gaea couldn’t come in contact with him and give him
the strength to keep fighting.
The most amazing
aspect of Donald Trump’s weird life is his uncanny ability to snatch victory
from the jaws of defeat. He did it in 1991, when the banks who had loaned him
money to build casinos in Atlantic City were about to foreclose on him and
force him into bankruptcy — until they realized that the casinos would be worth
more with Trump’s name on them than without it. So they cut a deal by which he
could keep his name on the casinos and collect a royalty from it, but without
having anything to do with running them. The deal energized Trump’s businesses;
realizing he could make money merely by leasing his name without the bother of
actually building or owning anything, he did many more such deals and raked in
huge amounts of money for doing absolutely nothing.
Trump snatched
victory from the jaws of defeat again in 2016, when the release of his
conversation with Billy Bush on the set of Access Hollywood — with Trump’s proud boast that he could have his
way with any woman he wanted because “when you’re a star, they’ll let you do
anything” — one month before the election caused panic within the Republican
Party. Veteran GOP professionals and strategists panicked, thinking there was
no way the American people would elect a President who had openly and proudly
boasted of committing rape on national TV. There was even talk of taking Trump
off the ticket and putting up his running mate, Mike Pence, for President.
Instead, Trump stayed on the ticket and ultimately won the presidency in the
Electoral College despite getting three million fewer votes than his principal
opponent.
And he’s about
to do it again as he becomes only the fourth President against whom impeachment
has been recommended to the House of Representatives. Andrew Johnson — a
Tennessee Democrat whom Illinois Republican Abraham Lincoln put on the 1864
ticket as a symbol of national unity — got impeached four years later, and
escaped conviction by one vote in the U.S. Senate. Richard Nixon resigned
rather than face near-certain impeachment by the House and removal by the
Senate. Bill Clinton, like Andrew Johnson, escaped removal because, though 55
Senators voted to convict him on one of the articles of impeachment, his
impeachers couldn’t muster the two-thirds Senate vote required under the
Constitution.
Donald Trump
will have no problem staying in office. He will not only escape Senate
conviction, he will do so by a far larger and more substantial margin than
either Johnson or Clinton. On December 12, 2019 the House Judiciary Committee
voted to recommend to the full House that Trump be impeached — but they did so
on a strict party-line vote, with all 21 committee Democrats voting for and all
17 Republicans voting against. The vote to impeach Trump in the full House is
likely to go along similarly strict party lines; a few Democrats may buck the
party and vote against impeachment but no Republican is likely to vote for it
because if they do, they’ll immediately be purged from the party the way
Right-wing Tea Party Michigan Congressmember Justin Amash was after he merely
said he favored the House launching an impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump.
Likewise, Trump
will have no trouble surviving the Senate trial. With the U.S. Senate split 53
to 47 in the Republicans’ favor, 20 Republicans would have to cross party lines
to vote to convict him and remove him from office. That would be 20 more
Republicans than will actually vote against him. Senate majority leader Mitch
McConnell (R-Kentucky) has made it clear he is actively coordinating
impeachment strategy with Trump and his attorneys to make sure no Republicans
defect. Instead of an impartial juror — which is what Senators are supposed to
be when they try an impeachment (they even have to take a special oath to do
that, above and beyond the oath they had to take to assume office) — McConnell
clearly sees himself as a partisan floor manager, working to make sure a bill
that would be hostile to his party and its leader gets defeated.
But even before
McConnell admitted publicly that he was “in lock-step” with Trump and his legal
team fighting the impeachment, there was virtually no chance of any Senate Republican defections. The reason is that
Trump has such a total “hold” on the Republican base that any GOP
Congressmember or Senator who dares defy him — especially on such an
existential issue as his ability to continue in office — would instantly be
writing his political obituary. Any Republican House member who votes to
impeach Trump, or any Senator who votes to convict him, will instantly draw a
pro-Trump primary challenger and get thrown out of office before he or she has
a chance to make it to the general election.
