The best single analysis of the post-impeachment state of political play I’ve seen so far is Brian Beutler’s over at Crooked.com. There are three big points I want to flag. First, Beutler describes how the president’s post-acquittal actions have centered on enhancing Donald Trump’s ability to screw with the 2020 elections, via giving Attorney General William Barr sign-off on investigations of presidential candidates, creating a channel for Rudy Giuiliani to funnel dirt and propaganda to the AG, and Barr taking the reins of all legal matters relating to the president. The second is that Trump’s campaign strategy for 2020, in addition to using a corrupted Justice Department to slander Democratic presidential candidates, is to demoralize his opposition as much as to energize his base; this includes a “multibillion dollar propaganda machine” documented in The Atlantic. And third, he sketches out how Democratic politicians can energize voters by the basic act of fighting back and defying Donald Trump as he pursues his reign of lawlessness.
Beutler captures major dimensions of America’s deepening political crisis, but I’ve been mulling over a further aspect that makes it so much worse: the apparent inability of much of the Democratic Party to recognize the crisis for what it is. While impeachment was still ongoing, I was struck by how so many Democratic politicians basically fetishized impeachment as the sole means to fight back against the president. This was despite the fact that pretty much every single one of them knew that impeachment would not end up removing the president, and would likelier than not unleash further depredations.
Well, unleashed he is: and the fact that congressional Democrats clearly had no plan in place to counter his rapid moves towards greater authoritarian control over the government — whether it was his rapid firing of officials who had responded to subpoenas issued by Congress or his Attorney General’s moves to turn the DOJ into a tool of partisan retribution — may be the greatest strategic blunder yet from a party that has made many of them during the course of this frightening administration.
I am not saying that the Democrats could have stopped these moves; they likely could have not. But there is a world of difference between the world of holy hell they should have raised, and simply covering their eyes at Trump’s moves. Instead, in the week and a half since the acquittal vote, by backing down from further confrontation, they’ve allowed the president to frame impeachment as a Democratic failure and a presidential victory.
Today, my last vestiges of hope that I was missing something, and that House Democrats were actually preparing to unleash a wave of subpoenas and new investigations against this White House, were dashed away by news that the new plan is indeed to retreat from confrontation with this president. Amazingly, they have decided not to subpoena former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who is widely believed to possess information that baldly contradicts the president’s cover story about his Ukraine extortion plot. Instead, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House leadership have decided that the way to beat Trump and the GOP in 2020 is to focus on jobs, corruption in Washington, and health care:
[J]ust as they did before the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats appear to have decided that focusing on Mr. Trump’s near-daily stream of norm-shattering words and deeds only elevates him, while alienating the swing voters they need to maintain their hold on the House and have a chance at winning the Senate.
Given that the House has already taken the most powerful step a Congress can take to hold a chief executive accountable — impeachment — Democrats reason that there is little more they can do. Some say Mr. Trump brings enough attention to his conduct all on his own.
I happily concede that there is more than one possible way to wage the 2020 campaign, and that the 2018 template shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. But in 2018, it was clear as day that the Blue Wave was driven by huge amounts of revulsion against this unfit president as much as by the appeal of Democratic health and jobs plans. The idea that the president’s unfitness for office should not be a central part of an argument for why citizens should vote to remove him simply makes no sense - particularly when the new strategy means avoiding the very tactics, like aggressive, escalated investigations, that can bring that unfitness into the clearest view possible.
Particularly unnerving is the inclusion of cleaning up corruption in Washington as one of the three pillars of the Democrats’ “For the People” agenda. What more pressing corruption does the nation face than the destruction of the rule of law by the president? When the poster child for corruption is in the White House, it makes no sense not to make him central to the Democrats’ case.
But another enormous fallacy is hiding in plain view. House and Senate Democrats would have us believe that their highest priority is to be re-elected in order to stop Trump, but this isn’t actually true. The way to stop Trump is to elect a Democratic president in 2020. In the face of Trump’s openly-conducted effort to subvert the 2020 election, the constitutional responsibility and political priority of House Democrats in particular are identical: to investigate, publicize, and work to stop the president’s lawlessness. Claiming that election in 2020 is their highest priority is an abdication of their oaths of office, and speaks to an unresolved divergence over how Democrats might best win the presidency versus win control of Congress.
In Beutler’s analysis, he draws a straight line from the demoralization many Democrats are feeling to the need for Democratic politicians to fight Trump as a way of keeping spirits up. After all, if Democratic politicians can’t be bothered to fight Trump, what sort of message does this send to the Democratic base, or undecided voters? If elected Democrats act like directing the Attorney General against the president’s enemies isn’t worth making a big fuss about, this telegraphs not only to their own party faithful but to potential converts to the anti-Trump cause that what the president is doing is normal. The president is not in fact self-indicting or bringing sufficient attention all on his own: the Democrats also need to bring all the attention and investigatory powers they can to exposing the details and extent of his authoritarian behavior.
The Democrats’ screwball decision to volte-face and pretend impeachment never happened also retroactively casts impeachment in an unflattering and futile light. If the claim was that Trump needed to be removed from office because he was a mortal threat to the republic, then what to make of the fact that they are no longer pressing that claim? Were they wrong? Is he no longer such a threat? Of course not — so why act in a way that undercuts their previous willingness to decisively confront this president?
This willingness to allow the president to essentially control the narrative of what impeachment means also throws into doubt the idea that the Democrats’ real plan was to put Republican senators on the record for their support of the president’s unconstitutional behavior. Why are they acting like impeachment didn’t achieve what they wanted when they knew in the first place it wouldn’t remove him, and that it did in fact taint 52 GOP senators with an indefensible vote? If it was bad for GOP senators to vote to acquit him, then why would it be bad to force them to continue to defend behavior that is arguably worse than what he was impeached for? Why take off the spotlight when the GOP is arguably on the ropes in terms of the damage being done to the party via its unstinting support for this unfit president?
The president plotted, and continues to plot, to rig the 2020 election. This is a mortal offense against our democracy, and throws into doubt the ability of Americans to vote him out of office in the coming election. In light of this, the highest priority of Democrats should be to document and highlight his war on American democracy, and to show the American people that no issue is more important. Health care, corruption, jobs: these are all meaningless if we can’t trust in a free and fair election in November.