Two pieces by TPM faves Jamelle Bouie and Greg Sargent are essential reading for impeachment supporters, as the president and his defenders attack the proceedings as undemocratic and illegitimate. Bouie gets the ball rolling with a column affirming the constitutional legitimacy of impeachment (i.e., it is not a coup, as the GOP would have us believe), and that hits back against claims that it’s an overturning of the 2016 election and that those who oppose Trump can only look to the 2020 elections for recourse. These are all important points in combatting the propaganda that takes the place of reasoned argument coming from the president’s defenders, but Bouie goes on to make an observation that goes to the heart of how weak these arguments are: the president has been acting and talking as if he represents the will of the voters, but this is purely a fiction. In the first place, he was elected by a minority of those who cast their votes in 2016; in the second, the Democrats won a majority of votes in the 2018 elections (and seized control of the House of Representatives despite odds stacked against them by GOP gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts). The degree to which only votes for the president, and not votes for members of Congress, count in the mind of the president and his defenders is truly remarkable, and fits neatly into their belief that the presidency is the “real” power in our system of government.
At a moment when the Democrats need to be hitting this president with every tool at their disposal, pointing out the illogic of his majoritarian pretensions seems a pretty good way to chisel at his defenses. Everyone knows he lost the popular vote, and the Democrats shouldn’t shy away from capitalizing on this fact, not when they face a president willing to lie and cheat his way to re-election. The fact of the House victory in 2018 should be kept front and center — it was a clear repudiation of this president, and is obviously why there can even be an impeachment effort now.
But keeping the truth of his minority status in the public mind is also an antidote to Trump’s “right-wing populist logic” in which those who don’t support him are, by definition, illegitimate actors in American politics. Bouie writes:
Trump has not tried to represent the nation as a whole and does not pretend to govern on everyone’s behalf. Instead, he casts himself as a representative of “the people,” narrowly defined as his supporters, who are themselves — in a sort of circular logic — the essence of the nation. In the Trumpist vision, the 2016 election stands apart from all others. It’s no longer a grant of constitutionally-bounded authority. It becomes a kind of coronation, in which Trump is sanctified as the embodiment of a “real America,” the actual size of which is irrelevant.
This is the first time it’s really clicked for me that Trump, and many of his supporters, view 2016 as a sort of “Year Zero,” when a celestial countdown ticked over and the elect were separated from the damned, and when, as far as they’re concerned, the rules all changed. This goes hand-in-fascist-glove, of course, with the idea that their opponents are illegitimate, either in wanting to hold power or in opposing this presidency — not exactly a vision of American politics compatible with contested elections or the peaceful transition of power.
Greg Sargent elaborates on some of Bouie’s points, referring to Trump’s actual position as “minoritarian populism" or “counter-majoritarian populism.” In particular, he zeroes in on how the president and his defenders have combined the idea that the president alone represents the will of the majority with their attacks on the federal bureaucracy, which they call “the deep state” and decry as undemocratically opposed to the president’s will. Here, Sargent makes a point that needs to be put into wider circulation:
The whole legal scaffolding of whistleblower protections that arose in legislative stages after Watergate reflects the recognition that you want government insiders to be able to sound the alarm about wrongdoing without fear of retaliation from agency heads who serve at the executive’s pleasure. You want this to protect the people [. . .] [T]he bottom line is that when Trump attacks this as a sham process — as an effort to flout some fictitious people’s will — he’s actually trying to undermine the very sort of protections that evolved to deal with precisely the sort of corruption Trump is engaged in. These processes were created and built upon by democratically elected Congresses and previous presidents.
In other words, while Trump is trying to convince us that he’s the victim of a “deep state” coup, the impeachment inquiry was set off by a member of the government following the rules put in place by democratically-elected congressmen and senators (and signed into law by a democratically-elected president!). And I would add that apart from the whistleblower in the Ukraine scandal, the behavior of those members of the diplomatic and national security bureaucracy troubled by Donald Trump’s corrupt backchannel efforts to pressure Ukraine and subvert the 2020 elections is remarkable for the degree to which they played by internal rules and procedures; if anything, we can see how the president was for a long time able to benefit from many people’s good faith belief in a system where the president is assumed not be a corrupt actor.
The logical, fact-based analysis and democratic appeals of Bouie and Sargent’s arguments could not contrast more strongly with the feral, anti-democratic animus of President Trump’s ugly populism, which is inseparable from his white supremacism and authoritarianism. Trump’s assertions of a unique rectitude and knowledge of what’s best for America are laughable, but also necessary given the weak hand he has always held. With impeachment, Democrats and the rest of America have called his bluff; part of the process of undoing this presidency will be to dissect his absurd pretensions to be the only democratic figure in government.