Impeaching Trump Voters
It’s revenge for 2016, and nervousness about Democratic prospects for 2020.
For the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that Donald Trump is everything Democrats say he is: a president
who abuses his national-security powers by siccing a foreign government on his political rival, a racist/bigot/nativist
constantly using “dog whistles” to stoke division, a man uniquely unfit to sit in the Oval Office.
Assume Mr. Trump is all these things. With an election scarcely a year away, the question then becomes:
Why impeach him now? Surely a president as abominable as this ought to be easy to defeat at the polls. Mr. Trump would appear to be especially vulnerable, given that last time he lost the national popular vote
and won several battleground states by razor-thin margins.
The answer speaks as much to what Democrats think of Trump voters—they don’t trust them—as it does
to what they think of Mr. Trump. In this sense, the push for impeachment now may reflect a lack of Democratic
confidence that they can persuade enough of the voters who went for Mr. Trump last time to give them the
margins they need for victory come November 2020.
The lack of confidence extends to doubts about each of their leading candidates. It’s no secret that many
Democrats worry Joe Biden isn’t up to the job of taking on Mr. Trump. So long as Ukraine is in the news,
stories about Hunter Biden’s sweetheart deal with a Ukrainian gas company will be in the news as well.
Other Democrats, meanwhile, worry that Elizabeth Warren is too far left to win. And Bernie Sanders’s heart
attack probably spells the end of any chance he might have had at the nomination.
A year ago, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler told Roll Call that before using impeachment
to overturn the results of the last election, Democrats would have to answer this question:
“Do you think that
the case is so stark, that the offenses are so terrible and the proof so clear, that once you’ve laid it all
out you will have convinced an appreciable fraction of the people who voted for Trump, who like him, that
you had no choice? That you had to do it?”We are nowhere close to meeting the Nadler standard. True, public support for impeachment is up since news of
Mr. Trump’s phone conversation with his Ukrainian counterpart broke. A FiveThirtyEight.com average of all the
impeachment polls finds 46.5% for and 44.8% against. More telling is the divide the numbers show when they
are broken down by party. While 79.1% of Democrats want impeachment, the number drops to 41.3% for independents
and only 12.5% for Republicans.
So why the rush? Maybe because in addition to concerns about 2020, there’s an itch to punish Trump voters for
what they did in 2016. In other words,
it isn’t enough that Mr. Trump be defeated. His whole presidency must be
delegitimized—along with the people who voted him in.In 2016 Hillary Clinton famously expressed this contempt for Trump voters when she told wealthy donors at a
Manhattan fundraiser “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”
She went on. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately there
are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
In “Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling,” reporter Amy Chozick
confirms this was no one-off gaffe. Mrs. Clinton, she reports, used the line repeatedly to Democratic audiences she
knew would appreciate the sentiment.
“The Deplorables always got a laugh, over living-room chats in the Hamptons, at dinner parties under the stars on
Martha’s Vineyard, over passed hors d’oeuvres in Beverly Hills, and during sunset cocktails in Silicon Valley,” wrote
Ms. Chozick. The unspoken corollary is that only a morally debased citizenry could have freely chosen Mr. Trump over
Mrs. Clinton.
Today few publicly call Trump voters “deplorable.” But the assumption remains. Remember that high-school kid from
Covington, Ky., who was accosted by a Native American activist? Simply because he was wearing a “Make America
Great Again” hat, the 16-year-old was instantly transformed into the face of white supremacy by a good part of the
American media.
When the facts finally emerged, of course, they told a much different story. But what happened to that Covington
student could not have happened without many in positions of influence unthinkingly sharing the view that people
who wear MAGA hats are what Mrs. Clinton says they are. Trump voters get this, while it doesn’t seem to occur to
Democrats that the president’s supporters stick with him in part because they appreciate that the Trump hatred is
directed at them as well.
In a poem written after East German workers rose up against their communist overlords in 1953, the playwright
Bertolt Brecht suggested that if the government was dissatisfied with the lack of appreciation from its countrymen,
perhaps it ought to “dissolve the people and elect another.” He meant it as irony. Some of those pushing hardest for
impeachment appear to be taking it more literally.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/impeaching-trump-voters-11570487810?shareToken=st33eff57c00d646adb521790ac0abf122
