John Oliver Makes the Case for Impeaching Trump A.S.A.P.
Road to Perdition
The Democratic Case for Not Impeaching Trump
With Trump no longer responsible for executing on what he advocates, Trumpism might even have a better shot. He'd probably become the most powerful ex-president ever.
Donald Trump sits on a firefighter truck as he attends a "Made in America" products showcase event at the White House, July 17, 2017.By Carlos Barria/Reuters.
One of the most memorable reflections on the crushing of China's Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 came several years later from a railway worker named Han Dongfang. The democracy movement, he told interviewers several years later, had been like a piece of unripe fruit, bitter and green, that people had eaten despite the certainty of digestive agony. "So should they have eaten the fruit?" Han asked. "You can say they shouldn't have, but they were hungry. And if you say that they should have, what they ate was still green, inedible."
For millions of Americans, Donald Trump was like that fruit. Nothing else seemed edible, and they were desperately hungry, so they chose to swallow it. Now we're feeling the pain. The troubles with Trump's character and temperament were always obvious, but they have proved even more severe than many had feared. No wonder that Julius Krein, editor of the Trumpist-minded (but erudite and thoughtful) journal American Affairs, recently took to the pages of The New York Times to disavow his previous support for the president. The inconsistencies in Trump's policy promises were also always obvious, but, with his decision to back a troop increase in Afghanistan, announced yesterday, Trump has backtracked further on his promises of non-intervention than his supporters feared. No wonder Breitbart, with Steve Bannon newly reinstalled at the helm, is on the attack.
Anyone who ever expressed a sanguine, or merely non-apocalyptic, view of Trump, only to change his or her mind, has had to weather a lot of grief and I-told-you-sos. Just look at the reader comments in response to Krein's article. Unless critics of Trump understood the appeal of his deviations from the conventional wisdom of Washington, however, they, too, were blind.
Video: A Lesson From Trump In Numbers
To avoid stealing any tragic nobility from the heroes of Tiananmen, let's use a less poetic analogy for the choices faced during the last election. Americans were like travelers in Denver looking for a ride out of town. Republicans were offering to chauffeur them to Atlanta in a lumbering GMC Yukon, while Democrats were offering to chauffeur them to New York City in a fashionable Tesla. But a lot of Americans were desperate to get to Las Vegas, and the only car available for that was a garish and ancient El Dorado steered by a lunatic, someone who spoke beautifully about the Strip but also seemed to forget what he was promising and who had a habit of pulling over every 200 feet to make a scene and bang on the windows of other drivers, although he promised to be normal any day now.
After the El Dorado knocked out the GMC Yukon, it was either the Tesla to New York or the Trumpmobile to Vegas. Which should you pick? Many voters felt the only responsible choice was to take the Tesla to New York and hope for a better car to Vegas to come along later. But the more desperate you were to foil the Washington blob and its insistence on maintaining—through trade, immigration, and war—the trappings of empire, the harder the choice was. We've been stuck in Denver trying for decades to get to Vegas, went the argument, but no one has ever offered us a ride there. Are you too dainty, too status-conscious, to get in this El Dorado with the loony driver and take the chance? Millions of conservatives, and even some non-conservatives, decided to go for it.
And, yes, as with the unripe fruit, the Trumpmobile has proven as bad as many feared. The passengers have come no closer to Vegas. The driver won't listen to suggestions, and he's still pulling over constantly to take out his road rage on some hapless new target. Everyone else on the road is just trying to avoid a wreck.
You might say that leaves some questions. One is this: will we just go back to choosing between New York and Atlanta? That's what many Republicans and Democrats hope. They argue that the Democrats need better marketing, not new policies, or that the Republican Party just needs to revert to its principles after Trump leaves. That might work, if neither party makes a change. But perhaps one of the major parties wakes up and produces a candidate who realizes that within Sandersism and Trumpism is something for which Americans yearn. Maybe it's Bernie Sanders, with more toughness on border security, or maybe it's an idiosyncratic Republican who's friendly toward Obamacare. Trump has widened the range of possibilities.
But that's the future. There's also the old-fashioned question about what we do now. Donald Trump didn't need to accept all of the prevailing narrative on Charlottesville—in which the violence of Antifa seems to have been downplayed—in order to have responded properly. He could still have unequivocally condemned Nazis, deplored what looked like white-supremacist terrorism, contacted Heather Heyer's family immediately, and stressed American unity of values. But instead, as we know, he acted as if there hadn't been a homicide and said that many of the blood-and-soil marchers were "fine people."
Video: Mike Pence Won't Make America Great Again
All signs are that this was a major turning point. It's not that Trump supporters were scared away. It's that Trump has now become such an icon of America's cold civil war that he politicizes everything he touches, whether he wants to or not. Even George W. Bush, hated as he was by liberals, could play the ceremonial and non-partisan role of head of state at the customary times: concerts, meetings with Olympic athletes, medal bestowals, and so forth. With Trump, the role of head of state threatens to be swallowed up entirely by the role of partisan and culture warrior. Already, Trump has felt obliged to skip the Kennedy Center Honors, because several of the artists vowed to boycott the White House reception. The artists made the first move, but it's hard to blame them. Trump makes it very hard to separate the office from the man.
It feels dangerous. Trump has used up his second chances, and righting the course seems close to impossible now. That doesn't mean he should be removed from office. Nothing good can come of impeachment, which would deepen partisan divisions and hurt the country, feeding into a narrative of deep-state coups. Democrats also want to ask themselves if increased suspicion of government would favor them going forward. But a lot of good could come from Trump's resignation. He'd probably become the most powerful ex-president ever, with his deplorables looking to him for thoughts on every move made by President Mike Pence. He might enjoy himself more, since his political skills, like those of Bannon, run to insurrection rather than management. Oddly enough, with Trump no longer responsible for executing on what he advocates, Trumpism might also have a better shot. Who knows? More important, the country would be less on edge, less on the brink, with divisions less likely to flare up into flat-out war. That doesn't mean anyone has to give up on trying to get to Las Vegas, if that's where people want to go. But it does mean getting to work on finding a different driver.