Twice Innocent Trump

Who needed a failed impeachment and why was it necessary?

On Wednesday, Donald Trump was acquitted by the Senate. He remains the president of the United States. Removing him from office, which required the agreement of two-thirds of the members of the upper house of Congress, turned out to be a mission impossible for those who initiated the impeachment proceedings.

The process, which the entire world followed, lasted four months. Seventeen witnesses, 28,000 pages of documents, and yet the result was totally predictable. The House of Representatives, where the Democrats have the majority, was able to impeach the president because voting took place almost exactly along party lines. In the Senate, where the Republicans (the president’s party) have the majority, Trump was acquitted, as they say, “with a clear advantage.” On the first charge, abuse of power, 48 senators voted guilty (the only Republican to join with the Democrats in the Senate on this count was Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, who ran for president against Barack Obama), while 52 voted not guilty. On the second charge, obstruction of Congress, the vote was clearly a partisan matter, with a vote of 53 to 47 in favor of acquittal. Some 67 votes finding Trump guilty were needed to remove Trump from office.

Everything was decided this week after senators refused to call witnesses at the hearing. The majority of Republicans (only two members of Trump’s party voted in favor of hearing from the witnesses: Romney and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine) decided to end the hearing without calling on former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who claimed that Trump had, in fact, stopped allocating aid to Ukraine while he demanded dirt on the Bidens – both father and son. The senators also refused to call other witnesses, thereby completely eliminating any new risks for Trump.

This is the first time in the history of the Senate that an impeachment hearing has taken place without witnesses.

Trump’s lawyers told House managers that they should have called all witnesses before voting on impeachment, and said the indictment was handled poorly and incorrectly. In response, House Democrats said that Trump and the White House prohibited administration officials from taking part in the investigation and demanded that they ignore House subpoenas. The Republican senators argued in turn that the House managers should have demanded that witnesses be present at the hearing and the Democratic managers said that such a demand would have caused the hearing to drag on until the November election and beyond. This kind of debate, where each side sticks to its ironclad rebuttals, is pretty unproductive!

Some Republican senators (Lamar Alexander, Marco Rubio, Rob Portman, Collins and others) now admit that Trump behaved inappropriately regarding Ukraine, but that his behavior doesn’t warrant his removal from office, that it’s not that bad.

During his annual State of the Union address before Congress on Tuesday, the president was confident that he wouldn’t be removed from office, something that would be an unprecedented and shameful moment in the history of the United States. Trump did not make history by delivering his address as an impeached president; Bill Clinton beat him to that distinction. However, if Trump is reelected in November, he will go down in history as the first U.S. president to win reelection after having been impeached.

On the eve of Trump’s address in Congress, the 45th president’s approval rating reached a record high of 49%, according to a Gallup poll. But there’s no talk of showing the president’s opponents any good will or an apology. At the State of the Union address, watched around the world, Trump ignored the outstretched hand of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In turn, the speaker waited until Trump had finished his speech before neatly ripping the pages of the text in two.

This week is undoubtedly a blessing for Trump. In addition to the president’s victory in the Senate, his record ratings and his turgid speech in Congress in front of his implacable enemies in the Democratic Party, the start of the Democratic primaries turned into total confusion. Trump is equally happy both with his own achievements and his opponents’ failures; and there are more of those than you realize. On Monday, during the Iowa caucuses, the specialized computer program for calculating votes malfunctioned. As a result, votes had to be recounted over several days. By Thursday morning (!), 86% of the votes had been processed, and Joe Biden notched only fourth place. So far, he has won no delegates of his own for the Democratic National Convention, which will be held on July 13-17 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the delegates will choose a Democratic Party presidential candidate. In Iowa, the former Indiana mayor, Pete Buttigieg, and the “socialist” senator, Bernie Sanders, were leading, having picked up 11 delegates each, while Elizabeth Warren had five. The state of Iowa provides a total of 41 delegates to the convention. Biden could still receive votes at the last minute; however, it’s an indisputable fact that he is not the Democrats’ favorite.

