Democrats gloat when they speak to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy about impeachment. “We know you’re losing because you keep talking about process,” they’re inclined to say if they bump into him at the gym. This suggests they’re convinced by that old wisdom about politicians not discussing process unless substance is against them.
But there’s an equally potent idea in politics that “when you’re explaining, you’re losing.” And Democrats have spent more than a month desperately explaining: explaining what’s wrong with President Trump prodding Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden’s sleazy $600,000 stipend from a shady energy company, explaining why it was abuse of power, explaining how it undermined the “interagency consensus” — man, if ever an idea was less likely to alarm ordinary voters! — explaining why it amounted to bribery (the crime that, not coincidentally, Democrats decided on after poll testing it against other charges).
But before an elected chief executive can be ousted, his offenses must be so clear that they don’t take much parsing. Yet the more the Democrats explain, the less convincing they become.
Let’s stipulate that the most plausible interpretation of Trump’s controversial July 25 phone call is that he tried to strong-arm Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy into supplying dirt on Joe Biden and conditioned U.S. aid on this “favor” being granted. But a reasonable assumption is not the same thing as a proven crime.
Believing Trump did what he did for personal benefit rather than out of genuine concern about Ukrainian corruption doesn’t mean his offense is so grave that he should be removed from office. As with other Trumpian scandals — the “Muslim ban” comes to mind — the president blundered into action with a clumsy and arrogant disregard for niceties and then dialed it back after officials stepped in to restrain him. In the case of Ukraine, he dialed it back so far that he dropped his insistence on the favor and delivered the aid anyway.
Democrats have made defending Trump easy because their impeachment process has been so manifestly unserious. After the Schiff charade, in which the eponymous partisan chairman excluded defense witnesses who would embarrass his narrative, the party rushed impeachment to the Judiciary Committee presided over by the hapless Jerry Nadler. There, lawyers came in, mostly for the prosecution, to present their constitutional exegesis in the hope of explaining (again) to a less-than-avid TV-viewing public that impeachment is warranted.
To be effective, these scholars needed to show lofty objectivity. Instead, we got hours of Pamela Karlan, a Stanford professor, who waxed rhetorical and, I’d bet, lost thousands of pro-impeachment voters with every excited word she uttered. There was also Noah Feldman, a Harvard professor, who suggested that failure to impeach Trump would mean America was a monarchy or dictatorship. The kind of monarchy or dictatorship where, er, voters will decide in less than a year whether to keep or replace the dictator, and if they keep him around, he’s term-limited out of office four years after that.
Do Democrats really think this sort of stuff will persuade the public? Can they?
They lugubriously insist they’re dragging the nation through all this not angrily or vengefully but out of a profound sense of duty. Do even their supporters believe that? No amount of flummery can conceal their unchanging purpose of sticking it to the Orange Man. The fact that Democrats and the #Resistance have cited perhaps a dozen different reasons to impeach Trump makes it clear to reasonable people (including those who think Trump behaved inappropriately) that Ukraine is just the latest stretch justification for an unwavering determination to destroy the president.
There are no salient new facts being brought to light by the impeachment hearings. There is merely disagreement over how to regard what the president did, which Trump himself laughably says was “perfect.”
Which gets us back to process. Republican messaging has focused on persuading the country that Democrats don’t trust voters. They’ve done this by saying the impeachment process is unfair, and Democrats have helped them magnificently by actually being unfair. Voters seem likely to think the impeachment tainted and will conclude that there has been prosecutorial abuse.
Trump seems certain to go through the 2020 presidential election with the scarlet letter “I” pinned to his chest. But, pace Prof. Feldman, voters seem less likely to think the threat to democracy comes from the man they elected than from those who have never accepted the result of the 2016 election.
