DID TRUMP’S IMPEACHMENT MATTER IN THE END?
It’s hard to believe, but one year ago the big news story was President Donald Trump’s impeachment. Twelve months later, a viral pandemic is killing thousands of Americans every day and Republicans are still so loyal to Trump that it took until just recently for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to acknowledge that he’d lost the November election.
So it seems worth asking: Did impeachment matter? And what, if anything, was it worth?
For one thing, it looks unlikely that the investigation, the impeachment itself or the Senate trial meaningfully affected the outcome of the 2020 vote. Trump emerged with his support from his base roughly intact.
And in fact, despite mismanaging the government response to COVID19 and presiding over an economic meltdown, Trump came nail-bitingly close to winning re-election. It’s easy to conclude that, without the pandemic, Trump would have won. And if that’s correct, it would seem that the impeachment would not have made any difference.
As for the congressional races, Democrats lost ground in the House, which could be interpreted as voters’ disapproval of impeachment — although that was not the explanation preferred by the losers. Nor were the handful Republican losses in the Senate read as disapproval of the absurd show trial led by McConnell.
But electoral results are not the only measure of the impeachment’s significance. There is also the verdict of history.
When history textbooks sum up the Trump presidency in the decades to come, they are likely to say something like this: Trump was elected in 2016 as an insurgent, populist candidate. He was impeached by the Democratic House for trying to subvert the 2020 election by getting the president of Ukraine to investigate his main rival, Joe Biden. The Republican Senate acquitted him. Then, in the midst of a pandemic, he lost his re-election bid to Biden, the same man he tried to smear.
Notice that this brief, U.S. history survey-course summary features the impeachment as the central narrative event of the Trump presidency. One reason impeachment will loom so large is that it will serve as a useful symbol of the controversy that plagued Trump’s entire presidency. The highly partisan nature of the impeachment and the trial will stand in for the hyper-polarized political environment of the last four years. Most important, the impeachment will fit well with the narrative of a single-term president who lost the popular vote twice and broke longstanding ethical and legal norms.
It’s impossible to be certain, of course, but if Trump’s presidency comes to be treated as an embarrassing anomaly, the impeachment can be made to function narratively as proof that the system didn’t take Trump’s corruption lying down.
Even if this somewhat optimistic prediction of the future historical repudiation of Trump is too rosy, the impeachment effort will still have been worthwhile. The fact is, the House investigation created a historical record of a president who abused the power of the office to pressure a foreign government to tarnish his most threatening political opponent.
If the House had not impeached Trump for that behavior, it would have communicated an implicit judgment that there was nothing wrong with his conduct. It would have invited future presidents to do likewise without serious fear of consequence.
Any further future president will at least have to consider that abusing the office of the presidency falls within the realm of impeachable conduct — even if you might be able to get an acquittal. Future presidents should also remember that Trump’s intended victim not only survived, but ultimately beat him at the ballot box.