Trump’s acquittal: “a right to do pretty much anything”?
The result of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial was never in doubt, said Jon Healey in the Los Angeles Times. The only question was how the Republican-controlled Senate would justify acquitting him. The president’s defence team began by arguing that there was no clear evidence that he personally demanded a freeze on military assistance to Ukraine until it agreed to launch an investigation into Joe Biden, his Democratic rival, and his son Hunter. But a leak last week from John Bolton’s new memoir badly undermined that defence. In the book, Trump’s former national security adviser writes that his boss explicitly demanded the quid pro quo. So the president’s team switched to the line that, even if he did apply pressure, that was “A-OK” – not an impeachable offence. Republicans used the same logic to block Bolton from testifying in the trial. There was no need for more evidence, they argued, to prove something that was already known.
The Democrats would have loved to drag this trial out for months, said Mollie Hemingway in The Federalist. They were out to impeach Trump from the moment he entered the White House. They claim that he poses such a dire threat that he must be removed from office at once; that Americans can’t afford to wait until the presidential election to make their own judgement. Yet, having launched this process, perhaps sensing how weak the case was, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi “inexplicably sat on the articles of impeachment for a month”. The Democrats have wasted everyone’s time, agreed the New York Post. Congress must “get back to doing the people’s business”.
The election will show whether this failed impeachment has “soured swing-state suburban voters irrevocably” against Trump, or “electrified” his base, said Stephen Collinson on CNN. Either way, it will have profound long-term effects. Trump’s lawyers relied on “a staggeringly broad concept of presidential power”, effectively arguing that leaders can’t be impeached if they believe an act is in the public interest, even if they define that as meaning it will help their re-election. That gives Trump and his successors the right to do pretty much anything. It doesn’t follow that all presidents will seek to force foreign powers to dig up dirt on their political rivals. “But it could convince unscrupulous future occupants of the Oval Office to reason they might get away with it.”