Yes, it means disgrace – but may only fire up his fans

On The day the Republicans impeached President Bill Clinton, 21 years ago today, he recorded his highest-ever score in Gallup’s presidential approval poll: 73 per cent said they viewed him favourably.

I was visiting Washington DC at the time for the BBC. It felt so flat. nobody was surprised by the impeachment but, more importantly, the cause of the fuss — the Monica Lewinsky affair — had already played out in public months before the vote. As they say in the ponderous and selfimportant world of American high-level politics: everything had been said but not everyone had yet said it.

So we had to endure the process even though we all knew that in the Senate, where the Democrats had a majority, it would end in a failure to convict him and leave the president in office.

I will always remember what Joe Lockhart, one of President Clinton’s top aides, told me about the day the impeachment itself was voted through.

he and another White house pal sat down for a beer at the end of it all. They had made some announcements about a military strike in Iraq, and a couple of other points as well about domestic policy.

As the friend put it to Joe: ‘ You know, except for getting impeached, we had a pretty good day.’ And that was the point. It was a blip.

They did have a good day. The aides went on afterwards, serving in the Clinton presidency, to have some good times too.

They could laugh about it because they suspected that the wind was in their sails.

The public was bored with Lewinsky — and the public liked Clinton. Some of the Republicans knew this, which is why, at the trial in the Senate, a few of them even backed Clinton.

As their leader said privately to one of the prosecutors in the house of Representatives: ‘ We don’t care if you have photographs of Clinton standing over a dead woman with a smoking gun in his hand. I have 55 Republican senators, seven of whom are up for re- election next year in very tough races.

‘You guys in the house just jumped off a cliff. We’re not following you off the cliff.’

he was right. It was a cliff. The impeachment of Clinton damaged the Republicans politically. he left office popular, and the Republicans suffered. Will it be the same for Trump? I suspect it will. The formal impeachment will stand against his name.

It will be there in the history books, and on Wikipedia, as it is for Bill Clinton.

But for Trump, as for Clinton, there seems no chance of him being actually convicted in the Senate — the second part of the process — so he will, like Clinton, remain in office.

Another contrast is with Richard nixon. And on this occasion, an impeachment process did lead to the removal of a president

But remember, nixon left not because he was impeached but because it became obvious that he had committed such serious crimes — in the cover up of the Watergate affair — that large numbers of his own Republican party decided there was no option but to vote against him.

Although the process had been started, the full impeachment in the house of Representatives and the trial in the Senate never actually happened.

The fact that members of his own party would have been complicit in his removal was enough to persuade him to go.

That was never the case with

Clinton and it is certainly not the case with Trump.

In fact, in the hyper- partisan atmosphere of modern America, it would probably be dangerous for Trump to be removed and I suspect top Democrats know that.

Ugly talk about an ensuing civil war within the Democratic party might not come to anything — but who wants to take the risk?

Democrats would much prefer to get the process over — to lose in the Senate as happened with Bill Clinton, and then try to beat him in an election.

President Trump himself claims that although he hates the process and regards it as a witch-hunt, he also thinks it will help him win re-election.

He might be correct. It might fire up his base.

There is some evidence that it already has: since the Democrats opened their formal impeachment inquiry in October regarding Trump’s alleged wrongdoing in Ukraine, his job approval rating in the latest Gallup Poll has risen solidly from 39 per cent to 45 per cent, while support for impeachment has fallen from 52 per cent to 46 per cent.

Oh dear! Perhaps the whole idea was not so wise.

But what moderate Democrats tell me behind the scenes is that, while they have no love for the process and some fears about it, the thing still has to be done.

To have stood back, and let the Ukraine business go, would have been cowardly given the evidence against Trump.

They have a point. And they have their own supporters to fire up, too. Politically, they have probably done the right thing.

Of course, the messages from history are always more mixed than we think. The Nixon impeachment process did indeed do immense damage to the party of the president and great good to the Democrats, ending in the unlikely election of Jimmy Carter.

But that was the full monty. The president actually had to leave office.

THE relevant question here is whether the result is always a disaster for those who attempt the ‘political assassination’ but fail? Does the president’s party always flourish when it is half-cocked, as it was with Bill Clinton and will be with Trump? Of course, the messages from history are more mixed than we think.

It’s true that Clinton soldiered on and was popular. That the Democrats ‘won’ and the Republicans ‘lost’. But what happened next? Impeachment and the scandal of Monica Lewinsky undoubtedly complicated Vice President Al Gore’s subsequent presidential campaign in 2000, leading to a narrow victory for Republican George W. Bush, whose message was that he would fight to ‘restore honour and dignity’ to the White House.

In the case of Trump, serious Republicans are going to have to attach their names to a motion letting the president off the hook.

How might that affect them in the future if he does something ghastly and the finger is pointed at them? How did you vote in the great impeachment trial? It will be a question that could yet be asked of Republicans and it could make a generation of them uneasy.

So let us keep away from firm predictions — they are for the partisans on both sides.

What we know is that Donald Trump loves a fight. No, it’s more than that: he lives for the fight.

And the Democrats had better have some good moves once the impeachment fizzles out.

He will come for them. And one prediction we can make with certainly: it ain’t going to be pretty.