Reading the two articles of impeachment, as damning and grounded in fact as they are, it’s impossible for me to not feel the howling absence of the many other articles that could and should have been drawn up alongside this pair. The power of these existing articles is partly responsible for igniting the imagination: solidly written and sobering, I can only speculate on what the impact would have been if there had been a whole stack of them, pages and pages of irrefutable indictment.
If impeachment has a vanishingly small chance of turning into a conviction in the Senate, it makes no sense that the Democrats have chosen not to broaden and diversify their case for why the president is unfit for office. Even as they attempt to demonstrate a pattern of presidential misconduct within the Ukraine scandal, they are passing up an opportunity to paint a far more extensive and darker picture of the president’s pattern of corruption and catastrophic incompetence, from excusing the Russian attack on the 2016 elections and undermining efforts at defense against future foreign subversion, to profiting off the presidency and very likely bending numerous areas of foreign and domestic policy to profit the Trump family at the expense of the national interest.
Far more than the two Ukraine-related articles alone, a broader indictment would help push forward the two defenses of the constitutional order that Democrats can achieve via impeachment: galvanizing the public into opposition to Trump, and demonstrating to the public the GOP’s complicity, by defending Trump, in attempting to transform the United States from a democracy into an authoritarian regime: because authoritarianism is what we will have if the president, supported by his party, can use the power of the U.S. government to make sure Americans don’t have a free and fair choice in deciding whether to re-elect him.
I think most of us have been led astray by a basic misconception encouraged both by Donald Trump’s singular ugliness and more recently by the Democrats’ decision to pursue impeachment against him: that the president is the main source of our democratic crisis, and that removing or neutralizing him politically will resolve it. The United States does of course face a crisis due to a corrupt and authoritarian-minded president, but it is a subsidiary of a larger crisis: that the GOP as a whole has long laid the groundwork for, and now under Trump has openly embraced, via lockstep support of every malevolent presidential action, the goal of enacting some form of authoritarianism in the United States. Impeachment, for all my criticisms for how the Democrats are running it, has at least achieved this much: it has demonstrated that the GOP no longer functions like a democratic party in a democratic society. It is in no conceivable way democratic for every member of a party to parrot discredited and false lines about the president’s behavior, or lies about the Democrats, and to claim that what the president said and did he did not actually do and say. (That key defenses and lies have their origins in Russian disinformation campaigns meant to support the president and undermine the Democrats is shocking, and indeed unforgivable, given that Republicans cannot legitimately pretend they don’t know of their Russian origins.)
So the United States doesn’t have a Donald Trump problem so much as a Republican Party problem. And this GOP problem can be summarized thusly: under Donald Trump, the Republican Party has seen the promised land, and it is authoritarianism. I don’t believe this is the result of some vast conspiracy or long-term plan — in fact, I’m not sure the GOP would have gotten to this point without Donald Trump’s uniquely malevolent skill set and lack of scruples. But you can’t understand where we are with Donald Trump — a president who has essentially declared his right to rig the 2020 election in his favor — without seeing that he’s only doing on a larger scale what the GOP has been doing for years now: manipulating elections across the country, via voter suppression and gerrymandering, to ensure that they win contests they should rightly lose, and to ensure that those who prefer Democrats are denied free and fair elections. Even before Donald Trump, the GOP had been gradually backing into authoritarianism for many years. Authoritarianism was not a conscious end goal, but the logical outcome of the sorts of policies required in order to keep winning elections based on a shrinking base of white voters and preventing majority rule from harshing the party’s mellow as it aimed to serve the interests of wealthy corporate donors. It took Donald Trump to make explicit all the less vocalized strands of Republicanism beyond the cardinal sin of subverting our elections — the racism, the worship of military might, the misogyny, the view that the earth is merely meant to be exploited for material gain — but nothing he has done is really different from what was latent in the GOP all along.