Impeachment Makes Trump
Stronger
What’s more,
being impeached by the Democratic House and acquitted by the Republican Senate
will only make Donald Trump a stronger,
not a weaker, candidate in November 2020. Trump has managed to build a cult of
victimhood that he shares with his base voters. For someone born to as much
money as he was (even if, as I suspect, Trump’s fortune is considerably smaller
than he says it is — one of the real
reasons I think he is fighting so hard to keep from having to release his tax
returns), Trump has an amazing amount of status anxiety and grievance. Fred
Trump, Donald’s father, was a reasonably successful developer in the outer
boroughs of New York City — but the Trumps weren’t considered part of New
York’s “A”-list because they hadn’t cracked Manhattan.
When Donald took
over, aided by attorney Roy Cohn — former chief of staff to the notorious
Red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) and later so unscrupulous a
lawyer that the New York State Bar disbarred him a few months before he died of
AIDS complications in 1987 — he did
manage to do real-estate deals in Manhattan. But he still didn’t get the
respect and awe he wanted from his fellow 1-percenters. Instead he was regarded
as a tabloid figure, a sort of “trash celebrity” who made headlines with his
adulteries and published ghost-written “autobiographies” like The Art
of the Deal and Surviving at the
Top. Trump eventually landed the job
hosting the “reality” TV show The Apprentice, which presented him as the most successful and
intelligent super-capitalist of all time, but he still felt so much status
anxiety, so much fear that he’s really a little man (and a lousy
businessperson) under all the braggadocio, he felt the only way he could
counteract his fears of inadequacy and inferiority was to run for, and win, the
biggest prize of all: the U.S. Presidency.
Trump’s status
anxieties, fears, hatreds and prejudices found a perfect match in the huge
voter base the Republican Party built out of the wrenching political changes of
the 1960’s. As the Democrats, once the party of slavery, segregation and the Ku
Klux Klan, switched sides on the race issue and became the party of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, many white working-class
voters who had previously been loyal Democrats started to change their views.
They saw the Democrats extending the reach of New Deal social programs to
African-Americans and other racial minorities, and believed this would mean
money and social access would be taken away from them and given to people of color. They also saw the
anti-Viet Nam War movement and wrenching social changes of the 1960’s —
particularly the sexual revolution, drug use and the hippie culture — as direct
attacks on the values they had been taught to revere and live by when they grew up.
Confronted by
the independent Presidential candidacy of openly racist, reactionary Alabama
governor George Wallace, which threatened to split the Right-wing working-class
vote aroused by racial and social prejudices and enable the Democrats to win
the 1968 Presidential election, Richard Nixon and Democrat-turned
independent-turned Republican Senator Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina) cooked
up the “Southern Strategy.” That meant that with the Democrats having given up
on being the policy of racism and cultural prejudice, the Republicans would
take on those mantles and embrace racist promises and policies. The “Southern
Strategy” worked even better than its authors intended: it reversed the
Presidential outcome from Lyndon Johnson’s 61 percent victory over Barry
Goldwater in 1964 to a combined 57 percent for Nixon and Wallace against
Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent in 1968.
It also set the
stage for the Republicans to become what political scientist Samuel Lubell called the “sun party,” the party that sets the agenda, dominates the
electorate and relegates America’s other major party to “moon party” status.
That doesn’t mean the “sun party” wins every election, but it does mean that when they lose they don’t stay out of
power very long, and they’re able to block any major changes the “moon party”
tries to make on the rare occasions they make it into power. Since 1968 the
Republicans have won eight Presidential elections to the Democrats’ five, and a
series of increasingly Right-wing Republican Presidents — Richard Nixon, Ronald
Reagan, George W. Bush and now Donald Trump — have slowly but surely remade the
country in an ideologically Rightward direction.
There are limits
to that analysis. The Republicans — especially since the 1980 election, when
the so-called “Moral Majority” and succeeding organizations on the Christian
Right first established themselves as a major part of the GOP base — have had a
lot more success with the Libertarian economic part of their agenda than the
social part. While a series of tax cuts biased in favor of the rich has
severely weakened government’s ability to level the playing field economically
or do much in the way of infrastructure and other social investments, women in
most states still have the right of reproductive choice and Queer people can
marry each other. It’s not surprising that a movement largely funded by the
super-rich would tackle the super-rich’s economic priorities — mainly, to make
America’s distribution of wealth and income even more unequal in their favor — before they’d fulfill the
demands of the Christian Right.
