Trump’s impeachment provokes a deeper descent into demagoguery
It was 9:05 Wednesday night. Seven minutes earlier, President Trump received word, in the middle of a campaign speech, that he had been impeached by the House on the second of two articles. And how did he observe this somber moment?
He mocked the widow of the longest-serving House member in history.
“Dingell! Dingell! ... Debbie Dingell, that’s a real beauty,” Trump told a crowd in Michigan, the home state of Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell and the husband she succeeded, John Dingell. He ridiculed the gratitude she showed Trump for her husband’s funeral honors this year. Then he speculated that John Dingell might now be “looking up” from hell. The crowd cheered. What is wrong with this man? Trump’s impeachment provoked him to descend still deeper into the depths of demagoguery. His impeachment-night campaign speech — just over two hours long — was an alarming blend of instability and rage.
He was vulgar. He spoke about “the crap that we’re going through” with impeachment, and said of former FBI director James B. Comey, “I fired his ass.” He tossed in “kiss my ass” and “get your ass whipped” for good measure. He was bizarre. He complained about inadequate water flow in toilets, sinks and showers (“Drip — it’s no good for me!”).
He was oddly detached. “It doesn’t really feel like we’re being impeached,” he said. Though it’s “a very dark era,” like “with Richard Nixon,” he added: “I’m having a good time.”
And he made his political opponents into monsters: “Band of thieves ... do not like our military ... witch hunts ... maniacs ... betrayed the American people ... socialism and blatant corruption.”
The impeached president took a night to sleep on it — or not — then spent Thursday morning in the White House, tweeting and retweeting a stew of insults, paranoia and threats.
“Democrats ... will feel the almighty wrath of God!”
“No Nads Nadler needs to Shut the H3LL Up.”
“Our Government was working ... to overthrow an [sic] duly elected President!”
Ladies and gentlemen: the president of the United States?
Even in the best of times, Trump has never been a model of stability. Now he has suffered a historic rebuke. His erratic reaction suggests we could be entering a more perilous time.
House Republicans, taking their cue from Trump, made the impeachment debate an extravaganza of epithets. “Sham” was alleged 27 times, “charade” 19, “hoax” 11, “socialist” nine, “rigged” eight, “witch hunt” five, “fraudulent” and “star chamber” four apiece. The majority leader, Steny Hoyer, D-Md., asked what had become of the virtues of “decency, honesty, responsibility and, yes, even civility.” Republicans answered his speech with jeers, including when he mentioned a lawmaker drummed out of the GOP for supporting impeachment, Rep. Justin Amash, I-Mich., “who represents a Republican district.”
“Not for long!” one of the Republicans called out. True. You can’t remain in Trump’s party if you acknowledge, as Amash did on the floor Wednesday, that Trump “abused and violated the public trust by using his high office to solicit the aid of a foreign power ... for his personal and political gain. His actions reflect precisely the type of conduct the framers of the Constitution intended to remedy through the power of impeachment.”
If there was any agreement in the debate, it was that American democracy is teetering. Five lawmakers — three Democrats and two Republicans — invoked the same Benjamin Franklin quote that the Founders gave us “a Republic, if you can keep it.” The bipartisan consensus: We are in danger of losing it.
Yet the demagogic fever rages. The once-restrained Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, let loose on the Senate floor Thursday with Trumpian invective: “slapdash ... partisan rage ... poisoned ... bullying ... rigged ... shoddy work ... entrenched elites.”
Trump .tweeted and retweeted in sync about the phony HOAX pathetic SCAM charade WITCH HUNT dirty tricks PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT! And this: “Trump has not been impeached.”
Indeed, Trump spoke Wednesday night as if his opponents had been impeached: “Through their depraved actions today, crazy Nancy Pelosi’s House Democrats have branded themselves with an eternal mark of shame.”
The day he died, John Dingell warned of such behavior. In reflections published posthumously in The Washington Post, lamenting that “the presidential bully pulpit seems dedicated to sowing division and denigrating, often in the most irrelevant and infantile personal terms, the political opposition.” America achieved its 20th-century greatness, he said, when “we observed modicums of respect even as we fought.”
That is how to keep a Republic.