By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, December 22, 2025
Last week, I was a guest
on Michael Medved’s show, and the host asked a question that surprised me:
If the Democrats take the House and the Senate after the midterm elections,
will they impeach Donald Trump a third time?
I was surprised by the question because I was surprised
that the question was in question.
Since ought implies can, let us begin with
a little bit of math.
At this moment it is just barely possible, as a matter of
arithmetic, that Democrats could go into January 2027 with a position in
Congress that would enable them to successfully impeach and convict Donald
Trump for his latest batch of high crimes and misdemeanors, which range
from gross financial corruption to conducting an
illegal war—a campaign of mass murder, in short—in the Caribbean. The
corruption of the Republican Party is so complete that it is impossible to
imagine a single Republican senator siding with the Democrats against
Trump—meaning that Democrats would have to sweep the midterms, winning
practically every contested seat, to arrive at the 67-vote minimum they would
need to convict Trump after the relatively simple matter of impeaching him in a
Democrat-controlled House, should that come to pass. I’d bet good money that,
in the unlikely scenario in which they had the votes, Democrats would be happy
to impeach and convict Trump—and not only Trump, but other members of his
administration as well, and that they would go further and exclude them from
holding future positions of public trust. I would cheer them on if they did.
Hell, I’d check the columnists’ handbook and see if it was okay to send Chuck
Schumer a bouquet of roses.
But the most likely scenario at this time is that
Democrats end up with a thin
majority in the House while Republicans retain control of the
Senate, possibly with a slightly diminished majority. The notion that
victorious Democrats will exit the midterms vindicated and in a position to
stage a final triumphant humiliation of Donald Trump looks very much like a
fantasy at this time.
In such a case, impeachment would be more a matter of
political messaging than the campaign of effective constitutional hygiene that
our moment requires. In general, I think Democrats probably should listen more
to people like me when it comes to how they talk about certain issues and their
vision of the national interest, but they are not going to do that, and, in
this particular case, I do not have any Machiavellian advice to give them.
Besides, working through that kind of political calculation is not really my
role.
In the most general terms, I would say that dilemma
Democrats are likely to face is that one faction of energetic and influential
partisans will demand another impeachment as practically the first order of
business, while others will worry that such a move, being numerically doomed to
failure, will produce only discouragement among Democrats and make it more
difficult for the party to present itself as a reasonable alternative to chaos
as opposed to a left-wing expression of the same counterproductive, rage-driven
politics typified by Trump and his movement. That potentially serious downside
has to be taken into consideration by Democrats if they assume there are
gettable votes toward the middle of the spectrum and that these—and not the
graduate students in the gender studies department at Bryn Mawr—would be the
building blocks of more consequential and more durable Democratic power.
We have a miseducated political class whose members have
been taught, at great expense, that a certain kind of cheap verbal cleverness
is the height of human achievement. (Yes, I do think I will title Vol. 2 of my
memoir A Certain Kind of Cheap Verbal Cleverness.) Superficial
cleverness, particularly among the so-called “comms professionals,” is an
absolute plague on our politics and public life. Should Democratic candidates
for the House run on impeachment? Should Democratic candidates for the Senate
run on impeachment? Ask 10 clever people, and you’ll get 13 clever answers.
I would like to suggest a relatively simple approach:
Democrats should run on a platform of what it is they actually intend to do in
office, and that platform should be what they believe to be the right thing. I
would offer the same advice to Republicans if they had not made it so perfectly
clear that they cannot and will not do any such thing, that their party and
their movement is incapable of candor and good faith. And here I have a
stronger view than I do on the technical matters.
Of course Donald Trump should be impeached again.
Today. Tomorrow. Yesterday. Twice on Sunday, on the theory that justice is
justice even on the Sabbath. In a sane and self-respecting society, the
impeachment and removal of Trump—and Pete Hegseth, and J.D. Vance, and many
others—would be only the beginning of the affair. Various attempts by
shambolically incompetent Democrats to prosecute Trump for his crimes the last
time around came to nothing and helped to ensure that the non-shambolic,
non-incompetent investigation of Jack Smith failed, too, but that fact does not
in itself excuse us—all of us—from the necessity of pursuing justice in the
here and now, again, today. That is not something that falls only to Democrats
and to officeholders: The idea of citizenship in a republic entails ordinary
people taking upon their own backs some share of the burdens of the state. We
are not here to be bystanders; political power ultimately rests with us. Qui
tacet consentire.
This is a serious matter, and one that does not need so
much calculation and superficial cleverness. Just say what you think, try to do
what you say, and follow the course that you believe to be the right one from
day to day. If the voters don’t like it, then the voters don’t like it, and you
can go back to being a lawyer or professor or business owner, or you might get
a nice cable news gig or a new career as a podcast dope slinging
dishonest horsepucky for fun and profit. But you’ll be able to say that you
tried to do the right thing—and I think that is going to matter to you when
things come to a close.
And Furthermore …
I don’t spend a lot of time quoting Scripture at people,
but there’s some good advice in there for those engaged in public life:
Woe unto them that call evil
good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that
put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter. … Which justify the wicked for
reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him.