But overall the
Right has become far more powerful and influential than the Left, not only
nationwide but worldwide (though that’s a topic for another article). And they’ve
done it largely by nursing the status anxieties of working-class voters who
used to support Left or center-Left parties but now see those parties as
representing ethnic minorities, immigrants and others who are “taking our jobs
away.” At least part of the Rightward transformation of America has been the
transformation of the U.S. media, which began in 1987 when Reagan’s Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) ended the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” that
had previously required broadcasters to present both sides of controversial
issues.
As music radio
shifted from AM to the better-sounding FM band, the entire AM radio band became
dominated by talk shows. Not all of them were political, but the ones that were
were almost entirely strongly Right-wing in orientation. Eventually the stars
of Right-wing radio — Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Levin, Roger Hedgecock
et al. — built huge followings by using
the same rhetorical style Senator Joe McCarthy had used before them and Donald
Trump would pick up later. It’s a combination of self-righteousness, a bullying
style that openly sneers at anyone who disagrees, a conspiratorial world view
that doesn’t admit the possibility that anyone might have a different opinion
without being part of some group with a nefarious anti-American agenda, and an
overall appeal in which the host tells the listeners that they are part of an
embattled “real American” minority under siege by the forces of progressivism
who want to take away their jobs, their schools, their guns and the God-given
“right” of white men to rule.
Trump has won
the huge following he has — about 40 to 45 percent of the American population —
in large measure because he’s the first Presidential candidate who talks like a
host on AM talk radio or Fox News (which brought the voice of talk radio to TV
in 1996 and has remained the highest-rated cable news network ever since). Like
the talk-radio and Fox hosts, he portrays himself as the victim, endlessly put
upon by dastardly “plots” seeking to undermine the good work he’s doing on
behalf of America — or at least on behalf of the Americans he considers part of
his coalition. Like Antaeus, he gains strength from every attack against him
because he can cite it as yet more evidence that “they” — the progressives, the
liberals, the Democrats, people of color, immigrants, “uppity” women, Queers —
are out to get him.
When Rush
Limbaugh first started gaining his nationwide popularity, many listeners told
reporters they liked him because “he says what I think.” Like Trump, Limbaugh
told his audiences that they shouldn’t be ashamed to be prejudiced against
people of color, feminists or Queers; instead, they should be proud of those attitudes because those were the attitudes that
had made America “great.” Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,”
tied right into the attitude of many white working-class voters that they had
lost something the Democrats, people of color, immigrants and “free-traders”
had taken away from them: not only the good-paying factory jobs that had once
sustained them but the unquestioned sense that men were superior to women,
whites were superior to people of color, and Queer people were so far beyond
the pale they should stay hidden in the closets, be arrested and, when exposed,
do the “honorable” thing of killing themselves.
Trump has played
the victim card again and again and again
during his candidacy and his Presidency. Every time he’s faced a serious
challenge, from the Access Hollywood
tape to Robert Mueller’s investigation into his campaign’s alleged “collusion”
with Russia to the current threat of impeachment, he’s denounced it as a “witch
hunt” by people who simply hate him and want to get rid of him no matter how
much harm that will do to “our Country” (a word he always capitalizes in his tweets). Like the 18th
century French King Louis XIV, who famously said, “L’etat, c’est moi” (“The
state? It is I!”), Trump equates his own interest with that of America as a
whole and regards his enemies as vicious, irredeemably evil and out to destroy
him and thereby hurt the “Country.”
A number of
commentators have noted the huge numbers of angry tweets Trump has sent out
about impeachment as evidence that he really doesn’t want to become just the
third President to be formally impeached by the House and tried by the Senate.
Don’t believe it. Trump saying “Please don’t impeach me” is like Br’er Rabbit
saying, “Please don’t throw me in the briar patch.” Just as Br’er Rabbit wanted to be in the briar patch because all the goodies he
wanted were there, Trump wants to be impeached because it will provide him the
ultimate victim card, the final proof that the dastardly “They” are out to get
him by any means necessary — and therefore his base needs to rise up and not
only re-elect him but do so by a landslide margin.
