Voters, not impeachment, must remove Trump
It’s easy to get inured to political scandals. Politicians and tycoons fly around the world in their jets, from Davos to Washington, Tokyo to Beirut and so on, preaching to us all about values or climate or business, and they all blur into one big corruption circus. But sometimes, the moment demands that we re-engage our critical faculties and start to pay attention. Donald Trump’s impeachment trial is one of those moments.
Democrats have been laying out the case for the prosecution in the US Senate over the last few days, and having watched some of the proceedings, my scandal-o-meter feels refreshed and revved up to incredulous levels.
Here, in a nutshell, is the charge sheet. In July last year, Donald Trump called up Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky to congratulate him on his party’s electoral success. On the call, Mr Trump decided to ask a favour of the fellow. Could he please be sure to investigate a popular conspiracy theory that held that the Democrats and hidden “deep state” agents had fabricated the Russian email hack on the party’s servers during the 2016 election? And could he also make sure he opened up a big corruption investigation into a Ukrainian gas company that had Joe Biden’s son on its board?
This wasn’t just a friendly sort of favour. Mr Trump followed up by withholding $391million (£298million) of
Trump on trial: the president is accused of corruption in order to win an electoral advantage federal funding earmarked for Ukraine and dangled the prospect of a diplomatically important visit to the White House.
In other words, the US president is accused of having explicitly subverted his own country’s foreign policy in order to obtain favours that he believed would give him electoral advantage.
If proven, this would be corruption of the most brazen and treacherous kind. If Boris Johnson had been caught doing anything like it, this country would be in uproar over one of the worst political scandals in our history. When President Nixon was caught in the
Seventies “merely” trying to suppress the Watergate investigation, Republican senators told him he would not command a single vote in his impeachment trial. He quit immediately.
So why is everyone so blasé about Mr Trump? The problem, oddly, is that Mr Trump has never tried to hide what he’s like. He does what he does openly, calls it “perfect” and shrugs. He was elected by voters who already knew exactly what sort of person he was. So when the man is accused of acting as an agent against his own country, it barely registers.
This is fundamentally why the impeachment will fail. Mr Trump was put there, with all his flaws, by voters. In the end, he must be removed by them, too.