Impeachment day – will Trump have the last laugh?
CNN calls it “a grave day in history” – “ a moment of national political tragedy”. Donald Trump says it is an “unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power unequaled in nearly two and a half centuries of American legislative history”.
The “it” is, of course, the impeachment of Trump by the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives. Today’s vote in the House indicting the 45th President for “high crimes and misdemeanours,” mostly relating to his dealings with Ukraine, will fall along pure party lines and is not in doubt. Once the votes are counted, the process will move to the Republican-dominated Senate where, on the same partisan basis, the charges will be dismissed, meaning that Trump will head into the 2020 presidential campaign having been officially cleared of all wrongdoing, but more deeply damaged than any other American leader before him, not excluding Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon.
If he was any other politician, Trump might choose to call it quits. He is, however, not any other politician. He is unique, driven entirely by ego, and will regard the presidential race ahead of him as a chance to prove not merely that he has made American great again and scattered its enemies, but that he, in his person, is the embodiment of its greatness.
Millions of Americans will rally to their wounded leader after the Senate delivers its not-guilty verdict, seeing him as a victim of the liberal Deep State. Millions more will demand that he be routed by whichever candidate the Democrats finally come up with to take him on in the election on November 3.
Whatever happens, it will be a watershed moment. Either Trump will have been hounded from office or he will have overcome, or painted over, a record so tarnished as to render him an international pariah.
The potential fallout will reach far and wide. Ever since he became leader of the Tory Party, and now prime minister, Boris Johnson has suffered from the fact that he appears to get on famously with Trump. It has even been suggested that they are brothers under the skin. But no one, surely, could seriously compare the two men. Johnson is, at worst, a self-absorbed bounder, whose chief skill is sleight of hand. Buried deep inside his bluster, the British leader displays good humour and a sense of hail-fellow-well-met that relieves his intemperance, as well as a sense of purpose, however convoluted, that lends method to his madness. Trump is pure villain.
Yesterday, the Oval Office released a densely-typed, six-page diatribe against the Democrats and their leader, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, that reeked of bile and self-delusion – two of the President’s strongest suits. It was obviously not entirely self-authored. Trump is borderline illiterate and has a tiny vocabulary. But his fingerprints and quasi-adolescent speech patterns are all over it. As it was read out to him by whoever assembled the final draft, it is easy to imagine the grunts of satisfaction, the stream of profanities and the fist-pumping that greeted each over-egged accusation.
Pelosi herself, who until recently opposed impeachment, preferring to let the electorate decide for themselves who they wanted in the White House, described the letter as “sick”. She will appreciate, however, the potency of the President’s words within the constituency he has created across the country, where the more he offends against the normal rules of decency and due process, the more his supporters love him.
What will they have made of the following?
“By proceeding with your invalid impeachment, you are violating your oaths of office, you are breaking your allegiance to the Constitution, and you are declaring open war on American Democracy. You dare to invoke the Founding Fathers in pursuit of this election-nullification scheme. Yet your spiteful actions display unfettered contempt for America’s founding and your egregious conduct threatens to destroy that which our Founders pledged their very lives to build. Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers, you are offending Americans of faith by continually saying pray for the President, when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense. It is a terrible thing you are doing, but you will have to live with it, not I!”
Not he, indeed. Not if he and his cronies in the Senate have anything to do with it. A clutch of Republican senators, including Majority leader Mitch McConnell and all-purpose Trumpian cheerleader Lindsey Graham, have boasted that they will sit as jurors in the coming trial as if they were fully signed-up members of the President’s defence team. They want the matter wrapped up in a matter of days, not weeks or months, and might as well have handed their not-guilty verdicts to the presiding officer, Chief Justice John Roberts, in advance, like postal votes, in order to save time.
Not that Trump, in his letter, doesn’t land a few telling blows. He didn’t hard-scrabble his way up through the New York property market without learning how to fight dirty. When he complains that the Democrats have been bent on his impeachment from the day he was elected, he is 100 per cent on the money. Even before his inauguration, Democratic members of the House and Senate were on his case, insisting that he be removed from office at the earliest opportunity. One newly-elected Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, having just been sworn in, went so far as to say that “we’re gonna go in in there and we’re gonna impeach the motherfucker”.
The Democrats were out to get him and they didn’t care where the evidence came from.
Trump is also right, in his letter, to question the role of former Vice President Joe Biden in dealing with the government of Ukraine in respect of his son, Hunter Biden, who was paid some $50,000 a month during his father’s time in office by a dubious Ukrainian oil and gas corporation that might have expected favours in return. Biden, too, is damaged goods. The problem for Trump is that Biden was until recently seen as his chief rival in the 2020 election. In asking the current Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian, to investigate alleged corruption concerning the Bidens, father and son, he was stretching his moral authority well beyond breaking point.
And so we are where we are. Today’s House vote will be widely seen as a hammer blow to Trump’s authority, and there is no doubt that he will feel the impact, not least in his dealings with foreign leaders. Boris Johnson included. But America, like the UK, is a deeply divided nation, and for every voter outraged that their President has behaved in office like the worst of Tammany Hall, there will be others who say, the Hell with the élite, we want a guy in the White House who understands that this country has been taken over by lilly-livered liberals, anti-gun nuts and ethnic minorities who care nothing for the values of the white working class.
The ball is in play in this most American of dramas and the House thus far has successfully run interference and made it half-way to the goal line. Just don’t expect a touchdown.