One Democrat who
realized from the get-go how dangerous it would be for her party to impeach
Donald Trump was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Ever since her party regained
control of the House in November 2018, Pelosi had been trying her damnedest to
put the brakes on any consideration of impeachment because she knew that with no chance that Trump would be convicted in
the Senate, all an impeachment would do is rile up Trump’s base and make his
re-election easier, not harder.
As Trump openly defied the House and Mueller’s investigation in every way he
could think of — including instituting a blanket prohibition on White House
staff talking to Congressional committees or providing them documents, thereby
blocking Congress from doing its constitutional job of “overseeing” the
Presidency — Pelosi kept short-circuiting the demands of other House Democrats
to take up impeachment because she knew how devastating it would be for her
party and its chances of defeating Trump in 2020.
But Donald
Trump, a man who mistakes forbearance for “weakness,” responded to Pelosi’s
reluctance to impeach not by stepping
back from his anti-democratic treatment of Congress, but by ramping it up. On
July 25 — just one day after Robert Mueller effectively closed out his
investigation by testifying inconclusively before the House Judiciary and
Intelligence Committees — Trump was at it again, calling Ukrainian President
Volodomyr Zelensky and threatening to withhold military aid Ukraine desperately
needed in its war with Russia unless Zelensky ordered investigations of former
vice-president Joe Biden, (so far) the front-runner in the race for the
Democratic nomination against Trump, and Biden’s son Hunter. Trump also asked
Zelensky to announce investigations into loony-tunes Right-wing conspiracy
theories that it wasn’t Russia that hacked the 2016 U.S. election, but Ukraine
— and they were trying to help Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump.
Trump’s pattern
of responding to attacks with defiance has continued to this day. In a bizarre
column in the December 15 Los Angeles Times (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-12-15/impeachment-democracy-presidents-donald-trump),
law professors Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq of the University of Chicago and David
Landau of Florida State University wrote, “Once impeachment begins, most
presidents are likely to refrain from the controversial behavior — be it
outright corruption or subverting foreign policy for a political campaign —
that precipitated the process.” Not Donald Trump. As the House Judiciary Committee was debating
impeachment, Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani — who himself is under
investigation by the Southern District of New York — was in Ukraine
interviewing government officials seeking derogatory information on the Bidens
for a documentary film he’s making for a Right-wing Web site.
Trump himself
said in one of the impromptu press conferences he likes to give on the White House
lawn, when asked if it was appropriate for him to tell the Ukrainian President
to investigate one of his political rivals, “I think Ukraine should investigate the Bidens.” He added that China should
also investigate the Bidens because Hunter Biden got a seat on the board of a
Chinese company after he left the board of the Ukrainian energy company
Burisma. As a number of commentators have noted, Trump seems to think that the
way to answer being accused of something illegal, like asking a foreign country
or its nationals to help his political campaign, is to do it again, and this
time to do it in public, telling his people that he’s so unafraid of any
consequences, and so convinced he did nothing wrong, that he’ll do it again in
plain view.
Impeachment and the
Democratic Presidential Candidates
Trump’s chances
for re-election are zooming upward not only because it will be yet another
victim card he can play to mobilize the base, but also because the Democratic
Party is, as usual, screwing things up. First, the Democrats overconfidently
assumed that Trump couldn’t win the 2016 election — and indeed he wouldn’t have
if the United States were really a
democracy, since three million more people voted for Hillary Clinton than for
Trump. Instead, the framers of the Constitution deliberately made the U.S. a
limited republic in which, as James Madison wrote in Federalist #10, elected representatives would “refine and
enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body
of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country.”
Thus the framers
created a structure in which no individual citizen would vote directly for any
office higher than a member of the House of Representatives. U.S. Senators
would be chosen by state legislatures (until 1913, when the Constitution was
amended to provide for direct election of Senators) and the President would be
chosen by an electoral college whose delegations would meet separately in their
own states. One of the ways the Republican Party has become and remained the
dominant “sun party” force in U.S. politics since 1968 is they’ve shrewdly used
and exploited the anti-democratic features of the Constitution — the Electoral
College, the guarantee of two Senators to each state regardless of population,
and the near-absolute power of state legislatures to decide who can (or can’t)
vote and to draw up the districts by which House members are elected.
