The Democrats must not turn getting rid of Trump into a fetish

My American wife sat up in bed at four o’clock this morning to tune in to the mid-term elections. The week before, she had posted her absentee ballot in favour of the Democrats all the way down the ticket.  She did so in spite of the fact that leafy Westchester County – which boasts the highest property taxes in the U.S. – has been solidly blue since 1992 and the party locally did not need her support. She just wanted to register her frustration and anger in the face of the Trump Revolution.

In the end, as she acknowledged, the result was a bit of an anti-climax. Yes, the Democrats did marginally better than expected in the elections for the House of Representatives, making them the majority party for the first time since 2006. But they also lost the Senate by a somewhat greater margin than had been forecast, leaving the upper chamber free to do its master’s bidding, which (naturally) would include resisting impeachment of the President and, in due course, voting another conservative onto the Supreme Court.

So where does this leave us? According to my wife, liberal hopes now hang less on the House, which we assume will once more feature Nancy Pelossi as Speaker – a bit like having Margaret Becket as health secretary – than on the long-drawn-out investigation into alleged collusion between Trump and Russia being carried out by former FBI chief Robert Mueller.

It feels like Mueller has been on the case ever since the Big Bang, or at any rate Trump’s inauguration speech. But in fact it’s only been 18 months. Hundreds of people, some of them working close to the Oval Office, have been interviewed, and there is still the prospect that the President himself will be subpoenaed, with a result that no one can predict. In the meantime, however, we wait.

Which leaves the Democrats and their new dominance of the House, including its powerful committees.

There are two schools of thought about what will happen next. The first, which I broadly discount, is that, with their majority of 27 or so in the 435-seat body, Democrats will embark on a series of legislative proposals designed to advance the cause of ordinary Americans. Among the obvious areas to be tackled: healthcare (the survival and consolidation of Obama’s Affordable Car Act); immigration (easing border restrictions and ensuring the rights of those, including children, who have made it into the national territory); tax reform (for the poor, not the rich); environmental protection; LGBT safeguards; relations with the international community and the UN … and so on.

I don’t doubt that pressure will be applied in each of these areas and that some actual bills will emerge, several of which might get through the Senate and end up on the President’s desk. But it is much more likely, it seems to me, that the next two years leading up to the 2020 presidential election will be dominated by bitter debate, name-calling and an ever-intensifying effort to expose Trump as wholly unfit for his office, from which he should be removed at the earliest available opportunity.

Personally, I sympathise with the latter approach. Trump is an abomination and an affront to whatever still passes for the American Way. But the House as a circus, more like the Colosseum than the place in which the nation’s business is done, is not a prospect I welcome. For a start, the Democrats will do it badly. An unbroken diet of negativity only goes down well with voters when they feel themselves in a crisis that has to be resolved, and quickly, for which the people at the top are manifestly reponsible. America is not in that position.

The economy is booming, wages are on the rise, unemployment is falling and living standards for minorities in every category are improving. Trump is by no means solely responsible for this. The surge began under Obama. But the income tax cuts he introduced in 2017, coupled with a sharp reduction in corporation tax leading to the repatriation of mega-billions by such giants as Apple, Facebook and Google, has definitely helped. When voters have more money in their pockets, they tend not to look fondly on those who appear to threaten its source.

My prediction is that the Democrats will foolishly over-indulge their anti-Trump rhetoric while failing to develop the necessary reforms that would actually make America a better place. Should there be a crisis, the markets fall and the economy begins to suffer, they could still come out on top in 2020. But if jobs and wages carry right on growing and they spend their time faffing around while aiming their megaphone endlessly at the White House, they will fail.

Leave Trump to Mueller and to events would be my advice to Democrats. Point out the worst excesses, expose the lies and, crucially, make sure voters know that a workable alternative is on the stocks, ready to be launched. At the same time, locate a candidate for 2020 and promote him, or more likely her, as the one to restore reason and respectability to what is still the biggest job in the world. In short, do not turn getting the President out of the Oval Office before his time into a fetish. Leave that to the late-night hosts.

Trump will not find it easy pushing his agenda without a willing House. The Senate, though powerful, has built-in limitations. It can reject bills sent across from the House, but, if overdone, as a matter of course, this can been presented as frustrating the will of the people. It can rubber-stamp trade treaties, but if damaging trade wars are the result, the unions, and voters, will know who to blame. Finally, of course, it is responsible for confirmation hearings. But who wants a repeat of the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco?

Only if the “I” word – impeachment – should arise will the GOP’s Senate majority truly come into its own, and for that to happen the constitutional equivalent of Pandora’s Box must first be opened.

It’s time to calm down. The Democrats have been given an opportunity and they must not waste it. If they do, and Trump, as the country’s circus barker and twitter maestro, manages to expand his base by even two or three per cent, they could find the Republicans come back at them in two years’ time, leaving them trapped in a wilderness of their own creation. The country is in a state of flux. No one can say which way it will go. Either everything that has happened since January 2017 will become the new norm, or it will be swept away in a Deep State restoration. It is time for level heads, not torches and pitchforks.