Trump’s new, despicable defence

The Trump impeachment defence is now beyond fatuous. The pretence that the president hadn’t made military assistance to Ukraine conditional on help investigating a political opponent has been dismantled.

So now the argument from his lawyer Alan Dershowitz becomes that, what really matters in this case is that it doesn’t really matter all that much.

As Dershowitz fantasises, it all comes down to motivation.

You won’t find reference to this in the actual law books, but

Dershowitz’s thinking, such as it is, goes like this: Trump, like any public official, sincerely believes it’s in the public interest for him to be re-elected. So any tactics he employs to that end are out of the reach of impeachment.

This is an appalling defence that could be used generically on behalf of any number of corrupt leaders.

It’s an even more brutish extension of the thinking that former president Richard Nixon used in his notorious 1977 interview with David Frost.

Frost: So what in a sense, you’re saying is that there are certain situations . . . where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.

Nixon: Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.

Frost: By definition. Nixon: Exactly: Exactly . . . Public interest isn’t to be identified by squinting through the blinding sheen coming off a president’s ego. It’s best defined by an informed public, and tested against constitutional protections.

The picture that’s being most sweepingly painted on Trump’s behalf is that the impeachment process has been misused to overturn the will of the people who voted for him, and will soon have the chance to decide whether to do so again.

This wilfully overlooks that much, not all, of the case against him is built on the revealed extent to which this man is prepared to corrupt the electoral process, including the particular no-no of engaging with a foreign government to manipulate an election result.

There is of course a distinction to be drawn between what’s in the public interest and what the public is minded to show an interest in. Towering though the stakes are, it would be wrong to assume that Americans are collectively hanging off every word in these hearings.

Former Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker, citing that claustrophobic Henry Fonda film, said so far it’s been ‘‘less 12 Angry Men, more 100 Sleepy Senators’’. Clearly large tracts of the US electorate are less than fully engaged with the process, partly because the prevailing view is that the outcome is tribally predetermined – notwithstanding the possibility that former national security adviser John Bolton may be unblocked from testifying, to the detriment of Trump’s case.

Politicians sitting in judgment on this matter have been reminded that history is watching, and so it is. But right here, right now, the wider world is watching too, and it grows more distressingly clear with each passing day that Trump’s defence is that there are rules against which he needn’t, or shouldn’t, or mustn’t, be held accountable; that standards long portrayed as bedrock for acceptable behaviour are more like highminded niceties that might need to be dispensed with if the art of the deal requires.

The question becomes whether enough senators, or failing that enough voters, are prepared to accept that.

Best they aren’t.

. . . right here, right now, the wider world is watching . . .