The Democrats
are slowly but surely throwing away whatever chance they had to defeat Donald Trump
at the polls in 2020. First, they allowed too many candidates to enter the
race. The Republicans made that mistake in 2016, but it didn’t matter because
Donald Trump seized the initiative and won an early (and lasting) advantage
over the Republican base by being more open and out-front in his bigotry than
his opponents had dared. No Democrat in 2020 has managed a similar lightning
emergence from the crowded field. If you’re a Democrat, no matter what tendency
within the party you identify with — militant progressive, cautious
left-of-center, moderate or economically conservative and socially liberal —
there’s more than one candidate for you.
In 2016
progressive Democrats didn’t have to choose between Bernie Sanders and
Elizabeth Warren because Sanders only decided to run after Warren decided not
to. Now they’re running against each other, thereby splitting the progressive
vote and paving the way for a moderate. Or, rather, they would be doing that if there were a truly viable moderate
candidate — which there isn’t. Joe Biden began the campaign as the Democratic
frontrunner largely because of his association with Barack Obama; he’s run so
openly and blatantly an appeal to return to the Obama years and to get politics
off the front pages as much as possible that I’ve joked his campaign slogan
should be, “Make America Boring Again.”
One of the grim
ironies of the Trump impeachment is that Joe Biden’s political career is
collateral damage — because Joe Biden in 2015 did exactly the same thing
to Ukraine that Donald Trump did in 2019.
In 2015 Biden went to Ukraine to meet with then-Ukrainian President Petro
Poroshenko and demanded that he fire the country’s general prosecutor, Viktor
Shokin, who at the time was leading an investigation into Burisma Holdings, the
Ukrainian energy company on whose board Biden’s son Hunter then sat. Biden told
Poroshenko that Ukraine wouldn’t be getting $1 billion in loan guarantees the
U.S. had promised them unless Poroshenko got rid of Shokin. Four years later,
Trump called the current Ukrainian President, Volodomyr Zelensky — who’d won
with 70 percent of the vote largely over allegations that the Poroshenko
administration was corrupt — and essentially told him he wouldn’t be getting
U.S. military aid for his war with Russia unless, among other things, he
reinstated the investigation Shokin had launched against Burisma and the
Bidens.
It’s true that,
as USA Today reporter Courtney
Subramanian explained in a story published October 3 (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/10/03/what-really-happened-when-biden-forced-out-ukraines-top-prosecutor/3785620002/),
there are extenuating circumstances in Biden’s case that don’t exist in
Trump’s. The European Union and the International Monetary Fund wanted Shokin
out not because they thought he was too aggressively investigating corruption,
but quite the opposite: they didn’t think he was investigating it aggressively
enough. Ukrainian activists like Daria Kaleniuk of the Anti-Corruption Action
Center in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, also thought Shokin was an impediment, not a
help, to the fight against Ukraine’s endemic corruption. “Civil society
organizations in Ukraine were pressing for his resignation,” Kaleniuk told
Subramanian, “but no one would have cared if there had not been voices from
outside this country calling on him to go.”
But as the old
expression goes, “When you’re explainin’, you ain’t campaignin’.” If Joe Biden
is the Democratic nominee, every Republican and Republican-leaning opinion
outlet, including talk radio and Fox News, will be hammering away at the
argument that the Democrats are being total hypocrites, impeaching Trump and
threatening to remove him from office for something it was Biden, not Trump,
who did. Already Viktor Shokin has written letters and sent them to Republican
political operatives, and it would not surprise me at all if Shokin either
appears in Republican campaign videos (like the “documentary” Rudy Giuliani was
just in Ukraine shooting) or, worse yet, comes to the U.S. and appears on stage
with Trump to finger Biden as the “real” culprit in attempting to influence
Ukraine for his own personal advantage.
Despite their
plethora of candidates, the Democrats at this point have no one running who has
a real chance of unseating Trump. If they nominate Joe Biden, the Republicans
will destroy him over his own dealings with Ukraine and whatever else they can
dig up in his past and that of his family (including Hunter’s history of
alcohol and drug abuse, which already got cited by Republican Congressmember
Matt Gaetz in the impeachment hearings). If they nominate Bernie Sanders or
Elizabeth Warren, Wall Street and the other members of America’s 1 percent, who
regard Sanders and Warren as existential threats, will either sit the election
out or actively support Trump. It will be 1972 all over again: an early
moderate front-runner done in by Republican dirty tricks and a progressive
nominee crushed by the real power centers in American society.
