David Leonhardt has just written a column that articulates, concisely but authoritatively, why the central question of American politics in 2019 is how to remove Donald Trump from office in light of his demonstrable unfitness. His summation of Trump’s offenses is conservative — he sets aside the issue of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in the 2018 election, not to mention Trump’s attempts to downplay Russian assistance, and also downplays the degree to which U.S. foreign policy now appears to be subordinated to the interests of foreign powers. Yet even Leonhardt’s more limited case, from Trump’s efforts to profit off the presidency, to the president’s subversion of American democracy, is solidly damning.
It is heartening to see Leonhardt’s piece receiving widespread attention and admiration. He has articulated what so many of us are thinking: that our country must not endure this president a moment longer than necessary, and that waiting until 2020 risks exponentially multiplying the harms already done. Yet a key argument Leonhardt makes — that Trump will not be removed from office without the significant support of some Republicans — raises a critical corollary to removing Trump from office that he does not address: that the Republican Party must not be allowed to wriggle free either from its complicity with this horrid man’s rise to power, or from paying dearly for an anti-democratic and plutocratic agenda that has meshed so seamlessly with Donald Trump’s authoritarian instincts and drive for personal aggrandizement.
Leonhardt argues that Republicans will need to turn against Trump in order for him to be removed or forced from office. He doesn’t say so explicitly, but he seems to foresee a situation in which enough GOP senators ultimately signal their opposition to the president so that the president resigns rather than face impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate. He writes that this process would be helped along both by the Democrats assiduously investigating the president’s misdeeds, particularly those, like corruption, with crossover appeal to Republicans, and by former or current members of the administration speaking publicly about the president’s unfitness.
Yet this otherwise logical approach would allow the very people who have enabled Trump’s perfidy to date — those senators and representatives who have sat by idly while the president attacked our democratic institutions, incited racist hatred, and kowtowed to foreign powers, as well as those who carried out his policies as members of his administration — to essentially shift the blame for all Trump’s evils onto Trump himself. This may contain some measure of defensibility when we are talking about mere complicity in acts that benefitted Trump personally, such as enriching himself via certain foreign policy decisions. But in the matter of Trump’s white supremacism and authoritarianism — such as his attacks on the free press, his false assertions of voter fraud, and his attempts to demonize undocumented immigrants — his behavior has been simply an enactment of attitudes and policies already long practiced by the GOP.
So there is a basic tension between getting the GOP comfortable with the idea of removing Trump from office, and the reality that the GOP has been A-OK with Trump’s various offenses to date. I think Leonhardt underestimates the bind the Republican Party is now in — as many have noted, the GOP is now Trump’s party. To expect GOP politicians to risk electoral obliteration by acting for the good of the country doesn’t seem at all a sure thing.
There is also a second tension that revolves around the the Democrats’ partisan interests and the national interest, on the one hand, and the GOP’s complicity with Trump’s bad acts, on the other. It seems to me that the Democratic Party would be foolish not to ensure that the Republican Party pay a maximal price for its coddling of Donald Trump these last two years. Every effort should be made to ensure the GOP wears a scarlet “T” for at least a generation.
Yet, I do accept the premise that Donald Trump is a singular threat to our country, and to this extent, the argument that Democrats need to prioritize his removal from office, as a matter that reaches beyond purely partisan interest. (After all, if the Democrats wanted to ensure the Republicans really pay the ultimate price for supporting Trump, they’d just sit back and let him wreck the country for another two years, then sweep in on a “I told you so” platform in 2020. For the sake of our nation, of course, this is not an option.) So, realistically, some Republican support is needed. But this reality does not remove the Democrats’ obligation to make the GOP pay both for its complicity and its continuity with Trump’s impeachable offenses; rather, it requires a careful threading of the needle so that both goals are achieved.
Leonhardt cites the collapse of Richard Nixon’s presidency as a useful guide to how Trump’s downfall might come about. He points out that even at the end of Nixon’s presidency, he still had 50% approval among GOP voters, but that political collapse did finally come, as Republican elected officials turned on the president. But I think we need to consider the possibility that even the most cautious and skillful approach to gaining GOP support for forcing Trump’s removal or resignation will fail; that the same rotten impulses that have led so many Republicans to support and enable Trump will prevent them from ever opposing him, preferring an authoritarian endgame to a democratic resolution. In such a case, there would be no downside at all to a no-holds-barred effort by Democrats to tie the GOP to Trump, and Trump to the GOP; in fact, the Republicans would have already done most of the work. As terrible as the short-term pain might be for the country, it is also difficult to see a way forward absent a historical pummeling of the GOP in 2020, that might exorcise the sway of racism, scourge away the endless advocacy for the wealthy, and bludgeon its anti-democratic impulses.