Impeachment would rip U.S. apart
One of the more rare delights of our time has been the unfolding melodrama since Donald Trump, coming down an escalator in Trump Tower, officially wandered into the wild and brutal arena of American politics. Americans have seen some remarkable politicians — heroes, rogues, giants and mediocrities. From Washington on they have provided a gallery of characters as rich as any to be found in the pages of literature.
Trump in one way exceeds them all. Not in eloquence surely, nor in leadership, though there is in Trump’s leadership much more than his fierce opponents are willing to grant, nor in his policies or in the cabinet he has built for himself.
Trump has brought the incomparable, exciting, dismaying, elevating, risqué and spontaneous, earthy and unstoppable personality of himself to the art of American politics. To comprehend or define that personality is beyond the capabilities of this laptop. But that it has been utterly explosive, unprecedented, maddening and unpredictable touches on some of its most salient characteristics.
On the pure narrow ground of what change he has brought to politics that most defines his White House occupancy I say, without irony, that it is his consistent and so far unfailing capacity to unset, even to derangement, the minds of those who most disparage and despair of him. His impact on the Democratic-friendly media — most of the big channels and a slew of their cable epigone — has been fundamental.
He has made them forget that a tradition of neutral journalism was even an accepted standard, evacuated their once proud sense of balanced, fair judgment, and turned many of its large- name performers into frothy caricatures of what journalists are supposed to be.
To his opponents in the Democratic Congress that impact has registered as well. The poor, sad Democrats who could not even conceive that a bloated, loudmouth bumpkin, with no political experience and a blustering mega-aggressive approach to both life and politics, had the slightest chance of wrecking the ambition of their House queen and empress, that vessel of unappeasable ambition and guile, Hillary Clinton.
That he did of course. He put a full- stop on a career started as early as her university days, took away that final step to the top of American politics that in her second effort to reach it was supposed by the fates, the press, and everyone of sane mind to be inescapably, ineluctably hers for the taking.
Both Democrats and their media allies have not, from the night of the election itself, to this very minute, been able to accept the fact, to digest the news, to accommodate the reality, that Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton; that he was president, she was not.
They felt and feel appalled at the result, and very much to shield their wounded sensibilities, they put Trump’s victory in a defensive, self- constructed category as something that was not “real,” that was so opposed to what they thought things should be that it was therefore not to be accepted. Further, that it was wrong; and further than that, because it was all these things, not real, not to be accepted, and wrong — it had to be defied, the election overturned by whatever means necessary. And that the arch-villain himself, Donald Trump, had to be slandered and attacked every day all day till they could find the means to throw him out of office.
That has provided the world with the ugly spectacle of the Russian collusion investigation, a confected and ridiculous theory that Trump actively sought Vladimir Putin’s help in his electoral efforts, that a sitting president was the stooge of a Russian oligarch. It was both emphatically bizarre and incredible to any but the most deranged partisan.
This is another aspect of Trump. He triggers in his enemies a weird kind of epistemology which runs something like this: because Trump is a buffoon and low class and vulgar and I despise him utterly, then anything, anything at all, no matter how risible or utterly incredible, can be accepted as a form of truth, indeed must be true. It needs no scaffolding, no logic, no test of evidence, or reasonable connection to reality: it must be true because it would hurt or get rid of Trump. That’s the one test: will it hurt Trump? If so, it is truth itself.
Robert Mueller having bombed, they’re now on to another fantasy. Three years into his presidency, Trump’s Democratic enemies cannot let go of their fixation that he never should have won, and therefore will not renounce the effort to impeach a president, who on adult or judicious reading, has done nothing to warrant being faced with the scythe of the Constitution’s more powerful instrument. The allegations made against him, of co- opting military aid to
Ukraine for his own political advantage, deserve a careful review, but that’s the last thing we can expect from the same people who savaged him for years before latching onto this newest opportunity. The voters will have their say in a year — is that not enough?
In a way, the hopelessness of their efforts, which will fail, has a great merit. Surely it must be known to those who practice and observe American politics that if the impeachment of Donald Trump were to succeed, if he were to be driven from his office by the weaponization of the impeachment process, it would set off an explosion in the American electorate that would have no parallel since the Civil War itself.
It is not too much to say that were Donald Trump to be impeached to the relish of his enemies and the fury of his supporters, the result would be seismic. The raw divisions in America politics, already intense, sharp and quick to manifest themselves, would explode into riot. Trump supporters, already convinced their man has not had a fair run since the day he was elected, would see impeachment as nothing less than a coup. They would resist. At the very least they would take to the streets.
And then there is Trump himself. Do not for a millisecond believe he would gently and passively accept the proceedings of his declared enemies, and quietly walk off stage to retire in the ermine suites of Trump Tower. The outstanding feature of his personality and his presidency is to fight back, and fight back twice as hard.
I do not think it is possible to project the scale of anger and resistance impeachment would bring.
But I can easily assert that it would rip American politics apart, wrench partisanship up into the territory of real animosity and hate, and split the world’s first democracy down the middle.
The impeachment game the Democrats have been playing for three years is ultimately very dangerous, with the potential to be a real and present danger to the United States.
That’s the one test: will it hurt Trump?