A disquieting paradox may be at the heart of Democratic reluctance to pursue impeachment inquiries against President Trump in the wake of the Mueller Report: to concentrate the party’s efforts on an effort that has nothing directly to do with improving the lives of Americans risks adding renewed energy to the currents of discontent that helped Trump win the White House in the first place. This seems to underly the frequently-heard position that the Democrats should seek to repeat their 2018 strategy in taking on Trump in 2020, with an emphasis on down-to-earth issues like health care. An analysis yesterday from The Washington Post surveys this perspective pretty thoroughly, and it is perhaps best summed up by an advisor to Kirsten Gillibrand’s remark that, “If in a year I am talking about the Mueller report, I am losing. Because the election is going to be about the economy.”
Democrats have inevitably been placed in a fraught position by the corrupt and authoritarian Donald Trump, and by the GOP that enables him. To an alarming degree, politics is no longer the realm that most Democratic politicians are accustomed to thinking of it, where the long, slow slide of the Republican Party into a proto-authoritarian entity could be excused as hard-ball politics or simply a change in quantity not quality, and where Democrats could persuade themselves they were competing on the basis of ideas within a common framework of accepting democratic governance. But Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, and what we have learned to date, up to and including the Mueller report, of both the president’s efforts to deny that interference and to obstruct its investigation, have helped demolish any lingering faith that we are still practicing politics as usual.
As much as many Democrats would like to make the 2020 election about the economy and health care, seeing that as fertile ground for defeating Donald Trump, and as strategically reasonable as it is to move the terms of the election onto ground that they see as highly favorable to the Democrats, the nature of the acts documented in the Mueller report are not simply the type that can be de-prioritized or set aside. Cover-up of a foreign attack against American democracy, and a willingness to accept that help, is treachery against every American, regardless of who they voted for. And for the Democratic Party, the issue is existential: Trump’s willingness to countenance Russian help, and then to seek to cover it up, was a direct attack on the Democratic Party’s ability to win elections.
The Trump administration and its allies aren’t going full-bore to discredit and propagandize against the Mueller report because they actually think it’s bullshit. They’re doing this because they’re fully aware of the mortal threat it poses to this presidency, a threat that the opposition is curiously slow to grasp. And this may get to the heart of what ails the Democrats. Too many in their leadership don’t realize that we’re in the late stages of a breakdown that’s been a long time coming, but that’s finally upon us. It is not just that the Republican Party has gone all in with defending a president who has committed indefensible acts, not only in terms of accepting Russian election interference, but in excusing his inexcusable incompetence on so many other fronts, from the drowning of Puerto Rico to the separation of families and the caging of immigrant children. It’s also that the GOP has for many years laid the groundwork for this escalation of authoritarianism on the right, with state-level voter ID laws, gerrymandering, and other voter suppression efforts allowing the GOP to win majorities despite its dwindling numbers nationwide, and its transformation into the party of white people, if not full-on white nationalism. We can’t forget this: in the face of such a tilted electoral playing field, were it not for the massive organizing and outrage that swept the country last year, the Democrats never would have had a prayer of re-taking the House and being able to provide even a modest check on this craptastic regime.
And this misunderstanding of the current crisis has, at least in part, led Democrats to misunderstand the role of impeachment in illuminating the convergence of Trump and the Republican Party. As Brian Beutler argues at Crooked.com, even as Democrats argue that a Republican-majority Senate makes an impeachment effort futile, they ignore the fact that both the inquiry and the Senate trial would put Republican congresspeople and senators on the public record, both in terms of their complicity with this presidency and in choosing to vote in his defense. By underestimating the possibilities of even an unsuccessful impeachment, the Democrats are missing an opportunity to permanently brand the GOP the party of Trump, and vice versa, as a prelude to 2020.
In arguing that the 2020 election will be the proper means by which to attempt to eject Trump from office, the Democrats are putting their faith in an electoral process that Trump, as shown by the Mueller report, has no qualms about corrupting. As others have pointed out, the Democrats on the one hand would have us believe Trump is an unfit president, but on the other undermine their argument by saying that we just have to live with him until 2020 - and if the president “wins” again, by the corrupt means that the Democrats had decided weren’t worth impeachment, well, that’s just how it goes.
Perhaps the short version of my argument is this: the Democrats may think that politics as usual will save them, and the country, but we have plenty of evidence that Trump will not be playing politics as usual through 2020. Even as the Democrats dither on impeachment, Trump and some in the GOP have indicated their intent to seek revenge against the Democrats for having supported investigating the president in the first place. Even without impeachment going forward, in other words, the president has no qualms about turning the tables, and seeking to unleash the power of the state against his political enemies. Here are a couple questions that I’d love for the Democratic leadership answer:
What will be the Democratic response when the president seeks to criminalize and remove from office Democratic lawmakers?
What will be the Democratic response when malign foreign actors attack the 2020 election in support of Trump, and Trump accepts this assistance, when the Democrats have established that such complicity by the president does not constitute an impeachable offense?
What will be the Democratic response when the president points to the lack of an impeachment inquiry as proof that he is doing nothing wrong in accepting the help of foreign powers in a presidential election?
Doing the right thing in no way means being politically unsavvy about how you do it. Democrats must draw as clear a line as possible between any impeachment inquiry and the ability of government to serve the public’s needs, including specific policies. Any impeachment effort must be accompanied by the Democrats doubling down on a progressive, transformative agenda making clear to the public what legislation they will pass once they have control of the Senate and presidency. Impeachment, somewhat paradoxically, can’t just be about impeachment.