Greg Sargent has an excellent run-down of what the Democrats should specifically do to reign in Trump’s post-impeachment efforts to rig the 2020 election. As he notes, the plot to smear Joe Biden “is still in operation today. Republicans have been running ads in Iowa that echo the fabricated narratives of Biden corruption in Ukraine. Giuliani has been meeting with former Ukrainian officials to further validate that narrative.” He also points out that though impeachment has failed to remove the president, it has produced copious damning evidence and further avenues of inquiry regarding the president’s corrupt behavior.
This gets to a point that I’ve tried to hammer home over the past couple months: no one should confuse the impeachment effort with the larger, overriding goal of exposing and ejecting from power this president and his allies in the Republican Party. Everyone knew that impeachment was highly unlikely to end with the president’s removal; but as I wrote a few days ago, the end of the impeachment process in no way ends our collective need to counter the malevolently anti-democratic agenda of this presidency. In this unsettled time between acquittal and whatever new phase we’re about to enter, the Democrats would be foolish to cede the initiative to the president. In the face of Trump trumpeting his acquittal, the Democrats need to signal that the president remains as much a danger today as he did the day before the Senate vote. The message should be that far from being cleared, the president’s corruption now extends to the vast bulk of the Republican Party, which has become a willing accomplice to his authoritarian goals.
In this, the Democrats perversely have both the GOP and Trump on their side. In chilling plain view, not only does the president continue to pursue his original scheme to smear Joe Biden, but the GOP is taking an active role in helping the plot along: just yesterday, we learned that two GOP senators had obtained Treasury department records of Hunter Biden’s financial information. That they no longer see a need to hide their illicit efforts to defame political opponents is chilling, but this offers the Democrats the chance to draw a stark distinction between themselves as defenders of American democracy and the GOP’s descent into banana republic shenanigans.
Acquittal has emboldened Trump and the GOP to escalate their movement toward anti-democratic rule, but in this they reveal their own confusion about the meaning of the impeachment process. They are pretending that acquittal means the president is innocent of the charges against him, but the actual meaning of acquittal was to establish that Trumpian corruption now extends through the bloodstream of the GOP as a whole. The facts remain what they were before, and new efforts to twist our government into Trump’s re-election machine reinforce what we already knew and provide fresh evidence of their unfitness to govern. They are betting everything on enough Americans being OK with unbridled corruption and authoritarianism; in response, the Democrats must double down on our democracy, on the rule of law, on free and fair elections.
The danger of this moment is great; but just as we shouldn’t underestimate its true dimensions, we also shouldn’t underestimate the simultaneously growing vulnerability of Trump and the GOP. Every step further they take to dismantle our democracy is one more sign of contempt for our shared American project. The fact that many or even most in the GOP are taking Trump’s lead out of fear rather than out of any fully-articulated ideological agreement signals their cowardice, but also the underlying ad-hoc nature of this authoritarian slide. In a substantial way, Team GOP has turned to outright opposition to our democratic norms because they know they can no longer win any other way, given this country’s demographic and ideological changes in combination with the party’s refusal to shift with the tides of history and justice. This makes them losers on a vast, even cosmic scale; all who oppose them should cheer themselves with this fact, and spare no effort in hammering home the cowardice and weakness of a party that has given up on persuasion, debate, and majority rule. As much as it’s trampling the constitution and engaging in corrupt activity, the GOP is also to a great degree trying to bluster and bluff its way to permanent power.