Words About Words
This is going to make a mess: “100,000
Ordered to Evacuate as Rivers Rise in Washington State.”
A person who evacuates is emptying his bowels. A
person removed from a place of danger is a person being evacuated. If
you have 100,000 people evacuating all at once ... well, maybe they won’t
notice it too much in Seattle.
Those 100,000 were not ordered to evacuate; they were
ordered to leave, to seek safety, to head for the hills, to make for higher
ground, etc.
Another Times
headline: “How Democrats Used One Word to Turn the Tide Against Trump.”
They didn’t. It wasn’t clever rhetoric that turned some Americans against Trump
and Republicans; it was reality. It was the grocery bill, the mortgage,
the car payment. Democrats have been trying to convince themselves—and, as if
by osmosis, some middle-of-the-road voters—that their problem is how they talk
about policies and politics and culture, not that they have real problems
with their policies, with politics, and with culture. They’ve been doing that
since at least the era of What’s
the Matter with Kansas?
But how we talk about things only really matters to the
extent that it helps voters and citizens to understand real connections and
relationships between their own experiences and what officeholders do or what
parties promise to do. Trump’s famous “She’s for they/them” ad, blasting Kamala
Harris as an out-of-touch weirdo overly invested in boutique sexual radicalism,
did not work because it was clever—it worked because Kamala Harris is an
out-of-touch weirdo overly
invested in boutique sexual radicalism. Trump can go out there and insist
that the affordability problem is a “hoax” all day long, but even if he were
capable of speaking about that—or anything—in a subtle or clever way, it would
not matter very much to people who are going to be more informed and more
persuaded by their own intimate, firsthand experience of inflation during the
Trump presidency.
The professional speechwriters and such don’t want to
acknowledge the fact, but it is a fact: Rhetoric is not magic. There is no “one
word” that is going to turn the tide in any political contest. Put one word on
one side of the balance and a ton of facts—the price of bread, the price of
meat, the price of college tuition, the price of health insurance—on the other,
and even so dim and credulous a creature as the American voter can detect the
difference in weight.
And Furtherermore …
A hot Christmas
take from the court of Herod (White House Deputy Chief
of Staff Stephen Miller):
As Americans get ready to
celebrate Christmas, the George W. Bush Presidential Center is very earnestly
posting about the urgent need for unfettered migration from the most dangerous
nations on planet earth, while effectively conceding some of these migrants
will try to kill us.
Miller, like Our Lord, is Jewish, and perhaps he is not
entirely familiar with the relevant Scripture here. Allow me to fill it in: The
parents and child at the center of the Christmas story were shortly thereafter
literal asylum seekers, in Egypt, you ridiculous f—ing numpty.
In Closing
“Heritage
Americans” is a funny expression. I mean, literally funny.
One of the comical aspects of our current political
moment is that every other anti-immigration activist and ethno-nationalist in
the United States has a surname that is Irish, Armenian, Hungarian, Indian,
Spanish—anything except Anglo-Saxon. Kash Patel is the son of Ugandan
Gujaratis. Donald Trump is the grandson of a German immigrant who dealt in
whores and horsemeat. The chairman
of the Edmund Burke Foundation is an Israeli national. There was not one
Ungar-Sargon or Krikorian on the Mayflower or among the signers of the Declaration
of Independence. The kind of white supremacy that includes
people called Fuentes is pretty newfangled. Not
a Cooper or a Standish or a Bradford in the bunch. But I suppose that is the
way of the world: White people, even white supremacists, just ain’t what they
used to be.
WASP life is in a strange chapter. I remember when some
Main Line social club rejected a local entertainment-industry billionaire’s bid
for membership, there were whispers—familiar and not entirely unjustified—that
he had been rejected because he was Jewish. But the story I heard and believe
is that he was rejected for a different reason: because he was famous,
and, for the old Main Line WASPs, that was the wrong kind of rich guy to be.
Over the years, the Main Line became less Anglo-Saxon and
much more Jewish and Italian, as well as home to a great many more good
old-fashioned American
mutts. But the old WASP culture was transmitted, at least for a generation
or two, to the newcomers. It is now much attenuated, and where the snootiness
notions of class had once prevailed there is now only the worship of money.
An elderly friend of mine who had arrived as a Jewish
child refugee from Germany and who had observed the Main Line’s social
evolution for the better part of a century used to do a little bit over lunch
at the Union League. “You know, this club is going to hell,” he would say,
switching to a very, very audible stage whisper. “I hear they even let … Jews
join now.” He and his people had not always been made to feel entirely welcome.
Making a lot of money and rising to a high position at a socially important,
locally based business, as well as rising to high positions at socially
important local cultural institutions, had opened some doors and made some
difference for him. WASP ethnic clannishness had also declined over the years,
while antisemitism was increasingly regarded as declassé. But he had not
forgotten. He never did. And he wanted me to know that. But my friend had a way
of putting things in their place:
“It’s always a special occasion when I get to see you,
Kevin,” he would say with a smile. “I’m wearing my second-best toupée.”
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