A “Who’s Who” of Democratic presidential candidates will become clear after Super Tuesday on March 3, when primaries will take place at the same time in 14 states, as well as in American Samoa. Democrats abroad will also be voting. Furthermore, the former mayor of New York City, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who has practically flooded the internet and cable channels with ads, is taking part in the race. Two billionaires fighting for the White House – this is a completely plausible scenario.

“Ukrainegate” might be described as the Democrats’ second try. This scandal was preceded by an arduous hunt for connections between Trump and the Kremlin. However, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report didn’t provide Trump’s opponents with the conclusions that could have served as a basis for impeachment. In his report, Mueller made a record of the Kremlin’s attempts to interfere in the elections and accused Russian hackers and GRU officers [Ed. note: Russia’s military intelligence service], but he didn’t find the president guilty.*

Therefore, the telephone conversation between Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskiy reported by a whistleblower in the intelligence community concerning a quid pro quo, in which the United States would give Ukraine military aid if Kyiv provided information on the Bidens, became the final opportunity to remove Trump from office without having to wait for the election.

The odds for conviction in the Senate were obviously not in the Democrats’ favor. Impeachment managers had one last chance to get Americans’ attention, to induce public outrage at Trump’s behavior, to bring down his ratings and with that, force Republican senators to vote against the president, provided that the voters in their states all supported the impeachment. This became their immediate challenge and it was here that failure was lying in wait for the Democratic Party.

Trump’s ratings didn’t drop. In fact, they went up during the crucial vote. And although the majority of Americans favored calling witnesses in the Senate, it still was not a 90% majority but closer to 60% to 65% in favor. Republican senators opted to present a united front and back the president. Of the three Senate votes in prior impeachment trials, this latest vote was the most partisan in U.S. history.

There was another goal of impeachment: to beat Trump in November after breaking him during multiple hearings broadcast on cable TV. But, as the local media reported, the TV ratings for the broadcasts turned out to be lower than ratings during Clinton’s impeachment and “Monicagate.” Surveys have shown that the American public followed the impeachment proceedings less this time because few believed that the Senate would remove Trump from office.

For the Democratic Party to achieve a final victory, it doesn’t just need a weakened Trump, but a strong candidate of its own. Biden, who seemed to be the unquestionable favorite at the very start of the race, has now had his moment, as they say. Among other things, this is due to the uproar in the press surrounding his son; the dismissal of the Ukrainian attorney general under pressure from Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden’s company having received money from a Chinese state agency.

The “Trumpophiles” believe that everything is above board. “Trumponomics is sweeping the country” by lowering taxes, deregulating financial rules enacted under Obama, and imposing tariffs on foreign partners, which have all boosted economic growth, led to record highs in the stock market, and helped stimulate the labor market.

Under Trump, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, has been eliminated, as well as Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who led terrorist operations throughout the world. Curiously, following Trump’s speech, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a special press release, in which the president’s activities were described in glowing terms: “All Americans can be proud of President Trump’s resolve to put American interests and values first and restore respect for American leadership on the world stage.” It’s hard to imagine Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Condoleezza Rice or John Kerry writing similar accolades about their bosses. Indeed, as Bob Dylan sang, “the times they are a-changin.”

Trump’s critics point out that, as usual, the president’s speech was full of inaccuracies. It was “a manifesto of lies,” said Speaker Pelosi, explaining why she publicly ripped up the speech. The “Trumpophobes” note that the tariffs have damaged American industry and agriculture, and that lowering taxes and increasing government spending has significantly increased the national debt. Under Obama it was $17 trillion, now it’s more than $23 trillion.

Who will turn out to be right in the end? As the saying goes, don’t count your chickens until they hatch. The count takes place in the U.S. on Nov. 3.

*Editor’s note: The Mueller Report found that the Russian government “interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion” and “violated U.S. criminal law.” The report concluded that the investigation did not find sufficient evidence to conclude the Trump campaign “coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.”