Defeat Trump, don’t impeach him
The growing demand from the Democratic party’s left wing that Donald Trump face impeachment is a bad idea, not because the president hasn’t earned a place in the hall of presidential infamy. It’s because it shortchanges democracy and clutters the path to Trump’s eventual eviction from the White House.
Impeachment by the House of Representatives will never result in conviction by the Senate. It’s impossible to imagine the Republican Senate casting Trump aside to make impeachment worthwhile — not when the president’s poll numbers among the GOP’s rank-and-file remain overwhelmingly strong.
Impeachment would be an act without visible result, symbolizing as maybe nothing else could the paralysis of democracy. The nation requires a demonstration of democracy’s vigor, not its weakness.
But, some say, impeachment is the Constitutional remedy the Founders created to rein in and dispose of a wayward chief executive.
True enough. But it’s not the only remedy. More conclusive would be a thrashing on Election Day 2020. Lincoln called elections the “great tribunal of the American people.” Impeachment, in the current circumstance, would be viewed as a highly partisan affair by a large number of Americans. Not such taint would long adhere to Trump’s defeat at the polls.
Elections are, or ought to be, the final arbiter.
(A “thrashing” would be a fine thing, but even a narrow defeat would work, though one does worry that a squeaker of an election would lead to a long, ugly season of protest and denial from Trump, such that Federal marshals might be required to haul his sorry self from the White House at noon on January 20, 2021, when his presidential powers would simply cease.)
Laurence Tribe, who teaches law at Harvard, is a sharp critic of Donald Trump. The other day on Twitter, Tribe noted, in regard to some typical Trump narcissistic self-aggrandizement, “Who says ‘I’m an extremely stable genius, OK’? Only a madman or an idiot – or someone who’s dangerous because he’s both.”
There was this on Twitter from former CBS anchor Dan Rather, reacting to the president’s nod in favor of a statement by the North Korean dictator that Democratic presidential frontrunner (for now) Joe Biden was a person of “low IQ.” Trump said, “He probably is, based on his record”
Rather noted: “We have a president of the United States wink at a murderous dictator (in order) to mock a former vice president?” The mere idea that Trump kisses up to Kim Jong-un “is despicable in too many ways to count.”
The Trump presidency is one long tale of the abnormal and the bizzare. Putting the Mueller Report aside, it shouldn’t be too hard for Democrats to make a winning election year case against Donald Trump, who, given eight years at the helm, might very well be our ruination.
As Ben Bradlee reminded Woodward and Bernstein during Watergate, “Nothing is riding on this except … maybe the future of the country.”
As for the non-Mueller case against Trump, I have some favorites, beginning with the president’s gross misuse of the regular army to patrol the southern border with Mexico, thereby turning the military into a tool of domestic politics.
Hardly anything could be more dangerous than deploying troops inside the United States. Well, there’s one thing more dangerous: deploying those troops for the sole purpose of serving the political interests of the president, which is what Donald Trump did during last winter’s border “crisis,” which was replete with hot rhetoric about “gangs” of young thugs making their way here from Central America. (It turns out the “gangs” were in large measure mothers and their children fleeing real gangs in their homelands.)
Meanwhile, the administration turned a blind eye to the drugs pouring across the U.S.-Mexico border at legal ports of entry. Such activity didn’t fit the president’s political narrative.
Domestically, the Trump administration has sowed discord and urged disunity. The president seems to relish poking the states which voted against him in 2016. For one thing, he’s gone out of his way to mischaracterize California’s deadly wildfires in which dozens of lives and one whole town were consumed.
Every citizen of every state should be dismayed by such conduct.
He has set Americans against one another. The typical Trump political rally is an exercise in disharmony. “Fake” media, the “corrupt” FBI, and “Hillary” are presidential hot buttons designed to stir the blood of rally-goers. As we are even now seeing with Biden, the president’s attempts at character assassination are never-ending.
Equally shameless, and dangerous, is the presidential war on scientific inquiry, including the attempt, reported on Tuesday, to undermine the science on which climate change policy rests.
Notice, this catalogue of misadventures doesn’t even touch on trade deals which threaten jobs, tariffs which threaten consumer prices, the threat to withhold coverage of pre-existing health conditions, or threats to the peace.
And it doesn’t touch on the issues raised in the Mueller Report, his strangely submissive and timid relationship with Vladimir Putin, or his abject failure to guard against election fraud and foreign vote interference.
The point is, Democrats don’t need to impeach Donald Trump, they need to beat him, and they can, without handing him the cudgel of impeachment — distracting, all-consuming impeachment.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.