Will impeaching Donald Trump make any difference?
“The facts are only going to get worse” for Donald Trump, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. In a “historic” 232-196 vote last Thursday, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed a formal resolution to press ahead with the impeachment inquiry against the president – a process that could lead to his removal from office. After Richard Nixon (1974) and Bill Clinton (1998), Trump is set to become the third president in modern US history to face such an inquiry in the House. Central to the proceedings will be a report by a whistle-blower asserting that Trump abused his powers by pressuring Ukraine’s President Zelensky to investigate the family of Joe Biden, Trump’s likely Democratic opponent in the 2020 US election. In a phone call in July, the president is alleged to have attempted to coerce Zelensky into digging up dirt on Biden’s son Hunter – who until early 2019 had sat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company – by threatening to withdraw $400m in military aid.
The House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s declaration that this was a “sad day” for US politics was insincere even by the standards of Congress, said The Wall Street Journal. The Democrats have wanted to impeach Trump ever since he came to office in 2017: recent events were merely a “formality on the superhighway to a foregone conclusion”. But Trump supporters needn’t worry: “barring new facts” emerging, this partisan impeachment, “driven mainly by hatred”, will fail in the Republican-majority Senate.
It’s true: the Senate will almost certainly acquit Trump, said David Leonhardt in The New York Times. But this process is more political than legal. It will be seen as a failure if the Democrats don’t persuade more Americans that Donald Trump is unfit for office. It will be seen as a success if Trump is no longer in the White House on 21 January 2021. The Democrats’ best hope is not to cast the president as a sleazy reprobate: name-calling only entrenches his supporters. Instead, they should use the impeachment process to cast doubt on the substance of his presidency – to show voters that a man who was elected on a promise to fight for ordinary people and make America great again is instead using his powers to further his own interests. In the public hearings, they must make the case not that Trump is a bad person, but that he is failing his country.