During the impeachment process, Democrats have at times invoked the permanent and devastating damage to the constitutional order that would result should the Senate fail to remove Donald Trump from office. Aimed more at the broader public, as a way to convey the seriousness of the president’s offenses, than at essentially unpersuadable Republican senators, this line of argument — sorrowful, elegaic, even despairing — points up the contradiction between the depth of Trump’s crimes and the near-inevitable failure of impeachment to end his reign.
While it is true that long-term damage could well result from the precedents that Trump is setting, both in terms of his own room for maneuver and the ability of future presidents to act in similarly corrupt fashion, impeachment was an important tool for stopping him — but not the only tool. And acquittal by the GOP-controlled Senate doesn’t mean that his crimes aren’t as grave as they’ve ever been, only that the Republican Party has now made itself party to those crimes. And just because impeachment has failed to remove him does not mean that the Democrats are to any degree discharged of their duty — political, moral, and constitutional — to fight tooth and nail to continue to expose this president’s corrupt behavior, particularly his attempts to rig the 2020 election in his favor, and to put a stop to it.
Yes, it is undeniably sad, even tragic, that our constitutional order has failed to remove a corrupt president when backed by the lockstep support of his party in the Senate — but it is also enraging and completely unacceptable. Donald Trump tried to use the power of the presidency to blackmail a foreign country into interfering into the 2020 election against a likely opponent, Joe Biden, and the Republican Party has determined that this is reasonable behavior for a president. In doing so, GOP congressmen and senators have nearly universally shown the public their unfitness to hold office in our democracy. There is no line they will not cross after this: not the president, and not his supporters in Congress. Already, senators are talking of investigating the original whistleblower after the impeachment trial ends, and of impeaching Joe Biden for his fictional Ukraine offenses if he is ever elected president. These are not the policies of an American political party, but of authoritarian regimes like those that exist in countries like Russia, Hungary, and Turkey.
Canny observers have made the case that the Democrats’ impeachment effort ultimately meant to put Senate Republicans on trial as much as, or more than, the president; was intended to show that they will excuse any act by Donald Trump, no matter how heinous or treasonous, and in the process set up more vulnerable members for electoral retribution in 2020. I desperately hope that this was part of their game plan all along, because it would indicate a greater awareness of the danger our country faces than the Democratic leadership sometimes shows.
At this point, alongside continued efforts to expose and stop as much of the president’s wrongdoing as possible, Democrats should build on what impeachment has revealed about the corruption of both Trump and the GOP, and make the case to voters that the Republican Party of today bears only a superficial resemblance to the Republican Party the GOP would have us believe it to be. Under the catalyst of Donald Trump’s morally empty leadership, the party has fully transformed into a vehicle of electoral corruption, treachery, and white nationalism that has no rightful place in American politics. Fortunately for the Democrats, the manner in which the GOP has turned back the impeachment effort only amplifies the case that the president and his party are a menace to the nation: polls consistently show that large majorities of Americans thought there should be witnesses and evidence at the Senate trial, and most American are savvy enough to know what it means when one side think witnesses won’t do its case any good.
The congressional GOP’s wholesale fusion with the agenda of the president makes the party deeply vulnerable to further revelations of presidential wrongdoing, but we shouldn’t skip over the fundamentally chilling fact of such unwavering mass support. As Josh Marshall reminds us in a recent effort to unpack how Trump’s dominance has come about, the fact that the whole party has more or less fallen in line with him has helped tremendously to normalize Trump’s extremism; indeed, as Marshall points out, when an entire party embraces a group of extreme positions, there are logical problems with calling them outside the mainstream (even if they objectively are).
In a quite frightening way, this turn to authoritarianism has happened so quickly that it’s simultaneously deeply uncanny but also superficially banal. Yet the Democrats cannot give an inch in this confrontation. They cannot agree to any move that sets this country further towards authoritarian rule, and they must accept the reality that the GOP cannot be compromised with, only defeated and discredited. Among other things, they need to start calling Trump-GOP authoritarianism out by name. Its manifestations include not only attempts to rig the 2020 election, but wider efforts to suppress the vote, gerrymander districts, and otherwise prevent majorities from electing the representatives of their choice. It seems undeniable that the GOP has come to the realization that it can no longer win the majority of voters anymore, and that this has led it to the logical but deeply immoral conclusion that democracy itself has become its enemy. After all, the Republicans have lost the popular vote 5 times out of the last 6 presidential elections, and won less votes than Democrats for Senators in the last 3 elections. It took a massive turnout in 2018, plus widespread revulsion at the Trumpian GOP, for the Democrats to re-take the House in the face of massive gerrymandering and voter suppression (even as they failed to re-take the Senate despite Democratic Senate candidates overall receiving more votes).
In other words, there is a perverse but extremely real reason why the GOP has finalized its turn to the hard right — and Democrats need to be talking about this as well. This awful turn in our history did not come out of nowhere, and it is based on undemocratic conclusions on the part of the GOP that need to be exposed and discredited. So while we can’t completely dismiss the sorrow of this moment, when the GOP has greenlighted and indeed made itself complicit in the president’s efforts to scam his way to re-election, we can’t confuse defeat of impeachment with defeat of American democracy. That fight is just getting started, and at the very least, millions of Americans now have a far clearer idea of the danger we face, and that defeat is not an option.