David Michael Miller
Has Donald Trump committed impeachable offenses? Almost certainly.
Has he mocked our Constitution, all but destroyed political norms, and repeatedly shown an inability to practice even basic human decency? Of course.
Is he a threat to national security in multiple ways, from leaking America’s secrets to our enemies to being an impulsive finger on the nuclear trigger? God help us, yes.
So, should he be impeached? No, of course not.
The point, as always in politics, is to keep our eyes on the prize and the prize is that in January 2021, a mere 20 months away, the worst, most dangerous president in U.S. history will be replaced. And so the question becomes how best to accomplish that and impeachment is emphatically not it.
Impeachment, which is essentially an indictment issued by the House, would run into a brick wall in a trial in the Republican controlled Senate. House Democrats could offer the Senate the most air-tight and powerful case imaginable and it just wouldn’t matter. There is no way the Senate will convict Donald Trump. Facts, reason and law simply don’t count in this case.
But worse than being a fool’s errand, impeachment would also give Trump a chance to win the election in 2020.
All things being equal there are more anti-Trump voters than Trump voters. That was even painfully true in 2016 when Hillary Clinton easily won the popular vote and it’s still true today. Trump’s approval rating has never approached 50 percent and he has no head room. He has a hard ceiling at around 45 percent and the 55 percent who are against him are firmly against him. So, there’s little doubt that the next Democrat will do just as well as Clinton, but as we all know too well, presidents don’t get elected by popular vote, but by a majority in the Electoral College.
And that’s the problem with impeachment. Trump’s approval rating is misleading because approval ratings don’t equal actual votes. Trump voters are older and they vote religiously in more ways than one. Anti-Trumpers are younger and tend not to vote as reliably. Mobilize that pro-Trump 45 percent in just the right places and Trump can win again. And just the right places for Trump include Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, states he won by a total of 77,000 votes.
Impeachment will do nothing to increase liberal turnout. It has been at a feverish “eleven” (in Spinal Tap terms) ever since Trump won in 2016 and it will not abate until he’s gone. But impeachment will fire up the Trump base and it risks turning away the narrow sliver of voters who are still persuadable, voters who cast ballots for Trump last time because they didn’t like Hillary Clinton or they were so angry and frustrated with things that they wanted to cast a protest vote to blow up the status quo. If the Democrats nominate someone like Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar those voters can be won back. There aren’t a lot of them, but are there 77,000 in three states? I think it’s a safe bet that there are.
But to the Trump base and to the small group of persuadable 2016 Trump voters who might be peeled away from him, impeachment will be a declaration of war on the man they elected. It will be portrayed as an attempted coup by the “liberal media” and coastal elites, an effort to remove a democratically elected president — never mind all of his attempts to undermine American democracy itself.
Liberals of the Rachel Maddow ilk didn’t help themselves by overselling the Mueller investigation. They had worked themselves into a lather expecting that the special counsel’s report would show clear evidence of collusion with the Russians. But it didn’t. It only showed clear evidence of corruption, incompetence and lawlessness, and maybe evidence of obstruction of justice — all things that ended up looking less important than they are when measured against treason.
Now that same left wing can’t help itself. It’s demanding impeachment because… because… because it’s the right thing to do! In a legal, maybe even moral sense, it probably is the right thing to do. But in a political sense it’s precisely the wrong thing to do. For the sake of the country, for the sake of getting this cancer cut out of our system as soon as possible with as little damage to the healthy tissue as possible, let’s not do it.
