Dems' ultimate fear is Don' 24
GIVEN that there have been only four presidential impeachments in American history, and given that only one man has twice suffered the indignity, viewers who tuned into the start of Donald Trump’s second Senate trial had a right to expect a buzz of excitement and a sense of drama.
What they got instead was buzzkill and all the drama of watching paint dry. Who knew impeachment could be so lifeless and history so meaningless?
Certainly Chief Justice John Roberts knew. His refusal to preside reveals the exercise to be a cheap knockoff rather than the real thing.
And it’s impossible to believe the Founders would approve of Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont acting as both a juror and presiding officer, a conflict of interest so large that it alone renders the trial out of bounds, as Trump lawyer David Schoen effectively argued. His display of Leahy tweets calling for conviction sealed the argument that Leahy cannot be viewed as neutral.
For viewers, Day One was mostly a dud, in that they didn’t even get a trial, only a debate about whether there should be a trial. The dueling videos were the most interesting part, but they were also irrelevant to the threshold question of constitutionality.
Although it passed in a late-afternoon vote with six Republicans joining all 50 Dems, the impeachers’ victory will be temporary. Their fundamental problem is that there can be no tension about the proceedings because there is no tension about the outcome, and thus no logical reason for the trial.
Trump is a private citizen in Florida, Joe Biden sits in the Oval Office and acquittal is rightly a foregone conclusion. The smart idea would be to call the whole thing off, on both constitutional grounds and common sense.
As I have said, Trump’s speech to the enormous rally on Jan. 6 was reckless in that it was too angry and too bitter. But there is no honest way to conclude he intended to incite the Capitol invasion and riot.
The only way Dems could argue otherwise was by omitting his line to the crowd that “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
The real question, then, is why Dems are putting the nation through the exercise again, just a year and five days after Trump was acquitted the first time.
To say they hope for partisan advantage is obvious because nothing unites their party like hating Trump.
It’s the glue that holds them together and prevents the factions from breaking into civil war.
That makes Biden the chief beneficiary and explains why, despite his calls for national unity, he gave his approval to the unprecedented trial of his predecessor. If it weren’t for the endless flogging of Trump, his leftwingers would be fighting with the far-left-wingers over which socialist programs to ram through now and how many dimes they can wring from taxpayers.
But Dems also perceive another, longer-range advantage in trying both Trump and Americans’ patience. For at its heart, the second Trump impeachment trial is exactly like the first in that both aimed at voter suppression.
Although the very definition of impeachment focuses on past acts while in office, the twin Trump impeachments have been about looking forward to the next election. The aim has been to knock him off the ballot if possible, but if not, dirty him up so he could be defeated.
The talk about Ukraine in the first trial and about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot now is a pretext. The real driver has always been the fear of what Trump will do, not what he has done. Neutralizing him as a political force and dividing the Republican Party are the ultimate aims.
Once you see that pattern, everything else makes sense. The flimsy evidence about withholding aid to Ukraine, based largely on a single phone call where Trump released the transcript, never had a chance of success in the Senate, and the impeachers knew it. Their aim was to beat him in 2020 and they did, though it’s unlikely that impeachment made much of a difference.
Having defeated him once, you might think the Dems would no longer be afraid of Trump. But they are, which is why they are desperate to keep him off the 2024 ballot. They probably won’t succeed but their endless effort to find a mechanism reveals their fear.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, assuming Trump is acquitted again, even floated the idea of censuring the former president, then concocting a way to turn that into a ballot ban. Politics doesn’t get any more devious and destructive.
Trump, meanwhile, has been shockingly silent. Knocked off social media, he can’t tweet and he’s been avoiding interviews until the trial ends.
The real suspense is what he will do after that. For as much as Dems and some Washington Republicans despise him, Trump remains extraordinarily popular with GOP voters.
Polls show that a big majority of the 74.2 million voters who backed him last year would do so again, with a YouGov survey showing that 80 percent of Republicans would definitely or probably support him for president in 2024. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and others are furious with Trump, but they can read the polls, too.
The last thing they want is to have Trump turn that firepower against the GOP for the 2022 midterms or possibly even start a third party.
As usual, Trump’s decisions will be far more interesting and consequential than anything likely to happen in the Senate over the next week.