One thing we can safely conclude at this point is that the current impeachment push is not about the content of Trump’s phone conversation with Ukraine’s president Zelensky or the “whistleblower” report, although the Democrats and NeverTrumpers will probably continue to pretend it is, at least for a while.
Nancy Pelosi is now trying to spin the incident as a cover-up. If so, it would be a coverup of something that wasn’t a problem in the first place, and a coverup that involved immediate release of the phone call transcript and the whistleblower report as soon as requested.
If that makes the left look foolish, it appears that they don’t care because they are driven by many things. Chief among them is the constant effort to undo an election whose result they really really really do not like.
They have the power to impeach because they hold a majority in the House, and the prospect of a juicy show trial, which Daniel Greenfield discusses here, is probably another driving motive:
Unless the Democrats take the Senate, impeachment would be a meaningless show trial. But Marxist regimes love show trials of political opponents. The Marxist element in the House desperately wants a show trial of President Trump because such a proceeding is an explicit rejection of our political system.
This is in line with other trends going on around the world, most particularly in Western Europe, where officials wish to ignore the will of the people if that will conflicts with theirs. This is a new aristocracy which feels it has enough power to accomplish this. Propaganda from the MSM enables them, as well.
Greenfield continues:
Impeachment is not just meant to be a trial of President Trump, but of the voters who chose him. Its outcome, whatever the composition of the Senate, is meant to be an argument for remaking the system of elections, whether by abolishing the Electoral College or tampering with the judiciary, that would take the power further out of the hands of the voters and concentrate them with the right sorts of people.
A Trump presidency is unconscionable to them and was from the start.
Democrats and others in this new aristocracy had grown very used to having a GOP whose members played the game like gentlemen (and that includes the Republican women). Every now and then there had been an eruption from the more combative right such as Bill Clinton’s impeachment or Gingrich’s short-lived Contract With America. But for the most part the left and the Democrats had to deal with people who were only tepidly on the right and often more than willing to play ball with the left, people such as McCain (the candidate in 2008) and Romney (2012). Even George W. Bush was no street fighter and no conservative, although they hated him for other reasons.
The left grew used to having opponents of a certain type, and Trump most definitely is not of that type. That’s why the NeverTrumpers hate him, too, perhaps even more than the left does, because the NeverTrumpers were (and are) of that type as well.
They all feel deeply betrayed, not so much by Trump as by the American people who chose him and repudiated them. And the people must not be allowed to get away with it.
Impeachment is just one part of the war against Trump that has been waged relentlessly since the day he was elected and even before. This latest issue regarding Trump’s conversation with Zelensky is notable for many things, but one of them is the evidence it gives of the relentless surveillance of Trump by moles in government willing to report every single thing he does that might be capitalized on by the anti-Trump forces. Trump can trust no one, and no foreign head of state who talks to him can trust that their communication will not be broadcast to the world.
This is not good for the country, but the Democrats think it’s very good for them.
There is also a strange and connected desperation motive that has emerged recently, as stated by Representative Al Green of Texas:
Rep. Al Green told MSNBC Saturday that he is “concerned if we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected.”
That seems contradictory, to say the least, because a lot of people on the right are convinced that a decision to impeach the president would be the thing that would actually lead to Trump’s re-election.
After the statement of Green’s I quoted above, he added this by way of explanation:
If we don’t impeach him, he will say he’s been vindicated. He will say the Democrats had an overwhelming majority in the House and didn’t take up impeachment. He will say we have a constitutional duty to do it if it was there and we didn’t. He will say he’s been vindicated.
In other words, for Green and the others, they are between a rock and a hard place. They are afraid that Trump might win if they impeach him; they can read the polls and do the math. But they also are afraid that if they don’t, Trump would be even more likely to win and perhaps even win bigger, because then Trump could taunt them with the fact that he must be innocent because they didn’t impeach him.
Plus – although Green doesn’t say it – I believe that Green and other Democrats may fear that, if the Democrats don’t impeach Trump, their base may just decide to stay home on Election Day.
So their only hope is to impeach him and hope it fires up their base and also convinces a lot of people in the moderate middle that Trump really is guilty of something and that in all that smoke there must be a fire. Doesn’t sound like a good bet to me.
[Neo is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at the new neo.]
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