Hence the panic
among corporate-friendly Democrats and their desperate search for a new
candidate — including the emergence of Michael Bloomberg as at least the third
mega-rich nominal Democrat (after Tom Steyer and Andrew Yang) who’s trying to
buy the nomination with his own personal fortune. The irony is that we know the
kind of Democrat who’s been able to win Presidential elections since the
Right-wing realignment of 1968 from the three people who have — Jimmy Carter,
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — and yet no one like that is running this year.
Carter, Clinton
and Obama had several things in common. They were all relatively young,
good-looking and charismatic, but they had substantial political experience in
important positions: Carter and Clinton as state governors and Obama as a U.S.
Senator. They all had the knack of making themselves seem more progressive than they really were: they looked
progressive enough to appeal to young voters but not so progressive as to scare Wall Street and unite the
super-rich against them. They were all able to carry at least some Southern
states: Carter and Clinton by being white Southerners themselves and Obama, in
the years before the U.S. Supreme Court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, by
getting enough African-American voters to overcome the Democrats’ ongoing
disadvantage among Southern whites.
You see anybody
like that in the Democratic race today? I sure don’t. (Sorry, Pete Buttigieg,
but being mayor of a small college town in Indiana doesn’t count as substantial
political experience.) Frankly, I was hoping Virginia Senator Tim Kaine would
run — he was Hillary Clinton’s running mate but somehow managed to avoid being
tainted by the scandals surrounding her, he helped make Virginia the one
ex-Confederate state Trump didn’t carry
in 2016, and while he’s not a hard-core progressive by any means he’s been
progressive enough he could
conceivably pull off the balancing act between moderate and progressive
Democrats that helped elect Carter, Clinton and Obama. But Kaine became one of
the few Democrats with a national reputation who didn’t announce for President in 2020, and without him or
someone like him in the race Trump’s re-election is looking more and more
likely every day.
And if Trump does win in 2020, goodbye to American democracy. The U.S.
will likely join the growing list of countries run by what I call “Dark
Nationalists,” dictators who take power in constitutionally legitimate ways but
then rule basically as autocrats, abolish all avenues for political dissent,
launch openly discriminatory campaigns against minorities, foreigners and
anyone else they don’t consider “truly _____ ” (insert name of country here).
The list includes big countries like Russia, India, Brazil and (since its most
recent election) Great Britain, as well as smaller but still important
countries like Turkey, Hungary, Poland and the Philippines. Trump’s re-election
would pave the way for a new world order in which the U.S. and Russia would be
fast allies, spreading the gospel of anti-democracy around the world and
supporting fellow Dark Nationalists in France, Germany and any other nation
with the right level of social discontent.
Impeaching Trump
will only make this bleak future more likely. It’s true that it’s not clear
just what alternative they had: not
impeaching Trump for at least one of his seemingly endless series of violations
of the U.S. Constitution would send a signal that from now on, that sort of Presidential
behavior is A-OK. The problem is that impeaching him and then losing the trial
in the Senate — especially losing it to a phalanx of Republican opposition —
will have the same result. Trump will proclaim the result as “a complete and
total exoneration,” just as he did with the Mueller report, and ride it to
either another narrow Electoral College victory (Trump could well become the
first person elected President by the Electoral College while losing the
popular vote twice) or —
especially if the Democrats nominate Sanders or Warren and the ruling class
mounts a no-holds-barred ideological offensive against them — a nationwide
landslide.
And once a
re-elected Trump starts abusing the powers of his office again — and he will —
the Democrats will have nothing they can
do to stop him. Trump will likely still own 2 ½ branches of the U.S.
government: the Presidency, the Senate and the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court
will likely rule in favor of Trump’s contention that he can declare absolute
“executive privilege” and shield himself from any Congressional attempts to investigate him or hold
him accountable. They won’t be able to impeach him again because such an
attempt will have zero political credibility. The old saying goes, “When you
strike at a king, be certain that you kill him.” The Democrats struck at Trump
when there was no way they could kill him — and as a result, he will not only
survive impeachment, he will be stronger for it.
