Republicans should ditch Trump to secure 2020 victory
Viewing US politics through the prism of UK media is like trying to imagine a dinosaur on the evidence of a toe. Even if you get the skeleton correct, you’ll be missing all the flesh and muscle that’s critical to understanding just why the creature was doomed for the tar pit.
As a headline “Trump faces impeachment” does little to explain the political reality of this week – his supposed fixation on putting “snakes or alligators” in a border trench to deter migrants, his use of the word “bullshit” in a tweet, his strange urge to touch the Finnish President’s knee, or his uncharacteristic prurience around the word “jockstrap” when insulting congressman Adam Schiff. It does nothing to convey how totally unhinged the President appears at the moment and just why, to those of us who have been watching this drama long enough to question our own sanity, a very different season appears to have settled over Washington.
It’s now almost a certainty that Trump will be impeached by the House of Representatives. But then it comes to the Senate, where Trump would need to be found guilty by a two-thirds supermajority in order to be kicked out of office. Just how might that happen? Well, to understand that, you need to appreciate the bigger picture.
Just a few weeks ago, the Democrats were slothing their way towards an impeachment based around the reading matter of choice for insomniacs, the two-volume Mueller Report. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was being pulled that way by the younger and more progressive wing of her party, but “reluctance” was the keyword. Everywhere the Democrats were attacking, they were proving impotent in the face of Trump’s obstructionism.
Then, just as it seemed like a stalemate would result, a whistleblower broke free and exposed Donald Trump’s now-infamous phone call with the leader of Ukraine. Don’t believe the subsequent gaslighting: the President had tried to leverage America’s military might to extort dirt on his political rival, Joe Biden. This didn’t need 448 pages to explain. This was political toxicity inside a dozen or so words.
It was the spark the Democrats needed, the collision in the particle accelerator of the 2020 election. From this one collision, many particles were suddenly in play. Here’s the President spending Wednesday fizzing with anger and throwing insults, accusation, and worse at the press. Then there’s Mike Pompeo, the US Secretary of State, admitting that he had been listening to the fateful phone call. His predicament wasn’t helped when the State Department’s Inspector General arrived on the Hill to deliver a package containing a sheaf of conspiracy twaddle. The bundle underwhelmed for the time it took to realise why the gaudily produced font-crazy envelope was significant. It was the product of Rudy Giuliani, who had been feeding alt-right talking points to Trump, who had been then feeding them straight to the State Department. Suddenly the State Department looks like a political operation, triggering a new fight between Trump cultists and government institutionalists.
Another collision and an even rarer elemental particle – this time the little-seen Vice President who, it emerges, was leading the push to make Ukraine face its corruption problem. Except it now appears that Trump had despatched his deputy without mentioning that Ukraine’s success at combating corruption would be measured by how much opposition research they produced about Biden. Pence was being set up, it seemed, which left him with the awful choice: either admit he knew about the deal (which makes him look as dirty at Trump) or explain he was ignorant of the facts (in which case it makes him look foolish). Given only one of those paths leads directly through political hell, it seemed reasonable if Pence’s team chose the latter as they did late on Wednesday, only for Pence to fold on Thursday and begin to peddle the same anti-Biden craziness.
This resembles an administration in meltdown. The President, mired in scandal, is looking to drag his Vice President in with him, explaining why Trump recently suggested to US media that they also read Mike Pence’s phone calls with Ukraine. The State Department, meanwhile, has political players fighting career diplomats. The latter look eager to testify to Congress, the former using every legal trick and Constitutional loophole (and there are plenty) to avoid scrutiny. Then there’s the Justice Department leaking that Attorney General William Barr is “surprised and angry” at discovering his name mentioned in the Ukraine phone call. At the same time, Barr is doing his utmost to protect the President (or maybe just himself) through questionable opinions.
Dizzy yet?
And that’s really the problem. To understand only a bit of this is to understand none of it. It’s why the UK media’s narrow focus tends to undersell Trump’s difficulties. The logic that Trump will never be found guilty by a Republican Senate certainly remains sound. The 67 votes needed to end Trump’s presidency means that in addition to the 45 Democrats (and two independents, Bernie Sanders and Angus King), there would have to twenty Republicans willing to commit regicide. Yet they might just do exactly that. There are no certainties, just odds that are shortening.
Kurt Volker, the former US special envoy to Ukraine, appeared on the Hill on Thursday and produced evidence that wasn’t exactly the “killer blow” but only because the most damning evidence is already out there, notably coming from the President’s own mouth. On Thursday, he marched out of the White House and committed another impeachable offence by suggesting China should investigate Biden. How do Republicans continue to rationalise this behaviour? They already face going into a general election with a man who the latest Economist/YouGov poll suggests is viewed unfavourably by 54% of Americans. Remember that Trump never won the popular vote and was elected through the perversity of the electoral college. No metric in the past two years even hints towards a second term. For all the talk of unity, he is deeply unpopular among Senate Republicans whose loyalty amounts to a pragmatic belief that it aids their own chances of re-election. That can change and change quickly, as Richard Nixon discovered. He had the support of Republicans until the release of the famous “smoking gun” tape and then his presidency was over.
Against this, we have the Democrat candidates. Biden is wobbly but charming; Warren cloying but energetic and bright. Bernie Sanders has a righteousness that contrasts starkly with Trump’s crass materialism, but he is now in hospital after heart surgery. The standout candidate remains Pete Buttigieg but his lacklustre polls probably show that America is not yet ready for its first openly gay president.
The strength being projected by Democrats, then, belies their underlying weakness. Replace Trump with a traditional Republican and the politics of this could shift. Is Joe Biden as charming as Mitt Romney? Elizabeth Warren as energetic and bright as Nikki Haley? Is Bernie Sanders a match for John Kasich? Would Buttigieg have the beating of Marco Rubio? Take Trump off the board and 2020 is wide open.
Such calculations are certainly in play, if not openly, then certainly where Republican Senators meet to snigger about alligator moats and Adam Schiff’s jockstrap. Former White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, has even predicted that Trump will “likely drop out by March of 2020.” If that is the result of the current scandal, it becomes a huge opportunity for the Republicans to reset themselves before election day. More to the point: when thinking about the implausibility of Republicans turning on Trump, consider the benefits they might reap by doing just that.
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