I understand that the argument I’m making may sound extreme, or difficult to stomach. If this is the case, I would urge you to go through the exercise of reviewing current events from the GOP’s perspective. Imagine that you have seen the writing on the wall for years: that demographic changes plus an ideological commitment to promoting the interests of the wealthy over those of the majority mean that you are likely to no longer win the House of Representatives in coming years, or the presidency (absent an electoral college win alongside a popular vote loss). This has already encouraged you to engage in various, escalating schemes to maximize your vote share by rigging elections against Democrats at the state level. Now imagine that an unlikely presidential candidate captures the enthusiastic backing of your base, wins the presidency with the help of Russia, and schemes a path to victory by an outright attack, enabled by the power of the presidency, on the 2020 contest in order to secure his re-election.
As a Republican, you’ve already grown accustomed to the idea that elections are not meant to be free and fair, but are something to be manipulated and managed. From your perspective, President Trump’s effort to enlist Ukraine in a scheme to thrown the 2020 election in his favor might be bigger and badder, but it’s not really different in kind from what the party has been doing for decades. Also, you realize that given the nearly infinite number of crimes you are pretty sure Donald Trump has committed during his first three years in office, the GOP is basically screwed if the Democrats win the White House in 2020, or actually ever again. After all, even if the Democrats choose not to weaponize presidential power in the manner of Donald Trump, even a more restrained approach in which the new Democratic president works with a Democratic congress to provide an accounting of Trump’s crimes will be an albatross around the GOP’s neck for a good long time to come.
From this perspective, based on calculations of power and the force of precedent, why wouldn’t the GOP go all in on a scheme that would essentially undo American democracy, potentially indefinitely?
Now, I’m playing somewhat loose with the term “authoritarianism,” which is the subject of reams of scholarship and debate and real-world studies. Although a good case can be made that various other authoritarian elements are present in the Trump-GOP — as I noted above, from the worship of military might and misogyny to the identification of certain populations as inferior or un-American — that’s not the case I’m trying to make right now (though I’m using authoritarian in part because it does indeed wrap in those important elements. And I will note for the record here that one of the complicating factors in being able to comprehend and thus address the threat posed by the Trumpist GOP is our lack of terms to describe what we’re experiencing, and the fact that often those terms, even when accurate (such as “authoritarianism”) nonetheless sound academic, alien, and/or insufficient. This is a big problem). Rather, for the purpose of the point I’m trying to make about how we should think about the issues swirling around impeachment, I’m using “authoritarian” as a super-charged way of saying “anti-democratic,” because I think it gets at the immediate and pre-eminent threat posed by Trump and the GOP: Trump by his actions around Ukraine, and GOP representatives and senators by their complicit defense, are trying to deny all Americans free and fair elections in 2020. There are obviously many anti-democratic behaviors possible, but the single greatest one is preventing Americans from choosing their president.
Yet the Democrats, or at least the Democratic leadership calling the shots on impeachment, continues to proceed as if it is the president alone who threatens our democracy with an authoritarian nightmare. This is simply not true: it was not true when the GOP covered for the president’s lesser yet also impeachable offenses prior to the Ukraine scandal, and it is certainly not true now, when the Senate and House GOP have become largely indistinguishable from the Trump White House in their defense of his actions, pursuing the dual, mutually contradictory tracks of arguing that the president did not do what he clearly did, and that it was 100% OK that he did it.
So we don’t face a problem of a rogue president: we face the problem of one political party desiring to bring about an end to American democracy.
The failure of Democrats to face up to or grapple with this fact has, I think, led to what I previously referred to as a fetishization of the impeachment process, in which impeachment is more or less acknowledged as doomed to stop short of removing Trump, but is nonetheless played up as a terrible, cleansing power that must be done out of a heavy heart and sense of duty, with the ultimate but never overtly stated goal of damaging the president’s re-election chances. But if you admit that the problem is not a rogue president but what amounts to a scheme by both the president and the congressional GOP to steal the 2020 election (another unexamined angle: the GOP as a whole, not simply Trump, stands to gain from any disinformation campaign against the Democratic presidential nominee), then impeachment as currently constituted neither addresses the larger issue of GOP perfidy nor the fact that it will not prevent the catastrophic subversion of the 2020 election. In effect, impeachment becomes an excuse for an actual strategy to defend American democracy.
