Trump’s Impeachment: Trading a Horse for a Chicken

Since the very beginning of initiating impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, it was clear that impeachment charges would be approved by the House of Representatives, and then would be rejected by the Senate. The latter will happen, because the Democratic Party holds the majority in the House, and the Republican Party holds the majority in the Senate. And the party-line vote in the House actually shows that the impeachment procedure was based on political, and not legal, arguments. When something like this happens, the representatives of the two houses of Congress react in a partisan fashion: Democrats vote for, Republicans against.

With the House vote that night officially charging Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, the Democrats won the battle, but will lose the war. The biggest failure of Trump’s opponents is that they failed to prove their charges. And when legal arguments were scarce, they relied on political reasoning. In this sense, we don’t know if the U.S. president actually violated the law governing executive power, but we do know that even if that is the case, the Democrats were unable to prove it.

Otherwise, thanks to political reasoning and the House majority which opposes Trump, impeachment was successful. However, for the exact same reasons, taking into account the Republican majority in the Senate and political alignment, the impeachment will fail in the Senate (unless something exceptional happens in the meantime, as occurred, for example, when President Richard Nixon was forced to resign in the 70s after compromising tapes were leaked).

The natural question then is why the Democrats initiated a procedure to remove Тrump when they know that they will not succeed in the end. The answer to this question lies in several places.

First, the Democrats did not want to lose momentum or give up the discourse, in which they have invested much time and resources, beginning with the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller into the alleged cooperation between Trump’s team and Russia during the 2016 election campaign. (The investigation was conducted carefully and thoroughly, but it ended unsuccessfully for Trump opponents.) In this regard, impeachment was a logical continuation of the Democrats’ efforts to compromise the American president.

Second, Democrats believed that negatively portraying Trump would affect his support. Here, however, his opponents drew a blank. A study whose results were provided immediately before the vote in the House of Representatives showed that the rating of the U.S. president actually rose since the beginning of the impeachment debate. (In the first half of December he had a 45% approval rating compared to 39% in October.) Moreover, if two months ago, 52% of Americans thought that Trump should be removed from office, those who hold the same opinion today have fallen to 45% (and 51% respectively believe that he should not be removed from the White House). This study was made by Gallup International and was conducted between Dec. 2 and Dec. 15. But this also shows that the impeachment process that was initiated is more likely to have mobilized the supporters of the president than to have discouraged them.

Third, with the negative clamor surrounding Trump, the Democrats are trying to shape the nature of the debate during the 2020 presidential election to favor arguments against the Republican candidate instead of favoring the Democratic candidate. In other words, the Democrats will run a negative campaign, betting on Trump’s shortcomings rather than on the merits of Joe Biden (the leading candidate from the left at the moment). That is, opponents of the U.S. president will build their messages and propaganda around the thesis that it is not about how good Biden is, but how bad Тrump is. The idea of such a strategy is to rely on support coming from anti-Тrump sentiment in American society beyond the cross-party level, which usually represents a broader electoral coalition than that of the Democratic Party itself. With this approach, Trump opponents will try to compensate for the less attractive Democratic presidential candidate, and lure in undecided voters (those who stand somewhere between Democrats and Republicans).

Fourth, Democrats have tried to create conditions under which Republican congressmen and senators will distance themselves from Trump, as they try to revive internal criticism of the president coming from the Republican Party ranks. This did not happen in the House. Every Republican congressman voted against impeachment. In the Senate, the course of this plot also seems limited. (There are only three senators who could ultimately vote with the opposition: Mitt Romney, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski.) Even if this happens, it will still not be enough for impeachment to succeed. Conviction on impeachment charges requires a qualified two-thirds majority vote in the Senate. But the Democrats’ hope here relates to something else: the noise that will be made by those Republican senators who vote differently.

Fifth, given the dynamics of the Democratic Party, the final failure of impeachment, as well as the negatives it has produced, will be blamed on the leaders of the organization’s radical wing at the root of the impeachment initiative. Democratic Party leaders will use that to tame the anti-establishment voices within the party for a while (Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), which may hinder the campaign of the Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 more than it will help. The Democratic establishment itself will try to neutralize the Jeremy Corbyn effect (the party’s takeover by the radical left in it), which rendered the British Labour Party leader unelectable. In this spirit, could recently hear Barack Obama’s voice. Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, knows quite well that her “Jeremy Corbyn” is Ocasio-Cortez.

In the end, however, the Democrats have failed to capitalize politically on the impeachment of Trump. And this is not bad news. Politics should occur within the law, and not in spite of it. And when the president of the United States is to be impeached, it should be done legally, not politically. Otherwise, House Democrats will pay for a successful impeachment with political failure in the long run. But this is what happens when you trade a horse for a chicken, which is hardly an equitable exchange.