Impeachment? (Part I)

The possibility of impeaching Donald Trump is being downplayed in most quarters. By Republican leaders confident that any impeachment effort would fall well short of the 67 votes necessary to convict in the Senate. By Democratic leaders trying to keep the issue out of the November elections in order to not scare voters and thus win those elections (walking a tightrope between beneficially mobilizing their hard-left base on the one hand but not mobilizing it too much on the other).

Such analyses are shortsighted because they fail to take into account how the political dynamics are likely to change in the next six months or so.

The likelihood of Trump being removed from office depends upon a range of factors, none of which work in his favor down the road.

First of these is obviously the outcome of the midterms. The left is mobilized, the right demoralized, to the point where the “pale and frail” (white and old) edge that Republicans usually have in such contests will likely be overwhelmed by an anti-Trump backlash.

It is much more fun to be on the attack, as the “resistance” is, than to have to defend Trump the indefensible, as the Republicans have been forced to do on a daily basis, producing an increasing zeal in the former and increasing fatigue in the latter.

Democrats will rush to the polls on Election Day; Republicans will hang their heads as they go, if they even bother. And when the Democrats win far more seats in the House than necessary to re-install Nancy Pelosi as speaker, it will be entirely because of public revulsion over Trump’s behavior.

Under such “blue wave” circumstances, the GOP may even end up losing the Senate despite an electoral map that should have dramatically strengthened its numbers in that chamber.

Trump will thus have achieved the near impossible in American politics—leading his party to a debacle at the polls while presiding over the best economic conditions in decades. A more decisive repudiation of a presidency will be difficult to imagine.

On the day after the election, Trump is going to therefore go from reluctantly tolerated to politically radioactive in GOP circles. Those Republicans in Congress who have gritted their teeth and supported him in exchange for policy victories (conservative judges, tax cuts, regulatory reform and Pentagon spending boosts) in a “transactional” politics sense are going to begin to edge away, and those who said he was a bad bet all along are going to look clairvoyant and be emboldened to step up their criticisms.

The broader point is that, after November, supporting Trump will be even riskier, and dropping support for him even more tempting.

The second factor pushing in favor of Trump’s removal will be the very nature of special counsel investigations.

In that sense, Trump’s presidency was seriously imperiled the day Robert Mueller was appointed because of the manner in which the dynamics of such investigations almost always tilt against the party being investigated.

Mueller can take as much time as he likes, spend as much money as he needs and, most important of all, and despite federal regulations designed to establish parameters, generally investigate whatever he wishes, even if it is far removed (as it increasingly appears to be) from the initial Russian “collusion” accusations. Such investigations are essentially open-ended fishing expeditions, virtually guaranteed to find some kind of skulduggery committed at some point by their quarry.

The partisanship or integrity of a given special counsel is not the key issue in such investigations; rather, it is the need to bring back scalps as a means of justifying the length and cost of the inquiry. Whether the counsel is named Lawrence Walsh, Kenneth Starr or Robert Mueller, they are likely to produce a report that would tarnish even the reputations of St. Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa.

This factor—the likelihood of any special counsel investigation producing incriminating findings—is, of course, magnified by another, which is the character and behavior of the particular party being investigated.

Which is another way of saying Trump is no St. Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa.

Indeed, the hunch is that Trump’s tawdry character and career have already produced so many leads suggesting criminal wrongdoing along so many different paths that Mueller’s team could spend decades following them up.

The one advantage Trump will likely have when Mueller’s report is finally offered up is that, as so often in his case, the offenses cited will be so numerous that the mind reels and it becomes difficult to focus on any one in particular.

But Democrats taking the House and a special counsel finding lots of easy-to-find dirt on Trump are only necessary but not sufficient steps for attempting what has only been attempted twice in our nation’s history, neither time successfully.

What will ultimately determine whether Donald Trump suffers a fate that Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton managed to avoid will be, among other factors, the ambiguity inherent in the “high crimes and misdemeanors” standard and how members of Trump’s own party assess their electoral prospects in 2020 with him still as president.