Lest you think I’m overstating the threat posed by either the Trumpist GOP in combination with the Democrats’ cognitive blocks to comprehending it, please take some time to read this startling and enraging Politico piece from a few days ago. This early paragraph gives you a taste of the self-defeating mindset that seems to have taken hold of some congressional Democrats:
Democrats say [. . .] the need to remove Trump from office is so urgent precisely because he's certain to continue threatening the integrity of the 2020 election and stonewalling Congress' ability to prevent it.
Yet Democrats are only just beginning to confront the paradox that their imminent impeachment vote creates: What happens when a remorseless president commits the same behavior that got him impeached in the first place — only this time after the House has already deployed the most potent weapon in its arsenal?
“I have not allowed myself to entertain that sequence of hypotheticals,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee and a constitutional lawyer. “If he’s just impeached and not removed, we will definitely have to continue to deal with a lawless and ungovernable president.”
Representative Raskin is a smart guy, but the quote above is one of the most discouraging statements I have heard from a politician in my lifetime. It’s clear that Donald Trump will not be removed by the Senate, and fully intends to continue his impeachable behavior, yet Raskin has not allowed himself “to entertain that sequence of hypotheticals”? Raskin is hardly an incompetent; rather, he appears to be a victim of impeachment fetishization, that mechanistic worldview in which the Democrats have no choice but to roll out the mighty impeachment cannon, fire it at the president, sit helplessly by while Senate Republicans acquit him, and then run around stunned by the sublime terror of what they’ve inflicted on the nation while the president continues to crime.
Other Democrats quoted in Politico amplify Raskin’s cluelessness. “‘Should we stop stopping speeders if they still speed?’ wondered Val Demings (D-Fla.), a member of the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. ‘When we vote, we will have done our job. Then the Senate needs to take these matters seriously and take action.’”
“When we vote, we will have done our job.” This is a statement that is simply not true, not when you know in advance that the Senate will in fact not “take action.” But Demings’ quote helps us get to the basic point I want to hammer home: the duty of Democrats, both in the House and Senate, is not to impeach Trump, but to identify the authoritarian menace posed by the GOP and Trump together, and to destroy it. The Democrats’ job is only done when they have used all means at their disposal to expose and derail this threat.
And here we get to the second cognitive failure of congressional Democrats. Not only do they refuse, at least publicly, do identify the GOP as a whole as a threat to the constitutional order, but they refuse to treat the GOP as the illegitimate actor it has become. In defending Trump over the Ukraine scandal, the GOP has indicated, without room for misunderstanding, that it does not believe the U.S. should have free and fair elections, full stop. This isn’t just some minor point to ding the GOP about: this is an existential threat to the United States and to our way of life, not to mention to the Democrats’ continued viability as a vehicle for Americans’ defense of the republic.
In short, Democrats need to stop acting as if democracy in America is a pre-ordained tragedy in which they are fated to play their heroic yet doomed role via an unsuccessful impeachment effort against the president, and start using the impeachment effort to identify the twin GOP-Trump threat for the unprecedented anti-democratic movement that it is. Anything else is dereliction of democratic duty.
Another quote in the Politico article neatly encapsulates the flaws in current Democratic thinking around impeachment:
The only way we’re going to stop [Trump] from continuing this is to convict him in the Senate and remove him from office,” said Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), a member of House leadership.
“If this president is not held accountable and my Republican colleagues in the Senate don’t honor their oath of office and convict him based on overwhelming evidence,” said Cicilline, “we will no longer have a democracy.”
So, in other words, we will 100% for sure very soon not have a democracy, since Cicilline knows full well that Republicans in the Senate will indeed fail to hold the president accountable. Yet, according to Cicilline, GOP senators are the only ones who can stop Trump from continuing his behavior. Cicilline may be a member of the House leadership, but these are not the words of a leader. While it may be fine for an anonymous blogger like myself to warn semi-hysterically of the end of American democracy, it is the responsibility of elected Democrats to actually prevent such an outcome, not attest to its inevitability. I do not see how Cicilline’s statement is substantially any different from Democrats literally throwing up their hands and telling Americans that our democracy is dead, and that they can think of no further defense of 200-plus years of an American experiment that to date has successfully defended itself against the Civil War, the Great Depression, Adolph Hitler, the nuclear abyss of the Cold War, and the mass death of 9/11. A reality TV show host and a party full of conservative hacks were apparently too much for us to handle.
The Democrats must waste no opportunity to describe the terms of this fight in unambiguous terms, hammering home a simple and true message: Trump has attempted and continues to attempt, and the GOP continues to assist, a scheme to rig the 2020 election in the president’s and the GOP’s behavior. Allow no daylight to exist between party and president, because effectively none does. Subverting a national election is no different than canceling it, and in fact is arguably worse, because it gives the American people the illusion of democracy while withholding the reality. Neither Trump nor the GOP deserves to politically survive such a crime against the American people. Certainly there is no need to pretend that either supports our democracy, or any longer follows an oath to defend the U.S. constitution.
This means using impeachment and continued investigations to make clear that the GOP and Trump are inextricably involved in the grand crime against our democracy of attempting to rig the 2020 election, as well as the various lesser but still impeachable corruptions of the Trump administration. Democrats must also make sure that there will be no backing down in this fight, no chance that they will ever accept the possibility, in Cicilline’s defeatist words, that we “no longer have a democracy.” Democracy is the ideal and the weapon with which the Democrats and all other opponents of Trump-GOP authoritarianism will degrade, delegitimize, and defeat the authoritarian monstrosity of the Trumpist GOP, even in the awful circumstance that Trump manages to cheat his way to re-election in 2020. Instead of bemoaning the imminent death of democracy, the Democrats must own and communicate their intention to implacably defend and advance the constitutional order, without compromise, until the boundaries of our democracy are again re-asserted.
Apart from the justness of the cause, the Democratic leadership also needs to recognize that even if elected Democrats are not looking ahead to what comes after impeachment, rank and file Democrats certainly are, and are not reassured by what they see. It is already deeply discouraging to read on a near-daily basis the myriad routes to victory the president can follow in 2020 by losing the popular vote but still winning the electoral college; when we face the prospect of Wisconsin being the boss of us all, it is hard not to feel physically queasy (however much we might love Wisconsin!) at the prospect of a third popular vote victory in 20 years snatched away by an outdated, slavery-abetting institution. That such an outcome is now inextricably intertwined with the president’s plan to game the 2020 election via foreign interference requires Democratic leadership do double down on, well, leadership. Democrats can’t expect citizens to keep fighting if Democratic officials keep insisting to us that the fate of democracy is in the hands of Senate Republicans (who most of us know will be putting party over country in the trial of Donald J. Trump) and that it’s game over once that foreordained conclusion is reached.
This is a politics of bright lines and absolutes that many Democrats are unfamiliar with, yet one they must quickly embrace. If GOP senators plan to betray their oath of office and not fully consider the charges against the president, then Democrats need to keep the impeachment process going in ways that do maximum damage to the president and the Republican Party. The GOP has made itself complicit in a scheme to subvert the 2020 election, and the Democrats must hammer this home at every opportunity.
The flip side to the GOP’s descent into full-time lies and propaganda in defense of the president is that the party has made itself deeply, collectively vulnerable to a democratic backlash and revival. If we can stop Trump in 2020, if we can take back the presidency and at least keep the House, then Democrats will have the opportunity to spend the coming years not only beginning to make the economic and electoral reforms that defuse the forces of inequality and hate that are giving strength to the authoritarian GOP, but will be able to continue to expose the perfidy of this presidency and his defenders by ongoing investigations that publicize what foul deeds have been done in the name of the American people.